Lorde will perform at South Side Ballroom on March 4, 2014, the second concert on her 18-city North American tour.
Photo by Brendan Walter
Most 17-year-olds are getting ready to head off to college, but New Zealand singer Lorde is on a slightly different trajectory: She'll come to Dallas on March 4, 2014 at South Side Ballroom as part of her first North American tour.
In fact, Texans get first dibs at seeing her, as she'll kick off the tour in Austin on March 3 and then head to Houston on March 5 before visiting 15 other cities in the U.S. and Canada.
Lorde is one of the breakout stars of 2013 thanks to her debut album, Pure Heroine, and its inescapable hit single, "Royals," which recently finished a nine-week run as the No. 1 song on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Lorde received four Grammy nominations for her work, including Record of the Year, Song of the Year, Best Pop Solo Performance and Best Pop Vocal Album.
Lorde has been praised for her singing and songwriting abilities — she co-wrote all 10 songs on Pure Heroine — but it will be interesting to see if she has the courage of her convictions going forward. "Royals" famously disses the excesses that often come along with fame, but her quick rise already has her cozying up to other famous people.
Tickets for the Dallas concert go on sale to the general public on Friday, December 20.
Stories featuring ordinary people faced with extreme situations have proven to be popular in film history. They range from Hitchcock movies like Rear Window to Brian De Palma’s Blow Out to the Coen Brothers’ Fargo. Recent films like Nobody and Love Hurts have put a twist on the sub-genre, featuring protagonists whose mild personas and everyman looks hide violent abilities.
The new film Novocaine is a further twist, as the ordinary man at its center has an ability that he’s never fully tapped before. Nate Caine (Jack Quaid) is a mild-mannered assistant bank manager whose life is boring by design, as he has a disorder called Congenital Insensitivity to Pain. Being unable to feel pain, traumatic events that would stop most people in their tracks don’t faze him at all, sometimes to his detriment.
Soon after making a rare connection with another bank employee, Sherry (Amber Midthunder), the bank is robbed and Sherry is kidnapped. Nate decides to pursue the kidnappers to try to rescue Sherry, setting in motion a series of events that a person without his condition would find unbearable. However, his inability to feel pain turns him into a kind of unstoppable machine, determined to do whatever it takes to achieve his goal.
That synopsis of the film, directed by Dan Berk and Robert Olsen and written by Lars Jacobsen, makes it sound like a serious action film, but it’s actually an action comedy that finds a unique angle for its hero. The filmmakers portray Nate’s condition, if not completely accurately, then with an air of plausible realism. The laughs come not at his expense, but in reaction to how he repeatedly uses his ability to his advantage.
The result is a violently graphic film that rivals ones like John Wick in what it showcases. Knowing he can’t get hurt, Nate has no issue putting himself in harm’s way, whether it’s burns, gunshot wounds, impalements, and more. The amount of damage done to him could make the film into a kind of live-action Looney Tunes, but the filmmakers manage to walk the line between hilariously ridiculous and eye-rollingly stupid.
The romance between Nate and Sherry provides a nice through-line for the story, with a few good twists and turns along the way. The lone big misstep of the film is Nate’s friendship with Roscoe (Jacob Batalon), one developed through online gaming that turns into real life by necessity. It takes a long time for them to get any scenes together, with their interactions ultimately feeling unnecessary.
Quaid seems to be hitting his stride as an actor, starring in The Boys on Prime Video and in the recent Companion. He does a great job of never overplaying this role, keeping Nate as a regular person despite what he’s able to do. Midthunder is hit-and-miss, as the story takes her character through a yo-yo arc. Betty Gabriel and Matt Walsh do serviceable work as detectives tracking Nate, delivering exactly what’s expected of them.
Novocaine is much better than it probably had a right to be, with some solid storytelling, some intense action, and a fantastic lead performance by Quaid. Humor and graphic violence don’t always go hand-in-hand, but this film finds a way to combine them in memorable ways.
