This Saturday, Ira Glass, host of the radio show This American Life and creator of the “Ira Glass Abs Workout,” will present Reinventing Radio: An Evening with Ira Glass at the AT&T Performing Arts Center. Glass started doing shows like this back in 1996, when This American Life went national…
I’m not surprised to learn Anthony Jeselnik is a fan of Bret Easton Ellis, that he was drawn to the tone of American Psycho as well as the fact that the book was banned. The comedian has cultivated an arrogant dick persona, which helps his steely delivery of one-liners about…
Every week we highlight the best comedy of the coming weekend. Find more comedy events at dallasobserver.com/calendar. Aziz Ansari at the Verizon Theatre at Grand Prairie Aziz Ansari is taking his Buried Alive! tour across America, targeting any cities he had to skip last time. Loved for his role as…
May Now You See Me, 5/31: Action filmmaker Louis Leterrier’s output is all over the map, from the fitfully delightful Transporter 2 to that irredeemable Clash of the Titans remake. His latest sounds pretty dopey — the FBI tries to stop a group of bank-robbing magicians — but Leterrier, the…
After completing five months of principal photography on The Avengers, Joss Whedon flew back to Los Angeles and threw himself a welcome-home party. As the guests circled his pool, he asked friends like Firefly’s Nathan Fillion, Angel’s Amy Acker, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Alexis Denisof if they were busy…
There’s a thing that sometimes happens to copy editors, the workhorses who do the final grammar cleanup, general fine-tuning and, sometimes, miracle-working before a story goes to print: An editor higher on the food chain will receive a disheveled manuscript from a writer, make a few halfhearted tweaks and pass…
Dull jobs in dreary surroundings have inspired many a wonderful play: David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, set in a rundown sales office; Thomas Heggen and Joshua Logan’s Mister Roberts, about bored sailors on a WWII supply ship; Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, the granddaddy of all dramas about soul-sucking…
If you’re a fan of Glengarry Glen Ross and you missed the fantastically funny Daffodil Girls at Plano’s Fun House Theatre and Film last month, it’s back for a weekend reprise, June 5 through 8 in the Plano Children’s Theatre space. Written and directed by Fun House founder and kiddie…
Kitchen Dog Theater opens its 15th annual New Works Festival with Octavio Solis’ absurd one-act Se Llama Cristina. It begins as a fuzzy encounter between a couple, played by Dallas stage newcomers Vanessa DeSilvio and Israel Lopez, wacked out on heroin and waking up a little hazy about who they…
The surprise twist in the new M. Night Shyamalan film is that the film is directed by M. Night Shyamalan, a fact that the movie — like the posters and commercials — won’t admit until after you’ve already sat through it. While at heart a Pinkett-Smith family bonding project, the…
You thought of Cesar Millan last week when you found your couch chewed open and gutted, like a tauntaun on Hoth. You thought of him the other day when your pup slipped his collar and ran directly into oncoming traffic, causing a comical chain-reaction of swerves and spin-outs. You thought…
That Mortal Coil: Rebuking the Ideal in Contemporary Figurative Art, is the latest group exhibition at CentralTrak (800 Exposition Ave.). It explores less traditional, more radical ideas about the human body, beauty and sexuality, via pieces from Denise Prince (who had her art psychoanalyzed live a couple weeks ago), Seth…
After comedian Anthony Jeselnik informed Donald Trump that nobody would mourn him if he got cancer, and after he created a sketch called “9-11 Babies” that involves dressing infants up like the Twin Towers, spoon feeding them and making their faces explode, he crawled into the uncomfortably small bed where…
In the modern world, if it’s not photographed, filmed or Facebooked, it barely exists. But in ancient times, important histories were passed along only in the form of oration. That’s quite a feat when you remember that two such tales — Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey — were transmitted…
In our adolescence, we cling to those writers who can reach us. For some, that writer was George Orwell or Stephen King, Anne Rice or Stephen Chbosky. For aspiring riot grrrls, it was Margaret Atwood — a Canadian feminist fiction writer perhaps best known for The Handmaid’sTale, an lyrical dystopian…
Dean Worrmer and the Omegas seriously had it coming to them. You don’t mess with the ragtag crew known as the Deltas, a lesson well-learned in the classic National Lampoon’s Animal House. For more than two decades, the granddaddy of all college misfit comedies has been preparing incoming students for…
Before he was Tom Haverford on Parks and Rec, Aziz Ansari starred in the video sketch series Human Giant. And before both of those things, the major venue stand-up comedy tours, television specials and wildly enthusiastic reviews from Rolling Stone and Pitchfork, Ansari was a gangly kid in New York…
Do you think you could survive a zombie apocalypse? No? Maybe you just need some training in the field of zombie evasion. Put on your running shoes and head to Forney this Saturday to Run for Your Lives where you’ll join your fellow humans in a 5K obstacle course where…
Gallery walks are a natural, easy continuation for the Design District’s pedestrians. But over in East Dallas, Gallery Day is more scavenger hunt than stroll — where a scattered, loose chunk of geography is punctuated by the city’s more experimental art spaces. Start your visits early to snag a gift…
Have you ever listened to This American Life and wondered how they decided which interview with the feuding restaurant owners should go first? Or how they strung together the audio clips about a bulletproof chicken? Have you ever wanted to know how the show takes the interviews, sound clips and…
Considering more than one third of Dallas’ population is Spanish-speaking, our lack of interesting bilingual entertainment is glaringly evident. Major theaters don’t offer reliable alternatives, only increasing the divide between cultures and, more important, neighbors. But there is one series that brings not only Spanish film to the big screen,…
Back to the Future/b> is, well, back. It’s showing at Sunset Screenings for FREE. That’s right, you can see adorable little Michael J. Fox, Lea Thompson and even Crispin Glover before he was a total prick. I’m fairly certain we all know the story — Marty McFly (Fox) meets up…
