What happened in Rwanda in the mid-1990s is almost beyond comprehension. An estimated 800,000 Rwandans were slaughtered in a genocide that somehow managed to fly under the radar of public consciousness (at least in the U.S.). It boggles the mind that so many people were systematically wiped out during modern…
The Dallas art scene has been steadily growing for the last decade, and the development of Dragon Street and the AT&T Performing Arts center has helped catapult the city into a real artistic contender. If you haven’t yet gotten involved in the growing art scene–for shame–head over to Holly Johnson…
Those of us who predicted that burlesque would go the way of the swing-dance craze are officially wrong. The tassels-and-ta-tas trend is here to stay, as The Ruby Revue is now a monthly showcase. April’s edition features Miss Eva Strangelove, a slinky, tattooed brunette whose glowing smile makes her striptease…
Finesse Mitchell may be the most forgettable black Saturday Night Live cast member ever. Remember Starkeisha, the stereotypical mean ghetto gal? Didn’t think so. How boring do you have to be that you’re overshadowed by the Good Burger dude? Of course, during Mitchell’s 2003 to 2006 stint, the memory of…
There is something undeniably inspiring and unifying about dance films. Footloose, Saturday Night Fever, Flashdance, You Got Served (that last one is obviously a joke…hopefully)…you get the idea. A film deserving classification amongst these on the great list of moving dance films is Dancing Across Borders, a film that will…
The second chapter in South Korean director Chan-wook Park’s vengeance trilogy, Oldboy(2003) follows a man held captive for unknown reasons and then released after 15 years, only to be thrown into a labyrinth of violence and mystery. Equipped with money, a cell phone and expensive clothes, Ho Dae-su (Min-sik Choi)…
The 1980 movie Xanadu is legendary if only for being ridiculously bad. That qualifies it for inclusion in the pantheon of ’80s movies that have been turned into Broadway musicals. Snuggling up cozily right next to Footloose, this refugee from the VHS days has found new life on the all-singing,…
Sad, funny and acutely self-conscious, Noah Baumbach’s new movie is the sort of mordant character study that people imagine was common in the ’70s. Greenberg is unafraid to project a downbeat worldview or feature an impossible protagonist—I’d be hard put to name one as maddening as the eponymous antihero unless…
Lost boy John Hughes was inducted into the pantheon this month, when the Academy devoted a moving Oscar-night tribute to the departed writer-director. But do you actually remember being a teenage moviegoer in the 1980s? It wasn’t all some kind of wonderful. Hughes movies came out twice a year, if…
Meet the burnouts of Burnfield, USA. The young adults of Eric Bogosian’s play subUrbia, now being done by Upstart Productions at The Green Zone, have turned the curbside at their local convenience store into an ersatz salon. They hang there every night and sometimes on toward dawn, drinking, smoking and…
While Edinburgh comic Danny Bhoy has a unique worldview thanks to his half-Indian and half-Scottish heritage, his comedy has more in common with the harmless, lighthearted observational comedy of fellow Scotsman Craig Ferguson than anything politically or racially provocative. For instance, at the Just for Laughs festival in Montreal, he…
The J. Erik Jonsson Central Library seems like a strange place to exhibit the wares of a secret society, but that’s just what the mysterious craftsmen of the Dallas Spinners and Handweavers Guild will do there through May 2. See handmade objects made by members of this mysterious group from…
25 years ago, Life magazine immortalized a stretch of U.S. Route 50 than runs through Nevada as “The Loneliest Road in America.” The nickname stuck. Ghost towns, cemeteries, mountains, railroad tracks and remnants of the Pony Express Trail flash by drivers headed along Route 50. These images burned themselves into…
There’s a new exhibition on display now at the Bath House Cultural Center, 521 E. Lawther Drive, and it goes by the name of Sweet Acrobatics: An Artistic Study of Motion. For you old-timers out there, let me explain: the “sweet” in the exhibition’s title does not refer to anything…
This week, Michael Ian Black’s gonna be speaking at the University of North Texas. The press release says Black’s most famous for his commentary on VH1’s I Love the ’70s/’80s/’90s series, but I recognize him as “That Dude From Stella,” “The One in the Super Short Shorts in Wet Hot…
With spring upon us, local landscapes are shedding their drab browns of winter in favor of the lush greens and bold colors that we’ve come to know and love in gardens. For those of us whose gardens have yet to bloom, the acrylic garden scenes of Sharen Chatterton’s The Nature…
In the great flood of the Noah’s Ark story, animals were saved two-by-two. Not so with the great floods of Hurricane Katrina. There were no arks; there were no clear directives from a higher power. It was a time of literally sinking or swimming, and it’s nearly impossible to swim,…
The Dallas Comedy Festival will show off the improv skills of comedy troupes from across this great nation–including Gangs of Recess (Fort Worth), Back to School Night (New York City), Chris and Tami (New Orleans/Austin), The Ones (Oklahoma City), Jill Bernard’s Drum Machine (Minneapolis) and Scram (Minneapolis/Chicago), as well as…
We’ve always kind of wanted to go to Antarctica, especially when the summer heat comes to call. However, we hate ice and really don’t like to be cold, and Antarctica is on average the coldest, driest, windiest continent in the world. Yuck. Plus 98 percent of the continent is covered…
Philanthropy doesn’t have to mean tuxes and ball gowns. Casual dressers can help AIDS Services of Dallas raise money at their No-Tie Dinner and Dessert Party on Saturday. It’s dinner with a twist–call 214-941-0523 to be added to a dinner party at one of dozens of private venues. After dinner,…
Rockers Vs Mods isn’t actually about rivalry. Well, OK, it is a little bit about the rivalry between those who ride and those who scoot, but mostly, the weekend-long two-wheeled rally is about tooling around, listening to rock music, eating good food and drinking (post-ride, of course). The packed itinerary…
Pot humor can hardly be called a universally enjoyed subject of comedy, as there will always be abstainers who don’t get the joke. But comedians who make the occasional 420 reference will always have a built-in audience of stoners–and that sucks. Because, as much as it pains me to admit…
