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.
Nobuhiko Obayashi’s Hausu: The Haunted House Meets The Holy Mountain
Grace Krilanovich10.27.10
Orange Eats Creeps, Grace Krilanovich’s debut novel, has been intensely praised by Shelley Jackson, Steve Erickson, Blake Butler, Brian Evenson and, um, Gawker. Set in a meth-ravaged section of the 1990s Pacific northwest, it includes junkie vampires, drug-induced ESP and a missing foster sister. By all reports it is awesome. Here, as a Halloween mood-setter, Krilanovich reviews the 1977 Japanese psychedelic horror film House, directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi, an experimental filmmaker who had previously directed a Charles Bronson commercial for "Mandom" cologne. The film has just been lushly re-released by Criterion Collection.
Jackass 3D in a 4D World
Jimmy Chen10.14.10
Jimmy Chen asks whether it re-contextualizes the question "Does life imitate art?" to rephrase it as "Do teenagers imitate TV?" It seems impossible to believe in the power of art to change lives without also conceding that art can change lives, not only for the better, but also for the worse. Using this lens, Chen examines the live-acton genital mutilaton of Jackass 3D.
Mark Zuckerberg is Maybe an Asshole: a review of The Social Network
Brandon Scott Gorrell09.30.10
This film offering a purported peek into the life of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg seems somehow like a fitting bedfellow for the public view we have allowed into our own lives by joining his network. The Social Network boasts the odd assortment of talents David Fincher (Fight Club), Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing), Jesse Eisenberg (Michael Cera’s understudy and star of The Squid and the Whale) and Justin Timberlake (spokesman for Audi, Givenchy and various Sony electronic products). Brandon Scott Gorrell, author of during my nervous breakdown i want to have a biographer present, is a poet whose writing depicts the impact of the internet on our neuroses and whose work is at much at home in the digital sphere as on the printed page. He seemed a natural fit for this review.
The 2010 New York Film Festival
Benjamin Strong09.24.10
Benjamin Strong takes in the offerings from the 48th annual New York Film Festival and finds there’s more to it than the story of the founder of the friend ogling phenom, facebook, in Social Networking––more than Aaron Sorkin’s limited involvement anyway (Sorkin admitted today that the hardest thing for him to do on a day to day basis is to "not do cocaine." What a weirdo…). Billionaire bios aside, many of the films try to straddle the headlines of the world economic downturn, but are still best here when running from middle to high brow. Strong unearths the diamonds amidst the coal (or maybe that order should be reversed, coal over diamonds, beautiful coal?…I dunno, but you’ll know what to see after his preview of a festival that has been "pretty tremendous across the board.")
Film: Trash Humpers
Mark Gluth06.24.10
A sexual, incantatory, violent nightmare. Four devils wander through a largely deserted rural landscape and its interiors destroying objects, tap…
And Everything is Going Fine: Soderbergh on Spalding Gray
Theresa Smalec05.21.10
Actor and monologist Spalding Gray’s suicide was all the more upsetting because he was an artist who seemed so intensely engaged with life. It seemed to say something a little unpleasant about life itself that he should choose to leave it behind. Although as Steven Soderbergh’s new documentary makes abundantly clear, Gray’s lifelong fascination with death was hardly a secret. Theresa Smalec interviewed Gray on January 9th, 2004, the day before his disappearance. Here she reviews Soderbergh’s film which is – appropriately enough – narrated entirely by Gray himself.
Reboots uniting parents and children: pop-cultural apologism
Ben Bush04.27.10
I’ve often wondered if remakes and reboots are timed about a generation apart in order to hit two demographics at once. Parents and children…
