MTV’s The Shannara Chronicles is gorgeous and lunkheaded, gory and hilarious, sometimes awful and sometimes full of awe. It’s also quite welcome: Just as Terry Brooks tore the pompousness out of Tolkien with his pulpy, brick-thick Shannara novels, the series – executive produced by Jon Favreau – shows your Game…
Black Sheep Feminism, Aura Satz & Jeff Zilm What promises to be another excellent round of programming opens this weekend at the Dallas Contemporary. Dallas-based artist Jeff Zilm fills one of the cavernous galleries with his newest paintings for Lossless Forms for Picture Plane; London-based artist Aura Satz, whose work…
Dallas doesn’t get many world movie premiers, not to mention ones that have potential to change the trajectory of presidential elections. That made last night’s world premier of 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, Michael Bay’s slick but effective movie of the siege of Benghazi in 2012, and event…
About three months ago, Dealey Plaza near the West End was pretty much shut down thanks to J.J. Abrams and James Franco. They were filming for a Hulu thriller series, 11.22.63, based on Stephen King’s book by the same name. You were either really mad at all the traffic it was causing…
Charlie Kaufman is a cartographer of the soul. You can picture him hunched over parchment accurately inking each dark river and, off to the side, cautioning that there be dragons. What makes Kaufman cinema’s best psychoanalyst is a contradiction. He sees people for who we are — hurtful, hopeful, lovely,…
Don’t let that title throw you. Joe Frank and Zachary Reed’s rambling neighborhood comedy Sweaty Betty isn’t dopey or sweaty, and I don’t recall meeting anyone in it named Betty. There is a 1,000-pound hog named Miss Charlotte, decked out in Washington Redskins gear, but that vision’s just one of…
People around the world suffered a certain kind of heartbreak Sunday night when news broke that music legend David Bowie died. He made the alien in all of us feel a little more at home during our time on planet earth. He left this place more colorful than when he…
Did that headline convince you? Hope so. If you are one of the few and the proud who are participating in Dry January, you are officially 12 days in and, like, only 1000 more to go. Well, at least that’s what it feels like. Because not drinking for an entire…
Like acne scars that never fade, even as middle-age wrinkles carve tiny paths around them, the worst moments of our teen years remain etched forever on our psyches. It is the time in life most pocked by humiliation, shame and insecurity. Impulse control hasn’t yet kicked in. Mistakes are made…
Nowhere is the spirit of Dallas more alive than in its artists. Their cultural brain power and unstoppable ambition bring us new events and festivals, revitalize neighborhoods, reflect on our blunders and offer us things to take pride in. Our artists challenge the status quo of theater, film, visual art…
Listening is a simple art: Keep your mouth closed, look at the person talking to you, move your head up and down a few times and ask a follow-up question that demonstrates you understood. That’s about it, and yet it’s increasingly hard to master. This is a problem since texting…
Yes, binge-watching eight hours of a documentary about the legal travails of cat-torturing ne’er-do-well is tempting, but it’s also more than a little depressing. Fight the urge to hole up on the couch and marathon through all those miscarriages of justice this week with these engaging endeavors, none of which…
The seventh episode of Transparent’s second season, now available on Amazon, takes place on Yom Kippur. The holiest day of the year in the Hebrew calendar, it’s a holiday on which Jews fast to symbolically atone for their sins. It’s also a significant occasion for Transparent, which, like the Pfefferman…
Connor Hill and Mallory Hill are a super fun couple with a super fun house. They also happen to have the same last name, but that’s just a fun fact for you to file away in your dossier. Guess what’s another fun fact? No one likes paragraphs. All the returns…
Do This! The 4th Annual Hypnotic Polar Plunge asks you to jump into the frigid waters of the FOE pool to raise money for the Greater Dallas Chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association. Freezing your ass off won’t be how they earn the money, the cold, hard cash you hand over to…
Annette Lawrence As the analog world becomes replaced by the digital, imagine transferring the scribbles in your journals into your laptop, or up into the cloud. Artist Annette Lawrence has long been interested in the written word as object and idea, and for her upcoming exhibition at Conduit Gallery (1626…
Quick! Pick two pop culture icons in your head right now, one with a musical background and the other from any non-musical, pop culture category. Now imagine the one from the non-musical column singing the other person’s music. Chances are you didn’t come up with the odd combination of Elvis…
In the current noble vogue of admirable female figures in documentaries, now comes Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict by Lisa Immordino Vreeland. Guggenheim may not be news to the art world, but for the rest of us the film might stir wishful nostalgia for a breakthrough time in cultural history —…
Guided by a belief that anything not backed by science or hard math is mythology as always, Dallas multimedia artist Celia Eberle explores love in her latest solo show. The Mythology of Love references music, poetry, movies, animals, and the love goddess herself. Eberle’s work is well known throughout Texas,…
The City of Dallas Office of Cultural Affairs has announced the recipients of the third-round of its Special Support Grants. Seven artists were awarded up to $5000. There were only twenty-three applicants this time around, but the next call for applicants already began this week. The grants aim to foster…
Somewhere between season two and season three of Game of Thrones I quit. It was too evil and rape-y for my squeamish brain. But one thing I loved about the show was the theme music. It fit perfectly with the show’s sinister, yet magisterial mood. Fast forward to last week…
Star Wars has warmed up box offices hotter than a Tatooine summer, and fans are going back to relive The Force Awakens experience to the fevered tune of 1.39 billion in global sales. As the film continues to dominate theaters with spaceship cameos and warm-hearted Wookiee hugs, detractors have begun…
