Weekend Event Planner

These are the 13 best things to do in Dallas this weekend

It's another big weekend in and around Dallas, with notable events happening at multiple venues. There will be three huge concerts, a music and arts festival, a Tony Award-winning musical, a ballet with a favorite children's character, a nationally known comedian, and historical airplanes on display, among other events.

Below are the best ways to spend your free time this weekend. Want more options? Lucky for you, we have a much longer list of the city's best events.

Thursday, May 16

DFW South Asian Film Festival
The 5th annual DFW South Asian Film Festival's lineup will include one world premiere, two North American premieres, one U.S. premiere, 14 Texas premieres, and three Dallas premieres. The four-day movie event, taking place through Sunday in various locations around Dallas, boasts 21 shorts, documentaries, and feature films, Q&A sessions with attending filmmakers/actors, and nightly after-parties for festival-goers.

Dallas Symphony Orchestra presents Symphonie Fantastique
The penultimate concert in Dallas Symphony Orchestra's 2018-2019 season features the invigorating Violin Concerto by Brahms and the hallucinatory Symphonie Fantastique. The concert, taking place through Sunday at the Meyerson Symphony Center, will also feature the DSO debut of violinist Blake Pouliot under the direction of conductor Pablo Heras-Casado.

Dallas Summer Musicals presents Miss Saigon
This new production of the legendary musical Miss Saigon, celebrating its 30th anniversary, tells the epic story of a young Vietnamese woman named Kim. In a bar run by a notorious character called The Engineer, Kim meets an American G.I., an encounter that will change their lives forever. The production, running through May 26 at the Music Hall at Fair Park, features a soaring score with songs like “Last Night of the World,” “The Movie in My Mind,” and “The Heat is On in Saigon."

Friday, May 17

Wildflower! Arts & Music Festival
The Wildflower! Arts & Music Festival in Richardson boasts six performance stages, four outdoor and two inside the Eisemann Center, where more than 80 musical acts are showcased. Headlined by bands like Good Charlotte, Fitz and the Tantrums, and The Jacksons, the festival also features other national, regional, and local bands, the Singer Songwriter contest, the family friendly WF! Kids, the WF! Eats, the WF! Marketplace, and Performers Row featuring strolling entertainers, buskers and acrobats.

Texas Ballet Theater presents Pinocchio
The final production in Texas Ballet Theater's 2018-2019 season features the mischievous Pinocchio, a puppet that embarks on a whirlwind quest to become a real boy. Featuring phenomenal costuming and innovative choreography, the production will play at Winspear Opera House through Sunday before moving over to Fort Worth next weekend.

Bishop Arts Theatre Center presents The Real James Bond Was Dominican
What happens when a Dominican boy in Queens who is obsessed with James Bond finds out that the real James Bond was Dominican? This is a true story about Porfirio Rubirosa, Ian Fleming’s inspiration for Bond, and how this discovery set off a whole tragi-comic journey for a young, Dominican actor-to-be. The production will run at Bishop Arts Theatre Center through Sunday.

Jim Gaffigan: Quality Time Tour
Comedian Jim Gaffigan is as relatable a celebrity as you'll ever find. His popularity has stemmed from bits involving his struggles as the father of five kids, marriage in general, and his love/hate relationship with Hot Pockets. In advance of his latest special, Quality Time, premiering on Amazon Prime, he'll bring his stand-up tour to The Pavilion at Toyota Music Factory in Irving.

New Kids On The Block in concert with Salt-N-Pepa, Tiffany, Debbie Gibson, and Naughty by Nature
Nostalgia for the '80s and '90s will be in full effect when New Kids On The Block, Salt-N-Pepa, Tiffany, Debbie Gibson, and Naughty by Nature get together for this concert at American Airlines Center. You may think all of these acts are stuck in a certain time, but headliners NKOTB released an EP, Thankful, in 2017, while Tiffany has been the most prolific musician of the group, releasing her 10th album, Pieces of Me, in 2018.

Saturday, May 18

Cavanaugh Flight Museum presents Warbirds Over Addison
Cavanaugh Flight Museum will present its biggest weekend of the year, Warbirds Over Addison. Aviation buffs will have the chance to see, touch and even fly in many of the planes in the Cavanaugh collection, including the P‐51 Mustang, AD-5 Skyraider, FM2 Wildcat, and many more. The event, taking place on Saturday and Sunday, also showcases visiting aircraft brought in by warbird enthusiasts and museum collections around the country.

Dave Matthews Band in concert
If it's the third weekend in May, that means it's time for the annual visit from Dave Matthews Band. The group has consistently played the same venue, Dos Equis Pavilion, on virtually the same weekend in May every year since at least 2013. Though their days of delivering hits like "What Would You Say," "Crash Into Me," and "The Space Between" are behind them, they always score No. 1 albums, including their 2018 album, Come Tomorrow.

Sunday, May 19

Dallas Museum of Art presents "Dior: From Paris to the World"
Dallas Museum of Art will present "Dior: From Paris to the World," an exhibition which surveys more than 70 years of the House of Dior’s legacy and global influence. The DMA is one of only two U.S. venues for this extensive retrospective of the celebrated fashion house. The exhibition, featuring a selection of more than 100 haute couture dresses, as well as accessories, photographs, original sketches, runway videos, and other archival material, will be on display through September 1.

John Cusack with 30th anniversary screening of Say Anything...
Hollywood icon John Cusack comes to Dallas for a live conversation and audience Q&A following a screening of the iconic 1989 film, Say Anything..., which is celebrating its 30th anniversary. With four decades’ worth of roles in over 70 films, Cusack will share stories from his career, answer audience questions, and give a behind-the-scenes look into his breakout role as Lloyd Dobler. The event will take place at Majestic Theatre.

Ben Platt in concert
Ben Platt has made quite the name for himself in the acting world, co-starring in two Pitch Perfect films, playing Elder Cunningham in The Book of Mormon, and winning a Tony Award for originating the title role in Dear Evan Hansen. That work in musicals inspired his next career move as a singer, and he'll perform at The Pavilion at Toyota Music Factory in Irving in support of his debut album, Sing to Me Instead.

New Kids on the Block will headline a concert with Salt-N-Pepa, Tiffany, Debbie Gibson, and Naughty by Nature at American Airlines Center on May 17.

New Kids on the Block/Facebook

New Kids on the Block will headline a concert with Salt-N-Pepa, Tiffany, Debbie Gibson, and Naughty by Nature at American Airlines Center on May 17.

festivals event-planner comedy music museums concerts

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