In his 2014 book Difficult Men, journalist Brett Martin identifies bad-boy antiheroes as the defining feature of our current “Golden Age” of television. Tony Soprano, Don Draper and The Wire’s Omar Little dazzle with their multifaceted complexity: How deep the furrow in Tony’s troubled brow! How pensive the trail of…
Every Halloween, adrenaline nuts seek out hauntings. They go on ghost tours or visit haunted houses. But to create a convincing haunt takes a lot of work and a lot of makeup. This is what we learned from a behind-the-scenes tour of Screams in Waxahachie. The make-up artists spend hours…
Shiki: Landscape and Beyond There is a pine tree that has seen more of the world than most humans. Well, it’s mostly a pine tree; the trunk is real, the leaves are handmade from resin by floral sculptor Azuma Makoto. In an exhibition, titled Shiki:Landscape and Beyond, this tree suspended…
Dear Movie Theater Patrons on Their Phones (re: Crimson Peak), A few months ago, I got new contact lenses. The doctor strengthened my prescription, and now I can pretty much count the stars on the American flag on the moon. It’s pretty intense. There’s a raisin on the floor over…
Here’s a hair-raising assignment: Imagine you’re tasked with capturing the social and psychological complexities of a nation’s crackup within the framework of popular moviemaking. What if Gone With the Wind tried, in its swooning romance, to explicate Scarlett O’Hara’s slow-to-dawn realization of the hopeless immorality of the world she has…
In The Shawshank Redemption, Tim Robbins plays Mozart over the prison’s public address system and locks himself in the control room. All the prisoners stop what they are doing and listen. They were shocked that it was actually happening, but inspired. And they understood the music. When Seth Knopp brought…
Quick! Name the movie where Bill Murray plays a proudly shabby dude who acts like a prick for an hour and then, for reasons of narrative convention rather than character-based truth, shambles toward either heroism or some vague be-nicer enlightenment. Maybe a tougher challenge would be to name the Bill…
Travis Clancy’s studio, located in an off-the-beaten-path warehouse district in Plano, is a stunning combination of recording studio and tattoo shop. It looks nothing like the semi-sketchy shops where most of us got our first piece of art — the barbed wire wrapped around the arm or small butterfly on…
Charlie is so fat that he eats, works and sleeps on his couch, a stained horror of abused upholstery. Sitting atop stacks of old books, the couch sags amid mounds of fast-food containers, soda cans, candy wrappers, chip bags — a rotting reliquary waiting for Charlie to wheeze his last…
When’s the last time you brushed up on your Texas history? Was it, say, over a couple of beers and on a Ghost Walk? No? Well, here is your opportunity to change that. I mean, what is more frightening that hearing scary stories that took place right where you are…
The last time RAW, the company’s long-running episodic television program set foot inside the AAC this past January, longtime WCW stalwart Sting made his first public appearance on WWE TV. Daniel Bryan – though hurt again and unsure when the company’s medical staff will clear him – wrestled his first…
Halloween is coming up, but that doesn’t mean you should sit at home and work on your costume all week. Your idea to dress up as a zombie Caitlyn Jenner is decidedly terrible, and your brain would be much better served by spending a little time taking in some knowledge…
Amy Strickland’s friends call her house The Funhouse and if this were a court of law, here’s our case. In her bedroom she has three plastic half balloons on the wall and a track of working carnival lights that were once used as a sales tool, but are now used…
A tight, quippy, gay-centric stage comedy like Chad Beguelin’s Harbor fits snugly at Uptown Players, where the 2012 play is getting its regional premiere in Kalita Humphreys Theater. Director Coy Covington has cast four actors so good they clearly outclass the so-so script. Uptown leading man Kevin Moore plays Kevin,…
In 1969, the late, always unpredictable and wacky actor Dennis established himself in the Hollywood system as “Billy” in his co-writing / directed debut, Easy Rider. This rebellious film set the mood for Hopper and the often wild card of roles and projects he would take on for the remainder…
Twenty-year-old Josh’s (Josh Thomas) world explodes twice in the Please Like Me pilot: first when he realizes he’s gay and again when his bipolar mother, Rose (Debra Lawrance), attempts suicide. Josh takes both revelations in stride, though he dreads having to inform his mom, whom he’ll be living with and…
The Crazy Mouse, a popular and relatively tame roller coaster at the State Fair of Texas, received some unwelcome attention this week when a wheel came off the ride, striking one of its operators in the legs and landing her at Baylor Hospital. She was released the same day and…
Do you enjoy sleeping soundly? Do you close your eyes and not have visions of ghosts and demons hanging around playing children? Let’s change that.This photo appeared on Reddit some time ago, but the mystery is still unsolved. Kevin Brown was at the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History…
Thursday, October 15 Bruckner’s Fifth Symphony One of the truly great symphonists, Bruckner wrote symphonies in the grand philosophical, yet personal, tradition of Beethoven; each symphony he composed stands as a richly detailed statement on the composer’s ideology and mood at the time of writing. Often referred to as the…
Unless you’re a diehard George Bernard Shaw fanatic (and if you are, keep it to yourself), there’s little to recommend in WingSpan Theatre’s current Dear Liar at the Bath House. It’s a creaky old thing by the late Jerome Kilty, who wrote the play in the 1950s and got it…
We’ve extolled the virtures of the Korean spa plenty of times before, so there’s really no need to rehash the fact that they are the most budget-friendly way to deeply relax in the greater Dallas-Fort Worth area. King Spa is one of our favorites, but its not-too-far-away neighbor Spa Castle…
Here’s a scary story for you. Somewhere in Hollywood, a cabal of producers are forever zombie-ing up the corpses of long-dead licensed properties, ever hopeful that you will continue to throw your money at familiar trademarked characters even as they eat your brains. Sometimes, when a silver moon shines just…
