BY RACHEL TESON Running out of shows to binge watch during quarantine? Well, your prayers have been answered. Netflix’s has just released their third season of Ozark, a druggy Breaking Bad-esque thriller set in the titular Ozark Mountains. Ozark stars Jason Bateman as Marty Byrd, whose specialized skill is finance instead of chemistry. Marty is forced to become a money launderer for a Mexican drug cartel because of his now-dead partners’ foiled attempt at stealing money from them. The show opens with a Mexican drug lord named Del (Esai Morales) killing all of Marty’s business partners, and only allowing Marty […]
CINEMA: There Will Be Differences Of Opinion
THE GUARDIAN: The title is a prophecy, a warning, or a vengeful supernatural pronouncement. Paul Thomas Anderson’s strange masterpiece, freely adapted by him from Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil!, is a tragic parable of man’s dependence on this commodity: formerly the lubricant of commercial triumph and technological innovation, and now the dwindling lifeblood of our material prosperity, the unacknowledged driving force of our military conflicts, and even the cause of a coming ecological catastrophe. That dark title threatens a calamity now visible on the horizon: destruction of the Earth itself. And it is all inscribed in the story of […]
REQUIEM: Threnody For The Victims Of Hiroshima
NEW YORK TIMES: Krzysztof Penderecki, a Polish composer and conductor whose modernist works jumped from the concert hall to popular culture, turning up in soundtracks for films like “The Exorcist” and “The Shining” and influencing a generation of edgy rock musicians, died on Sunday at his home in Krakow. He was 86. Mr. Penderecki was regarded as Poland’s pre-eminent composer for more than half a century, and in all those years he never seemed to sit still. Beginning in the 1960s with radical ideas that placed him firmly in the avant-garde. […] It was compositions from the wild first decade […]
CINEMA: In Werner Herzog We Trust
NEW YORK TIMES: You’ve talked in the past about your desire for your documentaries to convey ecstatic truth3 — or deeper truth — rather than what you’ve called “the truth of accountants.” Does anything about the need for ecstatic truth feel different now, at a time when even factual truth feels destabilized? WERNER HERZOG: I’ll make it very simple. My witness is Michelangelo, who did the statue of the Pietà. When you look at Jesus taken down from the cross, it’s the tormented face of a 33-year-old man. You look at the face of his mother: His mother is 17. […]
CINEMA: The MAGA Hunters
THE HUNT (Directed by Craig Zobel, 89 minutes, USA, 2020) BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC The Hunt is a guns-blazing riff on the classic humans-hunting-humans short story The Most Dangerous Game, with a very relevant Age of MAGA twist. The plot revolves around a Pizza Gate-style conspiracy called “Manor Gate” — an email chain conspiracy theory about a farm where a group of liberal elites hunt Trumpers after giving them a weapon and a head start into the woods. While the film is careful not to invoke Trump’s name in the film, it’s pretty clear who these right-wing folks voted […]
Spike Jonze Drops Beastie Boys Story Trailer
RS: As seen in the clip, the movie was inspired by Diamond and Horovitz’s collaboration on 2018 memoir Beastie Boys Book and the live show that followed it. The 571-page tome, written over the course of four years, paid tribute to their best friend and bandmate, Adam Yauch, who died of cancer in 2012, which is also a key part of the trailer. The film will premiere in IMAX on April 2nd and on Apple TV+ on April 24th, right on the heels of the 26th anniversary of the release of Beastie Boys’ 1994 album Ill Communication. It reunites Beastie […]
CINEMA: Open Wide
SWALLOW (directed by Carlo Mirabella-Davis, 94 minutes, USA, 2019) BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC Swallow, the directorial debut by Carlo Mirabella-Davis, stars Haley Bennett as Hunter, a timid, blue collar woman who has married into a wealthy, overbearing family. Hunter spends her days cloistered in newfound luxury, decorating the exquisite home gifted by her husband and in-laws, who pressure her into a pregnancy she is at best ambivalent about. Katelin Arizmendi’s sublime cinematography imbues Hunter’s antiseptic surroundings with an almost otherworldly quality. Desperately searching for a way to take back control of her life, Hunter soon comes down with pica, […]
Q&A W/ Swallow Director Carlo Mirabella-Davis
BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC A few weeks ago I got to chat with Carlo Mirabella-Davis, the writer and director of the unconventional psychological thriller Swallow, which opens in Philadelphia tomorrow. The upstate New York native’s feature length directorial debut stars Haley Bennett (The Girl on the Train) as the immaculate Hunter, a timid woman who married into a wealthy family and is now a stay at home wife. Desperately searching for the means to regain some semblance of control over her life, Hunter develops pica, a psychological disorder where you swallow things that no human should ingest: thumb […]
CINEMA: Indivisble
THE INVISIBLE MAN (Directed by Leigh Whannell, 124 minutes, USA, 2020) BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC The latest cinematic take on the H. G. Wells classic The Invisible Man, which hits theaters today, veers away from the source text to tell a much bleaker story, that is as much about domestic violence as it is its titular metaphorical monster. Set in modern day San Francisco, the film opens with Cecilia ( Elisabeth Moss) fleeing her abusive husband, who made his fortune in the field of optics. When he dies two weeks later due an apparent suicide, Cecilia inherits $5 […]
CINEMA: Q&A W/ Emma Actress Anya Taylor-Joy
BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC It’s hard to believe Anya Taylor-Joy has only been acting for six years. After being “discovered” by a modeling scout while walking her dog, she effortlessly made the jump to acting, quickly landing her first starring role in the excellent gothic coming of age fairy tale, The Witch. Born in Miami, the youngest of six children, Anya spent the bulk of her childhood shuttling between Argentina and England, before eventually settling in New York at 16 to pursue acting full time. Since then, she has worked with such directors as Robert Eggers, Edgar Wright […]
INCOMING: Kenn Kweder Superstarr
EDITOR’S NOTE: This interview originally published back in 2016 upon the release of the documentary Adventures Of A Secret Kidd. We are reprising it today in advance of his performance at Locks @ Sona in Manayunk on Saturday February 29th. Enjoy. BY JONATHAN VALANIA For the past four decades, Kenn Kweder has been rocking a mic 4.5 nights a week at pretty much any place in the 215 that would have him: rock clubs, coffee shops, neighborhood taprooms, frat parties, block parties, house parties, garden parties, birthday parties, pretty much any place that people party. He carries a business […]
NPR 4 THE DEAF: We Here It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is now the richest man in the world, with an empire that stretches from Hollywood to Whole Foods — and even into outer space. The new PBS Frontline documentary, Amazon Empire: The Rise And Reign Of Jeff Bezos, investigates how Bezos transformed Amazon from an online bookseller into a trillion-dollar business that’s unprecedented in its size and reach. Director James Jacoby, who worked with fellow filmmaker Anya Bourg on the project, calls the company an “inescapable part of our modern lives.” “It’s not just how the majority of Americans are shopping online,” he […]
CINEMA: Poster For New Wes Anderson Flick Drops
INDIE WIRE: The first look at Wes Anderson’s upcoming feature film The French Dispatch (in theaters July 24th) has arrived courtesy of The New Yorker, which has debuted a handful of photos from the project with captions that introduce the star-studded ensemble cast. […] For The French Dispatch, Anderson has reunited with the likes of Bill Murray, Bob Balaban, Jeff Goldblum, Tilda Swinton, Lea Seydoux and Owen Wilson, while welcoming Timothee Chalamet, Elisabeth Moss, and Benicio del Toro into his world for the first time. Searchlight’s official synopsis for “The French Dispatch” reads: “The film is a love letter to […]