Music Man Murray/Record Store Day
Casey McKinney04.15.12
Richard Parks is like a young Orson Welles, brimming with talent and well into his cups… sorry I mean his cups are overflowing, myriads of mastery spilling into various fissures, gullets, open wounds. He can pick a bluegrass mandolin till your heart bleeds in harmony or skips a pulse, but that’s beside the point. Sort [...]
The Whispers of the Gods: Oscars 2012
Kevin Killian02.27.12
Didn’t your mama…er…the movies ever tell you that silence is golden? i.e. shut off that damn cell phone. Yes, no, maybe? This year that little saying, worthy of Emerson, means something more apparently. Kevin Killian and his Oscar party crew do their annual send up of the idols of Hollywood.
The End Of The World As She Knows It: Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia
Scott Bradley10.28.11
It’s nigh Halloween, and if you haven’t already been spooked off by director Lars Von Trier’s comments at this year’s Cannes Film Festival or by Trier’s excruciatingly visceral last film Antichrist, then perhaps you’ll welcome his latest offering Melancholia, available now for internet download and soon to be in theaters. But don’t expect to be scared as his apocalyptic drama centers on another emotion, clinical depression. The world is about to end, in one person’s solipsistic view, and in general. Scott Bradley reviews.
George Kuchar: an appreciation and resurrected (self) interview
Brad Lapin09.30.11
George Kuchar died this month of cancer. He worked for over 50 years making films that mainstream audiences missed, but that an underground adored and was immeasurably inspired by. Brad Lapin has been a fan since the beginning and in 1979 he interviewed Kuchar for a zine he published called Damage. Yes it’s fucking punk rock.
!Women Art Revolution! – Lynn Hershman Leeson
Bradford Nordeen08.07.11
Lynn Hershman Leeson is at war. Has been for years. Her lastest film !Women Art Revolution! (aka WAR) is a collection of video portraits, interviews with key feminist artists concerning their uphill scrum against an artworld overcooked with machismo, but with a ceiling that’s been cracking since the 70s onward thanks to the likes of Judy Chicago, Carolee Schneeman, the Gorilla Girls and so forth. Bradford Nordeen brings us through Leeson’s career up to her current "revisionist vie for historiography, a smart and sober demand for reparation."
An Exclusive Excerpt from “The Making of Terrence Malick’s THE TREE OF LIFE: An Oral History” (circa 2021)
Scott Bradley07.25.11
Terrence Malick is a director known for his elusiveness to the big screen; he’s like a groundhog who only appears to see his shadow if he has a story beautiful enough to tell. Never mind if the story is about a couple on a killing spree, a soldier in the midst of battle, colonialists killing indigenous peoples––there’s always a silver lining of love, seen through an omnipresent eye that distills the good in any "bad" situation. In his latest film, The Tree of Life, he confronts his own bio, going further with the omnipresent––read God––lens, drawing on themes from The Bible’s Genesis story, yet replete with dinosaurs––creation in real time! And 10 years in the future we shall look back fondly on Malick’s juxtaposition of CGI, geology, and high family drama…yes. We <3 Terrence Malick.
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Oscars Host
Benjamin Strong02.28.11
I wouldn’t call him irascible, Mr. Strong, as he has certainly thought long and hard about the young Oscar host last night and nominee for best actor, James Franco, but he does get downright sardonic about this jack of all…ummm…and about other things concerning the 2011 Academy Awards. Ouch… (but then maybe this is just Ben’s performance art; in any case, Strong plays bad cop to Killian’s good for our 2nd Oscar piece of the day).
The 2011 Minna Street Oscars Party
Kevin Killian02.28.11
So you’ve saddled up to your desks and are wondering what the hell happened at the Academy Awards last night, or actually why they may have been the least surprising in years… still there remain a few head scratching queries in Kevin Killian’s inimitable style, like: Personally, all it took was nine words, “Gwyneth Paltrow will perform ‘Coming Home’ from the film Country Strong,” for me to hand back my SAG card, the way that boys my age used to burn their draft cards in the age of Vietnam. Where was poor Cher? as Randy Newman may have wondered. It’s another homestyle San Francisco Oscar Party!
Bullitt in Miniature
Michael Louie02.25.11
When I was young I was fascinated with the fact that my father’s first car was a dark green 1967 Mustang fastback, the…
For Tyler Perry Who Has Made the Movie When the Stage Play Is Enuf
Desiree Burch11.11.10
Ntzoake Shange’s choreopoem For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf was first produced in 1975 in a bay area bar and has since appeared off-broadway, on broadway, PBS and innumerable iterations on college campus — in a way that to my mind recalls the viral popularity of something like Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues. Comedian and performer Desiree Burch takes a look at Tyler Perry’s aesthetic and what it means for the film adaptation. She finds much to praise in the ensemble cast but, in addition to all the other colors of the rainbow hears the melodramatic speechifying of a tiny man dressed in gold.
