ASSOCIATED PRESS: David Letterman and Sen. Al Franken were both feeling frustrated about pessimism around the topic of climate change — so they got together to talk about it. Thankfully they invited some cameras along, too, with the help of Funny or Die and the Primetime Emmy Award-winning “Years of Living Dangerously.” The fruits of their conversations can be seen in the digital series “Boiling the Frog with Senator Al Franken.” Their talks run the gamut from serious to funny as they take on everything from coal and carbon prices to Letterman’s retirement beard in the six 5-minute shorts that […]
CINEMA: Maximum Overdrive
BABY DRIVER (2017, directed by Edgar Wright, 112 minutes, USA) BY CHRISTOPHER MALENEY When Youtube first began playing adds for Edgar Wright’s new crime and car flick, Baby Driver, I will admit I was a little upset that they seemed to have made a glaring omission by not including Simon & Garfunkel’s eponymous song anywhere in the trailer. “Just where do these jokers get off?” But, before I could take to social media to bemoan the state of modern cinema, I decided to do a little digging. What I found there more than satisfied me. In fact, it whet […]
CINEMA: Growing Up Spider-Man
SPIDER-MAN HOMECOMING (2017, Directed by Jon Watts, 133 minutes, USA) BY RICHARD SUPLEE GEEK SPACE CORRESPONDENT I bought my first my first Spider-Man comic book last century. I watched the Spider-Man cartoons every saturday as a kid. I own three Spider-Man T-Shirts, five Funko Pop collectibles, and wrote at least three poems (one of which made my creative writing thesis) focused on the character. However, I was not excited about Spider-Man: Homecoming. Sure, Tom Holland’s Spidey was amazing in Captain America: Civil War (2016) but I didn’t care. He was every bit the adorable nerdy smartass that Peter Parker […]
OKNOTOK: An Oral History Of OK, Computer
ROLLING STONE: The June 15th Rolling Stone cover story took an in-depth look at Radiohead‘s OK Computer in honor of the album’s 20th anniversary. The band let us hang backstage over the course of two days at the Berkeley Greek Theater as they shared memories from that tumultuous and wildly innovative time in their lives, and a week later Thom Yorke sat down with RS at an Italian restaurant in Los Angeles to chat some more. All in all, the members of Radiohead spoke on the record for more than seven hours in anticipation of the upcoming OKNOTOK reissue, […]
CINEMA: The Making Of Luc Besson’s Valerian
WIRED: Valerian, though, will be an order of magnitude stranger. For starters, there’s the source material, a French series of bandes dessinées (graphic novels, literally “drawn strips”) called Valérian et Laureline, a moderne sci-fi title not well known in the US. Then there’s the Avatar-level amount of alien that Besson is pumping in—far more than anything else he has made. The movie has visual effects from both Weta (The Lord of the Rings) and Industrial Light & Magic (basically everything else). Where The Fifth Element had just under 200 effects elements—that flying-car chase through Manhattan, the luxury-cruise starship—Valerian has […]
REVIEW: Andre Wyeth: In Retrospect
WINTER 1946 by ANDREW WYETH BY CHRISTOPHER MALENEY If you ever take a day trip out of the city and drive for about an hour down Baltimore Pike, past the small towns and strip malls, to Chadds Ford, be sure not to miss The Brandywine River Museum Of Art, a small art museum on the banks of the Brandywine River that holds one of the finest collections of American realist art. This summer, being the hundredth anniversary of Andrew Wyeth’s birth, the museum is holding a retrospective of the artist’s life and works called Andrew Wyeth: In Retrospect. Son of […]
BAD MOON RISEN: Q&A With CCR’s Stu Cook
BY JONATHAN VALANIA Populism ain’t what it used to be. The word has been hijacked by crypto-fascists, white supremacists and heartless neoliberal hatchet men who have warped its principles and perverted its meaning. Despite the torrent of media coverage saying otherwise, Donald Trump is NOT a populist. Marine Le Pen is NOT a populist. They are the wolves of bigotry hiding in populist sheep’s clothing. Bernie Sanders is a populist. Woody Guthrie is a populist. Bruce Springsteen is a very rich populist. More to our point, Creedence Clearwater Revival is populist. All those iconic songs in all their ragged […]
THEATER REVIEW: The Buddy Holly Story
Photo by JOAN MARCUS Bucks County Playhouse’s production of Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story, currently in residence at the Kimmel Center, is a must-see for audiences looking for an authentic journey back to teenage America in the bobby-sox-and-soda-pop ‘50s. This seamless adaptation of the 1978 film The Buddy Holly Story, starring pre-drugs-and-insanity Gary Busey, manages to artfully re-create the life and tragically premature death of Charles Hardin “Buddy” Holley with arresting performances, imaginative staging, and an unblinking glimpse of the racial tensions of the time. A quick history lesson for anyone who wasn’t a teenager in 1958: Buddy Holly was […]
ALBUM REVIEW: Rosu Lup Is Anything Real
Philly-based indie-folkers Rosu Lup’s band name probably doesn’t mean anything to you if you don’t speak Romanian. The origin story of their curious moniker goes like this: They got the idea for ‘Red Wolf’ from the lyrics of one of their favorite musicians. But ‘Red Wolf’ just wasn’t artsy-farsty enough for these guys. Instead, the band explains that they “…wanted the name to be a bit more unique so we threw it into Google Translator and picked different languages. We thought Rosu Lup sounded best, which is the Romanian translation. We happen to be pretty big fans of wolves.” […]
Q&A: Peter Sagal, Host Of Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me
Photo by ANDREW COLLINGS EDITOR’S NOTE: This interview originally ran on July 9th, 2015. On the occasion of Peter Sagal and Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me returning to the Mann Center tonight, we present this encore edition. Enjoy. BY JONATHAN VALANIA Like all good NPR nerds, I’ve passed more lazy Saturday afternoons listening to Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me than I care to admit. So, when I heard that Wait Wait was coming to the Mann Center to record an episode for broadcast, I was like, ‘Holy f*cking tote bags!’ And then I did what anyone in my shoes would’ve […]
WORTH REPEATING: The Princes Of Darkness
“Conspiracy is not a good word. But on the other hand, this is a vast and interconnected and not honest operation. They say these anodyne things about liberty—like the title of one book is Don’t Hurt People And Don’t Take Their Stuff! And that’s not what this is about.The reality is that they are gerrymandering with a vengeance, to a degree we’ve never seen before in our history; they’re practicing voter suppression in a way we’ve not seen since Reconstruction; they are smashing up labor unions under fake pretenses, not telling people that they actually do want to destroy […]
NPR 4 THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When U Can’t
FRESH AIR: Several years ago, when Garrett Graff was working at Washingtonian magazine, a coworker brought him a lost ID badge that he’d found on the floor of a parking garage. “It was a government ID for someone from the intelligence community, and he gave it to me since I write about that subject, and he’s like, “I figure you can get this back to this guy,’ ” Graff recalls. There were driving directions on the back of the ID, so Graff looked it up on Google Maps, and it led him to West Virginia. “The road dead ends […]
THE CACTUS BLOSSOMS: Stoplight Kisses
Yes, that was them at the end of episode three of Twin Peaks 2.0. They play Johnny Brendas on July 13th.