It’s so hard to get into the swing of things when the week starts out with a holiday. You skip all that Sunday night dread, relish not being in the office all day, and then the rest of the week somehow feels that much lighter. Even if your job still…
Do This! The National Polka Festival has been around for 50 freakin’ years and this year it’s expected to attract 50,000 people to downtown Ennis for its parade, 5K and 10K Polka Runs, musical performances and kolache-eating contest. Recent polka hall of fame inductees Brave Combo are among musical guests,…
Comic conventions have become snarling, hungry beasts that can never be sated. Every year they get bigger, with more parties, famous faces and costumed fans ready to declare their love for their favorite movie, show or comic book franchise. If this metaphorical beast was itself a comic book character, it…
Deep Eyellum at Epocha Shoe Gallery2540 Elm St. Native Texan graphic artist and painter Miguel Ibarra will paint one of his extraterrestrial flora murals onsite and exhibit his latest series of small “Eye-bud” paintings. Ibarra’s “green” mural series and paintings are inspired by nature’s potential to both revitalize and destroy…
Something troubling is afoot in Westeros: The heroes are beginning to outnumber the villains. The sixth season of Game of Thrones has already seen Jon Snow’s return from the dead, Arya Stark’s vision restored and — courtesy of two Stark children’s long-awaited reunion — the show’s first-ever tears of joy…
There was a time when the summer movie season was a season, sandwiched between Memorial Day and Labor Day weekends. By the 21st century, the start date drifted back to the first weekend in May. This year, the superhero flicks started arriving with Deadpool’s release on February 12. Only two…
Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban has built an empire on tech money and professional games. Now he’s eyeing another expansion — into the digital universe of the game Minecraft. In an unprecedented move, the Mavs have announced a partnership with Mineplex, one of the largest Minecraft servers in the world, to…
The Lone Star State is a fascinating place when viewed from behind the windshield. Ask anyone: What’s the wildest thing they’ve ever seen from the highway? And their answers will range from the bizarre to the terrifying to the sublime. We know because we asked Texas drivers on social media…
The guiding principle of Lewis Carroll’s classics Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass is that logic does not exist. You tumble down rabbit holes and into mirrors willy-nilly, and you try to survive, feeling what you feel, having fun when you can — oh, and try not to drown…
Maybe we’re crazy. Maybe we’re just grasping for any kind of hope. But maybe — just maybe — it took a guest star on The Real Housewives of Dallas to finally get things going. It’s Heidi Dillon. Or as Tiffany Hendra calls her — Heidi Effin’ Dillon. And what we’re…
If you’re planning to attend a production of Steve Yockey’s Blackberry Winter or The Thrush & the Woodpecker from Kitchen Dog Theater, plug in directions to Undermain Theatre. For more than a decade, Kitchen Dog Theater was housed in the bright blue building on McKinney Avenue known as The McKinney Avenue…
As Dallas continues its gradual and mostly awesome slide into the slightly unpleasant and less awesome days of summer, we’d encourage you to soak it up while going out doesn’t yet involve pitting out your shirts and burning yourself on the steering wheel. Maybe you’ll need an umbrella here and…
Everyone hold on. More reality TV is coming to Dallas. Kind of. Sort of. Not really. But you remember JoJo Fletcher, don’t you? She is the Dallas native who went on The Bachelor last season and fell in love with Ben Higgins. He totally blindsided her by saying the big…
Comics are a cynical breed. Their goal is to make an audience laugh and one common way to do that is by pointing out holes in our beliefs and behavior. Ryan Singer uses a different technique to get guffaws from the crowd. He thinks a sense of humor is necessary to…
Do This! If you’re looking to pamper the cute little dependents in your life, this is a good weekend to do it. At 9:30 a.m. Saturday at The Wild Detectives (314 W. 8th St.), local actress Katherine Bourne will regale your kiddos with a selection of storybooks illustrated by Garth…
Kurtz Frausun and Scott Alan Wilcox are chatting in a corner of Glass Half Full, the bar inside the Alamo Drafthouse, on yet another night of expected hail and thunderstorms in North Texas. Only a few weeks prior, on May 4, a five-minute short film they made called The Balance…
Ben Wheatley and Amy Jump’s microbudget black-and-white English Civil War mushroom-trip movie A Field in England (2013) squeezed a tense and bizarre story from just a few dudes wandering around in a field. The married couple and filmmaking team — Wheatley as director and Jump as writer — previously made…
Richard Bridgland was given an impossible task: recreate 1970s Hollywood for Shane Black’s buddy conspiracy thriller The Nice Guys … in Atlanta. As a production designer, Bridgland’s had to make the Czech Republic look like 1930s rural North Carolina (Serena), New Orleans look like West Virginia (American Ultra) and a…
If it had come out 20 years ago, when its creator was Hollywood’s best-paid screenwriter, Shane Black’s The Nice Guys might have stood, for some, as more proof that the studios had lost their way. So much money lavished on bloody buddy formula, on two-fisted archetypes cracking a case, some…
Let’s break the bad news this way. Maria Bamford’s new Netflix series isn’t a disaster. It’s sometimes funny — it’s got comic genius Maria Bamford in almost every scene! — but only its finest moments bear the stamp of sensibility. Too often, this fitful, clamorous show feels Bamford-flavored rather than…
Three New Films by Richard Bailey at the Margo Jones Theatre1121 1st Ave. Richard Bailey made a couple of 16mm films after finishing film school. But he started focusing on poetry and short stories once the expenses of filmmaking caught up with him. After digital advances drove down the costs,…
We’re more than halfway through the premiere season of The Real Housewives of Dallas. We’re using the word ‘we’ because this is a team effort. We can’t do it alone. We need support. See? That’s because the ratings for The Real Housewives of Dallas have been consistently low. The first…
