(2006, directed by Mike Judge, 84 min., U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Can Big Business take a joke? Maybe not, as Mike Judge appears to have found out with his latest film Idiocracy, which quietly slipped out on DVD a few weeks ago. Although wildly uneven, Idiocracy is one of the most eccentric Hollywood comedies ever produced, and further solidifies the creator of “Beavis and Butthead” and “King of the Hill” as one of the truly subversive voices in mass entertainment. So why did 20th Century Fox, which surely would like to keep a talent as successful as Judge […]
LOCAL GIRL MAKES GOOD: Former Fixture Of Area Poetry Slams Voted Into Rock N’ Roll Hall Of Fame
BY AMY Z. QUINN She’s hardly the most famous performer to ever come out of Jersey — The Boss and The Chairman Of The Board still hold those titles — but without a doubt, Patti Smith, the High Poetess of Punk, remains the greatest communicator of the kind of nameless electric angst that drives Kids In Search Of Something to head north on the Jersey Turnpike and never look back. When Patti beat it out of Gloucester County, fleeing a factory job and a year short of her degree at then-Glassboro State Teacher’s College, she was armed with a book […]
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 […]