Pressed for time? Well, save an extra minute or two to take in Jeff Zilm’s new art installation of full films pressed onto canvas. He’s “extracted the sound and image data from the celluloid base of a reel film” and projected it onto canvas. While you may not be able…
In sixth grade, I saw a real heart. No, not one of those cheesy, pink, heart-shaped necklaces; I actually saw the real deal. Okay, it was only because I had to. Every sixth grade science class was required to dissect a frog as a part of its final grade. Who…
If you’ve always wondered about the colorful facade of Uptown’s Kilgore Law Firm, wonder no more. Sometimes a law office is more than a law office. Here, it’s also an art museum. Delve deeper into the mystery, and MADI, the museum’s chosen focus, at an in-depth exhibit that explores Constructivism,…
Much has been said in the past decade or so about the evolution (or devolution) of sports in this country. It’s been obvious for many years that it’s not just about the game anymore; it’s the personalities and the paychecks and the merchandising that make the headlines rather than the…
Tracking the parallel trajectories of three employees laid off from cushy corporate jobs at the same Boston-based manufacturing conglomerate, The Company Men is transparent in its ambition to capture The Way We Live Now from a sensitive, equitable—rather than a withering and satiric—point of view. Writer/director John Wells portrays the…
Ivan Reitman, master of the high-concept, big-budget Hollywood comedy (Ghostbusters, Dave), would seem an unlikely candidate to direct No Strings Attached, an extremely low-concept, low-key romantic comedy of contemporary sexual mores centered on the dating foibles of attractive nerds. Fully devoid of the fantasy contrivance that often sets a Reitman…
They call it “human interest.” There are few narratives more compelling than a survival story like Peter Weir’s new adventure yarn. The protagonists of The Way Back, the veteran director’s first movie in the seven years since his seafaring Master and Commander, are a group of Soviet prisoners who escape…
“Maybe I should just tell you some of the facts as I remember them,” Spalding Gray says a few minutes into And Everything Is Going Fine, Steven Soderbergh’s fascinating posthumous documentary on the writer/actor/monologist, who apparently jumped off the Staten Island Ferry in 2004. Soderbergh, who filmed the monologue Gray’s…
A 2009 Cannes winner, Dogtooth is hyperrealist sci-fi detailing an (anti)social experiment gone awry. The matriarch and patriarch of an upper-class Greek family have taught their three nameless, college-age offspring an alternate language (“A sea is a leather armchair, like the one we have in the living room. A pussy…
In her recent English-speaking roles, 50-year-old bilingual Kristin Scott Thomas has gamely endured the fate of most actresses her age, cast as the fretful mother of Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson in The Other Boleyn Girl and the pinched, sexless guardian of Aaron Johnson’s John Lennon in Nowhere Boy. Her…
Deconstruct the features of Dallas actor Steven Walters and it’s hard to believe they constitute the attributes of a great stage performer. There’s his voice: high, a little nasal, with a hint of Texas twang and audible hisses on sibilant consonants. There’s his chin, strong but soft. His long nose…
After reading the bio of comic Shawn Halpin, you might wonder how the hell his show would be funny. Seems his stand-up works within Halpin’s somewhat downtrodden life experiences: dad leaving early, single mom, chubby kid, life in the Marines, commitment phobia, abandonment issues. Common, but also commonly sad, stuff…
It’s difficult to believe that 500X Gallery is 33 years old. The Exposition Park arts venue has hung in through trends and trials and remained a vibrant hub of local work, never seeming to age–save for whatever the art gallery equivalent of a little distinguished gray around the temples might…
Moral lessons are more interesting when delivered by bears. Although we’re most familiar with Goldilocks’ story (lesson: don’t nap after breaking, entering and porridge-eating), we can’t discount pearls of wisdom from lesser-known bears. The Berenstain Bears, stars of children’s books and a few cartoon specials, are a family that has…
Her curvy body moves in unison with the music as her long fingers move up her fully fit fishnet thighs. Her lips are luscious and her hair is done. There’s not a man or woman in the room that can take their wide eyes off her acrobatic grace and form…
The world can be a harsh, lonely place when your loyalty is split between two opposing factions. The little mermaid loved her finned kin of the underwater kingdom, but she also longed to be with her beloved fish-eating prince on land. That kid from Glee was a macho football player…
The cure for the winter blues is not in some sad bastard country album. The empathy that offers is tempting, but ultimately you’re forced to open a beer, take a big sigh, and agree wholeheartedly that everything sucks. What we all need (and some of us more than others, for…
“O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?” Irish poet William Butler Yeats mused. Dancing, some say, is physical poetry. And if movement is an act of self-expression, then it stands to reason the dance is the dancer, just as poetry…
If you can’t stand any more of that old margarita mix you’ve got laying around the house, head to Blue Mesa this week. At 7 p.m. Thursday, the restaurant hosts a Milagro Tequila Interactive Dinner Party at their Southlake location, 1586 Southlake Blvd. (you can also catch it at the…
Special effects may have made some serious advances in the 30-plus years since Dario Argento’s 1977 horror classic Suspiria, but no matter how accurately colored the blood spurting from an arterial wound may look in a modern CGI-enhanced horror movie, few come even close to matching the gut-wrenching, cold-blooded brutality…
What’s not to love about this campy sci-fi plot synopsis? On the distant planet Mongo, New York Jets quarterback “Flash” Gordon fights to save the earth from certain destruction at the hands of the merciless Emperor Ming…all with aid of the brilliant Dr. Hans Zarkov and the beautiful, um, travel…
Mom…now there was a crabby cook. Ah, a man can still hear her in the kitchen opening up cans of vegetables and searing meat in old grease scooped from a can atop the stove. Bam! Dirty word! Bang! Really dirty word! And finally: “Come eat your damn dinner before I…
