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 […]
CINEMA: We Steal Secrets
Opens Friday at The Ritz @ The Bourse. Bradley Manning is on trial right now. RELATED: The advance of information technology epitomized by Google heralds the death of privacy for most people and shifts the world toward authoritarianism. This is the principal thesis in my book, “Cypherpunks.” But while Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Cohen tell us that the death of privacy will aid governments in “repressive autocracies” in “targeting their citizens,” they also say governments in “open” democracies will see it as “a gift” enabling them to “better respond to citizen and customer concerns.” In reality, the erosion of individual […]
CINEMA: God Only Knows
THE DAILY BEAST: One of the most hotly anticipated films at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, running from May 15-26 in the south of France, is Only God Forgives. The crime-thriller reteams Drive director Nicholas Winding Refn with his star, Ryan Gosling, and is Gosling’s last film before his self-imposed hiatus from acting. Gosling plays Julian, an American running a Muy Thai boxing club in Bankok, Thailand, that’s a front for a drug-smuggling operation. When his brother, Billy (Tom Burke), is killed in an act of revenge after murdering an underage prostitute, the two boys’ mother, Crystal (Kristin Scott […]
CINEMA: Inside Inside Llewyn Davis
THE GUARDIAN: Inside Llewyn Davis is set in 1961 in New York, amid the folk-revival scene from which Bob Dylan would emerge. But this is not a story about the singer-songwriter, whom Ethan Coen called “the elephant in the room” of the film. The story, inspired by the memoir of folk singer Dave Van Ronk, instead takes as its main character a struggling artist teetering between success and failure, who would later be eclipsed by what its star, Oscar Isaac, described as “the poet, the abstract thinker” that Dylan became. It is about, said Joel Coen, “the lesser-known scene […]
CINEMA: Girl Interrupted
FRANCES HA (2012, directed by Noah Baumbach, 85 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC The comic character studies of writer/director Noah Baumbach are steeped in cynicism and despair, hashing out the dark realities of family, love, and life in general, so it is a surprise that his latest film radiates love from nearly every frame. That love is for the star and co-writer Greta Gerwig and Baumbach’s latest, Frances Ha is a sad sack comic valentine to the off-balance appeal of the daffy Ms. Gerwig. It’s tempting to oversell this poignant little slice of almost nothing but its delicate […]
CINEMA: Remain In The Light
STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS (2013, directed by J.J. Abrams, 132 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC The sequel to the J.J. Abrams 2009 Star Trek movie is not lacking in entertainment value. It’s as spectacular on screen as only a couple hundred million dollars can be but sad to say, it isn’t much of a movie. Never being more than a casual fan of the ubiquitous 2009 Paramount reboot, it is not quite sacrilege I feel regarding Abrams re-imagining of Roddenberry’s original series. Instead, it is disappointment at the Abrams’ Trek being so undistinguished on its own, its power […]
CINEMA: Crass Luhrmann
THE GREAT GATSBY (2013, directed by Baz Luhrmann, 143 minutes, Australia/U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC It is with no pleasure that I stand over the corpse of the long-promised Great Gatsby, extravagantly pieced together from parts of once-living things by the mad scientist/filmmaker Baz Luhrmann. I can’t say I ever had much faith that this enterprise was meant for greatness, but there at least seemed to be some excitement possible if the director could just get the beast off the operating table. But no, Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby is a stillborn Frankenstein; stare as you may, there […]
CINEMA: Iron & Whine
IRON MAN THREE (2013, directed by Shane Black, 130 minutes U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC A decade of endless super hero blockbusters, the majority from the Marvel Comics roster, should be enough to exhaust any Hollywood trend, but fresh or not the genre shows no signs of abating. The one thing that set Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark apart from the pack in previous installments of the Iron Man franchise was that, unlike his crime-fighting colleagues, he wasn’t crippled by angst but instead loved being a world-beating Man of Iron. However, with Iron Man Three the good times […]