The name of South African director Oliver Schmitz won’t be familiar to most American audiences outside those who noticed his contribution to Paris, Je T’Aime (2006), which paired him with directors like Wes Craven, Alexander Payne, Gus Van Sant, and the Coen Brothers. In his native country, however, Schmitz is something of a cult legend thanks to his popular debut, the gangster drama Mapantsula. Since then, Schmitz has spent much of his time directing for German television (he is German by descent), but the director returns to his homeland for his latest film, Life, Above All, an intense drama that utilizes the AIDS epidemic as a way of taking aim at social taboos.

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Actor Michael Rapaport’s first documentary, Beats, Rhymes, and Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest, which opens tomorrow at the Angelika, is more than a musical biography. We spoke to the first time director about the story that began with a simple question — Why won’t Tribe make more music — and emerged as a moving personal drama.

FrontRow: So tell me about your love of hip-hop. I read that one of your sons is named after a member of De La Soul, and now you have this movie about A Tribe Called Quest. How far back does your love of the genre go?

Michael Rapaport: You know hip-hop has been a part of my life since I was nine years old. My father brought home a promotional copy of Rappers Delight by the Sugar Hill Gang, and from that time till my early, mid 20’s that’s all I listened to. I’d grown up in NYC listening to the radio and having those moments where you’re listening to the radio and you’re hearing Run DMC for the first time, and, you know, hearing The Fat Boys for the first time. And it was an exciting time in hip-hop and an exciting time in music. It really gave me a lot of joy. It opened me up to a whole bunch of different things that I probably wouldn’t have been exposed to, hip-hop and basketball. But hip-hop was a soundtrack to it. It was a soundtrack to my youth really.

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Consider this the fourth installment in a series of reviews concerning musicians to whom I am too close for objectivity. All are connected to a now well-documented house-show movement that blossomed for six months before struggling through the weeds of practicality. I had the privilege to be there when it did. The house-show cultus is still present in Dallas, in forms and shadows, though diminished. Fox and the Bird have been at its core throughout.

Fox and the Bird believe in ..read more

This Thursday’s giveaway may have a little foreign flare but English indie band Arctic Monkeys holds true to the DIY American way. The band made it big without a major record label and attributes their success to homemade material and fast internet fame. We’ve got a pair of tickets to their show at the Palladium Ballroom on August 1st and to get your hands on them all you have to do is answer the question in the form below: The band formed in 2002 in what small suburb? We’ll pick a winner after 3pm.

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The Funeral Party with Keith P and Anthony Social (Beauty Bar): Anyone who has been missing Black Fridays (and that includes myself) can now get an early blast of the dark stuff (including “Post-Punk, Gothic Rock, Cold/Dark/New Wave, Synth, Industrial, Metal, Psych” etc according to the invite) by hitting Beauty Bar on Wednesday nights.

Not only is this somewhat unlikely night a welcome change of pace for Henderson Ave, it should be a successful experiment for the club since these particular DJs have the uncommon distinction of uniting the dance, fashion, hardcore, and punk communities for a common theme of music where they can all agree. For once.

Whatever Wednesdays (Rubber Gloves Rehearsal Studios): Tonight’s guest is Audrey Lee III.

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As you well know, we will be screening Wes Anderson’s Bottle Rocket this Thursday at the Kessler Theater as part of our “Dallas, Outlaws, and the American Dream” film series. And now, we’d like to give the event a little extra spin. If you come Thursday with some wearable homage to the movie — say, a yellow jumpsuit or some sweet collared shirts — we’ll give you a free ticket to the August 25th screening of Paris, Texas.

Oh, and we have some exciting news on that front too. Before the screening of Paris, Texas, we will screen a new short film entitled “For Rent” by Dallas filmmaker Madison Liane and starring none other than Paris, Texas lead Hunter Carson. Hunter will attend the screening, and after Paris, Texas, we’ll have an onstage Q&A. So you won’t want to miss that.

See you Thursday.

Some things are just timeless, you know, like “vulgarity, pretense, and the lust for money.” MBS Productions brings the enduring, if a bit rude, truth with their distinctive production of Gaius Petronius’ Satyricon.

Translator, director, music and makeup designer, researcher, and actor Mark-Brian Sonna (MBS) gives the Roman novel (some consider it the world’s earliest extant example of that form) the adaptation treatment for the stage and fills in its missing parts (lacunae).

There is a popular myth out there that classical literature depicted a simpler, pure time, and focused onexalted themes such as chaste love and conventional beauty.  However, we know from other highbrow masters of smut like Aristophanes, Chaucer, and Shakespeare (to name a few) that this is just not true.  The bawdy, sexy comedy Satyricon hearkens back to those risqué plays of old.  And likethose authors, Petronius focuses on the mundane and the ordinary to highlight the themes of gossip, shallowness, gluttony, and vanity, all the while poking fun at the upper classes during the time of Nero.

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There is nothing like the comfort food of a great musical. Even if the play is a bit overdone and moldy, and spotted with a few holes, it’s hard to resist its cheesy charms. WaterTower Theatre supplies the fromage in its energetic, beautiful to look at, yet slightly hollow rendition of Alan Menken and Howard Ashman’s classic crowd-pleaser Little Shop of Horrors.

The story of an insatiable plant bent on world conquest began as a 1960s cult classic by Roger Corman, and then Menken and Ashman adapted it into an Off Broadway musical in 1982. Then it became the iconic 1986 Hollywood movie. Now it exists as a near-constant revival piece cropping up in professional and amateur theaters.

Amy Anders Corcoran directs this version of Little Shop down the middle with notes taken from all of those famous iterations, yet with an artist’s eye for detail. However, the production bizarrely combines some understated acting with some anachronistic over gesturing, and singing that is all over the place, keeping it from truly taking off.

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Last December we noticed that the cranes from the construction of the 42-story Museum Tower condo development in the Arts District were beginning to obstruct the view from the aperture of James Turrell’s installation at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Tending, (Blue). Those photos were a follow up to an initial story in the September 2009 D Magazine which raised the potential conflict between the new condo tower and Turrell’s well-loved art work.

Jonathan Borofsky and Museum Tower

In that article, Willard Spiegelman and Tim Rogers conducted an experiment, ingeniously utilizing a giant red balloon to test whether or not the new building, when completed, would be seen from the interior of Turrell’s piece.

Now a balloon is hardly needed. Although a sign and rope at the Nasher indicates that Turrell’s work is currently closed to the public, photos taken by FrontRow show that Museum Tower is beginning to make its way into the view. In fact, the photo above shows that the tower is clearly visible from Tending, (Blue) even though it is only the 24^th story of the new building that has been constructed. There will be eighteen additional stories constructed before Museum Tower is complete.

Kristen Gibbins, a spokesperson for the Nasher, confirmed that the exhibit space is closed because the crane from the construction could be seen from Tending, (Blue). Gibbins said that the museum has been in conversations  with James Terrell about the progress on the tower, and that the artist will soon make a trip to Dallas to determine how to address the intrusion of the tower on the piece. The timing of that trip has not yet been set, she said.

Gibbins added that Museum Tower has been “very much involved” with the status of Tending, (Blue), and that they are committed to being a “good neighbor,” but said it was too early to comment on whether the museum would ask for financial assistance to modify Tending, (Blue).

Here are this week’s openings.

Image: Still from Ludwig Schwarz’s Untitled (Galveston), 2007 (detail).

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