THE DISASTER ARTIST (Dir. by James Franco, 104 minutes, 2017, USA) BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC The best in “So Bad It’s Good” cinema usually has one thing in common. Invariably, the auteur at the helm — everyone from Ed Wood to Michael Bay — sincerely believed they were making the best film possible. You can’t fake that kind of sincere ineptitude and those that have tried usually fall short of the mark, with the ensuing film choking on its irony. The Room (2003), the subject of The Disaster Artist, is one of those rare films that was born of […]
CONTEST: Win Tix To A VIP Advanced Screening Of Guillermo Del Toro’s The Shape Of Water
Easily the strangest film this prestige season is Guillermo del Toro’s eccentric romantic masterpiece The Shape of Water. The film opens in Philadelphia at the Ritz Five Friday, December 14th and is a rather unique love story involving a mute woman named Elisa and a mysterious creature trapped in a top-secret government lab. Heavily influenced by Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Delicatessen, City of Lost Children, Amélie), the film has del Toro returning to his roots to give us a darkly fantastic fairy tale that has Elisa falling in love with the monster who feels like a hybrid of Abe Sapien from […]
BEING THERE: LCD Soundsystem @ The Fillmore
Photo by JOSH PELTA-HELLER At 9:00 PM on Tuesday night, the players of LCD Soundsystem scrambled through a crowded, labyrinthine metropolis of instrumentation and stage gear to take their places. The last of them — singer and producer James Murphy — emerged to the roar of a Philly Fillmore at max capacity, heightened to a fever pitch of anticipation over six years of waiting since his 2011 “retirement.” Murphy is arguably one of the unlikeliest late-middle-aged heroes of a rock-n-roll myth. At 47 now, the frontman’s affect and aesthetic is derived from the unique interface between “don’t care” and “doin’ […]
CINEMA: A Red Carpet Q&A W/ Director Dan Gilroy
BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC This year at the Philadelphia Film Festival I got a few moments to pick the brain of screenwriter/director Dan Gilroy on the red carpet, who’s quickly made a name for himself crafting engrossing narratives around unlikely protagonists. The follow up to his acclaimed directorial debut Nightcrawler is Roman J. Israel, Esq. a film starring Denzel Washington as a legal savant with what appears to be Asperger’s syndrome. Roman is forced to fend for himself after the death of his legal partner who was the face of their team, the people person — while Roman […]
BEING THERE: The National @ The Kimmel Center
Photo by JOSH PELTA-HELLER I’m gonna get a little gonzo here. I didn’t go to the Kimmel Center last night because I was a huge fan of The National, I went because fans tend to talk up their live show, because I love live music, and because in best-case scenarios, seeing a band that you like live can make them a band you love. Four or five songs into their set, though, I was wondering why I wasn’t loving The National. Was it the venue, would I be enjoying this same show much more at a smaller club? Maybe. Music […]
NPR 4 THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR: Our guest Daniel Ellsberg became one of the best known opponents of the Vietnam War in 1971 when he leaked the Pentagon Papers, a secret Defense Department study of the war, to The New York Times and other publications. Ellsberg, then a national security analyst with top-secret clearances, was arrested and tried under the Espionage Act. A judge dismissed the charges when it emerged that officials in the Nixon administration had directed covert actions to discredit or silence Ellsberg, including tapping his phone and breaking into his psychiatrist’s office, looking for compromising information. Ellsberg is now 86, […]
PARANOID ANDROID: Q&A W/ Gary Numan
BY DAVID R. STAMPONE If you’ve been out of the loop on Gary Numan in recent years, you may not know that the highly influential (Nine Inch Nails to Afrikaa Bambaataa et al.) English new wave synth-rock star with the erstwhile icy android persona has become quite active again in the new millennium. Hugely popular through the very late ‘70s/ early ‘80s w #1 singles and albs, he’s in a very good place at age 59, having come to grips with issues like a decline in creative interest and his (eventually diagnosed) Asperger’s syndrome some time ago. (An engaging […]
CINEMA: Frontier Justice
BY CHRISTOPHER MALENEY FILM CRITIC If someone asks you to name the essential hallmarks of a Western, what would you say? The cowboy hat? The gunfight at high noon? The frontier town with running saloon fights and and anything-goes frontier feeling? The lone gunfighter on a quest for extrajudicial revenge against a villain too powerful for the law to contain? From Shane to Fargo, each retelling of the western — every reshuffle of the tropes — offers a different interpretation of the quest for justice in America, but all ultimately assure as that it can be found with the […]
SH*T MY UNCLE SAYS: Sweet Home Alabama
BY WILLIAM C. HENRY Jesus, God, whoda thunk it?! Whoda ever thunk that that imbecilic Oval Office swamp pig could actually outdo himself?! Yes indeed ladies and gentlemen and “children” of all ages, the pin-brained White House boar hog in residence has actually pulled off the heretofore believed impossible: he has totally and completely outschmucked himself! Way down yonder in Alabysmal — it’s a state of mindlessness and misogyny just inside the southeastern boundaries of the Great Republican Swamp — resides a pedophile by the name of Roy Moore who’s doing his slithering best to fill a vacant U.S. […]
INCOMING: Velvet Goldmine
RELATED: David Bowie Will Never Die
DIRTY PROJECTORS: Up In Hudson
Directed by Daren Rabinovitch of Encyclopedia Pictura. Incredible.
Q&A: Talking Guns, Suicide, Louis CK’s Dick & Getting Spanked By Robert De Niro W/ Jim Norton
BY EVAN HUNDELT American comedian Jim Norton’s self-deprecating jabs, sardonic wit, casually carnal pantomimes, and unabashed, caustic commentary, which he used to get chicks in grade school and avoid the eternally dreaded swirlie (the bullies dug his side-splitting humor), has landed him in the showbiz limelight with two New York Times best selling books, numerous standup specials on HBO GO, Hulu, Amazon, and most recently, his 5th hour standup special Mouthful of Shame, which premiered on Netflix last year. Additionally, he co-hosts UFC’s Unfiltered Podcast with Jim Norton & Matt Serra and can be heard weekdays on SiriusXm’s The […]
GEEK SQUAD: Dog Pile The Big Bad Purple Guy
Today Marvel dropped the first trailer for Avengers: Infinity War and it features every friggin’ superhero under the Marvel Cinematic Universe sun: Spider-Man, Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, a blonde Black Widow, Captain America, Black Panther, Winter Soldier, Doctor Strange, Scarlet Witch, Vision, Hawkeye, Falcon, War Machine, and even The Guardians of the Galaxy all show up to deal with Thanos, the super-villainous intergalactic emperor. But is Thanos a big enough threat to warrant this supersize cast? As a comic reader I am wondering who else is coming out to help them because Thanos is shown collecting the Infinity Stones. These […]