Comedian comes home
Local comic storyteller Sinbad’s ability to pull sidesplitting humor from the PG side of life is a real rarity.
Human Nature
For its first 20 minutes or so, screenwriter Charlie Kaufman’s follow-up to his witty conceptual coup Being John Malkovich looks like it’s going to be one of those wretched failures that become bad-movie legends. But his unique comic sense prevails, peppered with a surprising amount of insight into, well, human nature — with Tim Robbins…
Everything plus the girl … almost
Girl meets girl. Girl takes girl to bed. Girl falls in love. This play, Girl Meets Girl, with its cast of six sexed-up, messed-up lesbians, is more like a “Real World” episode.
Little Otik
Based on an old fairy tale, Czech surrealist Jan Svankmajer’s film tells the story of a barren couple who adopt a tree trunk that bears a grotesque resemblance to a human child, which comes to life and develops a rapacious appetite for human flesh, growing bigger after each grisly meal.
Pay it back with interest
The four well-seasoned members of the Paybacks have finally released their first album — hook-filled, relentless, rife with poppy Cheap Trickisms.
High Crimes
The odd-couple crime-fighting duo seems a cliché. But then along come Ashley Judd and Morgan Freeman — like those requisite surprise witnesses in every hackneyed courtroom drama — to give our worn-out defendant a fresh chance and to dress the old genre up in new clothes.
Rx for the Republicans
Disenchanted Democrats might want to take another look at gubernatorial candidate John Schwarz, a physician and self-described “raging middle-of-the-roader.”
Big Trouble
When the Hollywood machine manufactures a surplus of running gags and plot lines of contrived-to-be-comic coincidences, and assembles them together into a cheap caricature of criminal dark comedies like Pulp Fiction, the result is director Barry Sonnenfeld’s latest model.
Wonderwomen
There’s an edgy hilarity in the visual stereotypes explored in “Women Who Ruled,” at U-M’s Museum of Art … & With the recent death of Joseph Wesner, Detroit’s art community has lost one of its premier creative forces.
The Fluffer
The Fluffer is as convincing as a baritone drag queen with a five o’clock shadow. Its imitation of life in the sex industry (from gay porn to lap dancing) manages brief spurts of recognition, but mostly wobbles along like a first-time floozy in heels. In a word, yuk.
The magic touch?
Q: I am very new to all of this sex stuff and I was wondering if you can help me. I am 18 and I have been going out with this guy, 21, for about three months. He can’t seem to give me manual orgasms. Otherwise we have fabulous chemistry and our relationship is great.…
Unmasking secrecy
Ashcroft loses; Bush-appointed judge rules Haddad deportation hearings open to public and press….
Amour fou
Susan Minot’s novella Rapture (Knopf, 116 pp., $18) boasts one of the most arresting opening passages of this new year. She begins: “He lay back like the ambushed dead, arms flung down at his sides, legs splayed out and feet sticking up, naked.” And Minot spends the remainder of the book describing off and on…
Free will astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): To keep from boring myself, I did a survey to determine the words I use just way too much. The worst offenders are “just” and “way.” Other terms I rely on with embarrassing frequency are the adjectives “gorgeous” and “rowdy,” the verbs “rebel” and “explore,” and the oxymorons “fiercely tender” and…
Mystery cash
Mayor Kilpatrick’s campaign contribution reports still incomplete and overdue….
A Miller’s tale
Even Batman needs a hero, and he’s got one in Frank Miller. Fifteen years ago, when the dominant public image of the Caped Crusader was still TV’s wooden Adam West and his ridiculous bat-gadgets galore, artist and writer Miller refiled the old flying mammal’s once-sharp teeth and recaptured the dangerous violence and nocturnal spirit of…
April 10-16, 2002
10 WED • MUSIC: Les Savy Fav — Let the eye-rolling begin. They met at art school, they moved to Brooklyn, they’ve conjured the “post-” prefix out of armchair music journalists from Trenton to Tulsa while adhering to every little clause of the indie-rock handbook known to man (or at least the 98 percent Anglo,…
Parenthetical rants
Factory-farm regulation will be shaped by manure-stained hands (surprise, surprise)….
Blue and stubborn
The blues scene in Detroit is kind of like the air you breathe; sometimes warm, sometimes cold, sometimes windy, sometimes still, sometimes dirty. But whatever condition it’s in, the blues is always there making noise because the blues is stubborn. Detroit is stubborn too, so you know what that makes Detroit blues, don’t you? This…
Falling fast
This week’s abandoned house serves as a fine example of just how quickly a home can fall into ruin. According to neighbors, this once fine structure on the 2400 block of Helen on Detroit’s east side has been vacant only a year or so. “It was still livable up until last October,” one neighbor said.…
21 and legal
Yes Virginia, we’re all grown up now….
Union jackals
Re-deconstructing the White Stripes and Detroit’s conquest of the UK.
Sex, lies & missing legs
Three really depressing letters this week: A big-talking 24-year-old virgin, a wild woman whose partners run away afterward, and a brain-damaged, love-starved amputee.
Abandoned Shelter of the Week
This week’s abandoned house serves as a fine example of just how quickly a home can fall into ruin. According to neighbors, this once fine structure on the 2400 block of Helen on Detroit’s east side has been vacant only a year or so. “It was still livable up until last October,” one neighbor said.…
Millennial dissent
Today’s peace marchers aren’t just young, dope-smoking flower children — these anti-war advocates are uniting to form a multicultural, multigenerational front.
Family Thai
Rexy’s is an upscale version of a successful formula. The interior is interesting and elegant, with a saltwater fish tank and bold, tropical murals. For an appetizer, try koong houm pa ($6.50), large shrimp stuffed with minced pork, ensconced in a paper-thin wrapper, then briefly fried. Served with a sugary-sweet plum sauce, it’s a lovely…
Letters to the Editor
Art attack At the recent kaBOOM! opening at MONA, I wonder if reviewer Glen Mannisto was paying attention ("Eve of destruction," Metro Times, March 13-19). Apparently, I was a “guy pounding … a cello or bass with a big hammer” instead of a woman who destroyed a cello with first a saw, then an ax.…
Live: City Sounds
Busking in the afterglow of a much-rumored tryst with Kurt Cobain and the subsequent Courtney Love-spun venom, neo-folkie Mary Lou Lord made indie-world waves nearly as soon as she started hum ’n’ strumming on the Boston subway nearly a decade ago. Even then, the wisp-lisped singer wore her heart on other musicians’ record sleeves —…
Motor City madman
Motor City Brewing Works brewpub is at the center of the action, capturing sounds for use on the downtown Detroit rock scene documentary compilation.
Tunes Young People Will Enjoy
The solo debut from Gin Blossoms guitarist/songwriter Jesse Valenzuela will come as something of a surprise to those still trying get incessantly hummable hits like “Til I Hear It From You” and Follow You Down” out of their heads. Recorded in Los Angeles and Memphis with a talented cadre of session pros — whose credits…
Detroit hip hop’s identity crisis
You might do The C-Note Lounge. Detroit, east side, Van Dyke. Monday. Open-mic night. Local MC Uncle Ill is right. Most of the rhyme slingers here are essentially hardcore or gangsta. You’ll hear a fair share of ghetto soliloquies tonight. Call it as you see it, but in another part of town, the vibe is…
A Night in Tunisia
Among the dozen or so can’t-miss recordings that a hipster might pick up involving Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, this one has a special cachet. Recorded on April 8, 1957 for Vik, an RCA subsidiary, it presents Blakey’s hard-bop cadre as it had evolved after the drummer’s association with pianist-composer Horace Silver had dissolved:…
Art at the border
Here’s the next in a series of fresh looks at established art spaces… Artcite’s Christine Burchnal challenges the Art Gallery of Windsor.
Riding wild
Directed by Mexico City native Alfonso Cuarón, this film is a moment-to-moment, alive-with-life, sex-on-the-road-trip — an honest and realistic verbal and sexual intercourse from a teenage perspective within a country Cuarón considers to be in its own adolescence.
