Weekend Event Planner

These are the 8 best things to do in Dallas this weekend

As March blends into April, the Dallas area experiences a busy weekend, with lots of high-profile events taking place. They include the biggest film festival the area has to offer, the national tour of a Tony Award-winning musical, a gaggle of movie and TV celebrities, women's college basketball at its finest, three big concerts, and a popular comedian.

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 30

2017 Dallas International Film Festival
The 11th edition of the Dallas International Film Festival is headlined by a special 50th anniversary screening of Bonnie and Clyde on opening night at Dallas City Performance Hall, followed by 10 more days of movies at various venues around Dallas, primarily Angelika Film Center Dallas and Magnolia Theatre. In all, the festival features 122 films from 31 countries, including 75 features and 47 shorts, through April 9.

Dallas Summer Musicals presents Kinky Boots
With songs by pop icon Cyndi Lauper, Kinky Boots takes audiences from a gentlemen’s shoe factory in Northampton to the glamorous catwalks of Milan. Charlie Price is struggling to live up to his father’s expectations and continue the family business. With the factory’s future hanging in the balance, help arrives in the unlikely but spectacular form of Lola, a fabulous performer in need of some sturdy new stilettos. The Tony Award-winning musical plays at Music Hall at Fair Park through April 9.

Friday, March 31

Fan Expo Dallas
Fan Expo Dallas is the largest comics, sci-fi, horror, anime, and gaming event in Texas. Set to host more than 50,000 fans at Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center through Sunday, it features appearances by a slew of movie, TV, and comic book celebrities, including Stan Lee, Mark Hamill, Milo Ventimiglia, Adam West and Burt Ward from Batman, Norman Reedus and Jeffrey Dean Morgan from The Walking Dead, and more.

2017 NCAA Women's Final Four
It's no surprise that the University of Connecticut Huskies have made it back to the Final Four, as they've won each of the past four championships. They are joined on Friday at American Airlines Center by the Mississippi State Bulldogs, Stanford Cardinal, and South Carolina Gamecocks, followed by the championship game on Sunday. Tickets are technically sold out, but secondary market tickets can still be found.

Panic! at the Disco in concert
Las Vegas rockers Panic! at the Disco made a big first impression with their debut album, A Fever You Can't Sweat Out, and the hit single, "I Write Sins Not Tragedies." They haven't had any crossover songs since, but that hasn't hurt their popularity, as each of their four subsequent albums have reached the top 10 on the Billboard charts, including 2016's No. 1 Death of a Bachelor. They'll play at Allen Event Center with MisterWives and Saint Motel.

Lisa Lampanelli: Queen of Mean
If you choose to see Lisa Lampanelli in concert, you revoke your right to be offended. That's because Lampanelli, who's been a stand-up comic for over 25 years, is known as the "Queen of Mean," a cross between Don Rickles, Archie Bunker, and a vial of estrogen. She entertains with her brand of insult comedy at Majestic Theatre.

Saturday, April 1

Edgefest 2017
There may no longer be an Edge anymore, but Edgefest lives on, at least for one last time. The 2017 edition of Edgefest, taking place at Toyota Stadium in Frisco, includes performances by Blink-182, The Offspring, 311, Chevelle, Toadies, the Naked and Famous, the Record Company, The Nixons, Dreamers, Goodbye June, Missio, Black Pistol Fire, Badflower, and The Wrecks.

Sunday, April 2

Gladys Knight in concert
The great ones endure, and Gladys Knight has long been one of the greatest. Very few singers over the last 50 years have matched her unassailable artistry. The seven-time Grammy winner has enjoyed No.1 hits in Pop, Gospel, R&B, and Adult Contemporary, along with success in film and television. She performs a retrospective of songs from throughout her career at Winspear Opera House, including from her latest album, 2014's Where My Heart Belongs.

The 2017 Dallas International Film Festival takes place through April 9 at various venues, mostly the Angelika Film Center Dallas.

Photo by Marc Lee

The 2017 Dallas International Film Festival takes place through April 9 at various venues, mostly the Angelika Film Center Dallas.

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Movie Review

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma gives horror a surreal twist

Photo courtesy of MUBI

Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.

The horror genre really ramped up in the 1970s and ‘80s, bringing with it a new subgenre - the slasher - that gave audiences new visuals of gore, but also a reliance on sexism and homophobia that would come to define the era. The new film Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma wrestles with that legacy in ways that are funny, thought-provoking, and downright strange.

Kris (Hannah Einbinder) is a queer filmmaker who has been hired to reboot the moldy IP that is the Camp Miasma franchise, one that was fresh in the 1970s but which numerous shlocky sequels have rendered irrelevant. In an attempt to get to know the property better, Kris has scored a meeting with the reclusive Billy (Gillian Anderson), the star of the original film who has shunned the public eye for decades.

Turns out that Billy lives deep in the woods at Camp Rivoli, which served as the location for the first film. As Kris tries to get to know Billy and convince her to be a part of the new film, she starts to fall under Billy’s spell and the lore of the franchise as a whole. That includes believing that the movie’s villain, Little Death - a transgender person who has an air conditioning vent as a head/mask - may not just be a character created for the movies.

Written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun (I Saw the TV Glow), the film at first feels like it’s going to go the straight-up comedy route, with comic explosions of blood, a strange fascination with candy brands, and a production design that does nothing to hide that the two main actors are on a movie set with painted backdrops. This is backed up by Kris’ phone conversations with her girlfriend, Mari (Jasmine Savoy Brown) and her agent (Sarah Sherman), as well as numerous other details.

But the film starts to go down the surreal route the longer Kris stays at the camp with Billy, especially when they sit down to watch the original Camp Miasma. An extended sequence shows a good amount of that film-within-the-film, demonstrating why Kris and Billy have a love/hate relationship with the property. For Kris, though, the lines between the film and the real world start to blur, and Schoenbrun uses a variety of out-there elements to drive the point home.

The final act of the film can barely be described as Kris goes deeper down the rabbit hole, with Schoenbrun using her film to comment on the horror genre as a whole, its treatment of women and LGBT people, the movie industry, and more. All the while the “camp” of Camp Miasma maintains a presence, with candy wrappers showing up everywhere and the tongue-in-cheek references to Little Death (the French term La petite mort, which means “the little death,” is a euphemism for orgasm).

Einbinder, an Emmy winner for Hacks, is the perfect person to inhabit her role. Her established real-life and fictional personas color everything she does in the film, with her enthusiasm and curiosity shining through. Anderson leans heavily into another reference - Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard - to create a character that is as mysterious as she is alluring. Supporting actors like Brown, Sherman, Patrick Fischler, Dylan Baker, and Eva Victor keep the movie at the right pitch all the way through.

While other films have made fun of horror movie tropes before, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma finds a wholly unique way of doing so. It’s a funny and daring trip into the psyches of two women who may be victims of their own obsessions, and of the movies that made them that way.

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Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is now playing in select theaters

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