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 […]

REVIEW: Inland Empire (Dir. by DAVID LYNCH, 2006)

BY MATT PRIGGE FILM CRITIC Inland Empire looks like ass. It is also one of the best films released last year — and yet, for reasons that continue to elude me, this film has yet to be booked into an area theater. Maybe it’s the three hour running time, incomprehensible plot or the fact that it’s shot on video and, again, looks like ass. You could almost hear one of Malcolm Gladwell’s fabled Tipping Points make a thud when David Lynch — one of celluloid’s all-time bestest friends — declared a few months ago that not only was his latest […]