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.
Search Results for: dan buskirk
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. […]
FILM: ERASERHEAD NOW 1977-2007
BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC By now, after 10 feature films, assorted shorts and TV’s weirdest nighttime soap, we have mapped many of the dark recesses of the psyche of writer/director David Lynch. We know just what provocations push his buttons. We can relax into a comfort zone now while Lynch unleashes his expected tropes — the bugs twitching underground, the violent sex, the ironic old pop songs, the flashes of gore and morphing identities. Yet somehow, despite his mannerisms becoming ever more familiar, the years have done little to dull the effect of Lynch’s debut masterpiece, 1977’s sleepwalking vision […]
REVIEW: ALPHA DOG (Directed by Nick Cassavetes, 117 minutes)
BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Now that he’s brought sexy back, snagged Scarlett Johansson and popularized the gift-wrapped penis, you have to ask, what can’t Justin Timberlake do? Sorry Haters, but you won’t find the chink in this pop phenom’s armor watching his big screen debut in Alpha Dog, a surprisingly effective freewheeling crime drama from director Nick Cassavetes that opens today. Based on true events (bah, whatever) Alpha Dog tells the story of the pot-dealing gangster-wannabe Johnny Truelove (Emile Hirsch) and his posse of hard-partying buddies. With the rap videos constantly playing on their big screen TV, these who […]
REWIND 2006: THE YEAR IN MUSIC
WELCOME TO THE FIRST ANNUAL PHAWKER JAZZ AND POP POLL The critics have spoken, the ballots have been cast, all chads undangled, and fed into a mainframe computer the size of an Olympic swimming pool, to be crunched with the hard calculus of SUCKS/DOES NOT SUCK and arranged in impenetrably dense type on a spreadsheet that stretches from your house to mine. Hey, who we kiddin’? We don’t even have a mainframe the size of an Olympic swimming pool. Yet. And 30,000 CDs are released every year and fuck you if you think we’re gonna listen to all of them […]
APOCALYPSE WOW: Why Do My Favorite Films Of 2006 Make Me Hate Myself And Want To Die?
BY DAN BUSKIRK, FILM CRITIC APOCALYPTO (2006, directed by Mel Gibson) CASINO ROYALE (2006, directed by Martin Campbell) DEATH OF LAZARESCU (2005, directed by Christi Puiu, Romania) DELIVER US FROM EVIL (2006, directed by Amy Berg) THE DEVIL & DANIEL JOHNSTON (2006, directed by Jeff Feuerzeig) I AM A SEX ADDICT (2006, directed by Caveh Zahedi) THE KING (2006, directed by James Marsh) LITTLE CHILDREN (2006, directed by Todd Field) MUTUAL APPRECIATION (2006, directed by Andrew Bujalski) WASSUP ROCKERS (2006, directed by Larry Clark) Is not gloom in the very air we breathe, or am I seeing the world through […]
REVIEW: He Coulda Been Somebody
ROCKY BALBOA (2006, directed by Sylvester Stallone, 102 minutes) BY DAN BUSKIRK As the press cheers the return of Rocky Balboa to the big screen, you have to ask yourself: Is the public really crying out for another round with this mug, after 30 years? If the Riverview, the only movie theater in South Philly, draws only a three quarters-filled house at the advance screening, I’d say signs point to this fighter’s legs finally giving out. Hearing the promising advance word, I’ll admit to being vaguely optimistic that, against all reason, the man who wrote the arm-wrestling epic “Over the […]
TRIBUTE: Peter Boyle Has Exited The Monster’s Ball
Actor, Emmy winner, Philly native, LaSalle College alumnus and former seminarian Peter Boyle, 71, died Tuesday night. DAN BUSKIRK REMEMBERS: Peter Boyle didn’t look good bald. Actually, he didn’t look good with hair either, and perhaps you should put aside your warm memories of the recently departed actor and take a good look at his picture. His eyes are partly unreadable because of his natural squint, his lips are thin and seem to rest in a perpetual smartass smirk, and that forehead! With its thickened brow leading up to that bulbous dome, Boyle’s swollen head seemed to suggest both the […]
Now Playing On PHAWKER RADIO: How I Learned To STOP WORRYING About Chaos AND LOVE Free Jazz
CURATED BY DAN BUSKIRK CLICK HERE FOR TRACK LISTING & LINER NOTES “Kudos…this is a very well done and probably important series.” — DAVID DYE
BRITNEY’S VAGINA MONOLOGUES: Fanning The Flames of FIREcrotches Everywhere, Phawker Contributors Offer Gender And Generational Perspectives On Celebrity Pussy Galore
BRITNEY SPEARS, PLEASE PUT AWAY YOUR VAGINA BY MOTHER PHAWKER What I’m trying to tell you, dear Brit, is that you can hang out with Paris and Lindsay and Nicole or whichever tarts you choose, but YOU ARE NOT LIKE THEM. Not by virtue of talent, or beauty, or wealth, or skinniness. No, Mrs. Federline, when you gave birth to your two sons, you became unlike women who don’t have children. Hang out with your single, childless girlfriends all you want. Go out and party — you’ve been in the house changing diapers for two years, you’ve earned it. But […]
Now Playing On PHAWKER RADIO: How I Learned To STOP WORRYING About Chaos And LOVE Free Jazz
BY DAN BUSKIRK “I hope I never like this stuff,” I remember thinking as a 15-year-old, tuning past Philly’s jazz station, WRTI. Jazz was too unmelodic, too cerebral and too unsexy to my revved-up, hormone-addled mind, sentiments similar to what I still hear from many adult music lovers. For me, it was only a few years later that I finally found myself deep into jazz, after making my way up the time line from the big bands (the AM radio in my first car was set to the old timers’ station, WPEN), to Sinatra, to Chet Baker to Miles and […]
TRIBUTE: Nobody Will Love You Like Robert Altman Loved You
BY DAN BUSKIRK Last year I was teaching a summer film appreciation class to a bunch of middle-schoolers. You know what it\’s like if you?’re trying to pick out a film for any group, it’s impossible to come up with anything that somebody in the crowd isn’t going to roll their eyes at, but I’ve been doing this for a few years and I’ve come up with a batch of movies that really seem to work with kids. Still, I always want to try out something I haven’t shown before so last summer I decided to try out Robert Altman’s […]
NOW PLAYING: Put Your Hand In The Hand Of The Man Who Stilled The Water
On Phawker Radio. Why? Because We Love You. That’s Why. (Coming Wednesday, guest DJ Dandy Dan Buskirk explains why free jazz is nothing to be afraid of.)