Hot for his best friend’s girlfriend, stressed out over an application to a prestigious summer school, and audaciously neglectful of his Zoloft, 16-year-old Brooklyn high-schooler Craig (Keir Gilchrist) commits himself to a psych ward after tepid fantasies of jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge start warming. With this young-adult riff on One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, writers and directors Anna…
Seth Gordon pulls case studies from Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt’s best-selling book and hands them over to famous documentary filmmakers, resulting in the anthology Freakonomics. Gordon (The King of Kong) knits together the resulting shorts with interludes that attempt to build a coherent narrative out of clever animation and talking-head interviews with the authors. One of the pleasures of…
Paul (Ryan Reynolds), an American truck driver for a contractor in Iraq, is captured in an insurgent attack and wakes up buried in a coffin, totally defenseless but for a Zippo, a pencil, a flask, a flashlight, anti-anxiety meds, and someone else’s cell phone. He uses the latter to make a series of increasingly hysterical calls for help, which function…
Reaching the top isn’t nearly as hard as staying there. The Bone Thugs crew can attest to that. The quintet’s blend of gangsta rigor and R&B smoothness revolutionized the rap landscape when it emerged in the mid-’90s. But their friendship wasn’t as tight as their harmonies, and the group fractured under the weight of competing egos and agendas. Members fought…
Following up his Beijing Olympics opening-ceremony mega-production, Zhang Yimou remakes the Coen brothers’ Blood Simple by dressing it up in flamboyant silk and translating it into Mandarin. The honky-tonk of the Coens’ Southwestern noir becomes a noodle-shop compound on the edge of a painted western China desert, sometime in the feudal era. Owner Wang (Ni Dahong) cruelly harasses his younger…
Chris Cosgrove, one of Kansas City’s most prominent producers and engineers, is willing to do lots of things for his hometown. Just don’t ask him to go to Los Angeles. “I lived there for many years, and it’s just a hideous bitch-goddess of a place to go,” he says. His new endeavor, Prairie Fire Entertainment, might find him flying out…
Nathan Reusch has been wading through crowds in the dingy, beer-slopped underground for more than 15 years. He’s hard to miss at a local rock show, a friendly bear of a guy in a newsboy cap. These days, though, Reusch is mostly supporting a very specific band niche. Reusch is one of the founders of the Record Machine, along with…
Kazuo Ishiguro’s massively praised novel Never Let Me Go, published five years ago, is set in an alternate universe where life has been extended and catastrophic illness eliminated, thanks to an evolutionary advance: the harvesting of vital organs from specially bred human clones. But that’s back story. Despite its lurid premise, the novel is less sci-fi than oblique allegory, complete…
It’s still the 1960s at The Golden Ox Steakhouse. No, you don’t have to climb into The Time Machine to find out how Kansas City diners enjoyed a meal during a different time and place. Just walk into the city’s oldest dining room, the Savoy Grill, and you’re instantly in 1903, the year that the Savoy Hotel (which started…
Nicholas Grunauer has big patio plans this weekend The Oktoberfest festivities don’t officially kick off at the Grunauer Restaurant in the Crossroads until 4 p.m. Friday, but the tent over the patio will be erected early that morning so that chef-owner Peter Grunauer, son Nicholas and daughter Elizabeth can begin arranging the long communal tables. “We’re hoping to be…
Jeremy Mott’s family thinks he’d be alive if Balanca’s had better security. Ever since Jeremy Mott was found dead in the passenger seat of a green Dodge Charger this weekend, after a bar fight in Balanca’s, people have been asking why the 20-year-old was even in the club, and how a bar fight could so easily escalate into a…
A Seattle man is infamously hoping to get Weezer to break up by offering the band 10 million dollars in exchange for never making a record again. (After seeing the way Weezer has sold out to PacSun, can you really blame him?) We don’t think Weezer is the only one that needs to call it quits. Everyone already agrees that the…
Heidi Van Pelt-Belle’s Füd spelled big fun for local vegetarians. You don’t have to wear white to read this year’s Food & Drink section of the annual “Best of Kansas City” issue, but there is something old, something new, something borrowed (an idea, anyway) and something blue in its pages. Lots of new restaurants are honored this year, including…
Fred Phelps claims god hates fags, but the Supreme Court loves a good free speech case. This morning the Court will hear the case of Phelps and his cadre of everybody-hating paste-eaters protesting Maryland marine Matthew Snyder’s funeral in 2006, and whether their speech is protected or not. The case began when Snyder’s father, Albert, sued Phelps for displaying placards…
Sorry, Dwyane Wade fans. The Miami Heat guard won’t be suiting up for Friday night’s sold out preseason game at the Sprint Center. Wade limped off the court with a strained hamstring three minutes and 17 seconds into last night’s win against the Detroit Pistons. Doesn’t sound serious, although Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said Wade would be re-evaluated in a…
If your reactions to the selection of the Arthur Bryant’s beef sandwich as the No. 1 dish in our Top 50 dishes is any indication, we could have a fun little comment battle on our barbecue-sauce-stained hands. The Best of Barbecue results are in from around the compass, with a winner being declared in the North, South, East and West….
Sometime today our kindly circulation guy will drop several pounds of fawning inside your favorite bar or restaurant, a thick ream of love ready for you to shred with disagreement. We gush over Waldo Pizza; you compare their pies to hockey pucks or frisbees or some other sporting implement. We leave out your favorite hair stylist, you make fun…
In this week’s Pitch, you’ll find our picks of the best of what Kansas City has to offer. For all you music nerds, blurbs on your favorite bands are stowed away in the Arts & Entertainment section of our fabled Best Of Kansas City issue. Check out the Kansas City music scene’s Best Happy Accident, Best Album, Best Band to…
We’re big fans of Lawrence label Range Life Records’ work here at Wayward. Why, just today we named Before Our Hearts Explode!, the recent LP from flagship act Fourth of July, Best Album in our Best Of 2010 issue. Bittersweet, then, to hear word that label head Zach Hangauer is leaving Lawrence for the concrete jungle of Brooklyn. Not to…
I thought I was up on the latest food trends, but I’ve failed to consider that the hottest new dinner item could be coming from the tween set. The New York Times devotes a chunk of ink to spaghetti tacos — a scoop of spaghetti inside a hard-shell taco — that was inspired by the Nickelodeon show iCarly. If pasta…
Dallas Smith created and designed “a white, cone-shaped mask” in his first-grade art class at Winfield-Scott Elementary School in Fort Scott, Kansas. He wasn’t forced to wear the mask, which looks a lot like a Ku Klux Klan hood. Before we totally freak out, Smith is 6 years old. He also happens to be black. Nevertheless, when Barry Smith saw…
What if chef Michael Smith were appearing for a weeklong run in a contemporary downtown space, cranking out innovative street tacos? Or how about chef Alex Pope (The Pitch’s Best Chef — 2010), offering an entire menu of macaroni and cheese for a single weekend? That’s what could happen if the pop-up restaurant concept came to Kansas City. Categories: Dining,…
It’s the wild west these days in terms of making monies as a musician. New models are flying up all over the industry for releasing music and touring. Kansas City’s own Matt Pryor, frontman of emo forebearers the Get Up Kids, appears to be taking a progressive approach. According to a Get Up Kids tweet yesterday, he will come to your…
