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CINEMA: Fame Monster
VOX LUX (Directed by Brady Corbet, 110 minutes, USA, 2018) BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC Vox Lux opens in 1999 during a Columbine-esque school shooting. A young Celeste Montgomery, played by Raffey Cassidy, is shot in the neck after she offers to pray with the gunman for the release of her classmates. Miraculously she survives and while in the hospital writes a song about her nightmarish experience and what starts as Celeste trying to find a way to heal herself becomes an anthem for a fractured country. In no time, the show biz vampires descend and Celeste is groomed for […]
O BROTHER, WHO ART THOU: Q&A With Actor/Writer/Director Tim Blake Nelson, Star Of The Coen Brothers’ The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs
EDITOR’S NOTE: On the occasion of the release of The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs, starring Tim Blake Nelson as…wait for it…Buster Scruggs, we are reprising this 2013 interview with Mr. Nelson. Enjoy. BY JONATHAN VALANIA If you don’t know who Tim Blake Nelson is, the short answer is: the guy in O Brother Where Art Thou? who isn’t George Clooney or John Turturro. Any friend of the Coen brothers is a friend of mine, brother. Truth be told, he’s a whole lot more than that, as you’ll soon find out. I recently had cause to speak with Mr. Nelson […]
CINEMA: Creedence
CREED 2 (Directed by Steven Caple Jr., 130 minutes, USA, 2018) BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC Creed 2 picks up a few years after the first film where Adonis Johnson (Michael B. Jordan) wins both his Mustang and the world championship title from Danny ‘Stuntman’ Wheeler. With Johnson now the world champion, from the shadows emerges Ivan Drago and his son Viktor to challenge him, not just the title, but for a chance at redemption. After the events of Rocky IV, we find Ivan was left disgraced not only in front of Russia, but his family as well. Ivan’s wife […]
0 F*CKS GIVEN: Once Upon A Deadpool 2 Trailer
GIZMODO: The PG-13 recut of Deadpool 2 will feature much of the film’s original footage […] as a kind of test run to gauge how successfully the studio might be able to fold Deadpool into Marvel’s larger cinematic universe which has always skewed more family-friendly. MORE
GOSH: Q&A W/ Napoleon Dynamite‘s Jon Heder
BY HENRY SAVAGE When the world seems to consistently take a crap on you, it can feel as if there’s nothing left to do than to practice a few moves from your “D-Qwon’s Dance Grooves” VHS tape (for all you Napoleon diehards out there). Almost 15 years after it debuted at the Sundance Film Festival, Napoleon Dynamite has become an American comedy classic. What started back in 2002 as a class assignment for BYU’s film school (originally titled Peluca) went on to become the acclaimed indie comedy Napoleon Dynamite. Since then Napoleon Dynamite has become a comedy lodestar for […]
CINEMA: Life Of Brian
EDITOR’S NOTE: On the occasion of Brian Wilson’s sold out performance at Parx Casino tomorrow, we are re-posting our review of the 2015 biopic Love & Mercy. Sail on, sailors! LOVE & MERCY (2015, dir. by Bill Polhad, 120 minutes, USA) BY JONATHAN VALANIA Love & Mercy tells the harrowing, heartbreaking story of the life of Brian Wilson — Beach Boys auteur and resident genius — which goes like this: Angel-headed boy from Hawthorne, California, at the dawn of the 1960s, smitten by the harmonic convergence of The Four Freshman and the shimmering Spectorian grandeur of “Be My Baby,” […]
The Time 20,000 American Nazis Came To NYC
THE ATLANTIC: In 1939, the German American Bund organized a rally of 20,000 Nazi supporters at Madison Square Garden in New York City. When Academy Award-nominated documentarian Marshall Curry stumbled upon footage of the event in historical archives, he was flabbergasted. Together with Field of Vision, he decided to present the footage as a cautionary tale to Americans. The short film, A Night at the Garden, premieres on The Atlantic today. MORE RELATED: The apparent spark for the worst anti-Semitic massacre in American history was a racist hoax inflamed by a U.S. president seeking to help his party win a […]
CINEMA: Season Of The Witch
SUSPIRIA (Directed by Luca Guadagnino, 152 minutes, USA, 2018) BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC When discussing Italian horror’s influence on cinema as a whole you would be remiss if didn’t name check Dario Argento’s 1977 supernatural masterpiece Suspiria, a surrealist nightmare about a young girl who is sent to a dance school run by a coven of witches set to the score of prog rockers Goblin. As a devout horror fan, my initial response to the news that a remake of Suspiria was in the works was akin to hearing someone had planned to remake The Godfather. But director […]
AUTEUR NOUVEAU: Q&A W/ Director Jonah Hill
BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC Mid90s, Jonah Hill’s directorial debut, is an impressive feat for a first-time filmmaker. This coming of age drama set in the skateboarding subculture of the 90s is heavy on the nostalgia as you would probably expect, but also has something genuinely important to say about youth. We experience the film through the eyes of Stevie (Sunny Suljic) the son of a single mother who is taken in by a group of skaters much older than him who teach him some very important life lessons and how to be a man. It’s not the film […]
NPR 4 THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
Photo by CHAD GRIFFITH FRESH AIR: Paul Dano, is probably best known for his performance in “There Will Be Blood” as a teenaged evangelical preacher. Imagine being in your early 20s and working on that film with director Paul Thomas Anderson and actor Daniel Day Lewis. Dano was only 12 when he had a part in the Broadway revival of “Inherit The Wind” starring George C. Scott. Dano also co-starred in the films “Little Miss Sunshine,” “12 Years A Slave” and portrayed Brian Wilson in the film “Love & Mercy.” Now at the age of 34, he’s directed his first […]
CINEMA: Being Jenny McCarthy
FRESH AIR: Melissa McCarthy is not interested in playing pleasant characters — flawless women with perfect clothes and relationships. “Who wants to watch that?” she asks. “There’s nothing to sink your teeth into. … The people I love and like are filled with quirks and eccentricities. … We’re a bundle of all these different weirdnesses.” Instead, McCarthy became known for her comic roles in movies like Bridesmaids and The Heat — and for her impersonation of President Trump’s first press secretary, Sean Spicer, on SNL. More recently, McCarthy’s taken a turn into drama, playing the misanthropic writer and literary […]
CINEMA: Laurie Strode Will Have Her Revenge
HALLOWEEN (Directed by David Gordon Green, 105 minutes, USA, 2018) BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC It’s been nine long years since the last Halloween film, Rob Zombie’s 2009 franchise-killing sequel to his ill-fated 2007 re-boot of the series. The latest chapter in the Michael Myers’ slasher saga — simply called Halloween — dumps six sequels worth of convoluted plot, mythology and character development to position itself as a direct sequel to the original 1978 film. David Gordon Green (Eastbound & Down) is directing this entry with a script co-written with Jeff Fradley and Danny McBride that picks up 40 […]