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.
At this point in movie history, there are precious few ways to make a war film feel original. Every major American war, including the most recent ones in Iraq and Afghanistan, has been covered, and the “war is hell” idea has been featured in too many films to count. So for a film like the new Warfare to stand out, it needs to do something that other war films have not.
To say that it accomplishes that goal is an understatement. Set in Iraq in 2006, it follows a platoon of soldiers tasked with helping to gain control of the city of Ramadi, a hotbed of activity in the war at that time. But this is not a story of good triumphing over evil, nor one that tries to examine exactly what the U.S. military was trying to accomplish in the war. Instead, it’s just a story of a group of young men trying to do the job they’re asked to do, and what happens to them during that mission.
It presents as fact, with no judgment either way, that one squad of the platoon overtakes the home of two Iraqi families as part of the mission. An ensuing firefight pins the soldiers down with almost no way to escape, and subsequent rescue attempts by other squads result in multiple casualties. The bulk of the film focuses on how the shell-shocked and injured soldiers react to the situation in which they find themselves.
Written and directed by Alex Garland (Civil War) and Ray Mendoza, the film is based on the memories of Mendoza and his fellow soldiers of this exact situation they experienced. As such, the film does not attempt to add extra drama or even emphasize one character over another. In fact, the first 30-40 minutes of the film are relatively boring, as the squad relays information about their position to other, unseen people.
The men in the platoon are not exactly interchangeable with each other, but the way the film is structured, they’re essentially equals. It’s easy to tell who the leaders are, but those giving orders are not treated as more important to the film than those carrying them out. This is especially true when things go to hell, as each person goes from trying to fight to trying to survive, with their training coming into play in different ways.
The situation depicted in the film is somewhat mundane - it’s not some big battle or a turning point in the war - but the intensity with which Garland and Mendoza stage it makes it enormously impactful. They put the audience right in the thick of the carnage, and the horrific injuries inflicted on some of the men, as well as the seemingly never-ending screams of pain emanating from them, can be difficult to take.
The cast features a few actors who are starting to make names for themselves (Will Poulter, Joseph Quinn, Noah Centineo, Charles Melton, Michael Gandolfini), others who’ve had smaller impacts (D’Pharoah Woon-A-Tai, Cosmo Jarvis, Evan Holtzman), and plenty of others who have yet to get their big breaks. Each of them does their job extremely well, which in this case means that they complement each other’s performances, with none of them overshadowing the others.
Warfare is not an overtly political film, and yet the politics of war are inextricable from the story it tells. Neither anti-war nor pro-war, it simply lays out the facts of one individual mission in a larger conflict, and each viewer will likely take away something different from the experience of watching it.
