At 76 years old, George Takei’s career weaves an inspiring blueprint. He could have easily been typecast after Star Trek, doomed to a life trolling nerd conventions as Sulu. Instead he became a champion of gay rights, a speakerbox for Japanese-American relations, an accomplished playwright, an admirably grand geek and…
Martin Scorsese has been directing since 1967, when he made Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. It wasn’t until The Departed, nearly 40 years later in 2006, that he finally won an Oscar for Best Director, despite many critics declaring him one of the greatest directors to ever live. Here we…
If you’re one of the trillion ladies who got engaged this holiday season, you’ve got some planning to do. Fortunately there’s an entire industry that caters to making your big day even bigger and better and maybe even a little over the top. The Las Colinas Bridal Show is a…
The Game’s Afoot is bloodless bedlam, like Murder, She Wrote but without the dogged bad luck. The slapstick who-done-it play is your classic murder mystery. A holiday party in 1930s Connecticut is all fun and games until someone ends up dead. But this is no ordinary home. It’s the castle…
Just about every film buff worth his weight in rare 3-D copies of Captain EO raves about director Spike Jonze’s first feature-length film, Being John Malkovich, calling it one of those bizarre films you just have to see before you die. Well, now’s your chance. We don’t mean the dying…
If you think the word “pilates” translates to “rich people stretching,” boy are you wrong — at least when it takes place at Texas Discovery Gardens in Fair Park. For 45 minutes starting at 6 p.m. Monday you can stretch your hammies in the middle of 7.5 acres of a…
Masochistic opera lovers veer toward the impenetrable works of Wagner. Regression-prone classical enthusiasts seek out Mozart’s trippy-ass stage productions. People who just love great opera go for Verdi. The Italian king of the craft couldn’t make a flop and in his catalog of famous works, his 1853 La Traviata still…
No one knows how to throw a party like people who know how to throw parties. We’re talking about professional party planners, people whose job it is to make sure you’re having fun. Wedding planners, photographers, concierges, DJs, florists — there’s a surprising diversity when it comes to event planning…
Fifty Shades of Grey did for middle-aged women what the Harry Potter series has done for young children: finally made reading fun again. The series has sold more than 30 million copies and has a long-awaited movie adaptation in process. Not since the Twilight series has a work of literature…
Your Instagram account is chock-full of perfectly framed eye-candy, prompting mass “like”-age and plenty of comments about your obvious talent. Maybe it’s time to take your photography to the next level? If you’ve been thinking about stepping it up, Makerspace, 2995 Lady Bird Lane, is right up your alley. Venture…
One of the most memorable sketches in The Kids in the Hall’s repertoire had comedian Kevin McDonald skewering the gentlemanly image of Lubbock boy Buddy Holly. McDonald put on a pair of thick-frame glasses and treated everyone around him like dirt just moments before his fatal flight because, as McDonald…
Jayden Frost’s collection of vintage toys and collectibles has gotten so big so fast that he’s moving his toy collection to a bigger retail location in Carrollton. “We just can’t contain the amount of inventory or customers where we are now,” Frost said. Frost said he and his crew at…
I did the expensive party thing last year. I shelled out money for a ticket that granted me access to a sketchy warehouse in the Design District, where instead of dancing and Champagne, there was a drunken photo booth and a lot of Jack Daniels. This year, I’m hoping to…
Toby Halbrooks is on a roll. The local film producer and director is an integral part of the film community quietly earning Dallas a reputation. For the second year in a row, Halbrooks will return to Sundance Film Festival in 2014 with two projects. Last year he co-produced Shane Carruth’s…
Ladies, take a bow. And another and another. This was your year on North Texas stages. Local actresses turned in a remarkable number of memorable performances in musicals, comedies and dramas in 2013. And it’s not every year that women get so many good roles in live theater in Dallas…
From street artists to Picasso, the biggest museums in Dallas and Fort Worth welcomed a diverse array of mediums, genres and artists. The Dallas Museum of Art mounted a retrospective of the groundbreaking performance artist and photographer Cindy Sherman, while the Amon Carter’s survey of color photography welcomed submissions from…
A theater critic character is murdered in the first act of Ken Ludwig’s comedy-mystery The Game’s Afoot (or Holmes for the Holidays). Meanwhile, in an aisle seat at WaterTower Theatre, an actual critic wishes for the sweet release of sudden death. The Game’s Afoot, surely the worst play on any…
In the 20 years since Reality Bites, his directorial debut, Ben Stiller has metastasized from sketch comedy lunatic to Generation X darling to blockbuster king. Among the funny men, most of whom have calcified into cliques (yawn, Anchorman 2), he’s the last of the triple-threat writer-director-stars, and the only one…
Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street is the kind of movie directors make when they wield money, power and a not inconsiderable degree of arrogance. Sprawling and extravagant, it revels in all manner of excess, including sexual debauchery, hearty abuse of liquor and Quaaludes, even dwarf-tossing. Its antihero, the…
What becomes a legend most? After prolonged incubation, Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom offers the biopic’s usual reply: legend itself. Bigger, louder, more expensive legend, brought to bear by the best talents and technologies of the day. The name Nelson Mandela has long been shorthand for the things Mandela shows…
Solemn as a funeral march, humorless as your junior high principal, as Japanese as a grocery-store California roll, Keanu Reeves’ let’s-mope-about-and-kill-ourselves samurai drama has exactly three things going for it. First, the cockeyed sensuality of Rinko Kikuchi as a spider-puking evil witch who can transform herself into a fox, a…
The surprise in Grudge Match, the not-quite-a-comedy that pits Rocky Balboa against Raging Bull, isn’t that it has the chutzpah to posit a universe in which Sylvester Stallone and Robert DeNiro have, since the early ’80s, been equally matched rivals. The surprise is in how easily audiences will buy it…
