Weekend Event Planner

These are the 12 best things to do in Dallas this weekend

It's another eclectic weekend event-wise in Dallas, as a confluence of big holidays — spring break, St. Patrick's Day, and Easter — combine to create a lot of fun activities. Among the happenings are a block party downtown, traditional St. Patty's Day fun all along Greenville Avenue, two big music festivals, and much more.

Below are the best options for your precious free time Thursday through Sunday. Don't like what you see? Lucky for you, we have a much longer list of the city's best events.

Thursday, March 17

Dallas Summer Musicals presents The Little Mermaid
Two years after its last visit, The Little Mermaid returns to the Music Hall at Fair Park courtesy of Dallas Summer Musicals. The story is familiar if you know and love the Disney movie, but it includes many more songs to make it into a proper Broadway musical. The production runs through March 27.

An Evening with Elayne Boosler
Comedian/writer/animal activist Elayne Boosler is best known for her thoughtful and feisty political humor, and her love of baseball and animals, all of which share a big part of her act. Boosler is most familiar to those who came of age in the 1980s, but funny knows no age limit, as she demonstrates at The Kessler.

Friday, March 18

Dallas Holocaust Museum presents Conversations with Anne
In collaboration with the Anne Frank Center USA, the Dallas Holocaust Museum presents four performances of Conversations with Anne, a 40-minute play. The play, showing on Friday and Saturday, features a solo actor in the role of Anne Frank. The monologue is followed by a Q&A session where kids in the audience can ask Anne questions about her life before the war and her experiences while in hiding.

Dallas Arts District Spring Break Block Party
The third Friday in March lines up with spring break for a lot of people, so why not have a block party? Running from 6 pm to midnight, the Dallas Arts District's three big museums — Dallas Museum of Art, Nasher Sculpture Center, and Crow Collection of Asian Art — each present special events, and Flora and Harwood streets are lined with food trucks and other activities.

Spillover Music Fest
The ninth annual Spillover Music Fest, taking advantage of bands playing at SXSW, has expanded to three days at three separate locations in Deep Ellum. Taking place through Sunday at Three Links, Trees, and Club Dada, the festival features performances from bands like Anamanaguchi, The Orwells, Le Butcherettes, Nothing, Broncho, and more.

Heritage Farmstead Museum presents Adults-Only Night Easter Egg Hunt
Plano's Heritage Farmstead Museum hosts its third annual adults-only night Easter egg hunt event, which allows adults to hunt for the more than 2,000 prize-filled eggs hidden throughout the farmstead’s property. Prizes include Texas Rangers tickets, Hawaiian Falls tickets, and a variety of other coupons and gift cards. Online pre-registration is required.

Saturday, March 19

St. Patrick's Day events
It will be officially two days past St. Patrick's Day on Saturday, but who cares when you have this much fun stuff to do? All you need to do is roam Greenville Avenue, starting with the annual Dallas St. Patrick’s Parade and Festival. Then enjoy a concert by Third Eye Blind at Energy Square before heading down to Lower Greenville for its day-long block party.

So What? Texas Music Festival
The So What? Texas Music Festival, formerly known as South by So What, features well over 100 bands on multiple stages over the course of two days at QuikTrip Park in Grand Prairie. Headliners include New Found Glory, Bayside, Neck Deep, State Champs, Real Friends, Underoath, and Devil Wears Prada.

2016 Mudbug Bash
The annual Mudbug Bash at Main Street Garden features 4,000 pounds of crawfish, live music, games, beer, specialty drinks, and fun for the whole family, including four-legged members. Also expect live music from Steve ‘N’ Seagulls, Travis Matte & The Kingpins, and Dallas favorites Calvin Sexton & The Inner City All-Stars.

Arts & Letters Live: Rainn Wilson — Quirks, Comedy & Creativity
For nine seasons, Rainn Wilson built his career playing obnoxious Dwight Schrute, everyone’s favorite work nemesis, on the hit television series The Office. Now he’s ready to explain his socially awkward climb to stardom in his memoir, The Bassoon King: My Life in Art, Faith, and Idiocy. Wilson talks about the book at the Dallas Museum of Art.

Sunday, March 20

Knife at Highland Dallas presents Sunday Cinema Series: Wes Anderson WesFest
Chef John Tesar's restaurant Knife kicks off a new series of special movie screenings with Wes Anderson's Bottle Rocket. Guests enjoy themed gourmet bites by Tesar and craft beer from Four Corners Brewing Company. Other films to come in the series include Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Moonrise Kingdom, and The Grand Budapest Hotel.

AT&T Performing Arts Center presents An Evening with Sophia Loren
Synonymous with grace, beauty, and artistry, Oscar-winning actress Sophia Loren participates in an intimate onstage conversation and Q&A at Winspear Opera House. Loren's career spans over five decades, and she's earned a remarkable array of notable accolades, including the first Academy Award presented for a foreign-language role for her work in Two Women.

You can celebrate St. Patrick's Day up and down Greenville Avenue on March 19.

Greenville Avenue St. Patrick's Day Parade in Dallas

Photo by Jerry McClure

You can celebrate St. Patrick's Day up and down Greenville Avenue on March 19.

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Movie Review

Faces of Death returns with modern twist on cult horror film

Photo courtesy of of IFC Films

Dacre Montgomery in Faces of Death.

True horror fans will likely be familiar with the 1978 cult film Faces of Death, which purported to be a documentary showing real-life killings in gory detail. It didn’t, of course, but that didn’t stop rumors from continuing to spread for decades. Now, almost 50 years and multiple sequels later, comes a new version of Faces of Death, an actual movie that pays homage to the original in interesting ways.

Margot (Barbie Ferreira) works at a YouTube-like company called Kino as a content moderator, flagging videos that violate the company’s policies. This means her job often involves seeing some truly despicable things from all manner of depraved people. One day, though, she comes across a video that seems a little too real, and after seeing more similar videos, she starts to believe they’re genuine murders.

Going against her company NDA, she starts to investigate the videos on her own, which puts her on the radar of Arthur (Dacre Montgomery), who is actually kidnapping people and killing them on camera through methods seen in the original Faces of Death film. It’s not long before Arthur tracks her down, with a plan to make her one of his next victims.

Written and directed by Daniel Goldhaber (How to Blow Up a Pipeline) and co-written by Isa Mazzei, the film is not so much scary as it is creepy, with the occasional gross-out sequence. The idea of having someone emulate the killings in the cult film is a good idea, and pairing it with the modern-day attention economy - in which content creators go to increasing lengths for clicks - is a clever twist on a concept that other films have done.

The film as a whole is a commentary on how social media and video sharing sites have often decided to prioritize profits over the well-being of their users. Margot is shown allowing videos involving violence and sexual assault to stay on the site while nixing ones depicting how to use Narcan or demonstrating putting on a condom on a banana. Josh (Jermaine Fowler), Margot’s boss, is even explicit in the company mandate that outrageous videos drive views.

While Arthur has the makings of a good villain, there are few attempts to make him seem truly diabolical. His kidnappings often seem more spur-of-the-moment than calculated, and even though he has a well thought-out dungeon at home, the house’s location in the suburbs seems to make him vulnerable to easy discovery. Goldhaber and Mazzei leave more than a few unanswered questions along the way that take away from the intensity of the story.

Ferreira is yet another actor from Euphoria who’s capitalizing on her exposure from that show. She plays Margot’s increasing anxiety well, and when the action ratchets up in the final act, she meets the moment in a satisfying way. Montgomery returns to the vibe he had while playing the evil Billy on Stranger Things, and even though his character doesn’t fully live up to his potential, Montgomery sells his evil for all it’s worth.

The new Faces of Death may not be what some are expecting given the reputation of the previous films, but it’s a solid horror/thriller that uses the brand as a launching pad into something different. It doesn’t make much of a dent in the scare department, but it does give its violence and gore a degree of relevance in today’s often desensitized world.

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Faces of Death is now playing in theaters.

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