CINEMA: Sex, SSRI’s & Videotape

  SIDE EFFECTS (2013, directed by Steven Soderbergh, 106 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC One of our most frustrating filmmakers, Steven Soderbergh returns with another distressingly confounding work. With Side Effects he sends a medicated heroine into exciting unmined territory, and in a change of tone as scattershot as any Tyler Perry movie, he steers the film directly into a typhoon of ludicrous of Hollywood thriller cliches. With great filmmakers, even their misfires can be seen as understandable consequences of an intelligent risk that didn’t pay off. While Soderbergh’s best work (and I’d single out recent works like […]

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CINEMA: Running With The Devil

  WEST OF MEMPHIS (2012, Dir. by Amy Berg, 140 minutes U.S.) BY MIKE WALSH For West Memphis 3 (WM3) groupies, the new documentary West of Memphis won’t add to your knowledge of the case. If you’ve read the books and seen the excellent HBO Paradise Lost documentaries, you know almost all of what’s covered in West of Memphis. It contains no new revelations, but it does contain a good deal of video you haven’t seen. So see this new documentary, which you’ll thoroughly enjoy. It will have you hyperventilating with rage at the injustice all over again. But if […]

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GOODBYE GUNSHINE STATE: Pennsylavania Attorney Gen. Closes Florida Gun Carry Permit Loophole

PHILLY.COM: The Florida gun loophole, which allowed Philadelphia gun owners to skirt the city’s strict handgun-carrying rules, was closed today by Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen G. Kane. Florida gun permit holders in Pennsylvania now must be legal residents of Florida. The loophole allowed about 900 city residents to carry a weapon in Philadelphia if they had a mail-order permit issued by Florida. “Our state’s gun traffic and permits should never be bypassed,” said Kane in a statement. “Closing this loophole shows that it is possible to swiftly implement common sense gun safety measures that protect our streets. This is my […]

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JUST SAY NO: PCP, Enabling Naked Handcuffed Maniacs To Kick Out The Back Windows Of Police Cars Since 1970

  BY JEFF DEENEY FOR THE FIX Camden, New Jersey mother, high on drugs on a late summer night last August, decapitates her own son in a fit of violent psychosis, places his head in the kitchen freezer, calls 911, admits the crime to a dispatcher, and then stabs herself to death before police arrive on the scene. Across town just days later a father, also in a drug-fueled psychosis, steals into his daughters’ bedroom as they sleep and slits both their throats with a knife, killing one and critically injuring the other. The horrific, gory details are splashed across […]

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BREAKING: Blatstein Cashes Out Of No Libs

Photo via REESE JUEL INQUIRER: Developer Bart Blatstein, whose investment in Northern Liberties help to turn a scruffy neighborhood on the edge of Center City into a hip destination, has sold 60 percent of his holdings there to a New York investor group. Blatstein’s Tower Investments Inc. said today it has sold a controlling interest in The Piazza at Schmidt’s and Liberties Walk at Schmidt to Kushner Companies. Blatstein did not disclose a purchase price. The property in the deal, however, is thought to have a value of about $130 million. The acquisition is a joint venture between Kushner and […]

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THIS JUST IN: Redd Kross @ Kung Fu Necktie

  You were born in an age of mockery, which would be followed by a decade of irony. You were 11 years old when you played your first gig, opening for Black Flag. Your bass was bigger than you. You named your band after the crucifix masturbation scene in The Exorcist. Early on you were fascinated by pop culture gone horribly wrong, you wrote punky odes to Linda Blair, MacKenzie Phillips and Frosted Flakes. You covered Charlie Manson. “No metal sluts or punk rock ruts” was your motto. Almost overnight you were crowned ‘zine scene royalty. You recorded six albums […]

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36 Months After Medical Marijuana Became Law In NJ, 1,000 Patients Languish On Weed Waiting Lists

  DAILY BEAST: Most nights, 52-year-old Marta Portuguez wakes up crying from pain—jolted out of sleep by horrifying muscle spasms that occur without warning. “I cry my eyes out,” she tells The Daily Beast. “It feels like someone is chopping up my legs with a machete, or burning them with a torch from the inside out.” Diagnosed with 11 illnesses over the course of nine years—including severe fibromyalgia and gastroparesis—the former Comcast executive and mother of six now knows only two levels of pain: excruciating and unbearable. One of more than a thousand on the waiting list at New Jersey’s […]

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RIP: Troggs Singer Reg Presley Has Left The Building

  The Troggs were the party in Austin Powers’ pants. Let the record show that Reg Presley’s libidinous lead vocal on The Troggs’ primal, garage-rock-defining stomp through “Wild Thing” remains the second or third greatest rock n’ roll vocal of all time. Right up there with Richard Berry’s gloriously indecipherable blurt on The Kingsmen’s “Louie Louie” and Little Richard’s rawboned shriek on “Lucille.” Also, The Troggs is the best band name ever. He will be missed. REUTERS: Presley announced in January 2012 that he had been diagnosed with lung cancer after falling ill during a performance in Germany. He began […]

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EARLY WORD: Honeychurch

  Hey boss! Remember that time when I was your roadie? How I protected your garment bags and the Gretsch with my life? How I dutifully slept in the van in bad neighborhoods when needed to? The car chases? The porn stars and the drugs? All for the love of the experience and for no pay? I was wondering if all that was enough to try to call in a favor from you. One of my favorite bands of the last 6 or 7 years are from Doylestown. They’re called Honeychurch, and they’re criminally unknown. They have a huge following, […]

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