Self-Taught Artist Ricardo Paniagua Creates Art on Assignment

For Ricardo Paniagua, the canvas is sculpture and his sculpture is a canvas. He uses vivid colors to reconfigure recognizable shapes, suggesting interests in geometry and psychedelia, and to talk to Paniagua is to talk to someone inspired. His self-taught artistry and varied creative outputs are what he considers “assignments”…

Podcast: Is This the Rom-Com That Finally Kills the Rom-Com?

On this week’s episode of the Voice Film Club podcast, Voice film critics Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek, along with L.A. Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson, discuss rom-com Begin Again (2:26), starring the always-interesting Mark Ruffalo. They also talk about the biting rom-com parody They Came Together (15:47), which might…

Best Hidden Places in Texas for Road-Trippin’

By Angelica Leicht, courtesy of the Houston Press. Oh, there’s so much to see in Texas. From the white sands of the coastal shores to the deep canyons on down, our state has so much to offer. And while everyone knows about some of our more national attractions — Big…

100 Dallas Creatives: No. 91 Inventive Director Rene Moreno

Mixmaster presents “100 Creatives,” in which we feature cultural entrepreneurs of Dallas in random order. Know an artistic mind who deserves a little bit of blog love? Email lauren.smart@dallasobserver.com with the whos and whys. Rene Moreno was at the beginning of what promised to be a long, fruitful career as…

At Oak Cliff Film Festival, a Symphony’s Creation Documented

Nathan Felix fell in love with orchestral music on the open road. The leader of Austin-based indie-pop band The Noise Revival Orchestra was just out of college and touring with a punk band when he found himself in a moment of musical exasperation. “One night I was just so furious,”…

If You’re in Expo Park, Stop and Watch Some Video Art

It’s a Thursday night in Expo Park and a quick duck into the Amsterdam Bar accidentally becomes an art experience. A small group has gathered on the sidewalk in front of Beefhaus (833 Exposition Avenue) to watch a projected video of lobsters staring back at them. It’s part of Gregory…

100 Dallas Creatives: No. 92 Artistic Luminary Joshua King

Mixmaster presents “100 Creatives,” in which we feature cultural entrepreneurs of Dallas in random order. Know an artistic mind who deserves a little bit of blog love? Email lauren.smart@dallasobserver.com with the whos and whys. There’s a consistent trait shared by creators: the fear of not creating. When most people think…

17 Awesome Things to Do This Weekend, June 19- 22

The Oak Cliff Film Festival happens this weekend. Allow me to offer a few reasons you should care: Movies, drinks, bike rides, dance parties, and croquet. If you need more convincing, head over to Jamie Laughlin’s preview of how it all happens this weekend. If you’re like me, the above…

They Finally Made an Abortion Comedy — and It’s Good

For all the Fox News fear-mongering that Hollywood is out to indoctrinate us with liberal values, when it comes to pregnancy, the movies have for years been curiously conservative. If a woman gets knocked up, she either loses the baby by accident (cue waterworks) or carries it to term (cue…

Pattinson and Pearce battle through The Rover.

The Rover, Australian filmmaker David Michôd’s follow-up to the brutish family drama Animal Kingdom, is a post-apocalyptic Western from the Outback, a stretch of land that already looks like the world’s been blown away. All Michôd needs to convince us of the devastation is a title card pegging the events…

Eastwood’s Jersey Boys Walk Like Jersey Men

If you think summer movies are clamorous, try a current Broadway musical. Watching Jersey Boys onstage is like soldiering through some extreme eating contest where you’re force-fed dessert for three hours. It’s all falsetto heroics and hustled-through character drama, every beat of every scene over-scored, over-rehearsed and overbearing. And it’s…

Uptown Players’ Soho Cinders Belongs in the Musical Ash Heap

Instead of producing the American premiere of British musical Soho Cinders, Uptown Players should’ve taken script and score and burned them. What a tawdry, creepy adaptation of Cinderella. If a musical could carry an STD, this one would come with a warning from the CDC. With music by George Stiles,…