Address Unknown (Tartan) Anyone Can Dance: Nightclub Freestyle (Delta) National Lampoon’s Barely Legal (MGM) Dallas: The Complete Fourth Season (Warner Bros.) Educating Rita (Sony) Flightplan (Touchstone) The Fog (2005) (Sony) God Save the Queen: A Punk Rock Anthology (Music Video Dist.) Hooked (Eclectic) Ludacris: Southern Smoke (Music Video Dist.) My Big Fat Independent Movie (Anchor Bay) Oliver Twist (Sony) Paper…
Pop-culture pundits generally fall into two camps: those who think entertainment encourages a nation of knuckle-draggers, and those who say it’s actually making us smarter. In the case of Atari’s The Matrix: Path of Neo, both sides have a point. Like the movie trilogy that inspired it, Path of Neo is both innovative and trite, enjoyable and insufferable. Also…
The Aristocrats (Lions Gate) The single joke around which Paul Provenza’s documentary revolves has a standard beginning and ending, like pieces of bread that make a sandwich stuffed with excrement, incest, and whatever other foulness the teller can come up with. Provenza and Penn Jillette recorded more than 100 comedians riffing on this joke; the result is an exploration…
Fortinbras With Lee Blessing’s absurdist farce Fortinbras, our most exciting community-theater company tackles what could be called After Hamlet (or Hamlet 2: Citizens on Patrol). When Fortinbras starts strong-arming the surviving Danes before their prince’s corpse has cooled, we can guaran-damn-tee you more blood’s going to spill. But first: How will his assumption of the throne play in the media?…
Celebrating a Grand Gift: The Hallmark Photographic Collection On January 12, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art announced that when its new Bloch Building opens in 2007, it will house the 6,500-piece Hallmark Photographic Collection. Keith Davis, director of Hallmark’s fine-art programs, has spent 25 years assembling the collection — which, with its emphasis on the history of American work, is…
Since the goal of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art’s 10-artist Decelerate is to encourage gallery patrons — and, by implication, the world at large — to slow down, we took our sweet time getting there to see it. (The show opened back on December 16.) Curator Elizabeth Dunbar added the tagline “Searching for slowness in the age of…
When did serial killers become comfort food? That there are more serial killers in our entertainment media than the there are real-life victims doesn’t bother anyone. In films, television and grocery-store novels, killers — whose butchery is as lurid and lavished-over as the Grand Slams on a Denny’s menu — are, of course, caught or killed by dutiful authorities….
We popcorn-chomping hitchhikers never know who will pick us up on the roadside. In Flirting With Disaster, it was a neurotic Manhattan adoptee on a nationwide search for his biological parents. The desert-parched heroines of Thelma & Louise brought us along as they raised hell en route to their doom. In Sideways, we toured Napa and Sonoma with a pair…
What’s an unemployed former superspy to do? Faced with a midlife career change, suave Pierce Brosnan seems to have chosen wry self-mockery, reinventing himself as a scruffy, fallen James Bond surrogate, sometimes still furnished with a license to kill and a certain gift for cool but far more likely now to stop shaving for three days, have tawdry encounters…
Wasn’t it Miss Dorothy Gale of Kansas — as portrayed by Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz — who said, “Things come and go so quickly here”? One doesn’t need a pair of ruby slippers to understand that things can come and go just as quickly in the local restaurant world. The other day, I saw a “for rent”…
Inever watched the NBC reality show The Restaurant, starring celebrity chef Rocco DeSpirito, for the same reason I won’t watch any reality TV series: My own personal reality is complicated enough. If I even turn on the television, I want to see something featuring not real people but idiotic caricatures of them — say, The O’Reilly Factor. But sometimes…
If this column were an after-school special, the plug for this week’s installment would read something like this: The Night Ranger visits E.B. Bar & Grill on Martin Luther King Day, meets persons of color and, after an initial period of inebriated confusion, sees the person within. Thankfully, this column is nothing like an after-school special, unless we’re talking about…
It’s widely known that all DJs go to heaven, but unfortunately, not all of them make it to the Winter Music Conference — the biggest, hypest electronic music convention this side of the Horsehead Nebula. Each year, by the sunny sands of Miami Beach, DJs so underground their hair smells like mole shit rub shoulders with halo-endowed legends from around…
Hispanic rapper Panic’s promotional ditty, aptly titled the Madcell Mixtape, is filled with star-studded shout-outs, banging (albeit borrowed) beats and rhyme-spitting venom. Available free at www.panic music.com, Madcell rallies comedian John Witherspoon of Friday frame, Pimp My Ride’s Xzbit, infuego Hollywood actor John Leguizamo, Kansas City radio personality J.T. Quick and area music impresario Grant Rice (the mastermind behind rap…
Perhaps no other act has made so perilous a leap between record labels as English trio Saint Etienne, which just moved from indie rocking Sub Pop to venerable jazz stalwart Savoy. But Tales From the Turnpike House is no midlife crisis; these icons of early ’90s cool Britannia have been urban sophisticates since their mums were spoon-feeding them trifle. This…
Clearlake receives an infinitesimal percentage of fellow British import Coldplay’s publicity, and it seldom even appears in American magazines’ dismissive lists of U.K. also-rans (South, Elbow and, until recently, Muse). It’s a curious plight for a group that, three albums and a couple of EPs into its career, has yet to release a song that rates below “pretty great.” Then…
The concepts that Electric President’s Ben Cooper and Alex Kane explore on their debut — that proletarians are pawns to be used and unceremoniously discarded like machines, that everyone’s under surveillance, that civilization as we know it will collapse any minute now, for real — are certainly nothing new. Neither is their chosen genre, folktronica, which, generally speaking, is an…
Watching B.B. King glide through one of his pin-prick solos a couple years back, a friend said, “You can just tell how soft his hands are.” King suffered once, then pounded hurt into art. The only thing suffering lately, though, is his music, which — like too much of today’s commercial blues — comes forth as smooth and clean as…
What exactly is the Lincoln Conspiracy? Is it the theory that the CIA and the Cuban government worked together to assassinate our 16th president? Or maybe it’s the secret plot of an east-central Nebraska town not to suck quite so much. But more than likely — at least if you’re a three-piece from Boston — it’s a strong desire to…
Egypt’s macabre, death-obsessed history has inspired scads of role-playing dorks to take strange names and chant stranger bullshit to their friends, who also dwell in their secret world of magic and sorcery. So it’s no wonder that a group of long-haired stoners would draw inspiration from the pharaonic culture of death and create their own little metal band, complete with…
There’s no denying it — Minneapolis native Robert Skoro has way more than his fair share of songs that would be perfect for the floor-gazing, anguished “I never shoulda lied” montage of a WB drama. (If he hasn’t landed at least one of those, his agent isn’t trying hard enough.) Skoro spent his teenage years playing bass for the Jack…
The A&E Network series Biography has profiled plenty of questionable characters during its run, so it’s easy to understand why, when informed that country singer Martina McBride is next, one would shrug and sigh heavily. For once, though, A&E seems to know what it’s doing. Consider: McBride is probably the most consistent female name in country music over the past…
Reese Witherspoon’s Golden Globe-winning performance as June Carter Cash in Walk the Line introduced a general-interest audience to the sublime charms of a spirited twang. Witherspoon has demurred about making her own album (her feisty takes on “Jackson” and “It Ain’t Me Babe” appear on the Walk the Line soundtrack), humbly denying music fans the rare opportunity to hear a…
The story of Mi and L’au reads like a fairy tale. Overwhelmed by their love for each other and music, French model Mi and Finnish music industry veteran L’au sequestered themselves in a cabin in Finland to record one of the most chillingly exquisite records of 2005. Produced by Swans’ Michael Gira and released on his Young God Records label…
