Say what you want about the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge, its pending opening does seem to have brought more attention to the once-hinterlands on the west side of the Trinity River. Last week, The Dallas Contemporary brought street artist Shepard Fairey to town. This week, another plan in the works via the Ft. Worth Ave. Development Group. Artist/Magnolia Gallery curator/the Belmont Hotel’s Scott Horn sends word that the group is seeking submissions from an artist or team of artists to ..read more
Peter Simek
Peter Simek is the arts editor for D Magazine, where he manages, edits, and serves as the primary movie critic and reporter for FrontRow. Before coming to D Magazine, Simek launched the well-loved, if short-lived, Renegade Bus, an online journal that brought out-of-the-box perspectives to Dallas life and culture. He also wrote for D Magazine and D CEO on topics ranging from soccer hooligans and insurance detectives to the pedestrian friendliness of the Dallas Arts District. Simek covered Dallas City Hall; helped launch Oak Cliff People; and wrote about movies, classical music, and opera while on the staff at People Newspapers.
Articles by Peter Simek
-
Location
Wide ReleaseDates
Opens Feb 10That Brendan Fraser isn’t starring in the sequel to 2008’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, is the result of some odd, high-ground Hollywood grandstanding – meh actors standing up for meh directors. The original Journey director, Eric Brevig, was too busy putting the finishing touches on another clonker, Yogi Bear, to devote himself to Journey 2: The Mysterious Island. Unwilling to move on without the franchise originator, Fraser backed out of the film (gasp!), forcing studio execs, unwilling ..read more
-
Location
Wide ReleaseDates
Opens Feb 10The Vow is The Notebook meets Shattered, a story about a woman who loses her memory of her relationship with her husband after a car accident. It is a movie intended – by producers, casting directors, and marketers – to be this year’s go-to Valentine’s Day date movie, a brush off, feel good trifle that girls will drag their guys to out of deference to the ingrained rituals of the Hallmark holiday. Still it is hard to shake the feeling ..read more
-
Here’s a simple question: Have you seen the Oscar shortlisted documentary Battle for Brooklyn yet? Unless you traveled at some point last year to a film festival or caught the movie at one of its screenings in New York or on the West Coast, the answer is no. That’s because the movie is only making its Texas debut this Friday as the opening night film of the Thin Line Film Festival.
In its fifth year, the Denton-based film fest is the ..read more
-
Last week, artist Shepard Fairey completed a series of murals in West Dallas and at the site of the Dallas Contemporary, which brought the artist to Dallas for the project. Fairey is perhaps most well known for his iconic “Hope” poster of Barak Obama, which became a calling card for the 2008 presidential campaign and also landed Fairey in a legal battle over copyright with the Associated Press. Fairey is used to legal controversy, not only because he has been ..read more
-
Remember that proposed public art project for White Rock Lake? An artist has been chosen for the project, and there will be a public meeting/meet and greet this coming Monday, February 6 at 6 p.m. at the Bath House Culture Center to discuss the proposal. The artist is Brower Hatcher, a public art veteran, who heads up Mid-Ocean Studio. To get a sense of what Hatcher might bring to White Rock, you can check out some of his other projects ..read more
-
Dates
Opens Feb 3Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami made a short film in 1975 called Two Solutions for One Problem, about a schoolroom scuffle between two young boys. Through matter-the-fact narration, the filmmaker walks us through two possible resolutions of a relatively simple conflict: a boy borrows another boy’s book, but when he returns it, a page is ripped. In one scenario, the second boy responds to receiving his torn book by ruining one of the other boy’s possessions. This kicks off a cycle ..read more
-
Dates
Opens Feb 3German director Wim Wender’s new movie, Pina, isn’t so much a documentary about the German dancer and choreographer Pina Bausche, as it is an attempt to reconcile two artistic languages – film and dance – in a way that allows each to show us something new about the other. To this end, Wenders employs 3D, the first to use it in a major documentary project since his New German Cinema cohort, Werner Herzog (Cave of Forgotten Dreams). The technology is ..read more
-
Dates
Opens Feb 3Two young clerks sit the front desk of a old Connecticutinn on its last weekend of operation in Ti West’s latest spook-fare, The Innkeepers. Luke is a sputter-lipped, Dwight Schrute-come-Elvis Costello whose curiosity about the inn’s supposed haunting by a newlywed who was killed there decades ago has turned the pair into amateur ghost-hounds. Claire (Sara Paxton) is a jittery asthmatic: pretty, young, blond, and innocent. When one of the hotel’s only guests turns out to be one of her ..read more
-
Los Angeles-based street artist Shepard Fairey is best known in art circles as the man who created the instantly recognizable Andre the Giant “Obey” graphic, and to the wider public as the artist who faced-off with the Associated Press over copyright laws for his use of a photo in this Barak Obama poster.
This week, Fairey’s in Dallas as part of the latest project by the Dallas Contemporary, which has commissioned five new murals from the artist that will be put up on walls around ..read more