Klyde Warren Park – also known as Deck Park or the reason there's now a tunnel on Woodall Rodgers Freeway – has released details of the first concert during its opening weekend celebration. Billed The Concert for Dallas, the show will be headlined by longtime Dallas music icons The Polyphonic Spree and Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue. The concert will take place October 27 at 7 pm on the park's Great Lawn.
Polyphonic Spree, the trippy, peace-and-love collaborative headed by Tim DeLaughter and his wife, Julie Boyle, is best known for its girth, with more than a dozen members in the band at any one time, and for its flowing robes – sometimes in rainbow colors, sometimes all white. The Spree has toured internationally with major acts such as David Bowie and the Beach Boys, and their music has been featured on numerous TV shows, commercials and soundtracks, including Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Trombone Shorty is the stage name for Troy Andrews, whose trombone and trumpet skills have been noted by everyone from Lenny Kravitz to U2. His group, Orleans Avenue, mixes together elements of funk, hip-hop and pop music.
Other acts will join the lineup, but they'll all be followed by a fireworks display, which should be quite the sight, lighting up the night sky between Uptown and downtown. Around 6,000 free tickets will be available to the public October 9; how you'll get your hands on those tickets has yet to be announced. The opening weekend will also include an outdoor performance by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and an advance look at the park’s ongoing programming.
Describing the new movie Pillionis almost an act of futility. It contains a variety of seemingly disparate parts that coalesce into a whole to make it utterly fascinating. Few other recent films have been able to walk the line between filthy and wholesome in quite the way this one does, and that’s only because few other filmmakers would actually dare to try.
It centers on Colin (Harry Melling), a meek man in his mid-thirties who still lives at home with his parents, Pete (Douglas Hodge) and Peggy (Lesley Sharp), while working a dead-end job giving out parking tickets. While performing in a barbershop quartet at his local pub, Colin catches the eye of biker Ray (Alexander Skarsgård), who summons him for a clandestine hook-up the following day (which just so happens to be Christmas Day).
With barely a word exchanged between them, Ray establishes a dominance over Colin that quickly leads to them starting a relationship in which Colin does anything Ray asks. And that means more than just sex: Colin, whether desperate for any kind of affection or unlocking a side of himself he hadn’t known, readily agrees to cook, clean, shop, and basically do whatever else Ray wants him to do.
Written and directed by first-time feature filmmaker Harry Lighton, the film is astonishing in the way it’s able to mine humor from Colin and Ray’s atypical bond. To call Ray “unfeeling” might not be totally accurate, but the way he treats Colin borders on cruel. However, the way Lighton structures the film, it’s easy to understand why someone like Colin would be willing to go along with the situation. It’s both hilarious and heartbreaking to see Colin debase himself in a variety of ways.
On the flip side is Colin’s heartfelt arc with his parents. It’s established right away that Peggy, who is sick with cancer, is a bit too involved with Colin’s love life, with the opening scene featuring her setting him up on a blind date. But their easy acceptance of his queerness and desire to see him find love is as heartwarming as it gets. The juxtaposition between the wholesomeness of their family and Colin’s new life is also the source of a good amount of comedy.
Lighton does not shy away from the sexual side of Colin and Ray’s relationship, and the scenes he depicts are as graphic as you are likely to see in an R-rated film. Some go up to and a little past what might be expected in a mainstream movie (including the use of a certain fake appendage). Other times they play out in a comical way to illustrate just how far Colin has progressed from the person he was when the film started.
Skarsgård, who stole the show in the Charli XCX movie The Moment, is the attraction in more ways than one in this film. The part calls for someone who’s not only impossibly handsome, but also a person who can stop dissent with just a glance, and he lives up to both qualities equally well. Melling, best known for playing Neville Longbottom in the Harry Potter movies, also embodies his role perfectly. He plays Colin as weak enough to be run roughshod over by Ray, but not so hopeless as to not be worth rooting for.
Pillion (which is the name of the secondary seat on a motorcycle on which Colin rides multiple times in the film) operates at a storytelling level that is difficult to achieve. Many people will not fully understand the film’s central relationship, but the way it is showcased by Lighton makes it compelling, gut-wrenching, and sexy.
