After a week of the Dallas International Film Festival, I believe I’ve now cried four different times, and not just because the DIFF Lounge was closing. This year’s round of Texas films seem to have more emotional weight. After seeing Sean Gallagher’s bittersweet but uneven Good Night, Yen Tan’s heart-stringer…
Were Penn & Teller the original Mythbusters? They were often touted as magicians, and their act did include more traditional illusion and sleight of hand, but there was always something a bit subversive about them. Their long-running Showtime series, Bullshit!, worked to debunk political, paranormal and religious beliefs. More recently,…
Design District gastropub The Meddlesome Moth (1621 Oak Lawn Ave.) is kicking off spring in an indulgent fashion with Art, Small Bites & Brews: A Night of Pairings. Beer is the star of the night, and brew nerds should be especially happy to know Deschutes Brewery will have some of…
The Ochre House (825 Exposition Ave.) is coming off a banner 2012, with productions of Party Mouth and Old attracting sell-out audiences and much critical frothing. Ochre House’s papa bear, Matthew Posey, also took time out of his busy schedule to make an appearance on Dallas recently. The theater’s spring…
In “The Love of My Life,” her 2002 essay for literary journal The Sun, Cheryl Strayed is the 22-year-old woman who fell to her knees after seeing her mother dead in a hospital bed, then pressed those same bruised knees into a strange man a week later, unbeknownst to her…
When we enter a small-town gas station, many of us are quick to get in, out and on our way. Others are content to linger, to observe the fleeting interactions and become small-time voyeurs. That location serves as the nucleus of director Yen Tan’s latest film, Pit Stop, which follows…
William Friedkin, director of The Exorcist, will be at the Dallas International Film Fest next week for a Q&A after the 40th anniversary screening of a film that profoundly fucked up my adolescence. I know, I know. It fucked up a lot of people. My mom told me that before…
Cheryl Strayed had a pretty big 2012: Her memoir, Wild, was released, chronicling a journey across the Pacific Crest Trail in her early 20s, a way of dealing with the death of her mother. It was also revealed she was the voice behind literary website The Rumpus’ much-loved Dear Sugar…
The Ghost Sonata, Swedish playwright August Strindberg’s bleak chamber play, first produced in 1908, focuses on the inhabitants of an apartment building that might actually be a physical manifestation of hell. In the dreamlike sequences, ghosts wander around in the daytime, women are turned into mummies and the utter despair…
National Geographic’s Boyd Matson is a throwback to ye olde days of the adventurer, when men wrestled lions in the Sahara, went deep into the Amazon and climbed mountains in Nepal, all while keeping death in their back pockets. The journalist and National Geographic Weekend host will be stopping by…
When people think of Bobcat Goldthwait, many still picture the wobbly-voiced spaz from the Police Academy films or One Crazy Summer. However, in the last decade, Goldthwait has become a respected director, and has redefined the black comedy with World’s Greatest Dad (starring old pal Robin Williams) and God Bless…
“Well, this is all the adult stuff,” Brian Scott says, gesturing to the current exhibits in Conduit Gallery’s two main rooms. We’d just exited the project room, situated in the back of the Design District space, where I’d literally looked into the mind of Oak Cliff’s Chuck & George, the…
We’ve run many photos by Dallas photographer Justin Terveen, but the above photo went viral last August, after a spectacular thunderstorm danced across Dallas. While many of us watched from the safety of our couches, Terveen was on a rooftop, capturing the Ghostbusters-like scene in real time. The day after,…
The Modern (3200 Darnell St., Fort Worth) has a stacked schedule for its Tuesday evening spring lecture series, and sharing dusk with Trenton Doyle Hancock is a good start. The Houston artist’s imaginative work bridges ambient comic book influence with its abstract, future vision with folk art, and one of…
In the last year, contemporary art space Circuit 12 (1130 Dragon St., Suite 150) has raised the pulse of the Design District, thanks to gallery director/Miami transplant Dustin Orlando and the addition of events like the new vinyl-only monthly, Wax Addicts. To celebrate that year of existence, the bow-tied dandies…
Green Bandana Group has been throwing parties Dallas didn’t know it needed for a minute now, and it certainly carved out a spot in our hearts via last summer’s Thursday night Stoneleigh Hotel penthouse parties, featuring the Danny Church Band. Those hazy summer nights have given way to more art/fashion/music…
I posed this question to a friend last night: Has there been a main character in recent TV series history who has been so irredeemable, so flawed? We came up with Larry David, to whom Dunham’s character has been compared, both for their complete lack of awareness and how heavily…
It’s not often we say this, but there’s a great reason to go to Addison: The 2013 Out of the Loop Fringe Festival. WaterTower Theatre (15650 Addison Road) hosts the 10-day revolving door of dance, theatre, comedy, performance art and music, starting Thursday and running through March 17. Last year’s…
Remember Half Baked? Just barely? Perfect. Harland Williams played Kenny, the guy who gets thrown in jail and ignites 120 minutes worth of weed-filled shenanigans and catch phrases. Then there was 2002 Sunday hangover classic Sorority Boys. More recently, he played God in the severely underpromoted 2011 film Dahmer vs…
Piece of Work, the 2010 documentary on Joan Rivers, is a little more heartbreaking than you’d imagine. In it, we see Rivers, in her mid-70s, still struggles to get work, to pay the bills, to stay relevant, and it’s that determination to stay in the spotlight and not keep her…
Undermain Theatre is currently in its “Season of the Myth,” and will be taking over the Dallas Museum of Art (1717 N. Harwood St.) for a one-off afternoon reading of The Conference of the Birds. The Persian poem, originally penned by Farid ud-Din Attar, follows a flock of birds as…
As episode eight opens, we follow Hannah down the street. She receives a text from Adam, which causes her to have a nervous tic, one we’ve never seen before. We’re reminded Hannah got an e-book deal, and the deadline is looming, with nary a word written. Hannah starts doing everything…
