You, the Dallas film lover, don’t apologize for your passion. Even now, as spring’s overly cheerful birds sing of weather reprieve, you smile and flash your laminate, effectively telling them to shove it. It’s DIFF time, and that means 11 fake sick days of movies, galas and possible celebrity sightings…
Because you weren’t daunted enough, DIFF has added a few more selections to this year’s line-up. (Pro tip: Look for our survival guides, must-see recommends and a Matthew McConaughey paper doll in the next issue of the Observer, which is a film festival sponsor.) You’ve got eight new feature add-ons…
You can already see Spring Breakers in theaters across the metroplex, but starting this Thursday, the Texas Theater will be giving you a chance to see it in bona fide 35mm with the appropriate beverage in hand: beer. See also: The Spring Breakification of the Disney Princess Complex Spring Breakers…
At a quick glance, filmmaker Derek Cianfrance bears a striking resemblance to actor Ryan Gosling, who Cianfrance worked with in Blue Valentine (2010) and the director’s new film, The Place Beyond the Pines. They could be brothers, or at least cousins. Cianfrance’s forehead is higher and his hair thinner, but…
They say a few important works of cinema and literature thread generations together. I agree, as long as we’re all talking about Spaceballs, Mel Brooks’ 1987 intergalactic opus. Our buddies at Sundown at Granada also appreciate groundbreaking films about air-depleted planets, Dark Helmets, Mawgs and C3PO knock-off chastity androids, so…
Animated short by Chris “Stoph” Daniel. A few minutes after 7:30, when the North Texas College Film Festival was scheduled to start, the screen was as blank as it had been at 7:15 or 7:00. Sporadic bits of sound had come through the Dallas Angelika’s speakers, but nothing had registered…
The most recent census data puts the population of Denton at 113,383. It’s the home to two universities, multiple music festivals, a documentary film festival, and a thriving city square. Dallas is just an hour away by I-35, but what of it, Denton seems to day. It can’t compete size-wise,…
What must Bruce Willis have felt when he discovered that his seven or so minutes of G.I. Joe: Retaliation screen time offer much more agreeable Bruce Willis-ness than the entirety of A Good Day to Die Hard? Or that his cameo, shot two years back and rich with quips and…
Every week, we find you five movies for you to check out over the coming week or weekend, from the latest wide release to weird local screenings to timely classics you can watch on your couch. Did we miss something? Let readers know in the comments. American Beauty Screens Wednesday…
“I was hoping to be finished like two weeks ago, but things happen,” Eddie Lee Henderson says, taking a seat across from me. He’s tall, thin and resembles a more youthful Lenny Kravitz. With him is Trevor Ayala, a 2011 Plano East graduate. We’re meeting at a small but bustling…
The Nasher released its Summer/Fall schedule of ’til Midnight events today, and there’s some real gems in there. The late night series is a Dallas staple that pairs live bands, great movies and free admission on the third Friday evening of each month. The next six are a strong collection,…
Every week, we find you five movies for you to check out over the coming week or weekend, from the latest wide release to weird local screenings to timely classics you can watch on your couch. Did we miss something? Let readers know in the comments. Badlands Now available on…
“All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun,” goes Jean-Luc Godard’s quip. Add to that a few more girls and their bikinis and you have the rough formula for Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers, which looks like the most expensive Girls Gone Wild video ever made…
An actress in her 30s — a woman, that is, still playing characters of babymaking age — may have it even tougher than actresses in their 40s and 50s. Unless she is exceedingly glamorous, a la Charlize Theron, she can all too easily get stranded in the land of mom…
Like the blood that gushes forth from the elevators of the Overlook Hotel, brilliant/ridiculous theories of what Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is really about have for years surged madly and memorably — especially online, where the Internet’s dead-ends, blind links and back-where-you-started arguments just might be another part of the…
Two sacred texts of the ’50s proto-counterculture have escaped the rapacious machine of cinema adaptation for a half-century. One is J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, which probably only would have worked starring Salinger himself, and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, that ecstatic recount of crossings and recrossings of North…
File this under way-too-cute: The Dallas International Film Festival just announced a day-long family event at Klyde Warren Park, anchored by a 20-year-anniversary screening of The Sandlot. The free event is Saturday, April 6, and will also feature college dudes singing a capella, storytelling and opera. But mostly it will…
April Fools’ Day is creeping up to us. To celebrate, Gavin Industries and Mixmaster, the future-award-nominated culture blog of the Dallas Observer, have teamed up to bring you Spaceballs on the roof of the Sundown at Granada. Seriously, we swear: Please join us Monday, April 1 at 9 p.m., so…
I posed this question to a friend last night: Has there been a main character in recent TV series history who has been so irredeemable, so flawed? We came up with Larry David, to whom Dunham’s character has been compared, both for their complete lack of awareness and how heavily…
Puberty is sex and sex is murder in Stoker, a Hitchcockian stew of hothouse familial jealousy, sadism and psychosis all tied together by one teenage girl’s homicidal coming of age. Psychosexual imagery permeates every inch of renowned South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook’s stateside debut. A blood-tipped pencil, or water dripping…
Steve Carell’s gift is for men who might drown in their own obliviousness. Like his Daily Show reporter, or The Office’s Michael Scott, his 40-year-old virgin lived in terror that someone might catch on to the fact that he knows nothing about subjects he purports to have mastered. When his…
In 1988 the fate of Chile and its dictator came down to a ballot as simple as a middle-schooler’s do-you-like-me? note. A referendum offered citizens a simple choice: a “yes” for allowing President Augusto Pinochet to return to office for another eight years, having clung to power since his 1973…
