I’m not one for this pillar-of-salt take on each year, but it is not only expected but somewhat required, so I did my best to offer you a variety of views on well, ourselves. I asked a couple of other writers besides, in order to get appropriately closeup views on Denton and Fort Worth. I took Dallas for obvious reasons.

What follows is a very simple setup: two perspectives for each city or town filtered through the torturous punishment and reward ..read more

Best of lists invariably say more about the critic than they do about the year in movies, so I’ll preface my final roundup of my favorite films of 2011 with only a few caveats. First off, I haven’t seen everything. Two films, in fact, which may be glaringly absent from my list which I haven’t been able to see yet are Wim Wender’s Pina and Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation. No worries, we’ll get those in wide release in 2012 anyway. ..read more

We all know in Dallas that John Congleton is a bad ass, and not just because he is the front man of The Paper Chase. As Hunter mentioned this morning, Congleton has been putting together some highly-touted albums in his Oak Cliff studio from the likes of Annie Clark (aka St. Vincent), The Walkmen, and many others. But producers often dwell in the shadows of great recordings, which is why it is nice to see some national pub for Congleton and Stuart Sikes’ Elmwood Studios, via NPR music’s The Record blog:

An astonishing 20 records released this year have his fingerprints on them in one way or another. These include some of the year’s finest albums: Clap Your Hands Say Yeah‘s Hysterical, Hospital Ships‘ Lonely Twin, Mountain Goats‘ All Eternals Deck, Wye Oak‘s Civilian, and many more.

The Dallas-based producer has also served as Annie Clark’s primary collaborator and musical soulmate on St. Vincent’s last two records, 2009′s Actor and this year’s masterful Strange Mercy.

An interview with Congleton follows, which is worth checking out.

Photo: Elmwood Studios (via)

If you’re wondering how French director Michel Hazanavicius gets away with making a silent film in contemporary Hollywood, there are two simple answers. One is The Artist cleverly works its silence into its central theme, playing with multiple layers of representation – films within films – to use its voiceless drama as part of a comedic gag. Hazanavicius teases us at times, moments when the “real” sounds pop through, but these moments only punctuate his joke: the cinema is an ..read more

Just as the mood of Swedish director Tomas Alfredson’s last film, Let the Right One In, was dominated by an icy stillness, in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the director creates the feeling that his characters are moving in slow motion, that the mechanics of the film are stuck in molasses. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a pensive, heavy moving thing, a thriller that never ratchets-up and is instead content to allow the excitement to exist in the pure unfolding of ..read more

One of the most exciting things David Cronenberg’s latest, almost out-of-character film, A Dangerous Method, is watching its two lead actors, Michael Fassbinder and Viggo Mortensen, disappear into the seemingly out-of-character personalities they portray. Those roles also happen to be giants of the field of psychology, Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, and so there is some double play going on here. We bring our associations about Jung and Freud, as well as Fassbinder and Mortensen, and what we get is something altogether ..read more

Cameron Crowe’s first movie since 2005’s Elizabethtown feels like a made to order feel good family flick required to boast attendance from the under-13 set at American theaters this holiday season. And while it has all the ingredients of tear-jerking holiday fun – animals, a jolly Matt Damon – We Bought a Zoo is scattered and only sporadically charming.

The movie is about a family adrift. Damon plays Benjamin Mee, a widower with two kids, Dylan and Rosie. Their family life ..read more

I end my two-week journey into 2011’s pop music with, yep, a friggin’ list. Here are the albums I listened to the most this year, starting with No. 1 (hey, at least I’m not a click-count whore who insists on doing a slideshow countdown). How’d I come up with the list? Pretty simple. I just looked at the play counts in my iTunes. R.I.P., Steve Jobs.

1. Jay-Z and Kanye West, ‘Watch the Throne’ – Said everything I needed to say ..read more

THURSDAY

DJ Red Eye/Wanz Dover/DJ G/Trademarx (Zubar): A deep lineup of music experts present this first annual “Mistle Toe-Jam,” and though I’m not sure about that title, the promise of “lots of soul, borderlining [sic] on ghetto” from the event invite is fine with me. Also funny were these little details:

No cover No dress code No douchebaggery No bottle service No gogo dancers No drama No kidding

There you have it. Practically sounds like a list of New Year’s resolutions from this well-worked group of artists.

Usual Suspect/Ruby Rhod ..read more

First, the bad news. The brave tone of the press releases didn’t hide the hard facts: the two flagships of the classical musical establishment in Dallas, the Dallas Symphony and the Dallas Opera, made substantial, noticeable cuts in their core product. The 2012-13 classical subscription series of the Dallas Symphony will feature five fewer classical subscription concert weekends than in recent years (down from twenty-one to sixteen), and Dallas Opera subscribers were faced, for 2011-12, with a season that was ..read more