Talk to people about Tony Botello, the 36-year-old man-boy behind Kansas City’s biggest independent blog, and they inevitably ask some variation of the same question: “Does he really live in his mom’s basement?” Botello makes regular mention of living down there, constructing an image of a lair filled to the ducts with porn and campaign fliers. Readers, though, wonder whether…
Like the small-town community-center room in which it is set, Annie Baker’s Obie Award-winning Circle Mirror Transformation seems a modest and unassuming affair. There is no high-concept premise, no intriguing instigation, no razzle-dazzle, no big reveal. Dialogue stutters, and action sputters. The fragmentary scenes end too short or go too long, and there are moments when one wonders, along with…
The curse of midlevel stardom is familiar to Cold War Kids. The California band has been trying to put its idiosyncratic stamp on modern rock for six years. So far, the band has toured with Death Cab for Cutie and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. It churned out two albums and a slew of EPs before hooking up with a…
Dear Mexican: I am a mocha-skinned woman with long, curly hair and dark-brown eyes. Puerto Ricans always ask if I’m Puerto Rican. Dominicans just come and start speaking Spanish. Cubans ask if my abuelita made good arroz con leche. But Mexicans know I’m black. What gives? La Morena Dear Negrita: The countries you mentioned (along with Colombia, Venezuela, Honduras and…
This rollicking, surreal and existential kids’ Western worships at the altars of Sergio Leone, Hunter S. Thompson and Chinatown and drowns under the weight of discordant objectives and influences. With his crooked neck, bug eyes and Hawaiian shirt, reptilian Rango (Johnny Depp) is a Ralph Steadman creation come to anxious anthropomorphic life. A lizard with delusions of dramatist grandeur, Rango…
Fresh out of MIT, Matt Franklin (Topher Grace) is back in his hometown of Los Angeles, waiting for his future to clarify itself while he loiters behind the counter at Suncoast Video, hawking VHS tapes of Harry and the Hendersons because it’s, like, totally 1988. Inspiration comes when Matt re-encounters his unrequited high school crush, Tori (Teresa Palmer), whom he…
The antithesis of both Marley & Me cuddliness and Cesar Millan militance, J.R. Ackerley’s 1956 memoir, My Dog Tulip, about his recalcitrant German shepherd is one of the finest, most insightful chronicles of inter-species devotion. The writer’s empathy and wit are mostly well-served in the adaptation by Paul and Sandra Fierlinger. It’s the first animated feature to be entirely hand…
Aaron Katz’s junior detective mystery set in Portland, Oregon, stakes a claim as the founding work of mumble-noir. The 29-year-old director’s two previous features, Dance Party, USA (2006) and Quiet City (2007), established him as an offbeat miniaturist. Cold Weather opens with college dropout Doug (Cris Lankenau) and his older sister, Gail (Trieste Kelly Dunn), preparing dinner for their parents….
In this extremely loose adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s 1954 short story “Adjustment Team” (and the directorial debut of Bourne Ultimatum screenwriter George Nolfi), Matt Damon plays David Norris, a Brooklyn-born, bar-fight-prone congressman rocketing to the front of a Senate race, apparently on the strength of his charisma and the idealism of his young supporters. “Come November, I want to…
This six-piece band has won almost every bluegrass music award — the International Bluegrass Music Association Awards for best emerging artist, entertainer and song, to name a few — and includes veterans of the Grand Ole Opry in its lineup (which should form a solid pedigree). But the Grascals went a step further in the first year of its existence:…
We think we might know who the hardest working music lovers in Kansas City are: the folks putting together the showcase for Kansas City talent at 2011’s South by Southwest Music Festival. The showcase is called MidCoast Takeover. Following a string of fundraisers, a Kickstarter site and a free advance album, the organizers have assembled this last benefit show in…
The trade magazine Chinese Restaurant News has long insisted that there are more Chinese restaurants in the United States than McDonald’s franchises. Three times as many, in fact. Is that possible? In the Kansas City metro, according to the phone book and various websites, there seem to be about 100 McDonald’s locations. Yellowpages.com lists more than 126 Chinese restaurants in…
Going to hell? Cherokee Rock Rifle has your processional soundtrack. The local band’s debut EP — … And the Plains Are Burning — is 22-plus minutes of solid, blazing, hard-ass rock and roll. His voice ripe with defiance and swagger, frontman Dutch Humphrey leads this pack of apocalyptic horsemen past stoner- and psychedelic-rock graveyards into a barren horizon filled with…
Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr.’s music sounds nothing like the tunes blasted from racetrack speakers at NASCAR events. (Think Alabama and Lynyrd Skynyrd.) Instead, Joshua Epstein and Daniel Zott create invigorating electronic beats, soothing psychedelic melodies and catchy choruses better suited for the speakers of a sleek midtown bar. A simple style imbues the band’s compositions with a delicate sweetness —…
