LAST MINUTE: Calling All Peace Creeps

WHAT, WHERE, WHEN: Captain Milkshake, rarely-screened 1969 Hippie Anti-War Film, Andrew’s Video Vault at the Rotunda, 8 PM TONIGHT! BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC I lived in the San Francisco Bay area for most of the ’90s, and with their numerous repertory movie houses, one could hang out at the movies every night. The Pacific Film Archive, The Castro, The Roxy, The Red Vic, the UC Theater, The Fine Arts — I slouched for hours in their seats, catching scores of double features of noir films, foreign oddities, indie documentaries and weirdo one-offs that I’ll probably never be able to […]

REVIEW: Das Leben Der Anderen (The Lives Of Others)

(2006, Directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 137 minutes, Germany) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC When the subject arises of the U.S. Patriot Act, which allows government increased powers of surveillance, there’s always someone who argues, “Why should anyone care, unless they’re hiding something?” For those without the imagination to conceive of how a Surveillance Society invites abuse, German director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck has crafted a very patient and engrossing thriller that slowly turns the screws of tension on a character under complete scrutiny. It’s successful enough to make anyone’s inner paranoiac wiggle in his seat. The title crawl […]

TOM WAITS For No Man

An animated film starring Tom Waits. Performed for us live (at the La Brea stage in Hollywood, 1978), and rotoscoped — a process that traces back the live action frame by frame and turns it into animation. The original live action was shot with 5 cameras — 2 high, 2 low and one hand held. The music from “The One That Got Away” blared in the background as Tom sang karaoke style different lyrics on each take. Two strippers, 6 takes and 13 hours of video footage were edited to make a 5 1/2 minute live action short which we […]

REVIEW: BLACK SNAKE MOAN

(2007, Directed by Craig Brewer, 115 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC I can’t remember the last time a movie poster stopped me dead in my tracks. Laid out to look like the cover of a Marvel comic book, here’s Samuel L. Jackson looking like a Southern sharecropper, holding a chain that has Christina Ricci dressed up like Daisy Duke attached at the end. What is this, a cross-racial Last Tango, a sexually sadistic Saw? Is the chain merely metaphorical? Nope, nope and nope. The poster is unambiguous truth in advertising: Black Snake Moan actually is about impoverished, guitar-playing […]

COMING ATTRACTION: New Flick Combines Classic Philly Soul With Inspiring Tale Of Philly Swim Coach

PRIDE tells the true story of Philadelphia inner-city swim coach Jim Ellis and a group of audacious, talented African-American youngsters who trained with him, conquering inexperience, prejudice, low expectations and their own insecurities to win honors in a sport that had no black role models in 1973. Directed by South Africa’s Sunu Gonera, the life-affirming PRIDE stars Academy Award nominee Terrence Howard (HUSTLE & FLOW, CRASH, RAY) and Bernie Mac (GUESS WHO, OCEANS 12, BAD SANTA).Coinciding exactly with the time and place of the explosion of Philadelphia soul in the early 1970s, PRIDE presented an opportunity for the film music […]

DVD REVIEW: MUTUAL APPRECIATION

(2006, directed by Andrew Bujalski, 110 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Andrew Bujalski’s 2002 debut Funny Ha-Ha was such a dead-on portrait of confused urban twenty-somethings that I was curious to catch his well-reviewed follow-up, Mutual Appreciation in the theater. Would a young audience find this devastatingly unvarnished study of dumb-struck hipsters funny, or would the humbling awkwardness of the main characters hit too close to laugh along with? Alas, I still don’t know; when I caught the film during its brief run at the Ritz in Center City, there were only three other attendees, all of them […]

COMING ATTRACTION: Mr. & Mrs. au Naturale

On Friday, look for Phawker’s exclusive interview with the R. Crumb and Aline Kominsky-Crumb: Big butts, bigger boots, LSD, weird sex, piggyback rides, meeting the Beatles, leaving America, and growing up in Philadelphia…newly hired PHAWKER BOOK CRITIC Mavis Linneman‘s review of City Paper Editor Duane Swierczynski‘s The Blonde…FILM CRITIC DAN BUSKIRK‘s review of the hilarious hipster comedy of manners that is Mutual Appreciation. Plus, the new ARCADE FIRE on PHAWKER RADIO, NPR FOR THE DEAF, PhillyHistory Write-A-Caption contest, and, invariably, some wry riposte on the latest and seemingly regularly-scheduled snuffing of a human life by a gun. Damn.

REVIEW: FACTORY GIRL

(2007, dir. by George Hickenlooper 90 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC When you’re sent to review a film, you must have the patience of a priest and the endurance of a superhero, and refuse to pass judgment until the final credits finish rolling, no matter how badly your Spidey senses are tingling. Sad to say, it only took a few minutes of Factory Girl to sorely test my priestly patience. Director George Hickenlooper’s game plan — take this radical culture star and shoe-horn her life into the staid biopic formula — was apparent right out of the gate. […]

THE DUDE ABIDES: “Sometimes there’s a man — I won’t say a hee-ro, ’cause what’s a hee-ro? — sometimes there’s a man who, well, he’s the man for his time ‘n place, he fits right in there — and that’s the Dude.” –Big Lebowski

Feb. 10 (Bloomberg) — Illinois Senator Barack Obama, standing in front of the building where Abraham Lincoln gave his “House Divided” speech in 1858 opposing slavery, told Americans he will embrace a new kind of politics as he made his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination official. “We can build a more hopeful America,” Obama, 45, told supporters today in Springfield, Illinois. “And that is why, in the shadow of the Old State Capitol, where Lincoln once called on a divided house to stand together, where common hopes and common dreams still live, I stand before you today to announce […]