I’ve been to one book club meeting. It was a diverse group of ladies, some professionals, some artists, some stay-at-home moms. There was wine, there were introductions, there was a tacit understanding that it was supposed to be fun. And when it was time to discuss the book at hand…
Killer Mutant Leeches! Hollywood has forgotten how to make a good horror movie. They’re no longer terrifying or even mildly scary. They slaughter dumb, young adults who don’t have enough sense to stay away from the house with skulls hanging from the porch or to put down the GoPro when…
Love Ain’t Cheap Christmas has officially vacated store shelves, and that means the trappings of Valentine’s Day have flown in and claimed their place in the bright and shiny halls of holiday consumerism. That’s right — it’s time to bid adieu to the Christmas spirit and start welcoming looooove (and…
I had the startling realization yesterday that the past two new year’s eves have been complete letdowns. One year a group of friends went to a warehouse party where we drank cheap liquor, shared the flu with mouth kisses, and left just after midnight a little bored and completely disappointed…
Mixmaster presents “100 Creatives,” in which we feature cultural entrepreneurs of Dallas in random order. Rob Shearer was in my backyard, competing in Meat Fight 2011 on a team with his friend Kevin Johns. These were the guys who were running Blues, Bandits & Barbecue– an actual, legit barbecue event…
Sometime in early December an interesting status popped up in my newsfeed requesting votes for the “DFW Art Awards.” I’d never heard of these things, but then again, I don’t know everything that happens around Dallas. I started asking my art friends and contacts. My questions were immediately met with…
Since we started writing about some of Dallas’ fugliest buildings (the AT&T building, Dallas WTC, Turley Law Center, and Irving Convention Center, so far), one building was mentioned in the Mixmaster and Facebook comments more than any other — Dallas City Hall. Readers insisted that if any building needed our…
Mixmaster presents “100 Creatives,” in which we feature cultural entrepreneurs of Dallas in random order. Much has been said this year about the influx of progressive arts and theater into Dallas, but there is still a very strong dedication to the classics in our fair city. Despite these leaps and…
It’s a compliment or an insult, depending entirely upon how you feel about Dallas. After taking the temperature of the city for the last few years, I’ve found that to describe something as “so Dallas” is usually pejorative. The highest compliment you can pay something in this city, it seems,…
How did reality TV treat Dallas this year, you might be asking yourself, those around you or your trusted Dallas arts blog. Oh, God. Seriously, why would you ask that? How did Al Roker’s bowel movements treat him during his visit to the White House? It’s something similar to that…
Glimpse into Matt Tolentino’s Jazz Age Life at the Sunday Social March 30 Meet your friendly neighborhood hep cats, Matt Tolentino and his wife Danielle Bennignus. This lovely couple lives their life steeped in history and they brought some of it to the general public this year by launching an…
Big D New Year’s Eve The big outdoor New Year’s party happens at Victory Park everywhere and includes a music, fireworks and a live feed of the New York City ball drop. Party like it’s last day of 2014, because it is. It’s an all ages party that lasts from…
With 2015 swiftly approaching, it’s easy to look back on what could’ve been better in Dallas art, theater, dance, and music this year. You’re probably doing the same thing in your own life and then creating those tricky resolutions for the new year. I want to work out more and…
This was the year DFW’s favorite theater kids grew up. No longer newcomers on local stages — as actors, playwrights or companies — they did big things in big ways in 2014. Here’s a look back (and a glance ahead). Please hold your applause till the end. If you watched…
The Black Friday shopping holiday has become an economic beast that never gets hungry. Ever year, crowds of consumers flood the malls and big box retailers and start fights over a discounted toaster because the holidays are about giving and being kind to your fellow man. The folks at Cards…
In Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper, Navy SEAL Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) — an astoundingly talented marksman credited with over 160 confirmed kills in Iraq — runs into a fellow veteran at a mechanic’s shop between deployments. The soldier shows Kyle an artificial leg and thanks him for saving his life…
In Rupert Wyatt’s highball-cool reworking of Karel Reisz’s 1974 The Gambler, Mark Wahlberg does not play a cop, does not shoot bad guys with a gun and does not spend considerable time shirtless (though we do see him sulking in a bathtub, and there’s a fleeting wet T-shirt moment, too)…
Before worrying ourselves over its qualities as an adaptation, or its findings as an experiment in just how much tumpety-tump parump-pa-bump the human mind can endure, let’s take a moment to marvel that Rob Marshall’s Into the Woods even exists — as a PG from Disney, no less! No matter…
There’s something curiously airless about director Angelina Jolie’s Unbroken, the story of real-life Olympian and WWII P.O.W. Louis Zamperini. Early on, Louis (Jack O’Connell) and his fellow American soldiers are zipping through the golden skies, dogfighting with Japanese planes, and, though the B-24’s doors are open and the wind is…
“Politics really isn’t my specialty,” says Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) to a naval commander (Charles Dance) in an early job interview scene in Morten Tyldum’s choppy biopic The Imitation Game. Yet no less than Winston Churchill would credit Turing as the main cause of the Allies’ victory over the Nazis…
Here are movie moments from 2014 I’ll never forget: Gugu Mbatha-Raw’s sad pop tart smacking her ass in Beyond the Lights, the sickroom choked with flowers in Michel Gondry’s Mood Indigo, Oscar Isaac and Kirsten Dunst’s Greek island all-nighter in The Two Faces of January, and the entire soundtrack of…
“If everything were great, nothing would be great.” That line, from Scott Coffey’s smart and sweetly entertaining Adult World, is one of my favorite bits of movie dialogue this year, not least because it’s applicable to every movie genre — actually, every genre of everything. But in the movie world…
