12/6 Favorite fact from the Neiman Marcus-Adolphus Children’s Parade press release: “Potential viewing audience: More than 112 million households.” Well, sure, and the Dallas Observer has a potential readership of 3 million, but our circulation department would beg to differ. Face it; like all things Dallas, this Christmas parade, which…
12/5 They’re not dirty little secrets, exactly, but they’re probably dusty. You keep them well-hidden, maybe in a shoebox, tucked behind the extra blankets on a high shelf. The artifacts of your life–a fishing lure from your grandfather, the cheap gold-plated locket from your first boyfriend, ticket stubs, shriveled carnations,…
It has become a subject of much discussion and debate among film fetishists in recent weeks: For which movie will Sean Penn win the Academy Award, Mystic River or 21 Grams? Perhaps this seems like so much jockeying for blurbs on a movie poster or a newspaper advertisement–Sean Penn’s up…
In director Ron Howard’s The Missing, Tommy Lee Jones’ Samuel Jones takes his place among the oldest archetypes in the Western genre–the white man who has lived among the Indians till he has at last become one. This plot device, used in Hombre and Nevada Smith and myriad other movies,…
Michael Crichton seems pretty clever. The doctor-screenwriter-novelist digs odd history (Eaters of the Dead, a.k.a. The 13th Warrior), clashing cultures (Rising Sun) and cutting-edge biotechnology (Jurassic Park, and virtually his whole canon). His 1999 novel and its inevitable new movie adaptation, Timeline, both attempt to deliver all this and more,…
Bad Santa, in which Billy Bob Thornton plays a drunken department-store Santa who repeatedly swears at children, pisses himself publicly, chain-smokes like an industrial plant and cracks safes on Christmas Eve, is the least sentimental holiday release ever made. No one is redeemed, no one comes to believe in the…
Of the approximately 30,000 participants in this year’s Turkey Trot, you can divide those runners into two categories: those who are trying to work off their Thanksgiving meal before they eat it and those who just want a license to pig out when that stuffed bird hits the table. The…
Thursday, November 27 We’ll let you in on a little secret. The Fort Worth Zoo is open on Thanksgiving Day from noon to 4 p.m. You can put the turkey in the oven, spend the day at the zoo and return home in time for dinner and football. No, we…
On a recent trip to that retail Mecca known as Target, a sign grabbed our attention like a 4-year-old holds onto an ice cream cone for dear life. The letters spelled out opportunity, inspiration and glee with a simple message: Now Hiring Part Time/Seasonal Help. As a mid- to late-20s…
11/28 Welcoming the holiday season at the Dallas Galleria’s ice-skating rink has become a tradition for my best friend and me. It’s not the fabulous shopping or the allure of the nation’s tallest indoor Christmas tree. It’s not the manufactured snow descending gently like so many credit card receipts. It’s…
11/29 Just because you’re too old for the SATs doesn’t mean you should stop honing those problem-solving skills. Gotta keep your mind sharp to ward off old Father Time, right? Don’t worry, because in today’s installment of “Night & Day Makes You a Better Person,” we offer up a quiz:…
11/28 It’s the holidays, time for Six Flags Over Texas to get its annual makeover where the remnants of the theme park’s long-forgotten Texas-history shtick and its current Warner Bros. commercial overhaul (i.e., Looney Tunes/Superman/Batman) get covered up in boughs of holly, a sprinkling of tinsel and millions of twinkling…
12/1 America (and our fair Dallas) is pretty damn materialistic. We like our couture, our high-end body products and will go to great debt-filled lengths to be a part of that brand-name echelon. So why not use that status-conscious mentality for charity? December 1 marks World AIDS Day with charities…
11/30 It’s the jolly jive season, the time of year for thoughts and words that make the heart toasty and rouse the spirit into fits of joy, thankfulness, laughter, remembrance and all the other things that spill out of mistletoed greeting cards along with photos of Aunt Doris and her…
If you’re hankering for a movie about an awkward yet lovable “outsider” type who wanders into a pastel mock-up of Middle America and cajoles the straights to get saucy, you’re in luck. It’s called Edward Scissorhands, and it’s been available on video for years. Renting it will absolve you of…
It took four years, but finally Dark Castle–Robert Zemeckis and Joel Silver’s horror division, which puts out a movie a year around Halloween–has made something that’s genuinely scary. It may be no coincidence that this time around, Silver has scored a higher-profile cast than usual and a better-known director in…
All they ever wanted was someone who got their brand of humor–or, barring that, at least someone who could stomach it. It would not be easy to find a network executive keen on the concept of a 46-year-old ex-junkie whore returning to high school after decades on the street and…
Bad things happen in trailer parks. Between tornados, they’re magnets for human mayhem. Any episode of Cops finds a squad car rolling into some trailer park where a half-drunk, goggle-eyed good-for-nothing will be escorted in cuffs out of an aluminum double-wide as his teenage girlfriend sobs in the background, snot-smeared…
Think Tiki music, and you’ll think young. You’ll think hip. You’ll think 20-something guy who buys his vintage flower-print shirts at Ahab Bowen and classic brushed-steel cocktail shaker at Metro Retro. You don’t think 60-something, balding, trumpet-playing, Shriner-pledging grandfather. But we first heard of Tiki from our Poppy, who played…
Thursday, November 20 Without choreography, a dance performance would probably be like an improv comedy show–either really entertaining or laughable (and not in a good way). For the 2003 Fall Dance Concert at Meadows School of the Arts, they’ve got the choreography covered. Of the three works, a ballet, contemporary…
Not three years ago, the comic-book industry had been proclaimed as dead as Barry Allen and Hal Jordan–and if you don’t know the references, really, why are you even reading this? But that was before the X-Men mutated into movie stars and Spider-Man spun a franchise. Biz is up in…
11/20 No one looks particularly glamorous in Richard Avedon’s portraits. There’s the white background, set up wherever it’s convenient, on a wall or hanging from a trailer. There’s natural light with the shade creating lines and contours. Then there’s Avedon, his camera and his subject. That’s all. There are no…
