MUSCLE SHOALS is a documentary about a place filled with magic and music, legend and folklore, where the river is inhabited by a Native American spirit who has lured some of the greatest Rock and Roll and Soul legends of all time, and drawn from them some of the most uplifting, defiant, and important music ever created. In Muscle Shoals, Alabama, music runs through the hills, the river, and the spirit of the people. It is a place where, even before the Civil Rights Movement really took shape, the color of your skin didn’t matter inside the studio. At […]
CINEMA: In Space Nobody Can Hear You Scream
GRAVITY (2013, directed by Alfonso Cuarón, 90 minutes, U.S.) WADJDA (2012, directed by Haifaa Al-Mansour, 98 minutes, Saudi Arabia) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC I’ve been met with nothing but skepticism when I tell folks the next must-see film is a sci-fi epic starring George Clooney and Sandra Bullock. I can’t blame them; with that spare description, Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity sounds like Hollywood business as usual, which is exactly what this downright thrilling adventure is not. For at least the last decade, Hollywood blockbusters have smashed up cities and flexed super powers like clockwork, but here is a special […]
BEING THERE: Two Door Cinema Club @ The Tower
Photo by ALEXANDER BISIGNARO I’m never sure what to expect at a show when the band performing is still in its proverbial “early years.” Are they only going to play material from their successful debut album? Will the venue be crowded or awkwardly empty? How many songs am I going to actually recognize? These are the questions I was asking myself as I walked through the doors of Tower Theatre last night to see Two Door Cinema Club kick start their latest U.S. tour. After releasing Tourist History in 2010 and following it up with Beacon in 2012, Two Door […]
CINEMA: Trailer For Dubious New Spike Jonze Film
Joaquin Phoenix with a NAMBLA mustache falls in love with SIRI, voiced by Scarlett Johansson. Soundtrack by Arcade Fire. If this wasn’t directed by Spike Jonze, this would have lost us at ‘Joaquin Phoenix with a NAMBLA mustache.’
CINEMA: Remote Viewing
BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Exhumed Film is bringing an offbeat, forgotten gem to the big screen at International House this Tuesday, Jeff Lieberman’s 1988 sci-fi/action spoof Remote Control, with the writer/director on hand for post-screening Q&A. Remote Control is centered around two high school video clerks, Cosmo (Kevin Dillon of Entourage and the The Blob remake) and Georgie (Christopher Wynne, perhaps you remember him from the Johnny Depp sex comedy Private Resort?) who work at the busy video store, Village Video. A mysterious promotional stand-up has arrived for a video called “Remote Control,” a VHS tape whose hypnotic […]
CINEMA: Trayvon Station
FRUITVALE STATION (2013, directed by Ryan Coogler, 90 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Fruitvale Station is a true tear-jerker, a genre somewhat disreputable among male film critics (no big surprise) because bypassing the intellectual and heading straight to the emotional is seen as a dirty trick for a film to do to a guy. If Fruitvale Station is particularly successful in milking its viewers’ emotions, it may be because the American public has been slow to show empathy for the violence that been prejudicially doled out by law enforcement against African Americans and people of color in the […]
CINEMA: Summer Of The Blockbummer
PACIFIC RIM (2013, directed by Guillermo del Toro, 132 minutes, U.S.) THE LONE RANGER (2013, directed by Gore Verbinski, 149 minutes, U.S.) MAN OF STEEL (2013, directed by Zack Snyder, 143 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC There is a cultural belief that often goes unexamined that says the quality of the arts in this country is a constant: bad songs were always on the radio, TV has always been stupid and Hollywood has always made big budget fluff. It’s a naive viewpoint, history shows that art thrives and wilts according to all sorts of economic and cultural pressures. […]
RAWK TAWK: Life According To Brother JT
BY JONATHAN VALANIA Garage-punk savant, drone-rock wizard, acid-dazed psychonaut, human ouija board, holy fool of the Internet — Brother JT is a man of many hats. He’s been a puppet, a poet, a pirate, a pawn and king. He’s been up and down and over and out — and he still really likes the LSD thing. (SEE Trippin’ Balls With Brother JT, his lysergic talk show on Scrapple TV) He’s come to tell us all that the emperor has no clothes, the sky is falling, God is great, we’re already dead, and yet despite all that life is beautiful. He’s […]
CINEMA: Gimme Shelter
20 FEET FROM STARDOM (2013, directed by Morgan Neville, 90 minutes, U.S.) WORLD WAR Z (2013, directed by Marc Forster, 116 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC The world of classic rock was pretty much a guy’s show, with Janis Joplin and and Grace Slick being among the few women of the their era to grab rock’s glory. That’s the popular wisdom anyway but 20 Feet From Stardom may change your perspective on the era by spotlighting the achievements of the women, and mostly black women, who delivered the high points to classic recordings by The Rolling Stones, […]
CINEMA: James Franco’s La Passione
VICE: A decadent and beautifully shot trip that riffs on Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, if it were shot on acid and starred the ATL Twins as demons. MORE PHAWKER: The greatest Calvin Klein’s Obsession ad never made. That is high praise around our house. JAMES FRANCO: I have been working on some projects with Agyness Deyn for a while. We had previously collaborated on a shoot for Elle where she and Natalia Bonifacci had dressed up like James Dean and Sal Mineo and we shot them around the pool at the Chateau Marmont. Another time I […]
CINEMA: The Young And The Feckless
THE BLING RING (2013, directed by Sofia Coppola, 90 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC It’s hard to imagine any film involving Paris Hilton would grab my attention but Sofia Coppola found the angle with her latest, The Bling Ring. Based on a series of celebrity home burglaries carried out in 2008 and 2009 by fashion-conscious teens, one might expect a dreamy joyride through the perverse luxury of the glamor class. If robbing Hilton’s underwear drawer sounds like a good time at the movies, Ms. Coppola’s perspective is different: she sees these reckless kids not as joyriders but as […]
CINEMA: The Last Laugh
THIS IS THE END (2013, directed by Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen, 107 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC The most intoxicating summer blockbusters are those that really capture a cultural moment and have their way with it. As the previews ran before Iron Man 3 a few weeks back, it was depressing to discover that for the umpteenth summer we’ll yet again be treated to multiple visions of apocalypse. It was all death and devastation and the audience watching could hardly be bothered to yawn. It is as if we lack the imagination to solve our […]
CINEMA: A History Of Violence
THE PURGE (2013, directed by James DeMonaco, 85 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC You have to admire a sharp little thriller that really puts an audience through its paces as effectively as the new Michael Bay-produced thriller The Purge does. Clocking in at a no-nonsense 85 minutes, the film doesn’t waste a lot of time establishing logic but nonetheless it had the audience screaming and cheering Thursday night at its first official screenings. A deceptively intimate affair, this brutal little satire peeks at the bigger issue of a world driven mad by cathartic violence but focuses mainly on one man’s […]