Final Destination 3
The Final Destination franchise isn’t so much of a series of horror films; it’s more of a big-screen teen meat grinder. Every three years around Valentine’s Day, we get a sampling of attractive, clueless high schoolers, each one chewed up and spit out at the audience in a new and utterly disgusting way. Like a…
Mortality play
Andy Kirshner still isn’t sure how to categorize his dazzling multimedia spectacle, The Museum of Life and Death. “If I call it music theater, everyone thinks it’s Cats. If I call it opera, it sounds like big people in breastplates with horns on their heads. If I call it performance art, people think it’ll be…
Drive-by history
Stewart McMillin’s tour of Detroit’s black heritage.
The Pink Panther
Though lacking Sellers’ pokerfaced brilliance, Steve Martin still has the comedic chops to impress. What he needs is a better director. Blake Edwards, who helmed the original Pink Panther movies, had a genuine gift for slapstick. Unlike Levy, he knew how to set a gag in motion and give his actors the room to play…
Busy Tone
The recent death of the comic Zen Buddhist and avant-garde artist Nam June Paik illuminates the appearance of his colleague, Yasunao Tone, who’s in town this week to launch Windsor’s Media City festival. An iconoclastic composer, writer and performance artist, Tone, like Paik, has helped define avant-garde art-making. In his 40-year career, he’s worked with…
Curious George
The vibrant, simple animation is hardly lavish; some scenes closely mirror H.A. Rey’s black-and-white pages with just splashes of primary colors and spare backgrounds. A lot is left to the imagination, which suits George perfectly.
The story follows the Man with a Yellow Hat (whose name is Ted; who knew?) on an architectural hunt to…
What was that smell?
Eastern Market gets a noxious surprise
Void in the suburbs
The best way to experience the music of Thomas Koner is not to experience it as music at all. That is, merely conventional listening or looking is less important to the process than you might think. The German electronic composer, who began adding visual elements to his live performances a few years ago, creates music…
Minimum wage, maximum effort
Can activists put wage referendum before Michigan voters?
Art Bar
We constantly compare one thing with another, or attempt to, saying, “Well, you know, love is like … it’s like … well, YOU know what it’s like.” Here Bob King, who lives in Colorado, takes an original approach and compares love to the formation of rocks. Geology I know the origin of rocks, settling out…
Proactive
Heat-seeking humans — The second annual Heat the Streets and Walk for Warmth will be held Saturday, Feb. 25, in downtown Detroit. The event will raise money to help keep the heat on for hundreds of low-income families that have been hit hard by rising energy costs. Sponsored by the Detroit Department of Human Services,…
Metro Retro
Four years ago this week in Metro Times: Curt Guyette reports on the movement to adopt federal voting reforms. Thousands of demonstrators journeyed to Washington, D.C., the previous month to protest the inauguration of George W. Bush. Upon arrival they were given copies of the Voters’ Bill of Rights, a 10-point program promoted by a…
Farewell, J-Dilla
Last Tuesday, DJ Houseshoes, DJ Dez, Slum Village’s T3 and hundreds of others gathered at Northern Lights Lounge in Detroit to celebrate the release of producer J-Dilla’s latest album, Donuts. It was Dilla’s birthday. The next day, Houseshoes traveled to New York for a release party at Joe’s Pub. Wajeed, of Platinum Pied Pipers, DJ’d,…
Watchdog out
John Eddings sits at his desk, surrounded by emptiness. There are no personal touches in his office here on the first floor of the old Macomb County Building in Mount Clemens, its walls bereft of the usual photos, diplomas and awards. The only thing on his desk is a beat-up computer that he pecks at…
The rest of her
Everyone knows her as the Vagina Monologues lady. She’s Eve Ensler, and all it took was a one-woman show about the female nether regions to set the theater world on its head. Since the play debuted in 1996, countless independent and community theater productions have made the once-controversial production a household name: It’s official, the…
Meditation on Monk
Jazz pianist Thelonious Sphere Monk — the “high priest of bebop” — was a man who thought deeply and spoke economically. So it’s interesting that Laurence Holder and Rome Neal, writers and co-directors of the play Monk, would examine the revolutionary musician’s life and work through a one-man play that calls for a great deal…
Letters to the Editor
Too much man-ass I’m writing to you today to comment on the Metro Times cover for Feb. 1. I enjoy reading the magazine weekly and enjoy many of the stories. I think that the picture on the cover is in bad taste and does not represent the Super Bowl or the city of Detroit. During…
Backslash
Derby dos and don’ts — So how does this roller derby thing work anyway? Just about any derby Web site will supply you with the rules and regulations, but the Texas Lonestar Rollergirls (the first group of women to start the roller derby resurrection) have a nice one at txrd.com/rules.htm. Boiled down, there are five…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid The Perry Bible Fellowship – by Nicholas Gurewitch
Food Stuff
Full plates for local foodies.
Red lipstick and rink rash
Lisa Rosett leans over, revealing the large tattoos on her ample cleavage, and coquettishly extends her fishnet-clad leg, demurely pointing to the sundry purple bruises blooming over her shins and knees. Sassy short skirts and skinned knees, black eyes and glitter-flecked false eyelashes: It’s the fabulously I-don’t-fuck-around fashion statement favored by the Detroit Derby Girls.…
Arts and crash
Birthplace of College for Creative Studies gets knocked down
The schtick remains the same
We’ve been waiting a year to hear Dick Valentine scream it. “Your body is something I might not survive, so bite me. Bite me!” But now that, um, “Bite Me” and Señor Smoke have finally been released stateside — the album hit the UK more than a year ago, but label issues (i.e. not having…
Head Cheese
The daughter of singer-songwriter Greg Brown, she’s a fine musician in her own right. Her dusky and languid tunes initially won comparisons to Cowboy Junkies’ Margo Timmons. But Pieta Brown (pronounced Pee-etta) has a grittier approach on her latest, In the Cool, recalling Lucinda Williams’ rawer material. (Not entirely surprising: Her producer-guitarist-boyfriend Bo Ramsey was…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): In his book *And They All Sang*, Studs Terkel interviewed jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie. "When people say, ‘I don’t understand your music,’" reported Gillespie, "I say, ‘Don’t try to understand it, just try to *feel* it.’" That’s excellent advice to keep in mind as you weave your way through the complicated,…
The Cellar Door Sessions 1970
With their furious momentum, Miles Davis’ early fusion bands have often been compared to freight trains. And as the Greek philosopher Heraclitus said, you can’t step in front of the same fusionoid freight train twice — certainly not if it’s a great one. That’s why the world needs a six-CD set of Miles Davis’ 1970…
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout
Did you turn on, tune in and doze off two Sunday’s ago waiting for the Super Bowl halftime show to begin just so you could watch England’s oldest hit makers, the Rolling Stones? So did I, if only to confirm with my very own eyes that they were still at it. “The Rolling Stones lasting…
Melody unchained
“Lover’s rock” is filled with enough romantic sexual innuendo to make anyone disrobe once the needle drops. See, lover’s rock is the Jamaican version of baby-making soul. One of the genre’s pioneers, Ken Boothe, is flying in straight from Jamaica and headlining an evening of total, um, geniality, with area rocksteady singers Willie Ferguson, Clement…
Babies Makin’ Babies Vol. 2: The Misery Strikes
Amir “?uestlove” Thompson may be best known as the Roots’ ‘fro’d pick-sporting drummer and Fiona Apple, Jay-Z and John Mayer collaborator, but he moonlights as a crate-digging DJ, as first heard on 2002’s Babies Makin’ Babies comp of soul and funk. This time out, ?uestlove puts together an anti-Valentine’s Day comp of heartbroken soul cuts…
The offal truth
Brain food: Taking it from the pate to the plate.
Playing on the past
When Kim Carney’s mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and needed to go into care, the Michigan playwright took that experience and carved out a plot. Moonglow is her sad, poignant and mercilessly funny play about growing old and losing your mind. Maxine is a sick and elderly woman who veers from stubborn to aggressive,…
Bittersweet melodies
With Townes Van Zandt as the subject for her first documentary, Margaret Brown faces the challenge of telling a good story as well as reaching past the musician’s cult of adoring fans to entice the ignorant masses. Surprisingly, her modest but masterful reflection on the Van Zandt’s life and music delivers on both accounts.
How do we save our economy?
Politically, I have never been a big fan of L. Brooks Patterson, who got his start as the headline-grabbing attorney for a group of parents who were opposed to busing, way back in 1971. There were many problems with busing, and those in favor of it failed miserably to make their case. However, everybody knew…
Katrina & racism: A double whammy
Hurricane Katrina ripped apart New Orleans and other areas of the Gulf Coast in late August of last year. By mid-January, author, intellectual and Detroit native Michael Eric Dyson had not only finished writing a 200-page book about the disaster, but had it published. Anyone who has ever written a book and attempted to get…
Sisters in Law
This riveting documentary was filmed in a primarily Muslim village in Cameroon, a former British and French colony that’s considered one of the more stable African countries. It focuses on four court cases prosecuted by Judge Beatrice Ngassa and heard by state prosecutor Vera Ntuba. The crimes aren’t pretty, including the cases of Ladi and…
Night and Day
Wednesday • 15 Andriessen MUSIC Nonconformist Dutch composer Louis Andriessen comes to Ann Arbor this week for a night of unusual fun. The concert begins at 7:30 p.m. with a nine-minute work for carillon outside of Burton Memorial Tower (881 N. University Ave., Ann Arbor), and continues in the Power Center (121 Fletcher St., Ann…
Swann song
Quincy Jones suggested in his autobiography that the difference between 1950s-era jazz and hip-hop artists is this: Most jazz artists were more concerned with mastering their craft. Hip hop is driven as much by profit as aesthetic. Take 25-year-old Detroit emcee Owen “Swann” Raines. The year 2005 was one hell of a ride for him.…
Firewall
Like Red Bull cocktails or Karl Rove, the high-tech thriller is a stubborn scourge that isn’t going away anytime soon. Whether it’s Sandra Bullock in The Net or Ryan Phillipe in Antitrust, the formula is always the same: Take your standard wronged-everyman thriller, add some blatantly false computer jargon that will sound authentic to 90…
I’ll take you there
Xavier Lukomski’s Bridge over the Drina, about the aftermath of the Bosnian war, is not a typical feature-length film. There’s no character-driven plot starring an actor who lost 50 pounds and broke his back to portray a tortured hero. It’s pretty short, only about 20 minutes long, and it isn’t exactly what you’d call dramatic…
I remember, mama
Q: I’m a man in my early 30s and I have never been in a serious relationship. I started seeing a therapist to “get to the bottom” of my relationship problems and her opinion is that they may stem from an incident that happened years ago. I was raised by a single mom. When I…
