Legos seem to inspire something extremely clever and a little obsessive in certain people. These guys are the MacGyvers of the Lego world–you give them a bucket of plastic bricks, they create the Romanov summer palace of Djulber, complete with little lost princess Anastasia and an advancing counterrevolutionary battalion. Nowhere…
Thursday, May 5 We’re certain this week will be the best one of the entire season of the Dallas Arboretum’s summer concert series by the lake called Cool Thursdays. We’re not saying Naked Lunch: A Steely Dan Tribute Band is better than Vince Vance and the Valiants or Voodoo Blue:…
Someone once told us that rather than shop for jewelry, or any girlie thing for that matter, he’d take on the challenge of making sure Mom was technologically advanced instead–DVDs, digital cameras, you get the idea. The whole gift-buying thing befuddled him, and he had to somehow relate what he…
Janis Joplin’s art will go on 5/5 In the 2003 film Festival Express, which chronicles a five-day concert tour through Canada in 1970, Janis Joplin fills just a small portion of the footage, yet she is one of the most memorable elements of the documentary. Not surprising, really–not for a…
Dallasaurs get moving 5/7 Work off those unwanted winter pounds stomping through the wilds of Fair Park during Dino Dash’s 10K, 5K or 1K fun run/walk. Or if you’re already sleek as a raptor and don’t want to sweat, donate Dino Dollars to help The Science Place in Fair Park…
After School’s in session 5/6 When ABC’s After School Specials went off the air in 1988, I was crushed. The shows were riveting: What calamitous, life-shattering disaster would bend the plot this time? And which celebrity would I see pulling bong hits or snorting angel dust and leaping out a…
But watch out for trees, Charlie Brown 5/8 Ah, kites, such a simple way to fly. A little string, some paper and sticks–put them all together with a breeze and a blue sky, and suddenly the earthbound can reach out and touch the heavens. Or, this being Dallas, where more…
Author Douglas Adams died at age 49 on May 11, 2001, of a heart attack suffered during a workout at a Santa Barbara, California, gym. His biographer, M.J. Simpson, blamed Adams’ demise in part on his unending battle to get The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on a big screen,…
Alex Gibney’s Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is a thoroughly professional, frequently spectacular piece of muckraking. But any American who hopes to watch this portrait of unfettered corporate greed, cynical power-lust and outrageous deception without going postal about an hour into the thing would do well to bring…
VaVa Veronica blows a mean saxophone. But not with her mouth. As one of a handful of ragged “disappointment players,” Veronica, a would-be strip woman played by voluptuous Lydia Mackay, bumps and grinds and warms up her mouthpiece behind the stage door of an old Dallas vaudeville palace, waiting to…
The Last One-Nighter on the Death Trail If you like Cabaret, Gypsy, Follies and other backstage musicals, this new one from Our Endeavors Theater Collective will tickle your funny stick and make you tap a toe. The cast of eight wrote the tunes themselves (along with other collaborators), and director…
William Eggleston: The Los Alamos Project We live in a Technicolor world of cherry-red hot dog stands, pearly gray back-combed beehive hairdos and zapping-blue skies, or so William Eggleston’s photographs tell us. The banal yet brash photographs of this Mississippi-born photographer capture a world that seemed to be turning slower…
As a prospective student at the University of North Texas, I thought of Denton as a college kid’s paradise, a Lord of the Flies-like place where tattooed and spiky-haired musicians and their art school girlfriends ran free–no parents, no curfew, no one to set rules or enforce them. Boy, was…
Dancin’ in the streets 4/30 As if East Dallas residents don’t have enough block parties already, the Lakewood Street Fair & Dance promises to give locals another excuse to get drunk in the streets, or rather, the parking lots around the Lakewood shopping center. But seeing how it’s a street…
Jacket not required for polo 5/1 It’s a long time until the next Cowboys game, and serious fans of the tailgate party must be suffering. No foam rubber fingers or air horns. No drunken parties at the butt-end of an F150. Take heart, tailgaters, we have a deal for you…
A different kind of mystery machine 5/1 Arriving in a limo just doesn’t have the prestige it used to. A simple car won’t do it, not when dateless, horny wannabe TV stars get stretch limos–with hot tubs–on elimiDATE, and every prom attendee, not just the rich kids, carts his pimply…
It’s not a police siren; it’s just Michael Winslow 4/28 Isaac Newton was hit by a falling apple. Ben Franklin suffered a lightning strike while holding a kite. I saw Michael Winslow on Sally Jessy Raphael. As a young’un, I’d heard Winslow’s zillions of sound effects as Larvell Jones in…
Thursday, April 28 It’s a damn good thing that Dave & Buster’s hosts Karaoke Idol on Thursdays from 7 p.m. to 11 p.m., because no self-respecting Idol (that’s right, we mean American Idol) fan would leave the house on Tuesday or Wednesday before the performances are over and the unlucky…
Long before teen-angst films such as She’s All That and 10 Things I Hate About You showed us that true love is often right before our eyes (and only needs highlights, contacts and a bitchin’ new outfit for us to see it), there was Norman Juster’s 1964 classic picture book,…
Among the many mysteries surrounding The Interpreter is the one that finds Sydney Pollack heralded as a major American director, a maker of Serious and Important Movies. His filmography, marked by mawkish mediocrities (Out of Africa, as vibrant as a coffee-table book; The Way We Were, its romance as plausible…
“No more soccer!” declares small-time thug Sing (writer-director-star Stephen Chow) as he vigorously stomps on a child’s ball. In the context of Kung Fu Hustle, it’s a pathetic attempt by Sing to make himself look tough. The larger signal, however, is to followers of Chow’s work–it’s a direct reference to…
Of the 30 or so films playing the USA Film Festival, now celebrating its 35th anniversary, only one has never been shown to an audience before: former D magazine contributor Jeff Bowden’s directorial debut, Dirt, which documents a season of dirt-track racing at the Devil’s Bowl Speedway in Mesquite. Shot…
