The Good News Flower Hour #3 Folks, here’s the third installment of The Good News Flower Hour, wherein I provide the voice for a flower that reads the news. The debut is HERE and the last one is HERE. We are still tweaking the concept and streamlining the production schedule on these — it takes a LONG-ass time to make these little three-minute suckers — but we hope to make this a weekly feature in the very near future. Enjoy.
CINEMA: Chess Kings
CADILLAC RECORDS (2008, directed by Darnell Martin, 109 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK, FILM CRITIC If you’re born in the rock and roll era it is hard to resist the rock biopic, as shamelessly shaggy as the genre has been. The rise and revelations of the music icon, whether it is Tina Turner, Ray Charles or Johnny Cash is always more giddy than the the grim final act, where the star has to wallow, repent or die. The facts are casually trashed, their lives are hammered into crass trajectories and their craft is often minimized but they usually reach some […]
UNCONFIRMED SOURCES: Luke Wilson’s Twitter?
VALLEY WAG: Stars — they’re just like us, if by “us” you mean “people who use the Internet too much.” Luke Wilson, the Hollywood B-lister best known for playing a schlubby everyman, also appears to be a typical user of Twitter, the blogging service which sanely limits its users’ oversharing to 140 characters at a time, when it’s not actively destroying the news business. Someone signed up for a “LukeWilson” account back in April. Here’s why I think it’s really the actor. It’s not the autobiographical details, like a love for Austin or Blue Moon beer, which any pretender could […]
TRAILER: Che
The new 257-minute Che Guevara biopic is being released in two parts in January 2009, but a special single-picture engagement starts December 12 in New York in LA.
CINEMA: Get Milk
MILK (2008, directed by Gus Van Sant, 128 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK, FILM CRITIC Just last month Josh Brolin starred in W, the Oliver Stone biopic, utterly inhabiting the the dim, destructive id of incurious-ness. Now a month later Brolin pops up as the dark id of intolerance, political assassin Dan White in Gus Van Sant’s Milk. Where W seemed designed to hammer a stake into the heart of Bush’s legacy, Milk, which chronicles the life of slain gay activist Harvey Milk, uses the past as a map to inspire the future’s possibilities. If Stone’s film was dismissed in […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR Actor James Franco stars alongside Sean Penn in Gus Van Sant’s new film Milk, which opens Nov. 26 in some cities. He plays Scott Smith, the boyfriend of title character Harvey Milk, a pioneering gay activist and San Francisco politician who was murdered in 1978.Initially known for his role on the short-lived but critically acclaimed TV series Freaks and Geeks, Franco entered the popular film scene in earnest when he played Harry Osborne in the Spider-Man movies alongside his close friend Tobey Maguire. RADIO TIMES Hour 1 In his new book, American Lion, JON MEACHAM explores the presidency […]
WEEKEND UPDATE: The Good News Flower Hour
The Good News Flower Hour #2 Folks, here’s the second installment of The Good News Flower Hour, wherein I provide the voice for a flower that reads the news. The debut is HERE. We are still tweaking the concept and streamlining the production schedule on these — it takes a LONG-ass time to make these little three-minute suckers — but we hope to make this a weekly feature in the very near future. Enjoy.
CINEMA: Vampire Weekend
SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE (2008, directed by Danny Boyle, 120 minutes, U.K.) TWILIGHT (2008, directed by Catherine Hardwicke, 122 minutes, U.S.) LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (2008, directed by Tomas Alfredson, 114 minutes, Sweden) BY DAN BUSKIRK, FILM CRITIC If the economic meltdown is herding us all into poverty the latest film by flashy Brit showman Danny Boyle assures us the experience will be a life-affirming character builder. In Slumdog Millionaire Dev Patel plays the title character Jamal, a slum-born orphan who sits in the hot seat a single question away from winning the Indian version of “Who Wants To Be A […]
NPR 4 THE DEF: Giving Public Radio Edge Since 2006
FRESH AIR Sean Penn stars in Gus Van Sant‘s new biopic Milk — the story of an out gay politician who inspired a community with his courage, and whose 1978 murder made headlines across the country. Screenwriter Dustin Lance Black says he was among those for whom Harvey Milk made a real difference. Born to Mormon parents, he grew up amid the military communities of San Antonio, Texas. He says Milk’s story, when he finally learned about it, helped him summon the courage to come out to his family and friends. “Texas kept me very quiet,” Black told the Bay […]
CINEMA: Concentration Camping
Hitler had concentration camps: we had American-Japanese internment camps. Roosevelt OK’d it. Nixon, albeit 35 years later, apologized for it. Come and gone? I think not. Family Gathering is Lise Yasui’s opus which depicts her family’s experience in an American-Japanese internment camp. Yasui’s family left their internment shrouded in mystery for years as she was growing up. And so, Yasui’s curiosity to penetrate the taboo precipitated the production of this film. “I intended to make a straight-forward historical film that explored the political and social pressures that led to the internment,” Yasui said. Historical accounts in general, however, can be […]
Q&A: Conversation With An Okie Noodler
BY JONATHAN VALANIA Brad Beesley has been the Flaming Lips in-house documentarian and videographer since the mid-’90s. Just about any Flaming Lips video you have seen was made by Brad Beesley. He is also the director of Fearless Freaks, the excellent Lips documentary released a few years back, culled from literally hundreds of hours of interviews and performance footage that Beesley shot over the course of the last 10-plus years. Concurrent with his work on Fearless Freaks, Beesley also served as cinematographer for Christmas On Mars, the just-released low-rent sci-fi thriller the Lips made in Wayne Coyne’s garage. Back in […]
TONITE: Swallow Your Pride
Josh Camerote’s Swallow Your Pride, a documentary about Philadelphia’s Wing Bowl competition, chronicles a year of the life of a past Wing Bowl champion. Bill Simmons, aka El Wingador and the principle subject for the film, spent his days prior to Wing Bowl stardom in the limelight of professional sports. But upon retirement, he soon realized that the incessant stirring in his belly could be symptomatic pangs of his next vocation. But what glory is there in competitive eating, you ask? Well, Camerote thinks it about time all you dainty elitists swallowed your pride and recognize the intense […]
CINEMA: The Spy Who Shoved Me
Quantum of Solace (2008, directed by Marc Forster, 108 minutes, U.K.) BY DAN BUSKIRK, FILM CRITIC Directing action on film is sort of like being a good dancer, either you’re blessed with an understanding of movement, space and rhythm or you’re not. The recently trimmed down, buffed up and rebooted Bond, ushered in with Daniel Craig two years ago with Casino Royale, has anchored the long-running series more than ever to its action sequences; gone are the jokes, the gadgets and the preposterous villains. The mystery in Casino‘s sequel pertains to a shadowy scheme labeled “Quantum” yet the biggest conundrum […]