Each year’s Actors Equity Showcase offers exactly what the name implies: a chance for Kansas City’s professional thespians to razzle-dazzle on an intimate stage. But this who’s-who of local talent has also developed a tradition of spotlighting playwrights, a class of creative types that struggles to get by even more than actors do. This year’s showcase promises no fewer than…
Released in 1983, Strange Brew presaged Chuck Norris jokes, dumb-and-dumber buddy comedies and Air Bud-style flying dogs. The only feature film to emerge from the seminal Canadian sketch comedy show SCTV, Strange Brew compares favorably with most Saturday Night Live character vehicles. Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas play brothers Bob and Doug McKenzie, broadly stereotypical Canadian hosers who punctuate almost…
The Women’s Foundation of Greater Kansas City and MANA de Kansas City come together tonight for Sembrando Semillas en Kansas City, which translates: “Planting the Seeds in Kansas City.” The event features guest speaker Emilienne de Leon Aulina, executive director of Semillas. “Semillas is Mexico’s only fund that is directed toward women,” says Beth Shomin of the Women’s Foundation of…
What preserved trinket is less creepy than a shrunken monkey’s paw but still pretty ghoulish? Answer: art made out of human hair.It exists, all right. During the 18th and 19th centuries, the craft of hairwork was all the rage, especially among the middle class. Sentimental Americans hired artists to weave the hair of loved ones — living and deceased —…
François Cluzet simmers beautifully as a Paris pediatrician who, eight years after the brutal murder of his beloved wife (Marie-Josée Croze), receives an e-mailed video purporting to show her alive. His search for her or her captors is, to understate the situation, complicated by their search for him and the growing suspicions of the police — who reopen the case…
Writer-director Jonathan Levine’s mix tape of clichés takes cuts from a dozen or more coming-of-age melodramas and sets them to the backbeat of 1994 New York City. The movie begins by ballyhooing its “edge”: The Sony Classics logo gets tagged over. After teenage hip-hop head Luke (Josh Peck) is introduced stonewalling his psychiatrist, Dr. Squires (Ben Kingsley), the patient pays…
The title refers to the Estonian independence movement, incubated through the country’s stifled years as a Soviet satellite, when the sole outlet for the nation’s forbidden nationalist efforts was a folk-singing festival where tens of thousands of voices joined in a patriotic anthem. About half of The Singing Revolution recounts, through three generations of partisans, the agonized history of their…
For this dreary sequel, Dragonheart director Rob Cohen replaces Stephen Sommers and edges out cheerful extravagance in favor of joyless efficiency. In the film’s prologue, Emperor Han (Jet Li) seeks out witch Zi Juan (Michelle Yeoh) to help him conquer death. Instead, Zi curses Han. Cut to 1946: Rick (Brendan Fraser) and Evelyn O’Connell (Maria Bello, subbing for a now-too-respectable…
This movie adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s tale of England collapsing under the pressure of social change is much more fun than the 11-hour slog of the 1981 TV version. Waugh’s novel doesn’t have much of a story — social upstart Charles Ryder is taken up by an aristocratic family bent on destroying itself. But, as directed by Julian Jarrold, this…
Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, friends since kindergarten, want to build the stadium for this summer’s Olympics in Beijing. They do. So goes Bird’s Nest, a facile, frustrating documentary about the project. The stadium itself is striking, a luminous steel membrane that may, as its designers hope, become an iconic, Eiffel Tower-like public space. But despite what…
In June, U.S. Marshals worked with state and local law enforcement agencies across the country to apprehend 19,000 fugitives. Manuel Bonilla, who was wanted in Georgia on homicide charges, felt the cold snap of handcuffs when cops discovered him in Marshall, Missouri. The roundup was called Operation FALCON (Federal and Local Cops Organized Nationally). Cops, it turns out, really like…
Don’t ask the Alkaline Trio for help with your science project — they’ll tell you the visible spectrum includes only red, black and white wavelengths. Likewise for grammar advice — they’re from a genre known for its penchant for exclamation points. Since 1998’s Goddamnit, however, the group has mastered the punk-pop curriculum, graduating to a major label for this year’s…
“I Saw the Bright Shinies,” by the Octopus Project, from Hello, Avalanche (Peek-A-Boo Records): This quartet of noisemakers presumably chose to call itself the Octopus Project because the band members wanted to get their hands on as many instruments as possible and throw them all into the mix. But instead of the cacophony that the band professes to make, these…
“Monkey,” by Richard Lloyd, from The Radiant Monkey (Parasol Records): If you’ve ever seen a show at the Record Bar, you owe it to yourself to see Richard Lloyd. The man is best known as the former guitarist for New York proto-punk band Television, and nearly every indie purist and garage revivalist since has ripped off the sparse, spidery style…
“The Wrong Girl,” by Missy Higgins, from On a Clear Night (Eleven: A Music Company): Twenty-three-year-old singer-songwriter Missy Higgins is on her way to becoming an institution back home in her native Australia, yet she’s still struggling to find her footing in the States. Despite the fact that her songs regularly show up on TV soundtracks, the mysterious buzz that’s…
Instead of going the pay-what-you-like route, Paul Westerberg has set a definite price tag for his latest digital-only LP: 49 cents. Released last week, 49:00 … of Your Time/Life marks his seventh solo album (eighth if you include the soundtrack of that animated bear movie, tenth including … never mind) since the Replacements dissolved in 1991. Amazon.com was the only…
“Whiskey + Pills = Lady Shake,” by Thunder Eagle, from Whiskey + Pills = Lady Shake (self-released): It’s a sticky, humid Friday night at the Westport Beach Club. Women in sports bras and shorts struggle to overpower one another in a slippery pool of whitish mud set up in the middle of the volleyball court. Every so often, a female…
Out there in Country Music Radio Land, Brad Paisley — that witty, fratty, country singer and hot-shit guitarist — has lately racked up four inescapable hits, songs that click hard every time. There’s “Ticks,” a horny classic about what he’d like to check the woman at the bar for when he gets her out in the woods. There’s “I’m Still…
“Sweet Chariot,” by Dead Child, from Attack (Quarterstick Records): Sporting a playfully audacious band name and an old-school death logo, Louisville’s Dead Child takes listeners back to the days when groups such as Armored Saint walked the line between traditional, Priest-style metal and thrash. You might at first wonder what the hell this band is doing on Quarterstick Records, but…
CD Tradepost isn’t exactly the headquarters of heavy metal. But recently, one lucky chain store in Lawrence sprouted a pretty wicked metal section under the guidance of former employee Adam Mitchell — a drummer known to his friends as the “Elfin Hammerlord” on account of his resemblance to a Lord of the Rings character. One customer — a quiet guitarist…
Lady Luck and I are not friends — we’re barely even acquaintances. Unlike my father, who was a pretty savvy gambler, I’m lousy at all games of chance. But I have a couple of friends who play slot machines the way Joshua Bell handles the violin. Like virtuosos, I’m telling you. I mention these two gambling women because they’re practically…
The late Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart once famously noted that, while hardcore porn is hard to define, “I know it when I see it.” The same goes for bad installation art. We know it when we see it. Too many installation artists think that they can skate over conceptual and aesthetic rigor and just throw materials together, and we…
Imagine an Elvis movie that’s nothing but the goofy highlights of Elvis movies: a sexy drifter, idiotic romances, production numbers even more unclear than most about whether all the impromptu singing and dancing is happening within the reality of the story. Then imagine it staged with more musical-theater slickness than rock-and-roll abandon, and you’ve got All Shook Up, this year’s…
Under a nearly full moon, Scott Mansker cruised delicately along the Missouri River in his motor-powered canoe. He tailed a small group of kayakers as they paddled past Jefferson City. With temperatures simmering in the mid-90s, the river had looked like a mirror that afternoon, reflecting the sun’s punishing rays onto the paddlers who muscled along in a feat of…
