Weekend Event Planner

Nothing but holiday events on tap for Thanksgiving weekend in Dallas

Thanksgiving weekend is when most people kick off the holiday season in earnest and, appropriately, holiday-related events dominate the list of activities for the next five days.

Below are the best options for your precious free time Wednesday through Sunday. Don't like what you see? Lucky for you, we have a much longer list of the city's best events.

Wednesday, November 26

Gift of Lights
Gift of Lights at Texas Motor Speedway lets visitors circumnavigate the concourses of TMS in their cars, taking in more than 600 unique LED light displays. It'd be better if the event was actually on the track, but then someone would go all Jeff Gordon and ruin everyone's fun. You can look at the lights through January 1.

Dallas Theater Center presents A Christmas Carol
Even though Dallas Theater Center has put on A Christmas Carol for 30 years, they somehow find a way to make each year's show feel new and different. Chamblee Ferguson returns as Ebenezer Scrooge in a production that promises flying ghosts, falling snow and eye-popping special effects. The play runs through December 27 at Wyly Theatre.

Thursday, November 27

There are a handful of events going on Thanksgiving Day, but this should be a time to relax at home with your family. Enjoy the day off!

Friday, November 28

Galleria Dallas presents Macy's Grand Tree Lighting Celebration
The Christmas tree at Galleria Dallas is located in the middle of the signature ice rink, so what better way to celebrate the lighting of the tree than with champion ice skaters? Carolina Kostner and junior champion Amber Glenn perform at the inaugural lighting on Friday, but the real draw is on Saturday, when ice dancing gold medalists Charlie White and Meryl Davis take the ice.

Sparkle! Christmas at the Anatole
Anyone who's enjoyed ice skating, listening to music or just taking in the lights at the Hilton Anatole's annual Sparkle event may like it even more this year because they're bringing everything inside. From now through December 31, visitors can partake in all the fun activities in a nice 70 degrees, no matter how cold it gets outside.

XTO Energy Parade of Lights
There's almost no better way to start the holiday season than by lining the streets of downtown Fort Worth for the Parade of Lights. Now in its 32nd year, it features close to 100 professionally designed flights with more than 12,000 lights each, as well as vintage cars, bands and more. Get there early for a free sidewalk spot or reserve seats in the grandstands.

Vitruvian Lights
This lights display at Vitruvian Park in Addison is not as well-known as some others in the area, but it should be. The organizers of the display set it apart by going big and bold with the colors of the lights they use to line the trees, making the scene pop like none other. The lights stay up through January 1.

Saturday, November 29

Shop Small Holiday Market
Saturday is Small Business Saturday, and you can get the bad taste of Black Friday out of your mouth by shopping local at this event at Unbranded in Deep Ellum. Along with gift choices from The Citizenry, Unbranded and other Dallas-based makers, gourmets, designers and startups, the event has free beer tastings from Community Beer Company and Holy Kombucha mimosas.

Design District Market
Much like the Unbranded market, the final Design District Market of 2014, taking place at Community Beer Company, features more than 60 local vendors offering unique holiday gifts, ranging from locally crafted jewelry and clothing to housewares, pet accessories and growlers. Also enjoy holiday films playing on big screens, food trucks and live music.

Sunday, November 30

106.1 KISS FM Jingle Ball
The annual Jingle Ball, presented by 106.1 KISS FM at Verizon Theatre at Grand Prairie, is the first of several all-star music festivals put on by local radio stations during the holiday season. The lineup for this event includes perennials like Jason Derulo, Fall Out Boy and Nick Jonas, as well as of-the-moment acts like MAGIC!, Echosmith and Meghan Trainor.

The multicolored display at Vitruvian Lights, which starts on November 28 at Vitruvian Park in Addison, is as spectacular as any other in the area.

Photo by Stevan Koye

The multicolored display at Vitruvian Lights, which starts on November 28 at Vitruvian Park in Addison, is as spectacular as any other in the area.

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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.

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Elio opens in theaters on June 20.

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