Mill Around

3/15 Take your Claritin, your Allegra, your Tylenol Allergy, whatever. The time has come again to experience the blooms of nearly 250,000 bulbs. This year marks the most flora ever displayed since Dallas Blooms began 19 years ago. A landscape of thousands of pansies, violas, flowering azaleas and other blooming…

Shamrock On

3/15 Kids can celebrate St. Patrick’s Day early this year with the Luck of the Green Lock In at Eisenbergs Skate Park in Plano. From midnight Friday through 8 a.m. Saturday, kids are treated to all-night skating or biking, contests, pizza, party favors, games and breakfast. The only requirements are…

Dishing

3/13 From a survey we conducted among preschoolers, we gathered this informative fact about nutrition: Ten out of 10 do not balk at consuming unidentifiable items found on the ground. OK, so maybe we didn’t really ask kids about their eating habits, but we do have fond memories of our…

Get Out

3/13 Dallas theater bolts out of the winter doldrums this week with WaterTower Theatre’s second Out-of-the-Loop Festival, a celebration of acting, dance, music and art filling three venues at the Addison Theatre Centre. More than 20 new works will be featured, including the area premiere of The Guys, Anne Nelson’s…

Bass Ackwards

In nature, living things prey upon each other all the time. Humanity, on the other hand, has a choice. It’s flouting this choice that turns on director Gaspar Noé. In his latest project, Irrversible, he basically swipes Christopher Nolan’s backward-narrative structure from Memento to tell a lurid tale of rape…

Radner Reincarnate

“Having cancer gave me membership into an elite club to which I would rather not belong,” Gilda Radner said after being diagnosed. Cancer is a bonding experience, whether one has it, knows someone with it or has lost someone to it. A 16-year breast cancer survivor, Kathy LaTour has put…

Beer Run

3/15 If you think those athletic types who wake up on Saturday mornings for races and fun runs are a bunch of boring health nuts too busy counting carbs and calories to have any fun, then check out the pack of lushes that lines up each year for the St…

Impossible Dreamer

Filmmaker Terry Gilliam is no stranger to fiasco. After all, this is the human dynamo who saw 1989’s inventive (if sometimes incoherent) The Adventures of Baron Munchausen through a series of artistic and financial crises that would have landed most people in an asylum. But Gilliam’s encounter with the tale-spinning…

SEAL Appeal

John Shaft went to Africa, so why shouldn’t Die Hard’s John McClane? In the new action romp Tears of the Sun, Bruce Willis undertakes a jungle rescue operation on the Dark Continent, and for his part it’s a McClane adventure in camouflage, minus all the sass and most of the…

Phat Chance

You know Internet dating has become totally mainstream when Disney cranks out a bland comedy featuring a randomly selected pair of mismatched stars to take on the subject. Bearing the unwieldy and meaningless title Bringing Down the House, said comedy is predicated on the biggest pitfall of cyber-flirting, the idea…

River of Dreams

Emerging from Till Human Voices Wake Us, it was easy to overhear some male viewers striving to put the film’s metaphysical themes in their place, to explain them away, as it were. This is a shame. The source of the story’s mystique is fairly simple and may be obvious to…

That ’60s Show

This is a story with a happy ending, because, so far, nothing bad has happened to indicate otherwise. There are no ratings to sweat over, no network executives to fight with, no cancellations to suffer through. The rough territories lie ahead, over the horizon of 8:30 p.m. this Sunday, when…

Non-fat Greek Wedding

Some actors really throw themselves into their roles. Throughout the 90-minute drama Big Love, now playing at Dallas Theater Center’s Arts District Theater, the six leading actors physically throw themselves hither and thither across a half-acre of open stage. They sprint, leap, twirl, waltz, cartwheel, windmill, swoon and slam themselves…

A Big Hunk O’ Love

You have never seen such a sight. And we stand firmly behind that statement. But we wouldn’t want to be standing anywhere behind eXtreme Elvis. The King has left San Francisco with The Extra Action Marching Band and is touring select cities–cities that apparently really need exposure to a 300-pound…

Hooked on Classics

“Hey goombah, I love a how you dance a rumba/But take a some advice paisano, learn how to mambo.” –Rosemary Clooney, on her No. 1 1954 hit “Mambo Italiano” Very few American kids have their MP3 players loaded with classical music. They prefer to spend their scrilla on hip-hop because…

This Week’s Day-By-Day Picks

We wonder if whoever is using billboards along Interstate 30 to point out that graffiti is “Temporary Art” and asking taggers to use their talents wisely has ever heard of Jean-Michel Basquiat. The protégé of Andy Warhol began his art career as a New York City tagger using the handle…

French Kiss-Off

Apart from “I Am Fascinating” and/or “My Parents Are Horrid,” the reigning theme of film students’ movies is “Lovers Are Bonkers.” Thus, it comes as no surprise when a director’s first feature contains many elements that’ll be instantly familiar to anyone who’s ever hung around a film school. So it…

Steal This Movie

This should really piss you off: What follows is a story about a very funny movie you will have absolutely no chance of seeing any time soon. The powers that be who distribute movies–who copy prints, print up posters, deliver them to theaters, collect receipts, split profits (well…)–do not want…

Sour Hereafter

Collectively, giant squid now outweigh the entire human population. Got that from a report in Weekly World News, the most reliable of sources about all such phenomena, particularly breaking stories regarding squid, octopi, nautiluses and the misunderstood cuttlefish. According to the “world-renowned” scientists quoted by Weekly World News, global warming…

Gravy Train

It’s not with a little pleasure that I begin this piece with a toldyaso. See, already you’re getting sick to death of the stumbling-mumbling-fumblings of the Osbourne clan, currently shilling for Pepsi after torpedoing the American Music Awards (not hard work sinking Dick Clark’s leaky ship, but still). Turns out…

Formerly Known as Prince

Having recently recovered from a post-Valentine’s Day hangover–induced by a mixture of bitter feelings toward the opposite sex and a sale at the discount liquor store–we decided this year will be different. Call it a Valentine’s Day resolution: Come February 2004, we will rejoice at the sight of foil-wrapped chocolates,…

This Week’s Day-by-Day Picks

Thursday, February 27 We don’t get why so many movie stars spend their time off being comedians. They have to leave their Cribs-worthy houses, live out of suitcases and try to sound fresh and original telling the same jokes night after night in smoky clubs to a bunch of people…