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.

Dallas native Iliza Shlesinger performs at Majestic Theatre on January 21.

Photo by Robyn Von Swank

Dallas native Iliza Shlesinger performs at Majestic Theatre on January 21.

movies sports opera event-planner politics comedy dance theater

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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Weekend Event Planner

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

Dallas native Iliza Shlesinger performs at Majestic Theatre on January 21.

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Faces of Death returns with modern twist on cult horror film

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