I promised a live blog last week of Christopher Mosley’s guest KXT DJ set, forgetting the fact that I’m traveling today and wont’ be near a computer during the program. That said, feel free to leave your thoughts and comments regarding set, which promises “songs by artists so big that critics and fans could never possibly stop debating their merit.” You can live stream KXT here.

The Oak Cliff Film Festival has posted its full program, and the newest film festival on the block is shaping up to be a expanded vision of what The Texas Theatre is year round: a mix of art, genre, and cult films with a nod towards cinema history and an emphasis on stuff that doesn’t get to see the light of day locally very often.

For example, the festival will bring screenings of The Ghastly Love of Johnny X, a B-movie ..read more

The Dallas Children’s Theater has themed their 2012-2013 season “Passport To Imagination,” and one of the features of the new season: kids in subscriber families will receive a workbook with each performance filled with games, tibits, and other activities. As for the productions, in addition to DCT classics like Junie B. In Jingle Bells, Batman Smells!, as well as puppet adaptations of fairy tales like The Nutcracker and Rumplestilskin from the Kathy Burks Theatre of Puppetry Arts, there will be adaptations of ..read more

The third annual Homegrown Music and Art Festival kicks off Saturday at Main Street Garden featuring a bill of artists hailing from Texas. We have two pairs of tickets to giveaway. For your chance to see Black Joe Lewis, Ben Kweller, Eisley, Centro-matic, and more, all you have to do is enter your information in form below. We’ll draw a winner after 3 p.m.

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One of this summer’s most anticipated movie events is the release of Sir. Ridley Scott’s latest film, Prometheus, an almost-prequel to Alien that hits theaters June 8. To celebrate the director, The Big Movie at the Magnolia will bring two of Scott’s films back to the big screen this week and next. The mini-retrospective begins with Legend, the cult- fantasy dripping with goblins, unicorns, and fairys and starring Tom Cruise and Tim Curry. We have three pairs of tickets to tonight’s ..read more

Over on the Atlantic’s “Cities,” Michael Seman, a doctorate candidate in urban planning and public policy at the University of Arlington, writes about how 35 Denton is serving a role as an urban catalyst, not only attracting music lovers who call the town home, but businesses as well. Says Kevin Roden, a Denton city councilmember:

“We are seeing an increased interest in the downtown area,” Roden says, adding, “It’s hard to remove what’s going on with 35 Denton and the energy it’s put into downtown venues that host music throughout the year.”

(h/t Art&Seek)

Radio UTD is giving away a couple of tickets to FrontRow Live at the Dallas Contemporary on May 31. Head to their Facebook page to enter.

Admit it: as much as we pretend to enjoy intellectual, cultivated entertainment, there is a part of each of us that yearns for the exposed vulgarity of reality TV. Table-flipping, drink-throwing, insult hurling—watching others channel their most primitive selves is as thrilling as it is comforting, if only because it reinforces our own refinement. But how sophisticated are we, really? Playwright Yasmina Reza argues that no matter the cut of our clothes or the sum of our bank accounts, we ..read more

Class warfare and the battle of sexes broke out in Fort Worth Saturday night—at least onstage at Bass Performance Hall, where the Fort Worth Opera’s production of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro held up to the audience a cold, clear mirror of human folly.

Dissatisfaction was already smoldering across Europe when Pierre Beaumarchais wrote his play Le Mariage de Figaro, a not-so-thinly-veiled attack on the aristocracy, in 1781. Mozart and his librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte, clearly sensed the inevitable fall of ..read more

The moment when the details of New York City Planner Amanda Burden’s presentation at last night’s NasherSALON became largely inapplicable to its Dallas audience came very early on. “New York is going to grow by one million people,” Burden told the crowd at the Nasher, which included notables such as Mayor Mike Rawlings and the Trinity Trust’s Gail Thomas. “So we decided to focus on New York’s greatest asset: its mass transit system.”

What followed was an alternatively inspiring (for New ..read more

By the time the name of toy company Hasbro appeared onscreen during the opening credits, my expectations had reached their lowest point. It was a reminder that Battleship is based on a board game — a game that lacks even the sort of back-story or character development found in Candy Land or Monopoly.

“How are they going to make a movie out of that?” is the appropriate response of any reasonable observer. And yet they did. Fortunately, in the hands of ..read more

What to Expect When You’re Expecting begins with what I assumed was a spoof of the confoundingly popular TV show Dancing With the Stars. Cameron Diaz plays Jules Baxter, a fitness guru who is a contestant on the show and is herself the host of a televised weight-loss contest that looks like NBC’s The Biggest Loser.

But these two shows within the movie aren’t actually parodies. They’re more like straightforward re-creations. What to Expect isn’t made for audiences looking to laugh ..read more

Je-kyu Kang’s bloated, nationalistic World War II man-love melodrama feels like the child of Chariots of Fire and Steven Spielberg’s War Horse. There’s lots of Spielberg in My Way, in fact, down to the reshot Saving Private Ryan D-Day sequences that flip the perspective from the Allies to the Nazis. How we got there comprises the rest of My Way’s often hackneyed narrative, which tells the tale of two star runners, one Korean (Jun-shik Kim, Dong-gun Jang), and one Japanese (Tatsuo Hasegawa, Jo Odagiri), who end up ..read more

On Crooked Arrows’ website, the new movie about a ragtag lacrosse team made up of Native Americans is described as being “modeled upon the consistently successful underdog sports movie popularized by Mighty Ducks, Bad News Bears, Hoosiers, and Bend It Like Beckham.” You can take out the other three films; this is a blatant rip-off of The Mighty Ducks, one that does the original a disservice.

Part of the problem with Crooked Arrows is that its hackneyed, derivative plot is matched ..read more

As elegantly constructed, beautifully shot, and inspiring as Bess Kargman’s documentary First Position actually is, I have to admit I am growing weary of the competition doc genre. What movies like First Position offer – from Spellbound to A Surprise in Texas to Thank You For Judging – is a built in dramatic arc. We meet inspiring hopefuls who push through the drama of excruciating competition. The stakes are high, the tension is thick. And then, in the end – ..read more

The most enduring image of Ernesto Neto that remains after his weekend visit to Dallas for the opening of his exhibition, Cuddle on the Tightrope, at the Nasher Sculpture Center came during the opening reception. As rain began to drizzle down on the grounds of the Nasher garden, suited patrons and women in gowns squeezed underneath the overhang of Renzo Piano’s building, clutching their cocktails. Meanwhile, the artist, with his windblown curly grey locks falling down on his round, grinning ..read more

THURSDAY

Nervous Curtains/The Blurries (The Common Table): The lack of cover charge merely adds to the increasingly (yet delightfully) inappropriate bookings at this deep Uptown establishment. It might be a hard sell for their usual fans, and apparently the sound can leave something to be desired, but what else are you going to do in this neighborhood? Well, besides pick up your designer baseball cap from the cleaners before you go to some bar that serves beer only. Next.

The Tony Cliftons/The ..read more

Even though the AT&T Performing Arts Center opened its doors in the fall of 2009, the arts complex has always felt a little unfinished. That is because since before the center opened there has been talk about the need for some kind of cafe in Sammons Park, something to help energize what was intended to be a usable, round-the-clock public space. PAC officials have also expressed their desire to eventually move their box office to a stand alone structure out in the park. ..read more

On Sunday, May 27, The Reading Room will feature a performance of experimental music by the Denton-based duo anteroom. Billed as a group interested in “the nurturing and delivery of text based scores,” it is difficult to describe the duo’s performances, which involve the two musicians sitting a rug in an intimate setting with various found objects and percussive instruments – from wooden xylophones to woks and alarm clocks – often to the accompaniment of projected imagery.

To whet your appetite ..read more

The Dallas Theater Center has added two new actors to the Brierley Resident Acting Company, both with strong ties to Southern Methodist University.

Tiffany Hobbs just finished her MFA at SMU, and she also appeared in the DTC’s Cabaret and A Christmas Carol. She’s taking a post with the company that another SMU grad, Abbey Siegworth, is vacating. The other new member, Kieran (Michael) Connolly, is the former head of the acting program at SMU, where he taught Hobbs and Siegworth. He ..read more

You’ve seen her in the West Wing, heard her sing in Wicked, now Broadway, film, and television star Kristin Chenoweth will be performing a rare concert appearance at the Winspear Opera House on Thursday, May 24. Today is Thursday, so you know what that means: we have a pair of tickets to giveaway to the performance. To get your hands on them, just enter your information in the form below and answer this question: Chenoweth was only the third musical ..read more

It’s not based on a movie or TV show. It doesn’t boast a C-list celebrity headliner. It isn’t a loosely strung-together staging of a popular music group’s catalog. Memphis is—believe it or not—an original Broadway musical, full of its own heart and rhythm. Perhaps because it’s been so long since we’ve been presented with something not “inspired by” or “based on,” some might find it a tad difficult to grab hold of Memphis. No matter—the show grabs us within the ..read more

Here are this week’s gallery events and openings.

Image: Work by Duke Horn, part of the Oak Cliff Visual Speed Bump Tour

“Rewriting Art History” by Betsy Williamson at Mercantile Coffee House – May 17 : 6:00 PM – 7:00 PM; 1800 Main Street, Dallas, Tx 75201 .

“2012 Annual Membership Event” by the Texas Sculpture Association at Aloft Hotel – May 18 : 6:30 PM – 9:00 PM; 1033 Young Street, Dallas, Tx 75202.

“Mayan Prophecy” by Jonathan Ramirez at WAAS GALLERY – May ..read more

My wife and I had an idea for a public art piece for Dallas that we used to kick around during Friday happy hour: a pedestrian trail marked on the sidewalks of Downtown Dallas modeled after Boston’s Freedom Trail that leads visitors to the city’s notable architectural landmarks. The catch, however, is that Dallas’ landmarks — from Little Mexico to the Carousel Club — wouldn’t actually exist anymore.

That idea — Dallas’ lost architectural legacy — is the subject of an upcoming project at the Dallas Center For Architecture. Centered around an exhibition of photographs of lost buildings, neighborhoods, and other places at the Center’s Woodall Rodgers location, Lost Dallas will also include walking tours, lectures, and book signings. It all kicks off on May 21. Here’s the full release.

Image: Movie theaters lining Elm Street downtown, c. 1957 (via)

The KXT spring fundraising campaign kicked-off yesterday, and as the radio station has done in the past, a number of guest DJs will take to the airwaves with their own  sets of music. You can see a full list of the guest DJs here, but here’s the important date: Tuesday, May 22 at 2 p.m. when our own Christopher Mosley will bring to the station a program of music he describes like this: “Songs by artists so big that critics and fans could never possibly stop debating their merit.” And yes, look for us to live blog the Mosley set so that you can debate in the comments to your heart’s content.

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