The Hays Code, first imposed upon Hollywood in 1934, unwittingly created a smarter breed of filmmaker. Under its restrictive thumb, writers and directors such as Ben Hecht, Billy Wilder and Alfred Hitchcock found their way around the system by weaving the salacious and the scandalous into their films as thinly veiled subtext, like bootleggers peddling bathtub gin in speakeasies. Thursdays…
General (and future President) Zachary Taylor, 163 years ago today, won the first major battle of the Mexican-American War (at Palo Alto). Low-grade gunpowder and slow artillery hindered the Mexican troops, who actually outnumbered the American forces by 1,000. This won’t likely be a topic of conversation tonight when the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce kicks off Fiesta Kansas City, a…
In tough economic times, it stands to reason that charities would take a hit. But what might not be quite so apparent is the recession’s effect on another charitable cause: rock musicians. “A lot of bands that I talked to said they were having a harder time getting gigs,” says Melissa Freeman, the organizer of today’s MayDay-MayDay 2009 benefit show…
As your guide to all that is awesome in Kansas City every week, we sometimes have to protect you from yourselves. This occasionally means not telling you what really happens at a show because it’s more fun if you just go and be surprised. Such is the case with the Donkey Show, which occurs randomly throughout the year with different…
Restaurants will be packed with mothers today as their offspring treat them to brunches, lunches, dinners and desserts. Before you sit down to a hearty meal, though, encourage Mom to work up an appetite by participating in the Mother’s Day 5K, a 3.1-mile race for women and girls of all ages. Technically, it’s a competitive event, with cash prizes for…
As cinematic experiences go, could there be anything more meta than watching a heist film inside a former bank vault? (Porn aficionados, please, sit on your rebuttals.) Screening tonight at 6:30, 1932’s American Madness marks a departure from Frank Capra’s usual schmaltzfests — a tale of loyalty, integrity and infidelity in which a bank president (Walter Huston) fights for his…
Mo Mandel is not Howie Mandel’s son. But the twentysomething comedian does have some interesting Jewish parents. Apparently, the free spirits (or hippies, as he refers to them) stuck their white son with an Indian first name. It’s something that starts with Mo, hence the nickname. The comic pretends to be annoyed, but at least Mom and Dad’s unconventional choice…
Kansas City architect Jayne Higdon first came across Pecha Kucha in San Francisco and Chicago. Pecha Kucha takes its name from the onomatopoeic Japanese term indicating the sound of talking — think chitchat. It’s a quick, accessible format for creative people to network and present their work — with 20 PowerPoint slides for 20 seconds each, for a total of…
More than five years after Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy returned from Mount Doom with a hobbit cart full of Academy Awards, J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy still rules them all — all film-score fans. Composer Howard Shore distilled the nine hours of his Oscar-winning music for Jackson’s movies into The Lord of the Rings: Symphony in Six Movements, which…
(5400 West 119th Street, 913-663-5777). Handcrafted cocktails are $5.95 all day. That includes a strawberry-basil mojito that will knock you on your ass, as well as a couple of absinthe drinks. From 4 to 6 p.m., the restaurant offers food specials like fresh-shucked Blue Point oysters for 75 cents each. Servers also periodically circulate and dole out the Bristol’s famous…
(11570 Ash, 913-327-8466). Tuesdays (and Thursdays), Trezo Vino serves up $2 Bud Light draws and takes $2 off all wines by the glass. It also offers $5 select cocktails. The bar menu, which includes truffle fries, is also half-price. Located just north of the AMC Town Center 20, Trezo Vino also has an outdoor patio that overlooks a small patch…
(6765 West 119th Street, 913-451-4542). Enjoy $1 tacos as well as $2.50 well drinks, $3 Mexican beers and $4 margaritas. From 4 to 7 p.m., Johnny’s also serves up half-price appetizers, including potato skins and onion rings. Tue., May 12, 4-7 p.m., 2009 Tags: 548, Night & Day
(4311 West 119th Street, 913-345-9444). Starting at 3 p.m. until close, the southern outpost of J.P.’s offers $5 featured wines by the glass. From 3 to 6 p.m., sample $6 appetizers, such as tuna bites, goat cheese and crispy fish tacos. Tuesdays, 3 p.m., 2009 Tags: 3871, Night & Day
With lyrics that read like e.e. cummings poems and a husky voice that cracks on key, Richard Buckner has been a model of consistency during his nearly 20-year career. Relying largely on alternate guitar tunings and his singular vocal delivery, Buckner’s music is simultaneously haunting and comforting, like a big bear hug from a crazy ex-boyfriend. As he prepares for…
Christophe Barratier follows up his equally pandering The Chorus (2004) with an aggressively nostalgic, tinny homage to French musicals of the 1930s and ’40s. To distract viewers from the film’s shallowness and the fact that his honey-haired ingénue (Nora Arnezeder) has no charisma, Barratier, who also wrote the screenplay, frantically shifts from one subplot to the next: A tatty music…
Like John Waters kidnapped by Marilyn Manson and held hostage in a dilapidated dance club on the edge of town, My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult is a campy, over-the-top, gothic disco party celebrating deviancy with wryness and incessantly throbbing beats. Characterized by sample-rich backdrops, clattering synthetic beats and the sex-obsessed ethos of psychobillies in form-fitting leather, the Chicago-based…
There’s nothing new under the suburban sun (save for infectious ticks) in Derick Martini’s Lymelife, whose weighty allegorical title and fastidious 1970s accoutrements aim to do for beer-and-pretzels Long Island what Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm did for tony key-party Connecticut. Dad (Alec Baldwin) is shtupping the secretary (Cynthia Nixon); mom (Jill Hennessy) pretends not to notice; eldest son Jimmy…
Fleetwood Mac’s mid-’70s success so dwarfed its prior work that most people have been unaware that the band underwent several lineup changes and released 10 albums prior to the addition of Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. The group’s subsequent music and lifestyle epitomized the era, from rampant drug use and adultery to ambling soft-rock balladry. Though Christine McVie scored her…
The fado is a dolorous folk-song tradition from Portugal, first sung in the early 19th century by barefoot peasants mending nets and contemplating a roiling black Atlantic. It has survived to the present day, providing MP3 succor to middle-class professionals on antidepressants — lyric: “It was God’s will that I live with anxiety.” Now it’s the subject of a film…
Released late last year, Here Comes the Winter completes the two-part cycle that Devil Blare began earlier in ’08 with the release of his debut solo record, The Journeyman. The devil’s quest: Write two albums’ worth of songs that get deep into everyday life, playing most of the instruments himself and making the recordings sound like lost, lo-fi, psychedelic-era gems….
The Detroit Cobras have so much sexy, swaggering fun laying down the bare bones of early ’60s rock and roll, soul and R&B that the fact they’re a cover band lies somewhere between a nonissue and an asset. Led by principal players Rachel Nagy (throaty vocals) and Mary Ramirez (fuzzed-out lead guitar), the Cobras have weathered the trend of the…
No Depression magazine famously explained its area of interest as “alternative country (whatever that is).” The whatever part is still going strong, thanks to bands such as Dead Rock West, a SoCal ensemble that’s primarily a collaboration between Frank Lee Drennen and Cindy Wasserman. The group’s résumé includes stints as sidekicks for Grant-Lee Phillips, Mark Olson and John Doe, and…
If you’re a musician in Kansas City with any desire to hear yourself on the local alternative FM airwaves, you know the name Jeriney. It belongs to a 27-year-old, 6-foot-1-inch scenester with a severely angled black-and-purple haircut and piercings in her nose and in the flap of skin connecting her upper lip to her gums (a “smiley”). She’s sighted frequently…
Director John Crowley’s lighter follow-up to the anguished Boy A features a standard teaming of reluctant oldster and troubled youngster — both residents of a down-at-the-heels family-run rest home. One charming difference, besides retired-magician Clarence (Michael Caine, who could twinkly, tearily confide with bobbing accent in his sleep), is that the ornery kid (Bill Milner) gets as tetchy and self-pitying…
