Dance into 2013

Lights All Night on New Year's Eve is just the ticket for electronic music fans

Lights All Night runs December 29-31 at Fair Park.
Lights All Night
More than 50,000 fans are expected during the three-day electronic musicfestival.
Lights All Night

Dallas-area fans of electronic dance music get a post-Christmas present with Lights All Night 2012, a three-day music festival converging on Fair Park December 29 through New Year's Eve. The event features performances by more than 75 DJs and musical artists, headlined by Tiesto, Avicci, Calvin Harris and Axwell.

Electronic dance music (EDM) events are a popular format for New Year's Eve, but Lights All Night (LAN) is unique in that it extends for three days. The only other similar New Year's Eve festival is the SnowGlobe Music Festival in Lake Tahoe, which also runs December 29-31.

LAN started out in 2010 as a single-night New Year's Eve event with a crowd of 6,000; this year the festival moves to Fair Park and should draw 50,000.

LAN started out in 2010 as a single-night New Year's Eve event on the ice rink at the Plaza of the Americas in downtown Dallas, where it drew a crowd of 6,000 — respectable for an inaugural event but no match for this year, which is expected to attract an estimated 50,000 attendees.

2012 also marks a move to the more pedestrian-friendly Fair Park, where parking and staging options are more plentiful. Fair Park is no stranger to EDM: It was the site for the Electric Daisy Carnival in 2010 and 2011, which ended after a fatality.

Dallas has a well-established reputation as a dance-music center; in the past year, we've seen a series of highly visible EDM events, including the Meltdown Music Festival in June, the national Identify Festival tour in August, and not one but two dates on the global Day Glow “Life in Color” tour in September.

Lights All Night comes from Scott Osburn and Hank Keller, two thirtysomething entrepreneurs who cut their teeth in the business back in college by promoting acts such as the Indigo Girls. They partnered with MCP Presents in Denver to produce the 2011 festival. That partnership continues in 2012.

Stage setup
There are four stages: Main, Hangar, Fountain and Club Lights All Night. Major mainstream and commercial acts perform on the Main stage during "prime time" hours, including Tiesto, Avicci, Calvin Harris and Axwell.

See top trance, dubstep and electro house talent like Gareth Emery, Markus Schulz, 12th Planet, Alesso and Flux Pavilion at the Hanger stage.

Club Lights All Night showcases a variety of big room, dance floor sounds ranging from hip hop, dubstep, progressive house and funk from artists like Archnemesis, Tritonal, White Panda and Mord Fustang.

The Fountain is for local acts such as Billy the Kid, Joe Vega, Wish FM, Redeye and Exceed.

Must-see acts
With more than 75 DJs and musical artists, there's a lot to see. And with the event's earlier hours — starting at 4 pm and ending at midnight daily — you'll have to plan accordingly. If you're like me, you're used to headliners performing at 12:30 am.

Saturday's top picks include electro house DJ Zedd, trance artist Markus Schulz and dubstep DJ Flux Pavilion. If you prefer a more commercial EDM sound, then Avicci and Tiesto are your best bets.

On Sunday, there are two DJ duos worth seeing: the electro house Bingo Players and Zed’s Dead, who play a mix of bass, electro and dubstep. Also performing on Saturday is my favorite trance artist Gareth Emery and freestyler Bassnectar. If you’re a fan of the Rihanna hit “We Found Love,” then you need to add Calvin Harris to your artist list for Sunday.

Monday is heaven for those who love dubstep and drum n bass, with appearances by Krewella, 12th Planet, 3LAU and Archnemesis. If dubstep/drum n bass is not your thing, seek out progressive house DJs Sander van Doorn and Axwell of Swedish House Mafia fame. And if you haven’t carved out any time for local DJs, Sunday has two of Dallas’ best: Redeye and Wish FM.

No matter your favorite flavor of EDM, Lights All Night has it. Get ready to dance your way into the New Year, but remember to pace yourself. It is three days, after all.

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Movie review

Over-the-top The Bride! makes other Frankenstein movies seem subtle

Photo by Niko Tavernise

Christian Bale and Jessie Buckley in The Bride!.

The story of Dr. Frankenstein and his monster is now over 200 years old, with Mary Shelley’s book having been adapted or referenced in close to 500 films. Less common is the character of The Bride of Frankenstein, which existed in the original text but has more often than not been excised in adaptations. Writer/director Maggie Gyllenhaal has tried to rectify that by giving the character a big showcase in her new film, The Bride!.

Gyllenhaal has reimagined the story as one in which a woman named Ida (Jessie Buckley) becomes possessed by the spirit of Shelley (also Buckley). At the same time, the already-existing Frankenstein’s monster (Christian Bale) approaches Dr. Euphronius (Annette Bening), who specializes in reanimation, with the request to make him a wife. When Ida falls to her death in an “accident” involving her boyfriend (John Magaro), the ideal corpse becomes available.

After Ida’s resurrection, she and the monster become restless being studied by Dr. Euphronius and decide to break out to experience the world. The world, naturally, is not exactly welcoming to them, and soon the couple are on the run for causing mayhem, including a few murders. In hot pursuit are detective Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) and his assistant, Myrna Mallow (Penélope Cruz), as well as other authorities.

It’s clear that Gyllenhaal wanted to merge the Frankenstein story with Bonnie & Clyde, especially since she sets the film in the mid-1930s. And that wouldn’t have been a bad idea if having the monster and The Bride going on a crime spree was truly the focus of the movie. But most of the time there’s less intentionality in their misdeeds and more confusion, leading to a muddled plot with no clear direction or end goal in mind.

One of the biggest problems is that Gyllenhaal starts the energy of the film at an 11, giving her and everyone else nowhere to go but down. She dabbles in multiple different tones, at times going the straight drama route and other times making what seems like full-on camp. At one point, she even has the monster and the Bride in a dance sequence set to “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” which would be hilarious as an homage to Young Frankenstein if the film weren’t so disjointed.

Most baffling of all is what Gyllenhaal wants from The Bride character. She morphs multiple times over the course of the film, from close to unintelligible at the beginning to rough-and-tumble at the end. There are hints at the lack of control she has over her autonomy, including Shelley’s possession of her and the monster lying to her about her past, but any commentary that Gyllenhaal might be trying to make gets lost amid the oddity of the film as a whole.

Both Buckley and Bale are all-in for their performances, which definitely fall in the “love it or hate it” dichotomy. Each scene is pitched so high that there’s little nuance to either of them, and neither is on par with their previous Oscar-caliber roles. The high-powered supporting cast of Bening, Sarsgaard, Cruz, and Jake Gyllenhaal is watchable based on previous roles, but none of them elevate this particular movie.

Whatever intentions Maggie Gyllenhaal had in making The Bride! are only halfway legible in a film that can never find its tonal footing. There has rarely been subtlety in movies featuring Frankenstein’s monster and related characters, but this one makes all the others seem like stuffy dramas in comparison.

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The Bride! is now playing in theaters.

movies film