Weekend Event Planner

These are the 10 best things to do in Dallas this weekend

The slate of events in and around Dallas this weekend are literally and figuratively all over the map. You can enjoy movies, music, and more in Denton; celebrate the Earth at Fair Park; laugh your head off in Arlington; or check out art of all types at galleries throughout Dallas. But first, you might want to taste some of the best food Dallas has to offer at our own special event.

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, April 20

2017 Thin Line Festival
Thin Line is a film, music, and photography festival held at multiple venues in and around Denton, including Campus Theatre, Dan's Silverleaf, Rubber Gloves Studio, and UNT on the Square. The festival's program includes high-quality documentary films, world-class music, and a diverse selection of photography. The festival continues through Sunday.

CultureMap Tastemaker Awards
The CultureMap Tastemaker Awards are an annual celebration of talent in Dallas-Fort Worth's restaurant and bar community, as selected by their peers. Our mission is to shine a spotlight on the people making the city's restaurant scene special and honor their innovation, energy, and creativity. The swanky tasting event and awards ceremony, emceed by Tim Love, takes place at Sixty Five Hundred, where we celebrate the nominees and unveil the winners.

Friday, April 21

Earth Day Texas 2017
Earth Day Texas is a three-day event at Fair Park that features numerous outdoor experiences, including live music, sustainable beer and food pavilions, electric bike test tracks, and family activities. New this year is EarthxFilm, a concurrent film festival showcasing films and emerging media that explore science, conservation, climate change, and the environment. Both events will take place through Sunday.

USA Film Festival presents A Very Sordid Wedding
In A Very Sordid Wedding, it's 2015, 17 years after family matriarch Peggy tripped over G.W.’s wooden legs in Sordid Lives, and life has moved into the present for the residents of Winters, Texas. In the wake of the Supreme Court decision in favor of marriage equality, the Sordid saga continues. There are seven screenings of the film at Texas Theatre through April 30, with filmmakers in attendance at all screenings.

Dallas Opera presents Norma
The latest production from Dallas Opera is set during the Roman occupation of Gaul in 50 B.C., where a passionate love triangle in the midst of a deepening culture clash leads to dangerous consequences. Amid the turmoil of the occupation and impending revolution, Norma is driven to the brink of insanity, convinced of her betrayal and fearing disgrace for her fatherless children. The opera plays five times through May 7 at Winspear Opera House.

Improv Arlington presents Jay Pharoah
During his tenure on Saturday Night Live, Jay Pharoah proved himself to be one of the show's most talented and popular cast members, mostly thanks to his uncanny impressions of Will Smith, Denzel Washington, Stephen A. Smith, Kanye West, and Chris Tucker. He was unceremoniously fired from the show prior to this season, but their loss is our gain as he performs four times at Improv Arlington on Friday and Saturday.

Saturday, April 22

2017 Dallas Art Dealers Association Spring Gallery Walk
Dallas Art Dealers Association presents its annual Spring Gallery Walk, an event designed for everyone from the art novice to the aficionado. Participants can enjoy a full spectrum of gallery openings, special exhibitions, and art talks at over 30 art venues, including DADA members representing art dealer galleries and nonprofit art organization spaces.

Dallas Arts District presents Changing Perspectives Block Party
The Dallas Arts District closes down Flora Street from Routh to Crockett for a block party featuring Dallas' own Zhora and special guests Bandaloop: Vertical Dance Company. The event includes food trucks, a beer garden, an art fair, live mural painting, dance improv, and more. Bandaloop performs on the east side of the Hall Arts building at 3 pm, 5 pm, and 6 pm.

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers in concert with Joe Walsh
Tom Petty has been putting out memorable music for over 40 years, with a slew of hits that compare favorably to any classic musician. Petty and his longtime band, the Heartbreakers, come to American Airlines Center as part of their 40th anniversary tour. They are joined by another classic musician, special guest Joe Walsh of the Eagles.

Sunday, April 23

Arts & Letters Live: Chelsea Clinton
Former first daughter Chelsea Clinton comes to Dallas to share insights from her book, It's Your World: Get Informed, Get Inspired & Get Going! The book is designed to inspire and empower readers of all ages to do their part to make the world a better place, as it addresses challenging issues prevalent in the modern world, including poverty, global warming, obesity, gender inequality, and cancer. The event takes place at the Dallas Museum of Art.

Dallas Opera presents Norma at Winspear Opera House five times between April 21 and May 7.

Photo by Maxine Helfman

Dallas Opera presents Norma at Winspear Opera House five times between April 21 and May 7.

event-planner

Movie Review

Animated Disney film Elio is fun but falls short of Pixar top tier

Photo courtesy of Pixar

Elio (Yonas Kibreab) and Glordon (Remy Edgerly) in Elio.

Pixar has done a ton of different things in the 28 feature films they’ve released over the past 30 years, but the one they’d never done is deal with aliens (and, no, the alien toys in Toy Story don’t count). Now they’re going where many storytellers have gone before, but in their own unique way, in the new film Elio.

Elio (voiced by Yonas Kibreab) is a space fanatic who has recently lost both of his parents in an unnamed event. His Aunt Olga (Zoe Saldaña) is now his guardian, and because she happens to be a member of the U.S. Space Force, Elio finds himself tantalizingly close to communications from space. With a desire to be abducted by aliens for both curiosity and sentimental reasons, Elio sends a message into space, hoping for some kind of response.

He gets that and more when a ship full of multiple types of beings takes him into space, believing him to be a leader instead of a child. An encounter with a hostile force led by Lord Grigon (Brad Garrett) gives Elio both a new friend, Grigon’s son Glordon (Remy Edgerly), and responsibility for maintaining peace during an unexpected galactic crisis.

Pixar has not typically followed the route of many Disney movies of giving their child protagonist the trauma of dead parents, and doing so here is the first of a few minor missteps. Having Olga be his mom instead of his aunt would have altered their dynamic, but only slightly. While Elio is shown to miss his parents, his major focus is on making contact with aliens. Since the film only briefly deals with his grief, it would have been better served by excising it altogether.

For the most part, the film is goofy, with Elio’s enthusiasm for aliens matched by the oddness of the creatures he meets in space. The filmmakers - there are three credited directors and three credited writers - seem to have taken inspiration from sea creatures and Pixar’s own history, as the main bad guy emulates Mike and Sully’s boss from Monsters, Inc. Almost every character in the film is heightened to a degree that makes for funny situations, but not as much sentimentality as other Pixar offerings.

Surprisingly, especially since the film ends with a voiceover from notable astronomer Carl Sagan, the filmmakers play fast and loose with real-life science. Elio’s journeys to and from the alien spaceship are treated as close-to-instantaneous trips, even involving portals directly to Earth. The idea of the story doesn’t allow them to delve into things like relativistic time dilation, but there still could have been other scientific references to keep the story aboveboard.

There are very few stars to be found among the film’s voice cast other than Saldaña and Garrett, who are each fine if unmemorable. Kibreab and Edgerly are given many more scenes than anyone else, and they each do a great job of bringing out both the joy and naivete of their characters. Some lesser-known actors like Jameela Jamil, Atsuko Okatsuka, and Brendan Hunt show up in minor roles, but they don’t stand out in any way.

The story and characters in Elio are sweet and fun, but the film as a whole falls well short of the top tier Pixar movies. The filmmakers could have gone many different directions with a story about a boy who wants to be abducted by aliens, and the way they chose ended up being innocuous and less than compelling.

---

Elio opens in theaters on June 20.

movies film