“We had a couple of situations last year that frankly were quite scary.” — Missouri coach Quin Snyder, discussing the tragic death of ten members of the Oklahoma State men’s basketball family in a plane crash after they left Boulder, Colorado, January 27, Omaha World-Herald GH: During a trip to Baylor last season, the cabin of the Tigers’ team plane…
Ridley Scott’s Hannibal, with a screenplay by David Mamet and Steven Zaillian, is being released exactly ten years after Silence of the Lambs, the film that established Hannibal Lecter as an iconic villain in our culture, right up there with Nightmare on Elm Street’s Freddy Krueger, Friday the 13th’s Jason and Halloween’s Michael Myers, though one suspects that novelist…
The man who made Problem Child, Beverly Hills Ninja and Brain Donors — movies that are to humor what Robert Downey Jr. is to clean living — has, perhaps all too explicably, become Hollywood’s most coveted and celebrated comedic director. “From the director of Big Daddy,” blares the trailer for Saving Silverman, touting Dennis Dugan as though he were…
Cameron Newlin is sleepy, and his hotel room provides solace for a lazy morning. This 27-year-old Cedar Rapids, Iowa, native owes his exhaustion to the previous night’s performance, during which he left his soul on the stage in a flourish of rhythmic noise, using various objects and his own body to pound out furious rhythms. Stomp, which contains no speech,…
There’s not much in the way of art inside the Plaza’s new, improved Granfalloon Bar & Grill — on the tables or on the walls. At first glance, the place seems devoid of decor or style, beyond the typical sports bar setup: bright neon beer signs, “antique” mirrored signs and enough mounted TVs to fill Brandsmart’s electronics department. But step…
1 Thursday For anyone who thinks that the search for a mate deserves both scrutiny and mockery, Maybe Baby, It’s You at American Heartland Theater, 2450 Grand, performed at 8 tonight, makes light of the antics that surround coupling up. Depicting numerous lovelorn pairs, including flirtatious high school nerds who one day become estranged suburbanites at their kids’ weekend sporting…
Heartburn is the last thing most of us want on Valentine’s Day. It’s a little better than heartbreak, heartworms or heart attacks, but seasonal ad campaigns certainly aren’t out to appeal to the public’s love of gripping chest pain. Then again, Tom Deatherage, who runs The Late Show gallery out of his Hyde Park home, doesn’t cater to mainstream promotional…
Cinema preserves the dead for later life — it’s the mummification process of the modern age. This peculiar perspective is at the heart of Electromediascope’s winter series, The Lives of Images Reverberate in Time, at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. In Ernest Larsen and Sherry Millner’s nineteen-minute film, Some Notes on Ruins (Archeology and Cinema), screening February 9 with…
Zack, the lonely toilet salesman at the heart of Slight Defect: A Desert Holiday, wears his hangdog expression like a badge of honor. It makes him just repellent enough to keep emotional complications at arm’s length, which is perfectly okay with him. Toilets are Zack’s life, and he’s too busy peddling the company’s top-line model to realize that, in…
In a perfect world, Tony Iommi’s name would naturally be included in the same lexicon as Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page and Jimi Hendrix, and Black Sabbath would have been accepted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame long before Billy Joel could have even been nominated. The paradox is that if the world were perfect and people got what…
The emergence of Kris Kristofferson in the late ’60s and early ’70s stands as one of the most important events in modern country music. His finest compositions synthesized the countercultural innovations of Bob Dylan and others with the troubadour tradition of Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams and Merle Haggard. Granted, there are a few clunkers on his recently reissued 1970 debut….
For the most part, great soundtracks fall into one of three categories: collections of tunes that are integral to the film’s plot (Dancer in the Dark), prereleased tracks used memorably during crucial scenes (Pulp Fiction) or original songs with lyrics inspired by the motion picture that, while not as essential to the movie as numbers from a musical, convey the…
During “El Presidente,” the opening track on the demo Beat Down, Urban Disorder vocalist Syko rails against former president Bill Clinton, jabbing at his infidelity, draft-dodging and inability to admit his marijuana intake. Against a trudging backdrop broken up periodically by a frenzied chorus, Urban Disorder theorizes that the nation needs a real man/with a head on his shoulders. It’s…
To see Sonny Kenner play his weekly gigs at Mill Creek Brewery or The Levee was to witness a legend in action, a rare luxury enjoyed by local music fans for more than a decade. True, nationally acclaimed artists such as Jay McShann and Kevin Mahogany maintain a Kansas City connection, but these performers don’t keep regular office hours —…
Whatever happened to sex, drugs, and rock and roll? Remember that? Each one so perfectly complemented the others. When did that sacred triumvirate go out of style? At what point was it replaced by not getting any, Frappuccino and skinny guys who stare at their shoes and spout bogus introspection? In short, whatever happened to rock just for the sake…
To obtain the space to list every musical alliance of Mark Reynolds’ long local career, this paper would have to sell an obscenely high number of ads, a feat that the limitations of human physiology would seem to prohibit. Reynolds figures he’s been part of roughly twenty bands in as many years. Some, like Grither, the Pedaljets and Cher UK,…
“Destiny found me,” Chris Duarte writes in the liner notes to his new Love Is Greater Than Me. If that’s true, destiny was the last one looking. At 37, Duarte has already been discovered by two labels, an audience, several guitar magazines, some other terrific musicians, drug dealers and two wives. Though he has released only three albums, the guitarist…
Watching this film is like watching a donkey being beaten for ninety minutes, so egregiously is the titular character treated and so powerless does she appear against her offenders. That the abuse is treated in a comedic fashion for a good part of the film makes it even more reproachable. Perhaps it’s simply a matter of cultural differences. Italian…
“The one question I have about Kansas is that I don’t know that there is a go-to guy, one guy who you would want to take the shot with the game on the line. I asked Roy Williams about that and he named five guys. If you have five go-to guys, it means you don’t have any.” — Dave Stewart,…
JaRon Rush works the baseline, then pops outside the lane with his right hand raised, silently calling for the ball. He takes the bounce pass and backs his defender toward the goal with two dribbles and a slight feint to his right. His knees flex, he wheels left gracefully and elevates to release a jump shot — an easy 8-footer…
A Sporting Chance The seat of power: Nice work landing KC’s most controversial and talked-about “underground” local columnist, Greg Hall. For those classical music patrons among us, Greg Hall bristled the hairs on many spinal columns supported on gluteal masses spread over media chairs in this town through his currently defunct “Drudge-esque” Web site, sportswaves.com, and we, the sports talk…
Bottoms up: Coyote Ugly is now out on video, but you’re no Tyra Banks, and this ain’t New York City, so don’t even think about stomping around on your favorite bar in your George W. Bush shit kickers. That’s the message from Kansas City’s manager of regulated industries, Eldon “Killjoy” Audsley, who sent out a lengthy memo to bar owners…
Today, anyone gazing from a window of the Western Auto building would see few traces of the sixteen homeless people who camped beneath the overpass at 20th and McGee a month earlier, unsure of where they would go next. The area is free of their belongings, and the charred barrel that once contained a nightly fire houses only a pile…
The January 17 meeting of the Southwest Charter School board of directors touched on a number of subjects, including discipline, a possible revision of the school’s attendance policy and a library upgrade. After the meeting, one of the school’s board members touched on a subject that hadn’t been on the agenda. Margaret Schmitz Rizzo criticized former Southwest Charter instructor Josh…
