Weekend Event Planner

These are the 9 best things to do in Dallas this weekend

Appropriately enough, a running theme through this weekend's events in Dallas is politics. With Inauguration Day on Friday, over half of the events on the slate below have an implicit or explicit political bent, with those expressions coming through dance, theater, comedy, and an actual march.

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, January 19

Danielle Georgiou Dance Group presents War Flower
With this new offering, Danielle Georgiou Dance Group investigates the establishment of culture itself. War Flower examines the cyclic and savage laws of time, nature, and ritual. In addition to original text by Danielle Georgiou, the show references political and philosophical texts, as well as political and ritual practices in animal ecosystems. War Flower is presented six times through January 28 at Bath House Cultural Center.

Friday, January 20

WaterTower Theatre presents Silent Sky
WaterTower Theatre presents the regional premiere of Silent Sky, a new play by Lauren Gunderson. The play blends humor and romance in a riveting exploration of the life and career of celebrated astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt, who fearlessly asserted herself in the male-driven, turn-of-the-century world of science and academia. The play runs through February 12.

Chippendales 2017: Best. Night. Ever. Tour
Some things may come and go, but buff male dancers stripping down to their g-strings for their admirers is something that's almost guaranteed to remain popular. The dancers of the Chippendales Touring Show provide a whirlwind of sexy goodness at House of Blues Dallas, with a lot of pants dropping and handclapping.

Saturday, January 21

2017 Texas Rangers Fan Fest
Spring training is only a month away, so it's time to get excited about the Texas Rangers again. The 2017 Texas Rangers Fan Fest features autograph sessions with current Rangers players and coaches; interactive Q&A sessions; on-field events; pitching, hitting, and fielding clinics; and more. If that's not enough, there's also the Rangers Awards Dinner on Friday night at Gilley's Dallas.

Dallas Women's March
On Saturday, millions are gathering in Washington, D.C., for the Women's March on Washington. In solidarity with that march, thousands more are expected to gather at Dallas City Hall for a so-called "Sister March." The Women’s March is designed to send a message to the world and to the new administration on its first day in office that women's rights are human rights. There is also a planned march in Denton.

USA Film Festival presents 2017 KidFilm Festival
KidFilm, presented by USA Film Festival, is the oldest and largest-attended children’s film festival in the United States, featuring an entertaining, educational, and diverse line-up of new and classic films for both children and adults. The free event, taking place at Angelika Film Center Dallas on both Saturday and Sunday, also features tributes to several prominent children's book authors.

Iliza Shlesinger: The Confirmed Kills Tour
Dallas native Iliza Shlesinger is the only female and the youngest comedian to hold the title of NBC’s Last Comic Standing. In addition to her stand-up work, her new TBS series, Separation Anxiety, premiered in March of 2016. If for some reason you can't get into this concert at Majestic Theatre, you might just see her earlier in the day at the Women's March, which she has pledged to join.

Sunday, January 22

The Dallas Opera presents Michael Fabiano
Michael Fabiano is considered one of the greatest tenors in the world today. In 2014 he was the first singer ever to be awarded the prestigious Beverly Sills Artist Award and the Richard Tucker Award in the same year. This exclusive recital, produced by the Dallas Opera, takes place at Dallas City Performance Hall.

Bill Maher in concert
For more than 20 years, Bill Maher has set the boundaries of where funny, political talk can go on American television — first on Politically Incorrect, then, for the last 13 years, on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher. With this concert at the Music Hall at Fair Park taking place just after Inauguration Day, you can expect Maher to have a lot to say about the current state of politics.

Danielle Georgiou Dance Group presents War Flower at Bath House Cultural Center through January 28.

Photo by Steve Visneau

Danielle Georgiou Dance Group presents War Flower at Bath House Cultural Center through January 28.

movies sports opera event-planner politics comedy dance theater

Movie review

Over-the-top The Bride! makes other Frankenstein movies seem subtle

Photo by Niko Tavernise

Christian Bale and Jessie Buckley in The Bride!.

The story of Dr. Frankenstein and his monster is now over 200 years old, with Mary Shelley’s book having been adapted or referenced in close to 500 films. Less common is the character of The Bride of Frankenstein, which existed in the original text but has more often than not been excised in adaptations. Writer/director Maggie Gyllenhaal has tried to rectify that by giving the character a big showcase in her new film, The Bride!.

Gyllenhaal has reimagined the story as one in which a woman named Ida (Jessie Buckley) becomes possessed by the spirit of Shelley (also Buckley). At the same time, the already-existing Frankenstein’s monster (Christian Bale) approaches Dr. Euphronius (Annette Bening), who specializes in reanimation, with the request to make him a wife. When Ida falls to her death in an “accident” involving her boyfriend (John Magaro), the ideal corpse becomes available.

After Ida’s resurrection, she and the monster become restless being studied by Dr. Euphronius and decide to break out to experience the world. The world, naturally, is not exactly welcoming to them, and soon the couple are on the run for causing mayhem, including a few murders. In hot pursuit are detective Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) and his assistant, Myrna Mallow (Penélope Cruz), as well as other authorities.

It’s clear that Gyllenhaal wanted to merge the Frankenstein story with Bonnie & Clyde, especially since she sets the film in the mid-1930s. And that wouldn’t have been a bad idea if having the monster and The Bride going on a crime spree was truly the focus of the movie. But most of the time there’s less intentionality in their misdeeds and more confusion, leading to a muddled plot with no clear direction or end goal in mind.

One of the biggest problems is that Gyllenhaal starts the energy of the film at an 11, giving her and everyone else nowhere to go but down. She dabbles in multiple different tones, at times going the straight drama route and other times making what seems like full-on camp. At one point, she even has the monster and the Bride in a dance sequence set to “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” which would be hilarious as an homage to Young Frankenstein if the film weren’t so disjointed.

Most baffling of all is what Gyllenhaal wants from The Bride character. She morphs multiple times over the course of the film, from close to unintelligible at the beginning to rough-and-tumble at the end. There are hints at the lack of control she has over her autonomy, including Shelley’s possession of her and the monster lying to her about her past, but any commentary that Gyllenhaal might be trying to make gets lost amid the oddity of the film as a whole.

Both Buckley and Bale are all-in for their performances, which definitely fall in the “love it or hate it” dichotomy. Each scene is pitched so high that there’s little nuance to either of them, and neither is on par with their previous Oscar-caliber roles. The high-powered supporting cast of Bening, Sarsgaard, Cruz, and Jake Gyllenhaal is watchable based on previous roles, but none of them elevate this particular movie.

Whatever intentions Maggie Gyllenhaal had in making The Bride! are only halfway legible in a film that can never find its tonal footing. There has rarely been subtlety in movies featuring Frankenstein’s monster and related characters, but this one makes all the others seem like stuffy dramas in comparison.

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The Bride! is now playing in theaters.

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