2013 was a good year to be bad. This year’s best villains weren’t just goons with guns — although there were a few great examples of those. (Here’s looking at you, Sean Penn.) We also hissed at slave-owners, inventors, seducers, producers, and a couple amazing women who left an impression…
Beekeepers in More Than Honey.This year saw its share of incredible documentaries, but in 2013 the stand-outs are films that help flesh out the way we see the world. Below are fifteen docs we suggest seeing, from the grisly to uplifting. Click on the name of the film to read…
Images courtesy Lionsgate.Ritchman and Schlund in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.In The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, opening this Friday, Alan Ritchson and Stephanie Leigh Schlund play two of the story’s fiercest bad guys. But tucked away in a hotel room on the 17th floor of the Mandarin Oriental in Miami’s…
AirwolfberlinJonathan Brandis hanged himself 10 years ago this week at Sixth and Detroit in Los Angeles, in the second-floor hallway of an apartment building south of Hollywood near a decent doughnut shop and a cat groomer. He was 27 years old. And he was my first big crush. If you’re…
Birth of the Living Dead.The zombification of America got its start in 1968, when George A. Romero and a bunch of his friends and colleagues released Night of the Living Dead, the scrappy little horror movie that could not only serve as patient zero in the ongoing pop-cultural zombie apocalypse,…
Photo by Jay Maidment – © 2012 MVLFFLLC. TM &2012 Marvel. All Rights Reserved. Thor: The Dark World just doesn’t compare to the 2011 original, in spite of its few redeeming qualities. That’s the consensus among this paper’s film critics on this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, available now. Listen…
Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto in Dallas Buyers Club.On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, our critics discuss the upcoming Dallas Buyers Club, the late Lou Reed, 1983’s Get Crazy, 1979’s The Visitor, and 2008’s In Bruges. Matthew McConaughey extends his streak of taking on challenging roles in Dallas Buyers…
GravityOn this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, the Village Voice’s Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek both praise Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity (starring George Clooney and Sandra Bullock), saying the director exhibits a “lovely human touch” with film, which is set in space, and that it’s “so different than anything else he’s…
Bernie Su and Hank Green captured the hearts, iPhones, Pinterest pages, Instagram accounts and GetGlue music playlists of teens across America with their 2012 series The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, which updated Pride and Prejudice to modern life through real-time transmedia storytelling. The series consisted of 9½ hours of content stretched…
If you need to quickly get your hands on $1 million but don’t have the resources or skills to pull off an “Italian Job” style heist, do not fret. Monday, July 8 could be your lucky day. There’s a chance you’ll get the money you need to keep your elbows…
Sunday Fun Day knows no ally like a holiday Monday, which this Sunday meant Dallas’ committed party people throwing on their smallest apparel and descending on Sisu Uptown Resort, for a pool party with English DJ Paul Oakenfold. Photographer Bianca Montes captured the scene, including these fashion try-harders. See her…
You, the Dallas film lover, don’t apologize for your passion. Even now, as spring’s overly cheerful birds sing of weather reprieve, you smile and flash your laminate, effectively telling them to shove it. It’s DIFF time, and that means 11 fake sick days of movies, galas and possible celebrity sightings…
If you knowing in you’re going to make an ass out of yourself, you might as well accentuate that ass: That’s the apparent conclusion the folks above came to Saturday on Greenville Avenue, where Dallas drunkenly did its thing. You can see slideshows from the parade and our Snoop Dogg…
Over the weekend, the local Instant Film Society hosted one of its regular PolaWalk events, wherein photographers wandered the streets in search of scenes worth of their sepia-toned attention. Read about the PolaWalks here, and see some of the best photos from this weekend’s event below. See also: Share Your…
Late last year, as most of the city’s creators went into holiday hibernation, the Observer’s culture editor, Jamie Laughlin, assembled a team of fellow cultural obsessives and went to work, looking for this year’s Masterminds. See also: The Dallas Observer 2011 MasterMinds Awards It’s the third straight year we’ve done…
In May in the Summer, Dahlia (Arrested Development’s hilarious Alia Shawkat) is a lesbian tentatively trying to step out of the closet.by Scott Foundas In his brief remarks before the first public screening of the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, Robert Redford praised the Sundance Institute’s ongoing filmmaker development labs as…
D Magazine announced yesterday that it will team up with the local TV station KTXD and rebrand it D-TV. The new station will continue to broadcast KTXD’s current offerings, including the news show The Texas Daily and the lifestyle show Texas Living, which will be renamed D Living. It will…
For the rest of the world, the body is a temple. Here in Texas it’s a dive bar where booze lives, so to celebrate the return of Dallas, we’ve put together a little libation inspiration. The show airs tonight at 8 p.m. on TNT, and whether you choose to watch…
There’s an over-arching theme in the show Battlestar Galatica that is an apt metaphor for Hollywood: “It happened before and it will happen again.” The “it” in Battlestar is the whole Machines-Become-Sentient-and-Kill-Humans-thing. But the catchy, ominous phrase could be viewed as a metaphor for Hollywood’s persistent ability to repeat mind-numbingly…
The trifecta of female role models just came through Dallas and Fort Worth, so we drew straws, traded the straws, traded them a few more times, wished we had time machines, and then set out in separate directions to spend the evening with some highly influential women. Here’s what happened…
The main virtual hall Most conventions are pants-mandatory kinds of affairs — even those of the adult nature. For the world’s first virtual porn convention, however, I’m not wearing any (relax … I’m in my PJs). This past weekend, XBiz and Red Light Center hosted the Adult Entertainment Virtual Convention,…
Today, there’s a flurry of Steve Jobs-related Tweets and news posts and mournful consumer images. For some it’s quickly reaching the point of saturation, while others are posting tributes on the steps of Apple stores around the world (our sister paper is talking the Foxconn factory suicides in a must-read…
