FRESH AIR FILM CRITIC DAVID EDELSTEIN: I don’t know how director Adam McKay pulled it off, but with “The Big Short,” he has made an exuberant comedy about the global financial apocalypse of 2008. It’s goofy, suspenseful, fast-moving and also manages to explain the labyrinthine fraud that led to the crisis. Because the more you understand, the more your mind is blown by the scope of the greed and illogic. Mckay is working from a terrific playbook, Michael Lewis’s book of the same name on the collapse of the subprime mortgage market. The film’s protagonists are traders, ex-traders, fund […]
GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN: Bernie Sanders Crushes Donald Trump In New Quinnipiac Poll
THE HILL: Stop the presses! According to a new poll by Quinnipiac University on Tuesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) destroys Republican candidate Donald Trump in a general election by 13 percentage points. In this new poll, Sanders has 51 percent to Trump’s 38 percent. If this margin held in a general election, Democrats would almost certainly regain control of the United States Senate and very possibly the House of Representatives. It is high time and long overdue for television networks such as CNN to end their obsession with Trump and report the all-important fact that in most polls, both […]
MUST SEE TV: Holiday Talent Show
Holiday Talent Show from June Tate on Vimeo. This animated short by June Short and Zack Johnston packs more humanity, more heart-tugging-catch-in-your-throat emotionalism and bittersweet ragtag charm, into 30 seconds than most network holiday specials do in an hour. It took first prize in Studio 306’s “It’s A Wonderful Short” 30 Second Holiday Film Festival. And there’s more where this came from. All I want for Christmas is for these two to keep making films.
NPR 4 THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR Anomalisa, a new film about an emotionally stifled middle-aged customer service expert, tackles existential questions about what it means to be alive. But unlike other movies that raise similar issues, the characters in Anomalisa are doll-sized puppets. Duke Johnson, who co-directed the film with Charlie Kaufman, explains that everything the characters do in the film — from speaking to showering to having sex — is shot frame-by-frame using stop-motion animation. Co-directors Charlie Kaufman (left) and Duke Johnson, on the set of their film, where everything is built at “Barbie scale.” “Everything is static,” Johnson tells Fresh Air’s […]
Q&A w/ Jon Bream, Curator Of Dylan: Disc By Disc
When veteran music journalist Jon Bream was asked by Voyageur Press to write book-length series of essays about every Dylan album, he came back with a counter-proposal: how about if I pair high profile music critics (Robert Christgau, Anthony DeCurtis, Alan Light) with high profile musicians (Questlove, Ric Ocasek, Jason Isbell) and have them sit down and have a conversation about a particular Dylan album, voila, the book writes itself? Voyageur was soon sold on the idea and earlier this year they published Dylan: Disc By Disc, curated, compiled and edited by Bream [pictured below with Prince circa 1983/photo […]
WORD: How The Tea Party Became The Troll Party
Artwork by CHAD WHITE EDITOR’S NOTE: Rick Wilson’s piece originally published on the Daily Beast on September 16th, but it remains the definitive analysis of the pathologies at the heart of the Trump phenomenon. Sadly, three months later, it continues to get truer every day. THE DAILY BEAST: The Troll Party’s central characteristic is an ever tightening spiral of self-reinforcing and self-referential purity tests that makes communicating with anyone beyond the febrile and furious a nearly impossible task. The people pushing for this transformation aren’t a majority yet, but when a virus infects the body politic, its minuscule size belies […]
FICTION: Judgement
JUDGEMENT by Blaze Archer There is so much I don’t know. I’m lying on a hospital bed, wondering why the pillow smells of baby powder and why the rain sounds muffled against the glass of the window. It’s cold in here. The nurses let me keep a notebook by my bed, but I haven’t written in it for days—the ink is clogging in my veins, it’s made my heart stop beating. They don’t let you use pens in here, but I’ve got a pencil, worn down to the nub. It hasn’t got an eraser, so I’ve got to make […]
BEING THERE: The Arcs @ The Fillmore
Photo by JOSH PELTA-HELLER When the opening act is a mariachi band, it makes it pretty hard to guess what to expect next. I never bothered to check to see who the opener was, so when four women graced the stage of The Fillmore at about 8:15 pm dressed in spangled vests and concho belts and carrying a trumpet, violin, guitarron and guitarra de golpe (this gringo had to look up those last two), I began to wonder whether I came to an Arcs concert or accidentally stumbled into the wrong venue and was about to watch the San Mateo […]
CINEMA: Heir Force
VULTURE: Director J.J. Abrams is so intuitively unoriginal that he’s almost mystical: He seems to be using the Force to get on the wavelength of other filmmakers. He aped Steven Spielberg’s signature moves in the sci-fi adventure Super 8. He rekindled Star Trek onscreen, delighting many fans — even if they couldn’t point to a single performance or scene that surpassed the old films or shows. Now, with Star Wars: The Force Awakens, he does a good imitation of George Lucas circa 1977. He and co-writers Michael Arndt and Lawrence Kasdan (who co-wrote by far the best of the […]
INCOMING: The Men Who Sold The World
Holy Holy, featuring golden-eared producer and bassist Tony Visconti (Bowie, T. Rex) and Spider From Mars drummer Woody Woodmansey, will tour North America performing David Bowie’s album The Man Who Sold the World in an exclusive 11-date tour coming to Phoenixville’s Colonial Theatre on Jan. 15, 2016. The show happens just one week after the release of Bowie’s new album, Blackstar, which Visconti produced. In addition to co-writing and producing The Man Who Sold The World, Visconti has produced 11 other Bowie albums over the years, including Young Americans (1975) Heroes (1977), Low (1977), Lodger (1979) and Scary Monsters […]
INCOMING: The Hateful Eight
Opens in Philly Christmas day with a 70mm print.
NPR 4 THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR Author Neil Gaiman has always been fascinated by dreams. As he sees it, dreams are what differentiate people from one another. “None of us exist in a world that is the same world that any of the rest of us live in,” Gaiman explains to Fresh Air’s Sam Briger. “The world that’s important is the world behind each of our eyes, which is something that none of the rest of us can access.” One could argue that Gaiman’s dream world is a bit more public than most. In his horror/fantasy comic book series The Sandman, originally published […]
INCOMING: New Zoolander 2 Schwag Drops
LOS ANGELES TIMES: The really, really ridiculously good-looking days of Derek Zoolander are over — at least that’s what the “Zoolander 2” trailer would have us believe. The washed-up male supermodel played by Ben Stiller and his rival-turned-pal Hansel, played by Owen Wilson, returned to the runway on Paramount’s new trailer for the follow-up to the 2001 screwball comedy. Stiller and Wilson confirmed the start of “Zoolander 2” when they hijacked the Valentino runway in character at Paris Fashion Week in March and have dropped a few teasers since, and with the plot being revealed in the trailer the […]