Punk rock legend, Glenn Danzig, who is currently in the midst of his reunion tour with The Misfits is making a solo stop at our very own Philadelphia Film Center, Friday, December the 13th, the night before The Misfits play the Wells Fargo Center. Danzig will be presenting an exclusive, one-night-only screening of his directorial debut, Verotika, a feature-length horror anthology of tales culled from his comic book series. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Danzig and producer James Cullen Bressack. Verotika premiered at this year’s Cinepocalypse Film Fest and reportedly achieved instant infamy, drawing comparisons […]
EXCERPT: Postcard From The Edge
VULTURE: [Carrie] caused deep worry that was somehow hidden by the movie crews’ obsession with John’s addiction rather than her own. Carrie—younger than the others—was intensely fragile. She was generous, brilliant, witty, charismatic, caring—and deeply vulnerable: friends could see that. When they all got to the Belushis’ Vineyard house, “my brother was most concerned about her. He had to carry her limp body from room to room. I guess she was conscious enough that he didn’t call an ambulance, but he had a strong sense that she was really out of it.” It was during that spate of days on the […]
CINEMA: Bad Fellas
THE IRISHMAN (directed by Martin Scorsese, 209 minutes, USA, 2019) BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC Based on the mob hitman memoir I Hear You Paint Houses, The Irishman is the “true” story of Irish Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro), a blue-collar World War II veteran who made a life for himself in the Italian mafia hitman “painting houses” with the blood of his wiseguy victims. At the start of The Irishman, we meet Frank living out his final days in a nursing home as he reflects back on how he rose to the right-hand of not only Russell Bufalino […]
CINEMA: Springtime For Hitler
JOJO RABBIT (directed by Taika Waititi, 108 minutes, USA, 2019) BY DAN TABOR Jojo Rabbit is the answer to the unasked question: what if Wes Anderson decided to make a whimsical, black comedic satire about Nazis? Based on Christine Leunens’s book Caging Skies and set at the tail end of World War II, Jojo Rabbit is the story of 10 year-old Jojo (Roman Griffin Davis), who lives in Germany with his single mother (Scarlett Johansson) and his imaginary best friend, a cartoonish version of Adolph Hitler played by the film’s director Taika Waititi (Thor Ragnarok, Hunt for the Wilderpeople). […]
CINEMA: Moby Dicks
THE LIGHTHOUSE (directed by Robert Eggers, 109 minutes, USA, 2019) BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC Robert Eggers The Witch was nothing short of a masterpiece, a complex cinematic meditation on feminism and coming of age using witchcraft as a metaphorical framework that is unveiled in a slow burn narrative. So I’ve been eagerly anticipating Robert Eggers’ follow-up and when it was finally unveiled that it would be starring Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson, I was all-in. While some will never forgive Pattinson for his wooden acting in the Twilight movies, let the record show he’s used the celebrity that […]
CINEMA: Zombies All The Way Down
ZOMBIELAND: DOUBLE TAP (dir. by Ruben Fleisher, 99 minutes, 2019, USA) BY DAN TABOR It’s been over a decade since the release of Zombieland, the charmingly dysfunctional family comedy that just so happens to take place during the zombie apocalypse. The Ruben Fleischer directed film was the front runner of our current zombie resurgence, soon followed by the juggernaut that is The Walking Dead, which over nine years has run its course both as a show and as a fixture in the pop-culture landscape. Thanks to TWD I think every variation of the formula has been attempted in every […]
TELEVISION: Last Night On Always Sunny
Everybody’s a critic. In episode 2 of the new season, the gang gets recruited for a Hollywood studio focus group re: Thunder Gun 4: Maximum Cool, the latest installment in the notoriously sexist/racist/tasteless action movie franchise. Not surprisingly, the gang LOVES the Thunder Gun movies so they jump at the chance, but are quickly horrified to learn that the dreaded “Hollywood liberal elite” has eliminated all the sexism/racism/tastelessness — basically everything that the gang thinks makes the Thunder Gun movies great — in the name of political correctness. The gang is not having it. Mac demands foreign enemies, preferably, “Eastern […]
CINEMA: Do The Hustle
HUSTLERS (Directed by Lorene Scafaria, 110 minutes, 2019, USA) BY SOPHIE BURKHOLDER Any movie that includes Jennifer Lopez pole-dancing to Fiona Apple’s “Criminal” is a must-see in my mind. In this early scene of Hustlers, Lopez, who plays Ramona, lands multiple splits on her way down from the pole, sweeping piles of cash in towards her as she says, “Doesn’t money make you horny?” Ramona, a notable dancer at the Manhattan club Moves, directs her question to fellow employee Dorothy (stage named Destiny), played by an endearing Constance Wu, who soon finds herself in a mother-daughter-like friendship with Ramona. […]
IN MEMORIAM: The Devil And Daniel Johnston
Artwork by Daniel Johnston BY JON HOULON When I lived in Austin in the early 90s, Daniel Johnston hovered over the place like a ghost. He made his name there in the 80s but had since been institutionalized after clubbing a friend with a lead pipe or baptizing himself in a fountain on campus. Equally felonious, perhaps. But I didn’t know any of that back then as I puzzled over his hand-labelled cassettes in the local music section of Tower Records on Guadalupe. I couldn’t be bothered at the time. I wish I had. Like many, I found my way […]
CINEMA: The Retro Future Is Closer Than We Think
The Ornithopter by Arthur Radebaugh BY TODD KIMMEL The 90s in Old City were some wild years, but wild like riding a bucking bronco drunk while laughing maniacally and somehow magically staying in the saddle, not wild like driving someone into the Badlands to get straight. It was funny, and central to that neighborhood specific comedy was my company, Mambo Movers. Very Peter Pan and The Lost Boys with skateboards and guitars, directed by Mel Brooks and Wim Wenders. Loft spaces were shockingly cheap, and we had the 2nd, 3rd and 4th floors of 312 Market for less than $500 […]
Q&A: Tigers Are Not Afraid Director Issa Lopez
Photo by Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC Tigers Are Not Afraid, which hits Philadelphia theaters next week, is a stunningly phantasmagorical Mexican horror/fantasy flick about a group of children who create a morose fairytale world to help cope with/explain the murder of their parents at the hands of the bloodthirsty drug cartels. This premise of abandoned Mexican children struggling to find hope in a world without is shockingly more relevant today than it was when I originally got to see it on the festival circuit back in 2017. The highest compliment I can […]
TRAILER: The Between Two Ferns Movie
ROLLING STONE: Between Two Ferns: The Movie will feature an exhaustive list of cameos by Peter Dinklage, Benedict Cumberbatch, Paul Rudd, Tiffany Haddish, Brie Larson, Keanu Reeves, Jon Hamm, David Letterman, Jason Schwartzman, Adam Scott, John Cho, Chance the Rapper, Rashida Jones, Hailee Steinfeld, John Legend, Chrissy Teigen, Tessa Thompson and more. The film is directed by Between Two Ferns co-creator Scott Aukerman from a script by Aukerman and Galifianakis. Premiers September 20th on Netflix. MORE
CINEMA: Kill Yr. Idols
THE FANATIC (Dir. by Fred Durst, 88 minutes, USA, 2019) BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC No one is more familiar with the fickle and bizarre nature of fame and fandom than Limp Bizkit’s backwards-baseball-cap-wearing bro-dawg front man Fred Durst who had the world turn on him almost as fast as it embraced him. Since his precipitous descent from rap-rock stardom Durst has since ingrained himself in Hollywood, trying his hand at acting and even hosting a weekly jazz night at a Magic Club that was inspired by La La Land. So, when I heard he was directing a film […]