Results tagged “satire”

Still from The District! The DistrictNovember 16-222110 South Lamar (2110 S. Lamar)Various Showtimes, $8.25[info]We heard a lot of good things about Áron Gauder's one-of-a-kind animated gem The District! during Fantastic Fest last year, but we hadn't had a chance to see it until recently. It's a Hungarian Hip-Hop / time travel / gangster odyssey set in Budapest's notorious 8th district, where rival crime families feud like Montagues and Capulets. That is, until their kids fall...

Poster image from Wikipedia Starship TroopersFriday, November 9th / Saturday, November 10thAlamo Drafthouse Lake Creek (17329 Research Blvd)Midnight, $8.25[info] | [tickets]It takes a certain type of movie to make it to midnight-movie cult status, and on first glance the big-budget gloss of Starship Troopers would seem to preclude such distinction. When was the last time Con Air or Timecop played to a packed house of screaming fans in the middle of the night? But hang...

Austin artist Michael Schliefke—of Bolm Studios and one of the driving forces behind the annual East Austin Studio Tour (E.A.S.T.)—recently unveiled a new comic book side project that takes aim at all of the development shenanigans happening on the eastside. "Towards the beginning of this year, I got the idea to do some drawings of East Austin before it was entirely cleaned up and was completely overrun by condos and lofts," said Schliefke. "My idea...

What, exactly, is postmodernism? We ask ourselves this question whenever the work of a postmodern playwright makes the stage in Austin. Charles L. Mee is one such playwright. Did you know that he encourages writers to "pillage [my] plays as I have pillaged the structures and contents of the plays of Euripides and Brecht and stuff out of Soap Opera Digest and the evening news and the internet, and build your own, entirely new, piece..."?...

The Out of Bounds Improv Festival and Miniature Golf Tournament ended on Monday after six days of blithe musings from some of the finest improv and sketch-comedy troupes in the country. In its sixth year, Out of Bounds reached new heights of comedic exuberance over the past week—and, more importantly, surely introduced a new universe of humor to an unimaginable quantity of newcomers. But for some, Out of Bounds was more than a once-a-year...

You look like you need a cupcake, and that is just what you will get tonight when the Austin Parks Foundation and the Alamo Drafthouse bring you Election, the second installment in the spring Movies in the Park series. However, that cupcake will be laced with arsenic icing and a heavy dose of satire extract. When we first saw Election back in the late 90’s, high school was still fresh enough in our minds that...

Sadly, it is upon us. We'd say they saved the best for last, but the whole darn fest has been great from start to finish. Along those lines, all of the offerings these last several days look to be par excellence. Here're just a few. The Blue Screen International Program, Part I, curated by Lisa Kaselak. (Read Lisa's interview with Refraction Arts' Ron Berry here.) This 1.5 hour program, tonight only, 8pm at the Blue...

You might think that observational office-centric humor has been over done, what with Office Space and two versions of The Office, Anglo and American. And who -among the old skool set- can forget the venerable Nine to Five, the movie and both incarnations of the television show? Dabney Coleman is a genius! But have you ever experienced office satire...in book form!? Company is Max Barry's fictional foray into that obtuse world bred by capitalism, where...

Spring Break is over and the students at The University of Texas have reclaimed their city--things are slowly coming back together. However, before the break, one would assume that these future leaders of tomorrow would have saved up their energy for a vacation to Cancun, a road trip to Florida or, god forbid, staying in town for that music festival that you only gets you a wristband tanline. But just months, weeks and days...

Looking for something outside the bounds of SXSW? This weekend, Austin's Latino Comedy Project returns to Esther's Follies for three nights of fast-paced comedy from a distinctly Latino point of view, before heading to Los Angeles to perform for the suits at Comedy Central.

Whether you've just entered your twenties and are thinking about things like what to major in in College, or you can see 30 looming on the horizon (or fading behind you, for that matter) there's at least one thing that everyone has in common: parenthood. Wait, what? Seriously. Think about it: you are either a parent yourself, or you'll eventually become one, or your friends are parents or maybe you simply have parents (and the...

The city of Austin is a bastion of local print and internet media publications of many varieties, and we at the Austinist are always excited to get our from under our cave desks, rub the sleep from our eyes, and actually read something that has been printed on a real live piece of paper once in a while. Or just download the .PDF. Regardless of how we come to read our favorite local print publications,...

Classes have ended at The University of Texas and winter is finally here, the time when girls trade short skirts for sweatpants and guys replace short-sleeve UT shirts with long-sleeve UT shirts. For the students at UT Austin, it's been a pretty tough year. West Campus construction has kept them up all night, their football team choked, APD won't let them party as hard, and now, starting tomorrow, it's final exam time. Where do...

Runners' High Documentary Feature Competition Screening Info: 2:30pm October 21st at Hideout Regional Premiere. The Toronto Star says, "It's pure inspiration every step of the way." The SF Bay Guardian raves, "Inspirational Sports Movies are hard to beat and this one is particularly potent." When teenagers from one of the nation’s toughest neighborhoods in Oakland, California sign up to train for a marathon, they begin the journey of a lifetime. Runners High is an...

This week, ProArts Collective's Black Arts Movement Festival concludes with more amazing works by more amazing performers. Though there's a motherload of theatre open and opening in A-town right now, we think you should give these gems some serious consideration when you're planning your artful outings for the next few days. Note: Tickets are $10, door only / $35-$65 via festival pass, online only. Dance: ACC Dance, Dallas Black Dance, and UpRise! Productions We...

Reeling from the nomination as the #1 Party School in the nation, students at The University of Texas are hard at work peeing on street corners, throwing up during class and passing out on the steps of The Church of Scientology. And in recent years, we've been lucky enough to have a record of these acts, thanks to the folks over at the UT Police Department. The boys in blue release a bi-weekly campus-watch...

FronteraFest, Austin’s annual fringe performance festival, breeds all kinds of odd experimentation, leaps of theatrical faith, and – this past year – a political satire with kitchen appliances as puppets. Puppet Government, written by Steve Barney and directed Chris Humphrey, has grown beyond its Frontera beginnings, and is now re-tooled, re-worked, and heading for the New York International Fringe Festival. Before they set sail for the Apple, the company is holding a fundraiser at...

Peter Carey’s latest novel, Theft: A Love Story, is occasionally clever, often pretentious, and ultimately unsatisfying. A mish-mash of genres---Hitchcockian how-done-it, art-world satire, high-brow drama---the novel never lives up to its potential.

The Superman Returns unprecedented 7-day opening weekend begins today. To kick off this holiday “week end,” film philes might opt for something really special: An Austin Film Society 20th Anniversary screening of Jean-Luc Godard’s Week End at the Alamo Downtown. This 1967 classic follows a bourgeois French couple as they make their way to the country to visit the wife’s mother and find themselves in the mother of all traffic jams. What is intended to...

In case you've missed it, there's a comedy revolution brewing in New York right now. Comics like Todd Barry, Demitri Martin, and Aziz Ansari have been drawing huge audiences of hipsters and regular folk alike with satire that owes far more to the silliness and irony of Steve Martin and Eddie Izzard than to the lowbrow Comedy Central/Def Comedy Jam nonsense that's infested comedy clubs for a decade. Among the brightest lights of the...

On the menu today: Sizzling underwater action! Hot Art School brats! Delicious football soccer stars! Scrumptious teen empires! Delectable California Jews! Tasty foreign brides! Bon appetit! Poseidon We’ve said it before, and now we’re saying it again: Josh Lucas is the new Kevin Costner. Careful, Josh. Remember what happened after Kevin’s big “water” movie? Yeah. Nothing good. *Art School Confidential We didn’t go to Art School. We imagine it’s just like the stories say:...

Lookin' for something fun & cheap to do tonight? Or next Saturday night? Or the one after that?? As we've mentioned before, some of the fabulously talented improv folks here in Austin have cooked up a little weekly satirical news special that runs every Saturday night, 10:30, at the Hideout Theatre. This being Income Tax Day, we suspect tonight's Whirled News will be the funniest yet! We sat down recently (and virtually) with the...

Sure, David Sedaris is all the rage. And with good reason. His faux-angry satire always provides us with a hearty laugh. Even more so when we hear him read it. He's one of the great humor writers in the country today. Here's the catch, he's not even the funniest person in his family. We love David but give us Amy Sedaris any day. The absurdly funny Amy has kept us laughing for years with...

Daily Texan writer Eric Seufert has a bone to pick with the liberal media. And hipsters. And Democrats. Seufert is a senior at UT majoring in finance, with an apparent minor in either satire or unsubstantiated hate. Or so it seems. We were on the Dillo riding to work this morning when we came across his Opinion piece in the Daily Texan. The headline: SXSW: Liberal menace. The piece goes off on several tangents,...

Because, in their own words, "," the Dallas-based sketch comedy group Queertown is rolling into Austin tomorrow night only (8:00 pm) at Esther's Follies.

Sadly for us -- very, very sadly for us -- we've been under the weather and have missed several previously scheduled programs. This includes Saturday night's Best of Week IV at Frontera Fest. Since we can't share our impressions of the evening, we thought we'd at least give a rundown of the winning shows (details from the HPT website). "Aucun Espoir pour l'Homme: a junk romance" by Rocky Hopson. Clown satire about the ups...

If you have not seen “The Colbert Report” starring Stephen Colbert, you are missing some of the best the only good tv there is. The character “Stephen Colbert” affects all the pomposity, self-involvement and simple-mindedness of your least-favorite cable news hosts (hello, Bill O’Reilly). His interviews generally show a blatant disregard for the for the ‘expertise’ of the subject, and he is a ‘journalist’ who admittedly favors his opinions over facts. Because, as he puts it, facts can change, his opinion can’t. And while Colbert’s obnoxious, sentorian voice may grate a little, the juicy satire that comes from his death-grip on the voices of sociopolitical commentary makes it all worthwhile.

M O N D A Y [ 2 8 ] film · End of an Ear hosts a free screening of Lee Ranaldo and Leah Singer's "Drift" at the Alamo South Lamar (Free, 10pm) [link] music · The Kingsbury Manx, The Standard and The Heavenly States at Emo's film · KOOP Radio's Monthly Film Benefit at MonkeyWrench Books - Gillo Pontecorvo's “The Battle of Algiers”, about the French occupation of 1950s Algeria. (Inc. Beer and...

The Austinist has, somewhat regretfully, agreed to accept the ramblings of truecraig: a 78704 resident with bad knees, questionable taste in facial hair, and an erroneous belief that the bathroom walls of the men’s restroom in Casino El Camino contain the deepest of possible political satire. Craig drinks, smokes, runs, tells ridiculous stories, describes himself in the third person, and spends money he does not have. All in the bestest Texan city, Austin.

George W. Bush: aka Dubya, President of the United States, dumbass Owen Wilson: aka The Butterscotch Stallion, screenwriter, asslicker, and Movie Star Wes Anderson: writer/director of the best films ever(Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, etc), wears cool glasses Sandra Bullock: aka Mrs. Jesse James, producer, movie star, nice gal Matthew McConaughey: bongo player, weed smoker, movie star, hunk Marcia Gay Harden: character actress, Oscar winner Benjamin McKenzie: stud, lead actor of the O.C. Molly Ivins: whip-smart...