Daring the discomfited viewer to laugh at shame and suffering, and then wonder why we’re laughing, Todd Solondz is back. The misanthropic moralizer is as confounding and trigger-happy as ever, his big clown thumb poised over an assortment of hot buttons: race, suicide, autism, sexual misery, self-hatred, Israel and — his old favorite — pedophilia. Life During Wartime is both…
An orphan for all practical purposes, 12-year-old Owen (Kodi Smit-McPhee) has been left to sprout like a weed. At home, he gets sparse recognition from his divorced mother; at school, he absorbs castrating taunts from a pack of bullies who’ve gleaned “eternal victim” from his spacey stare. Owen fills the unstructured hours by sucking Now and Laters, fantasizing empowering self-defense…
Lebanon, written and directed by Samuel Maoz, is not just the year’s most impressive first feature but also the strongest new movie I’ve seen in 2010. Actually, Lebanon hardly seems like a debut, perhaps because it’s based on a scenario that Maoz has replayed in his head for nearly 30 years. Lebanon is a film by a traumatized veteran and…
Facebook, Twitter and hotel-lobby coffee are starting to feel like the only complimentary comforts left these days. Thanks to Irv Da Phenom, though, we can add one more freebie to our lives: a whopping 15-track effort from the singer and rapper. Free hits listeners with the sultry attitude that made his last effort, American Idol Reject, a veritable coming-out party…
There’s a reason that Grand Marquis is the hardest-working band in Kansas City: The straight-from-the-speakeasy jazz band plays music that everyone likes to hear. The band’s fifth release, Hold on to Me, blends expert trumpet solos, soulful upright bass and smart guitar riffs with delicious drumbeats. Out front, lead singer and sax player Bryan Redmond brings his gospel background to…
Simply put, Deadmau5 is DJ Joel Thomas Zimmerman and an oversized, gem-encrusted mouse hat that shoots lasers from its eyes. (Well, that and a set of speakers.) A DJ is nothing without his stage presence, and Deadmau5 brings with him on tour his seizure-inducing light show: a three-sided setup covered with 75 tiles of LED screens. The Canadian electro guru…
Reggae without a low end isn’t reggae at all. The first third of 77 Jefferson’s latest release, In the Right Mood, sounds like reggae for college kids who think Bob Marley is exotic. Opening tracks “On My Way Home” and “Me and You” focus on chicken-scratch guitar and Joel Castillo’s nasal vocals, and bury the bass and drums. The result…
So much for the Southern California sun. The rain has been pouring for days, clogging the freeways and prompting tornado warnings. But here at Bethany Cosentino’s home in Los Angeles’ Eagle Rock neighborhood, it’s warm. She sits on a couch and pets her now-famous Garfield doppelgänger, Snacks, while a space heater and two candles keep things toasty. Warmth is important…
On both of my visits to DiCarlo’s Mustard Seed Mexican-Americana Restaurant & Bar, I asked different employees if the name of the restaurant was a reference to the New Testament parable in Matthew 17:20. You know, the one in which Jesus admonishes his disciples that if they had “faith as a grain of mustard seed,” they could tell the nearest…
New work of Review Studios resident artist Warren Rosser finds playful geometric dynamism via some frankly yacht-clubby visual references. Many of the titles are drawn from nautical terminology. The abstract paintings and mixed-media works here allude to nautical ephemera such as signal pennants, which are designed for maximum visual clarity at a great distance. This trait is apparent in Ship/Shape,…
Playwright Norm Foster is to theater as Danielle Steel is to literature: a happily prolific producer of reliable, mainstream entertainment who makes no pretension to art. Foster’s specialty is light theatrical comedy; he has churned out dozens of slick, formulaic, punch-line-stuffed crowd pleasers. Thus the sobriquet (sometimes said as praise, sometimes as condemnation): “the Canadian Neil Simon.” Foster obviously doesn’t…
It’s early on a Saturday morning in the farmland of southeast Missouri. Beyond the tall grass that borders the two-lane country roads, two dozen women huddle around an instructor who’s splayed on the ground, clutching a pink .22-caliber rifle and demonstrating a proper shooting position. The women who are gathered here look more like weekend Wal-Mart shoppers than aspiring markswomen….
Times are tough for school boards and crossing guards in certain parts of the region. Officials with the Shawnee Mission School District want to close five buildings. The proposal upset parents, but it pales in comparison with the painful choices made in Kansas City, Missouri, where the district has locked up two dozen schools and plans to sell an 11-story…
Oh, you indie bands with your semi-controversial names; how you try our patience. (Holy Fuck, Fucked Up and Fuck Buttons — this goes for you, too.) Good thing that Starfucker — who has gone by STRFCKR, Pyramidd, and PYRAMID since its inception in 2008 — has the catchy tunes to maintain its fanbase through its schizophrenic name-switches. Though you might not recognize…
This month, he appears in the nude on the cover of Billboard, a magazine that apparently still exists? It’s part of Billboard’s “Maximum Exposure” issue, which lists the “100 best ways to get your music seen and heard.” All you up-and-coming bands out there would do well to note that starring in reality television shows is one of the top…
No, it wasn’t Red Lobster’s fried shrimp that Mark remembers. Fat City reader Mark remembers visiting a restaurant in Kansas City in the mid-1980s. This is his description of the place: “It featured shrimp of some kind. The setting was very informal with baseball caps hanging from the ceiling…” Baseball caps hanging from the ceiling? That sounds more like a…
The Kansas City chapter of the American Institute of Architects is asking Highwoods Properties to redo its proposal for a law office on one of the Country Club Plaza’s original blocks. In a letter describing the Plaza as one of Kansas City’s “few special places,” the AIA board says the design of Polsinelli Shughart’s headquarters “needs to be significantly reconsidered,”…
I sat down with a bowl of chili to enjoy the debut episode of Meat & Potatoes — which featured the burgers at the Westport Flea Market — on the Food Network Friday night. The show is a love letter to carnivores; host Rahm Fama promises to scour the country to satisfy his “craving for meat.” I’m certainly a carnivore,…
Click here for a slideshow. Categories: Music Tags: buzz beach ball, Smashing Pumpkins
Kansas State football coach and crypt keeper Bill Snyder must have thought the four horsemen of the apocalypse were finally coming for him Saturday. Check out the photo on the right (it’s from the Associated Press and there are other cool shots from the Wichita Eagle via Sports By Brooks). The Wildcats squeaked out a 17-13 win, and no one…
To whet your appetite for The Pitch’s annual Best of Kansas City issue, we’re counting down our favorite Top 50 dishes each weekday until October 7. There is no great Kansas Ocean. But Cafe Sebastienne (4420 Warwick Boulevard), in the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, can make you forget that fact with its plate of exquisite crab cakes served on…
Forty years later, soup still rules. Although the first official day of autumn was last Wednesday, it was easy to ignore the so-called change of seasons until the noticeable chill in the weather over the weekend. We saw men and women at the UnPlaza Art Fair on Sunday in shorts and flip-flops, still pretending it was summer. They seemed to…
