Bambi is perhaps the quintessential nature vs. man cautionary tale in the animation genre, but somewhere along the way, we all get distracted by the giddy “why Goofy wears pants” debate. Today the Missouri Department of Conservation shows its sillier side by presenting a daylong marathon of animalcentric animated features for families coming down from their holiday sugar and adrenaline…
If random knowledge is your thing, there’s a brand-new destination to show off your smarts. Right in step with such longtime trivia hot spots as the Brick, the Record Bar, the Westport Flea Market and the Flying Saucer, downtown’s Czar Bar (1531 Grand, 816-221-2244) presents its own Saturday Night Trivia Clash with host Pat Hopewell. The game starts at 6…
German fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld once said, “There is no beauty without strangeness.” If sexiness is subjective and beauty is in the eye of the beholder, the contestants of Miss Riot Room 2008, Kansas City’s first rock-and-roll beauty pageant, have a lot to work with tonight.Judged by local celebrities Slimfast (from KRBZ 96.5), rapper Mac Lethal and Gnarly Dan of…
Annie is one of those musicals whose songs everyone seems to know by heart — almost by heart. You’ll catch yourself singing “Tomorrow” in the shower and then realize that you can remember only the chorus. Tonight offers the perfect chance to learn the rest of the words while escaping the hard-knock life of the holiday season. Hit the Music…
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Claus Philipp Maria Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg (Tom Cruise) plotted to kill Hitler in 1944 in order to seize control of Germany and broker a truce with the Allies. But Valkyrie has no interest in memorializing this forgotten soldier, and the film isn’t really Oscar fare, despite the based-on-a-true-story baggage, period clothing, setting and reputable cast (Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson,…
Richard Nixon as muse — beetle brows, ski nose and mirthless grin, made for caricature, and his rampant pathology add up to a gift for novelists and psychohistorians. Frost/Nixon, dutifully directed by Ron Howard from screenwriter Peter Morgan’s enjoyably glib play, is not about Watergate but its aftermath — the series of four televised interviews with the disgraced 37th president…
The movie version of John Grogan’s best-selling memoir lacks a crucial ingredient: any sense of what made its hero different from every other table-smashing, necklace-swallowing dogzilla on Earth. Marley never develops a personality beyond generic mutt-goes-nuts antics. Without that crucial spark of soul, all director David Frankel (The Devil Wears Prada) delivers is a Beethoven movie with less shedding. The…
Lawrence lost one of its finest artisans of brainy indie pop when songwriter Justin Ripley moved to Seattle a year ago, effectively ending the reign of his band, the Pomonas. Since cozying up to the Space Needle, Ripley has found steady work as a soundman, parlaying it into a South American tour with two European metal bands. He has continued…
With bristling topicality, a ritzy cast and Roger Deakins’ gracefully bleak cinematography, John Patrick Shanley’s movie is prime Oscar bait. In this callow but entertaining adaptation of his 2005 play, provocation passes for complexity. A timid, young Sister James (Amy Adams), unnerved by what looks like unusually close contact between a well-liked priest, Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman), and a…
Along with Freedy Johnston and Mates of State, Chuck Mead may well be known as the one who got away from Lawrence’s music scene. Mead’s band, the Homestead Grays, brought the roots-rock to Larryville in the late ’80s, before he bolted to Nashville and formed BR549. That group was too damn country even for Nashville, but they filled up enough…
This comic, ultimately touching family melodrama is a heady plum pudding of a movie — studded with outsized performances and drenched in cinematic brio. The narrative pattern seems to extend every which way at once as Arnaud Desplechin brings the Vuillard clan back to their parental home in Roubaix, a small city on the Belgian border. The gathering is prompted…
Though born in Kansas City, Chris Schutz cut his musical teeth in his current home of Philadelphia. But don’t expect to hear any hints of the classic soul that the City of Brotherly Love is famous for. Drawing heavily from ’70s-era Bob Dylan and John Lennon, Schutz grounds himself in traditional Americana and left-field pop. The EP Stowaway feels like…
Chicken hoof n. — “barbecued chicken wing.” According to Mark Southerland, award-winning Kansas City saxophonist, the term also denotes the best reason to get down this New Year’s Eve. Nine years ago, on September 9, 1999 (9/9/99), Chickenhoof played its first gig, at Mike’s Tavern. Southerland describes the date as “a certain aligning of numbers that brought us all together…
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is certainly curious — a modest F. Scott Fitzgerald story, about a man born in the twilight of life who is gradually regressing toward dawn. Directed by David Fincher from a screenplay by Eric Roth, Benjamin Button announces its epic intentions right from the start. An orchestra tunes up on the soundtrack; two studio…
The Adam Sandler who shows up in Bedtime Stories is that most unnecessary of movie-star guises: the benign family-comedy guy. Sandler plays a lowly Los Angeles handyman recruited by his sister (Courteney Cox) to baby-sit her two children. He entertains them with made-up bedtime stories, but once events he describes start happening in real life, he realizes that the kids’…
That’ll be quite enough from you, 2008. The collapsing economy, the escalating wars, the rise of Sarah Palin, the virulent spread of Auto-Tune throughout mainstream pop — you nearly killed us. Fortunately, folks in Kansas City had plenty of good music to turn to for comfort. For our year-end wrap-up, we caught up with a few prominent locals to see…
The prettiest museum restaurant in the city is Rozzelle Court in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, but I haven’t eaten there since late summer when the management contract for the food service was outsourced to New York-based American Food and Vending. I’m assuming the food is much the same as it always was: sort of expensive and wildly overrated. And…
Robert Stackhouse’s work used to remind me of a well-trained standard poodle: smart and accomplished but a little aloof and standoffish. I always found his art hard to warm up to, even when he was living in Kansas City and exhibiting sculptures in the region. This exhibition changed my mind. The works on display at the Belger Arts Center demonstrate…
Snowflakes streak through the air and melt as soon as they hit the ground on an early December afternoon. “It’s a good day for blight,” says the man known to Kansas City blog readers as Midtown Miscreant. Midtown Miscreant is Mark Smith, an ex-con possessed of an attraction to the city’s saddest places. I grew mesmerized with his posts (at…
If a few more decision makers and party animals in this city had spent the days before Christmas the way the rest of us did — lining up at Target, covering our ears at Best Buy, hiding under a candy-cane-print tablecloth in the coat closet — then maybe the last full workweek of the year would have looked a little…
Dear Mexican: I was driving home on old King Road in San Jose, where a bunch of Mexicans live, and I noticed that almost every house still has Christmas lights hanging from the rafters, and reindeer and Santa Claus decorations weathered by the hot sun on the roofs. It’s the middle of May, ¿qué onda? I took it one step…
Letters: “Google It,” December 4 Socialism Debate Rages On Regarding Joshua Lawson’s letter from December 4 concerning Barack Obama’s “Socialism”: What is the name of the economic system that allows a corporation to be left alone and deregulated when it is raking in record profits, but requires everyone who pays taxes to prop it up or bail it out when…
