Photo by LAUREN M. WAKSMAN Folks, we got trouble right here in Philadelphia. Trouble with a capital “T.” And that rhymes with “C” and that stands for CORRUPTION. All the major institutions in this city are wretched hives of patronage hires, hacks and shady backroom deals. There is zero accountability for the police, the unions, the politicians and don’t even get us started on the PPA. There is just one candidate running for City Council that aims to do something about it. His name is N. A. Poe and he is running on a platform of pulling back the curtains […]
CINEMA: What A Drag It Is Never Getting Old
Artwork by GRACE O’CONNOR ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE (2013, directed by Jim Jarmusch, 123 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Adam and Eve, as played by Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton, channel a sweet strain of sublime melancholy as the aging couple in director Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive. To describe this beautiful pair as an aging couple is not quite right; actually as vampires their bodies aren’t aging at all but together they possess a world-weariness born of observing centuries of man’s foolhardy ways. The two exist in a beautiful stasis, a state that Jarmusch milks for […]
CINEMA: Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Slint But Were Too In Utero To Ask
Trailer for Lance Bangs’ (Jackass, Thunder Ant) documentary about the then-tender-aged Louisville math-rock mystics known as Slint. The band’s 1991 masterwork Spiderland is the alpha and omega of indie-rock. It says the unsayable, it speaks the unspeakable. It is the first thing enlightened people reach for when fleeing a burning building or sinking ship. It is the last thing the astronauts left on the moon, which is why the moon has been off limits ever since*. The re-activated Slint will be playing Spiderland in its entirety at Union Transfer on Thursday May 1st. I pity the fool that misses […]
CINEMA: It’s Tricky
TRICK BABY (1972, directed by Larry Yust, 89 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC This Thursday at 8:00pm Exhumed Films and the Cinedelphia Film Festival present one of the gems of the 1970s blaxploitation era, Larry Yust’s 1972 film Trick Baby. Shot extensively on the gritty streets of Philadelphia, Trick Baby doesn’t traffic in the exaggerated “super spade” clichés of the genre but instead functions as an exceptionally thoughtful street-level crime film following a pair of con men as their luck runs out. Based on Iceberg Slim’s second book, the follow-up to his black fiction classic “Pimp: The […]
CINEMA: Sexy Beast
UNDER THE SKIN (2013, directed by Jonathan Glazer, 108 minutes, U.K.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC There’s a moment early on in Jonathan Glazer’s hallucinatory new film Under the Skin where Scarlett Johansson’s unnamed character plucks an ant from a lifeless body and inspects it indifferently. The fleeting scene sets the tone for this grimly hypnotizing little mood piece, as it invites us to study the young woman as she moves through her surreal rituals like a bug collecting its prey. Long on process and short on explanation, Under the Skin pulls us into its spell by eschewing formula […]
CINEMA: Taste The Whip, In Love Not Given Lightly
THE RAID 2 (2014, directed by Gareth Evans, 150 min., Indonesia) NYMPHOMANIAC: VOLUME 2 (2013, directed by Lars Van Trier, 123 min., Denmark) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Director Gareth Evans’ 2012 film Raid: The Redemption was the freshest slab of action cinema to bloody-up the screen since the early ’90s heyday of John Woo. The film followed Rama (self-contained martial artist Iko Uwais) as a member of a SWAT team climbing the stairs of a high rise housing project in Jakarta to arrest the drug lord who living in the top floor suite. The team soon finds out […]
CINEMA: Captain Sensible
CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER (2014, directed by Anthony & Joe Russo, 136 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC The sequel to Captain America: The First Avenger is the ninth in the “Marvel Cinematic Universe” franchise and to paraphrase classic rock titans Foreigner, it feels like the ninth time. Directed by TV directors/feature film failures The Russo Brothers (of the Owen Wilson vehicle You, Me and Dupree) Cap’s latest adventure, subtitled The Winter Soldier, hits all the expected marks of an $170 million profit-reaper but its shameless calculations do little to break this entry out of the increasingly […]
Q&A: With Documentary Filmmaker Sam Green, Inventor Of The Love Song Of Buckminster Fuller
BY JONATHAN VALANIA Since 1997, filmmaker Sam Green has been making thought-provoking, rigorously reported and eminently entertaining documentaries about, in his words, “the outer contours of human experience.” Be it the rainbow-wigged, Bible-thumping kidnapper (currently serving three life sentences) of 1997’s The Rainbow Man/John 3:16 or the utopian dreamers turned bomb-throwing revolutionaries by the murderous insanity of the Vietnam War in The Weather Underground, or the miraculous Guinness Book human oddities living lives of quiet desperation in 2014’s The Measure Of All Things. The Love Song Of R. Buckminster Fuller, which gets its Philly premiere tonight during two sold […]
INCOMING: The Love Song Of Buckminster Fuller
Bringing indie rock to its waterfront stage for the very first time, FringeArts announces an exciting addition to its spring 2014 calendar: the documentary film The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller, directed and live-narrated by Academy Award-nominated director Sam Green; and accompanied by a score performed live on stage by legendary Hoboken band Yo La Tengo. FringeArts will host two showings of the The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller on First Friday, April 4, at 7 and 9 p.m. Tickets are on sale at fringearts.com. The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller traces the career of the titular 20th-century futurist, […]
LISTEN: The Flaming Side Of The Moon
THE FLAMING LIPS new digital release, FLAMING SIDE OF THE MOON is live now in digital form. Designed as an immersive companion piece to the original 1973 album, DARK SIDE OF THE MOON, listeners are encouraged to listen to the new LIPS album while listening to DARK SIDE at the same time. FLAMING SIDE OF THE MOON was also carefully crafted to sync up perfectly with the 1939 film, THE WIZARD OF OZ. For ideal listening conditions, fans are encouraged to seek out the original Alan Parsons’ engineered quadraphonic LP mix of DARK SIDE, but it will work with the album on any format. Available now through all participating digital outlets. […]
CINEMA: Enemy Of The State
ENEMY (2013, directed by Denis Villeneuve, 90 minutes, Canada) NYMPHOMANIAC: VOLUME ONE (2013, directed by Lars Von Trier, 118 minutes, Denmark) THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL (2014, directed by Wes Anderson, 99 minutes) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Denis Villeneuve’s new thriller Enemy is an irritating new film, which is both a function and a fault of its design. Shot in a urine-hued filter and played with a humorless hush, Enemy is meant to get under your skin. I don’t mind a film getting under my skin as long as it knows what it is doing under there. Director Villeneuve […]
CINEMA: Satyricon
NYMPHOMANIAC VOLUME I & II (2014, dir. by Lars Von Trier, 241 minutes) DAVID EDELSTEIN: Lars von Trier’s latest provocation is an episodic sexual epic called Nymphomaniac, which comes in two two-hour parts, or “volumes,” though it’s basically one movie sliced in half. The thinking must have been, “Who wants four hours of hardcore sex and philosophizing?,” and if you say, “Me, me!,” I suggest seeing both back to back: It’s an art-house orgy! Should you see it at all? I recommend it guardedly. It’s dumb, but in a bold, ambitious way movies mostly aren’t these days, especially when […]
CINEMA: Welcome To The Hotel Andersonia
The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014, directed by Wes Anderson, 99 minutes, USA) BY JONATHAN VALANIA There are, I am increasingly convinced, but two kinds of people in this world: people who hate Wes Anderson films and human beings. Before we go further I should make it clear that I am of the opinion that Wes Anderson only makes two kinds of movies: great, and really great. That Wes Anderson is the two-word answer to the increasingly asked question: What good is a liberal arts education? There are times in this country’s history when we’ve had to take stock and […]