Free Lunch

Dallas offers free tickets to teens for waterpark and other summer events

It looks empty now but that won't last long.

Courtesy photo

The city of Dallas is opening its recreation facilities to teens for free, including its prized Bahama Beach Waterpark.

The offering is part of its Teen All Access Pass program, which gives one teen and a limited number of companions free entry to Dallas museums, nature and botanical gardens, outdoor entertainment venues, and leisure facilities in July and August.

The passes will become available on Monday, July 3 at 10 am, when the Dallas Park and Recreation Department will make 10,000 passes available on a first-come, first-serve basis only to Dallas residents 13 to 17 years old.

To get the passes, teens must register in person at a Dallas recreation center during regular business hours and show proof of Dallas residency. Pass details, center locations, and a list of venues are at DallasParks.org.

Recreation centers will be closed on Tuesday, July 4 because July 4th, but they'll reopen on Wednesday, July 5 at 9 am to resume distribution of the 10,000 free tix.

In a statement, Mayor Eric L. Johnson reminds us that this is a wildly successful returning program that's been offered for the past two years.

"This program is one of many tools our city is leveraging to give Dallas kids and teens the opportunity to keep cool, get active, expand their knowledge, and most importantly, stay safe this summer. Engaging Dallas’ youth during the summer months will lead us further down the path toward our goal of becoming the safest major city in the United States," he says.

The following facilities will be free to these pass holders, including the Sixth Floor Museum, which is joining for the first time this year:

African American Museum at Fair Park
Bahama Beach Waterpark
City of Dallas Office of Arts and Culture
Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Garden
Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum
Dallas Public Library
Golf Dallas
Shakespeare Dallas
Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza
Southern Skates Roller Rink
Trinity River Audubon Center

Those are all perfectly good and great but Bahama Beach Waterpark is clearly the winner.

Dallas Park and Recreation officials said the pass is an adventure for teens because it opens a new horizon of opportunities outside of school time. Also, the pass gives them activities they can do to celebrate July as National Park and Recreation Month along with park and recreation agencies nationwide.

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Movie Review

Cillian Murphy takes on church in Irish film Small Things Like These

Photo by Enda Bowe/Lionsgate

Cillian Murphy in Small Things Like These.

Last we saw actor Cillian Murphy, he was starring in the titular role of Oppenheimer, a role that would go on to earn him a Best Actor Oscar, not to mention many awards for the film itself. Instead of a big, flashy follow-up to build on that momentum, Murphy has gone in the opposite direction with the small and personal Small Things Like These.

Set in the 1980s in Murphy’s native Ireland, the film centers on Bill (Murphy), who owns a coal delivery company. One of his clients is the local convent, and during a delivery he witnesses a young pregnant woman being forced into the convent against her will by her mother. The scene triggers memories from his own childhood when he was raised by a single mother.

Every subsequent delivery to the convent has him questioning his own morality, although his taciturn nature doesn’t allow him to share his misgivings with his wife, Eileen (Eileen Walsh). With the Catholic Church an all-encompassing entity in Ireland, even if Bill wanted to help the girls who are trapped and mistreated at the convent, he’s not sure of any way to go about it.

Directed by Tim Mielants and written by Enda Walsh, the film has a slow build to it, so slow that it is a little difficult to ascertain the point of the story. The filmmakers go back and forth between scenes showing Bill as an adult and Bill as a child, and even though they each contain elements of trauma for the characters, the connection between the two timelines is not as strong as they might want it to be.

Even when it’s not part of a scene, the power of the church is the driving force of the film. Bill is clearly having a crisis of faith given his history and what he sees, but his wife seems to be willfully ignorant of any faults of the church and remains a true believer. The few segments that take the audience inside the convent are full of unforgiving nuns, with Sister Mary (Emily Watson) as their ultra-stern leader.

Given that this is an Irish film featuring all Irish actors, heavy accents accompany the majority of the dialogue, making it difficult to understand at times. This is clearly not an issue with the filmmaking and it helps with the verisimilitude of the story, but anyone who doesn’t have a lot of experience with the Irish accent may find themselves a little lost and/or disengaged with the emotions of the story.

Murphy’s role in Oppenheimer and this one don’t share much in common save for the fact that he clearly put his whole self into each of them. This is a testament to Murphy’s skills and dedication that he cares as much about an inherently local story as he did about a world-changing one. Walsh and Watson are also great as two women who have a huge influence on Bill’s outlook on life.

Small Things Like These, based on the book by Claire Keegan, is not as huge a takedown of the Catholic Church as some other films, but it’s still a searing indictment of its arcane practices. It’s one made even more effective by using a smaller story of one man’s lonely fight against injustice.

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Small Things Like These opens in theaters on November 8.

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