Akeelah and the Bee (Lions Gate) American Gun (IFC) The Castle of Cagliostro (Manga) Desperate Housewives: Season Two (Buena Vista) Stephen King’s Desperation (Lions Gate) Friends With Money (Sony) Iron Island (Kino) Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (Paramount) Lonesome Jim (IFC) Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World (Warner Bros.) Mountain Patrol: Kekelixi (Sony) Nip/Tuck: The Complete Third Season (Warner…
Have you ever looked into onrushing traffic and imagined how much damage you would cause with a simple crank of the steering wheel? If so, FlatOut 2 is the racing game for you. The latest entry in a genre best described as Evel Knievel meets NASCAR, FlatOut 2 lets you vent vehicular aggression without dying or getting sued. As in…
Arrested Development: Season Three (Fox) The final collection of Arrested Development discs feels sadly incomplete: only 13 episodes this time, the result of Fox’s inability to attract viewers to one of TV’s greatest comedies and the network’s unwillingness to give it a full farewell. But none of that diminishes the quality of the show about the world’s most dysfunctional…
Come Back to the 9 to 5, Dolly Parton, Dolly Parton With one show left to go in a 10th-anniversary season that at times has seemed too celebratory, Late Night Theatre seems hungry again. Writer-director David Wayne Reed has marshaled everything that Late Night does well: the glorious get-ups, the bawdy puns, the dizzy set pieces that fizz as if…
Elissa Armstrong: Objects of Innocence and Experience Lawrence artist Elissa Armstrong takes the lighthearted concept of “sit-arounds” (or “set-arounds,” depending on how rural your accent is) —decorative objects, including porcelain unicorns, free-standing arrangements of dried flowers and Precious Moments figurines — and flips it on its innocent little head. For this show, the Alfred University-educated ceramist (and University of Kansas…
To appreciate the witty, eclectic Full Deck: La Loteria, the group show at Mattie Rhodes Art Gallery, it helps to have an understanding of the bingolike game for which the exhibit is named and the process by which the show was arranged. The original Italian lotería immigrated to Mexico from Spain in 1769. The game uses 54 cards, which…
By the time Trust the Man opens this weekend, it will have been nearly a year since it debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it was picked up for distribution by Fox Searchlight. But really, this thing tastes a good decade past its expiration date. It plays like a watered-down TV-pilot version of Woody Allen’s 1992 Husbands and…
Vienna in the late 1890s — a great imperial capital in ferment. Gustav Mahler is not only reinventing the harmonic structure of serious music but also getting his head seriously shrunk by Sigmund Freud. Arnold Schoenberg takes painting lessons from the eroticist Richard Gerstl (who will later bed the composer’s wife), and new schools of thought are quickly multiplying…
Kansas City’s reputation as a steak-and-potatoes town dates back to 1871, when the stockyards were built in the West Bottoms to handle all the cattle being shipped east. The stockyards were still thriving in 1906, when most Kansas City restaurant menus offered at least one steak. But not all of them. In August of that year, the city’s first all-vegetarian…
Yes, the name of the 2-month-old restaurant at 151st Street and Nall is Coco Bolos New Mexican Wood-Fired Grill & Cantina. But the owners don’t want customers to think it’s, you know, a Mexican restaurant. They insist that Coco Bolos “has a lot more to offer than enchiladas and tacos.” That’s true, though it should be noted that the…
Of all the obsessions we harbor (drinking, the sport of curling), our fascination with the Lawrence Massacre ranks high on the list. So when we figured out that August 21 marked its 143rd anniversary, we had to stage our own reenactment. The plan? A drinking tour of the major spots that William Quantrill and his men hit, of course. Just…
For some time now, the Empire Room in midtown has been one of KC’s best 3 a.m. options. The Empire seems to be a rare breed as far as area nightclubs go, especially for its mature, open and unafraid interracial mingling. Labor Day at the ER brings us yet another block party on Martini Corner, this time with Two Heavy…
Singing death metal requires a lot of practice. Uninitiated growlers wouldn’t make it through a single song without hacking as if it were the morning after a four-pack smoking bender. However, given similar talent and preparation, death-metal frontmen, even at the genre’s highest level, are relatively interchangeable. Moiré has maintained its position at the top of local metal for almost…
One can’t be blamed for being wary of a PE remix album, which could easily be the latest installment in a long series of indignities since 1990: Professor Griff’s anti-Jewish remarks, Flavor Flav’s embarrassing drug arrest and — worst of all — Flav’s wretched TV appearances (not to mention a steady creative decline and the defections of DJ Terminator X…
On its third release for Omaha’s Saddle Creek record label, Athens, Georgia’s Now It’s Overhead continues to produce dark pop music that is simultaneously haunting and hummable. Opener “Let the Sirens Rest” combines a hip-swaying backbeat with a Southern Gothic attitude that would make Flannery O’Connor proud, and the strangely groovy drive of “Walls” and the four-on-the-snare cadence of “Type…
The Ssion reinvents itself with a frequency rivaling Pete Doherty’s drug arrests, but for a year the band has seemed comfortably rooted in punk basics, leaving little opportunity for leader Cody Critcheloe to get his dance on. Enter Street Jizz, a collaboration with Ashley Miller, fellow Ssioner and the mystic weirdo behind tonight’s headliner, Pewep in the Formats. “I wanted…
You might think that The Kansas City Star is hiring when you see a few of the names on this bill. Instead, you get the latest incarnation of the heralded Relapse Contamination Tour. Ottawa four-piece Fuck the Facts plays some of the freshest, most engaging, most fun grind out there. Despite the band’s kitchen-sink approach to influences, the music changes…
Is it sacrilege for Def Leppard to take on the Kinks’ “Waterloo Sunset”? Probably. But so what? On the covers album Yeah!, Def Leppard delivers one of the year’s least likely best records by reaching into the past and applying its patented laser-gun metal to David Bowie, Blondie, T.Rex and ELO. As for tourmates Journey, 1988’s Greatest Hits remains a…
There is nothing groundbreaking about Honky’s music. And that’s what makes it rock. In an age of smoothly produced indie rock and an ever-slick DJ scene, this horny trio of high-voltage Texans amps up rough, driven music that’ll hit you in the head like a cast-iron skillet. Honky makes no bones about the beautiful primitiveness of the sound it…
Queensryche has prompted many deep questions in the course of its 20 years as a band: What does it mean to be silently lucid? Has anyone ever been noisily lucid? Is Dr. X noisily lucid? Ronnie James Dio certainly is. Further: Does “conceptual metal” exist only in one’s head, and does one need to be silently lucid to hear it?…
Indianapolis is more than just the holy land for NASCAR enthusiasts. It’s also one of three homes to the annual Rib America Festival. Because America needs a good ribbing. Seriously, though, the four-day event kicks off Friday at Military Park (601 West New York Street, 317-233-2434) with succulent smoked meats and live performances from yesteryear favorites such as REO Speedwagon,…
Mike Dillon’s creativity knows no bounds. A member of once-local act Billy Goat, the planet’s only punk-rock vibraphonist lands in his native Kansas City fresh from a summer of touring and studying with the likes of Bill Ware (the Jazz Passengers, Steely Dan) and Les Claypool (Primus, of course). Bassist J.J. Richards and drummer Ray Pollard join Dillon to form…
Mention Dublin’s Hothouse Flowers, and fans of Irish music smile, their wistful expressions asking the unspoken question: “Whatever became of them?” At least on this side of the Atlantic. The Flowers hit American shores in 1988 with “Don’t Go,” the kind of song Springsteen might’ve done if he’d grown up motoring across the Irish Sea shore. Then, in 1994, just…
Swagger: You got it or you don’t. Billy Joel? No swagger there. Mick Jagger? Rhymes with it, dawg. The best swagger I’ve seen locally emanates from the hips of one Jenny Carr, whose band, the Waiting List, I saw for the first time last week at Davey’s. Wearing a blue dress shirt, a necktie and pinstriped slacks, Carr slung her…
