Academy Awards Collection (MGM) The Comedians of Comedy (Anchor Bay) Dallas: The Complete Sixth Season (Warner Bros.) The Doctor, the Tornado & the Kentucky Kid: Ultimate Collector’s Edition (New Video Group) Dora the Explorer: Cowgirl Dora (Paramount) The Fabulous Baker Boys (MGM) Facing the Giants (Sony) The Festival: The Complete First Season (New Video Group) Flyboys (MGM) Looker (Warner Bros.)…
Anyone who played games back in the olden days (i.e., the late ’80s) knows they used to be a lot tougher. Cartridges back then subscribed to the “Oh, you want some of this?” school of game design. They made you gnash your teeth, throw your controller, and bellow four-letter words. But when you finally emerged victorious . . ….
Catch a Fire (Focus) In his commentary for the underrated, undervalued Catch a Fire, director Phillip Noyce discusses the inspiration: witnessing the terror attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001. He wanted to comprehend “the terrorist’s mind,” so he found a story that accomplishes such a difficult thing: the true-life tale of Patrick Chamusso (Derek Luke, wonderfully sympathetic),…
The Giver It’s Junior’s First Utopian Nightmare down at the Coterie, where shows made for kids are often better than the adult-content theaters in staging, style and intelligence. Coterie shows are shorter, too, and more likely to make a point. This time, director Jeff Church takes on Lois Lawry’s Newberry-winning novel about a “perfect” future in which peace and politeness…
Carrousel As the first and last thing that visitors will see at the disparate but satisfying Carrousel exhibit, the assertive colors and bold shapes of Marcus Cain’s vinyl-tape wall installation bracket a collection of works by past Charlotte Street Award winners as well as young local artists making their Paragraph debut. Cain also contributes a smaller abstraction that both echoes…
The latest installation at Grand Arts stinks. It really does. The Fear of Smell, the Smell of Fear, by Norway-born artist Sissel Tolaas, is an ambitious, nontraditional exhibit at a gallery that’s known for booking sprawling and challenging installations. This is the first that’s completely aromatic. At first glance, the gallery seems barren, bereft of any visible artwork. The…
As drama, King Lear is kind of awful. Saying that, I feel like the old coot himself, shaking my fist at storms and forces far beyond my ken. But that won’t stop me. The tragedy of an old man forced to spend a night in the rain, Lear peaks full acts before it ends and asks you to feel for…
PARK CITY, Utah — Ten days of terse texting among professional narcissists working on little or no sleep in one of the last cold spots left on Al Gore’s inconvenient Earth: Welcome to Sundance ’07, where wounding homefront melodrama Grace Is Gone sells and it hardly pays to be nice. Indeed, only the most well-insulated of parka-clad, swag-swinging power-players here…
PARK CITY, Utah —On the first Saturday of the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, I rolled out of bed and hustled up Main Street for the 8:30 screening of Tamara Jenkins’ The Savages, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney as adult siblings caring for an irascible elderly parent. Only I went to the wrong theater by mistake and instead…
Even by the lacerating standards of recent Sundance docs Why We Fight and Iraq in Fragments, the nonfiction at this year’s fest felt, well, real — alarmingly so. Indeed, after doing battle with films about U.S. policies on Iraq, Darfur, and global warming, this critic was nearly moved to rescind his American citizenship. Which is merely to say that Sundance,…
We all know about the cathartic power of blues music, but until the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, who knew that it could serve as a cure-all for everything from nymphomania to childhood sexual abuse? In Hustle & Flow director Craig Brewer’s Black Snake Moan, the out-of-competition premiere of which was one of the festival’s hottest tickets, a gaunt and…
One morning, Gary Walkow was suddenly transformed into a successful Hollywood filmmaker. Gone were the hat-in-hand searches for financing, the deferred salaries, the long shooting days with undermanned crews, and the months upon years spent touring the festival circuit while seeking a distribution deal. For a moment, he was taking calls by the dozen instead of waiting for the phone…
The release of the Diane Keaton-Mandy Moore romantic comedy Because I Said So while the scent of this year’s Sundance Film Festival is still fresh in the air provides an excellent opportunity to review the wayward career of the movie’s director, Michael Lehmann. Once upon a time — 1989, to be exact — Lehmann came to Park City, Utah, with…
I’m one of those journalists who actually keeps a journal, though I don’t write in it every day, despite my best intentions. Sometimes I write in it about restaurants, but not if I can help it. It’s really a running commentary about my diet (going badly), my exercise plan (ditto) and the often hilarious observations of friends who call or…
My friend Ned has a theory that you can never find really good food in any joint with a jukebox. It’s an opinion that my parents would have shared, a pervasive snobbishness that dates back, I guess, to the days when only drive-ins and smoky bars had jukeboxes and the best thing on the menu — if the place…
Hey, DJs, the Pitch is sending one talented local spinner to Miami to perform at the Winter Music Conference’s closing Ultra Music Festival, March 23-24. Send us your mind-blowing CD mix by Friday, February 9. (Mail or deliver it to the Pitch, 1701 Main, Kansas City, MO 64108.) Five finalists (who will be announced in the February 15 and February…
For us, the rules of nightlife have come down to this: Free drinks, good. Blow-job shots at 18-and-over bars, bad. But only in that cheesy-bad way, not evil-bad. At least that’s what we concluded after a night at Orlando’s 21. We were lured to this Northland bar by its Thursday night drinkfest. Ladies pay $5 and guys $6 for all-you-can-stomach…
Inner demons have always been the fuel for Cage’s fiery brand of hip-hop. His horrorcore delivery is a product of a hard-knock life riddled with broken homes, mental hospitals and drug abuse. But Cage turned a corner a couple of years ago. He got clean, joined the Definitive Jux imprint and released one of 2005’s most revered hip-hop albums, Hell’s…
With She Wants Revenge and so many other Depeche Mode fetishists having grabbed the spotlight in 2006, it’d be easy to dismiss Shiny Toy Guns as bandwagoneers — that is, until you’ve rocked the group’s hit track “Le Disko” a couple hundred times. Fans of Ladytron and Peaches lose their shit over tracks like this: throbbing electro bass, sultry female…
John Prine’s concerts, even the ones in big old theaters, feel like a Saturday afternoon pit stop at a buddy’s house — by rights, you ought to be holding a six-pack of Milwaukee’s Best and a freshly burned gift CD when you hit the door. Prine won a Grammy for the songwriting on his last album, Fair and Square (who…
Calling all half-wits, blockheads, imbeciles, clods, simpletons, goons and ignorami: The Queers are coming! Since this writer’s teenage punk band opened for the Queers at the old Bastille’s in St. Louis in 1993, the much-loved New Hampshire trio has changed members repeatedly without altering its primordial sound — snotty, catchy pop-punk (“Fuck the World,” “Janelle, Janelle”) cut with snotty-snotty…
Lindsey Buckingham isn’t a man you necessarily want to hear naked. He’s about the only folk-influenced artist who’s more soulful through a delay pedal and in five-part self-harmony than as an honest troubadour. His latest, Under the Skin, has it both ways: It’s mainly acoustic guitar and voice — minimalist compared with his work with Fleetwood Mac or previous…
Approximate number of strip clubs in the Greater Atlanta area: 80. In Lawrence: two. Whether this spells disaster for the Ying Yang Twins’ after-show entertainment plans remains to be seen. Duo D-Roc and Kaine’s crunk canon is anchored primarily by their affinity for all things carnal, tempered with a bit of gimmickry (aping the Seven Dwarves on 2000’s “Whistle While…
Oxford Collapse is the kind of drunk, loopy band that you heard, beer in hand, rocking the musty basement at your older, cooler cousin’s birthday party when you were 16. Remember the Night Parties?, the Brooklyn trio’s aptly named new album, is a light collection of bizarre postpunk poetry that follows two previous albums that were both more urgent than…
