DAVID EDELSTEIN: Gone are the days when filmmakers kept a respectful distance from their characters. In Blue Valentine, writer and director Derek Cianfrance is obsessive in how he uses the hand-held camera to get in his actors’ faces. Yet there’s something in those faces to see — something momentous, angry, desperate, unmanageable. The film is a rough ride with the shock absorbers removed. Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams play a married couple, Dean and Cindy, with a little daughter named Frankie. Dean paints houses and Cindy is a nurse. The movie’s opening is as ominous as any horror film. The […]
PAPERBOY: Slow-Jamming The Alt-Weeklies
BY DAVE ALLEN Like time, news waits for no man. Keeping up with the funny papers has always been an all-day job, even in the pre-Internets era. These days, however, it’s a two-man job. That’s right, these days you need someone to do your reading for you, or risk falling hopelessly behind and, as a result, increasing your chances of dying lonely and somewhat bitter. That’s why every week PAPERBOY does your alt-weekly reading for you. We pore over those time-consuming cover stories and give you the takeaway, suss out the cover art, warn you off the ink-wasters and steer […]
WORTH REPEATING: The Man Who Knew Too Much
[Illustration by Abode of Chaos] VANITY FAIR: The partnership between The Guardian and WikiLeaks brought together two desperately ambitious organizations that happen to be diametric opposites in their approach to reporting the news. One of the oldest newspapers in the world, with strict and established journalistic standards, joined up with one of the newest in a breed of online muckrakers, with no standards at all except fealty to an ideal of “transparency”—that is, dumping raw material into the public square for people to pick over as they will. It is very likely that neither Alan Rusbridger nor Julian Assange fully […]
EARLY WORD: Father, Son & Holy Ghost
JOHNNY BRENDAS: On their debut album, Acoustic Sessions, The Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger (Sean Lennon and Charlotte Kemp Muhl) show their love of quirky and whimsical ’60s folk pop, reminiscent at times of Syd Barrett, Incredible String Band and Simon & Garfunkel. Though stripped-down to spotlight their idiom juggling and intriguing wordplay, the sparse arrangements are adventurous and playful, anchored by the beautiful blend of Sean and Charlotte’s voices, acoustic guitar and a smattering of other instruments – a vibraphone here, a banjo there. TGOASTT weaves narratives around a metaphysical geography of their own devising, finding a surrealist […]
TOUGH LOVE: Uncle Beats Nephew With A Belt For Gang-Banging, Makes Him Post Video Online
WARNING: Strong language, controversial parenting techniques.
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR After working together on Three Kings and I Heart Huckabees, actor Mark Wahlberg and director David O. Russell collaborated for the third time on their new film The Fighter, based on the true story of the Massachusetts boxer “Irish” Micky Ward. Ward, best known for his three fights against Arturo Gatti, won the Light Welterweight Championship in 2000, when his older half-brother, Dicky, convinced him to re-enter the ring after several years on hiatus. Dicky, portrayed by Christian Bale in the film, was a former pro boxer whose career ended after he became addicted to crack cocaine. Wahlberg […]
The Sad, Strange Final Hours Of John P. Wheeler III
INQUIRER: As more becomes publicly known of the final days and hours of John P. Wheeler 3d, an image is emerging of a man coming unglued. Less than 48 hours before the respected former Pentagon aide turned up dead last week in a Delaware landfill, Wheeler limped into a Wilmington parking garage. Coatless and confused, one of his shoes in hand, he bizarrely inquired about the location of his car, then declined offers of help, witnesses said. A day later, police said Wednesday, surveillance video captured Wheeler in downtown Wilmington again – this time looking “confused” inside the Nemours Building […]
WWMTD: What Would Mark Twain Do?
PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY: Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a classic by most any measure—T.S. Eliot called it a masterpiece, and Ernest Hemingway pronounced it the source of “all modern American literature.” Yet, for decades, it has been disappearing from grade school curricula across the country, relegated to optional reading lists, or banned outright, appearing again and again on lists of the nation’s most challenged books, and all for its repeated use of a single, singularly offensive word: “nigger.” Twain himself defined a “classic” as “a book which people praise and don’t read.” Rather than see Twain’s most important work […]
DEBUNKED: The Great Philadelphia Paywall Scare
As you may have seen by now, Philebrity is trumpeting an exclusive on news that Philly.com will be going behind a paywall some time soon, according to what they claim are reliable sources. We have it on good authority, from an even more reliable source apparently, that is NOT true — although the confusion is not surprising given that some senior editors at the paper were unwittingly parroting misinformation. And Philadelphia Media Network CEO Greg Osberg confirmed as much in a meeting with staffers earlier this evening. The virtual version of the print editions of both the Inquirer and Daily […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR Guitarist and composer Marc Ribot has been called “a master of introverted ironies” by The Village Voice and “a fount of pithy commentary” by The New York Times. Citing everything from Haitian classical music to Jimi Hendrix as influences, Ribot has been featured on albums by Elvis Costello, Tom Waits, Solomon Burke, T-Bone Burnett, The Black Keys and Alison Krauss. His solo projects have been performed by the National Symphony Orchestra and other major symphonies. Ribot grew up in suburban New Jersey, where he performed in several garage bands, before moving to New York City in 1978 to […]
Robert Gibbs To Step Down As White House Spokesman And Join ‘Professional Left”
CNN: White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs says it’s been a “remarkable privilege” to be President Barack Obama’s top spokesman, “even when you wake up at 4 and pick up the paper and groan.” “I would not trade the worst days here for many of the best days at another job,” Gibbs told reporters Wednesday, after announcing his departure from the White House. But he said he wants to “step back a little bit and recharge some” after four years of campaigning and a hard-fought first half of the Obama administration — “probably the busiest years that Washington and the […]
LET THEM EAT KAKE: Tasty Baking In Trouble, Looking To Merge Or Sell Itself To Competitors
PHILLY.COM: Tasty Baking Co. announced today that financial problems are forcing it to explore options that could include merging with another company or selling itself. Charles P. Pizzi, president and CEO of the Philadelphia-based maker of baked goods, said preliminary financial information for the fourth quarter, which ended Dec. 25, showed an expected annualized pretax savings of about $10 million. That number had been projected to be $13 million. The company also cited the Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing Dec. 12 of the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co., a major customer whose Philadelphia-area presence is best known through its Pathmark, […]
ENIGMATIC: Plot Thickens In Case Of Former Bush Aide Found Dead In A Delaware Landfill
INQUIRER: Police in Delaware have discovered evidence that a former Pentagon aide may have been involved in an attempted arson days before his murder, a law enforcement source has told The Inquirer. Police found evidence linking John Parsons Wheeler 3d to devices planted at the New Castle home of a neighbor with whom he had been feuding, said the source, who is close to the investigation. The feud was over the size of the neighbor’s house, which was under construction in the city’s historic district. The source emphasized that the evidence does not shed light on the murder itself, but […]