FOIA fever
Detroit Metro Airport is busy answering reporters’ requests for info (and reporters are kept busy with the information they receive).
Hart’s War
Begging comparison to that classic World War II POW movie, Stalag 17 (1953), this project escapes all of the latter’s lighthearted shtick and most of its Hollywood dialogue and melodrama, while grimly generating deep questions of race, law and politics that haven’t been exhumed since 1984’s A Soldier’s Story.
Hot art
Artwork is sadly snatched from a local gallery’s dance party….
Italian for Beginners
Serious layer-peeling is required to get to director Lone Scherfig’s pleasantly inconsequential story of three couples fated to eventually get together. It’s a combination of the charming and the grotesque being touted as a saucy romp, but be warned: The sauce has a few poison mushrooms in it.
Bargain hunting
This week’s house at 2592 Drexel only looks abandoned. Sure, the windows are boarded up and the padlocked front door has been kicked in. The back porch has collapsed, and there’s a burgundy Town Car sans wheels rusting in the drive. What’s not apparent to the casual observer is that, until Monday anyway, this property…
John Q
As congenitally flawed as the heart of its titular character’s son, John Q is both a ridiculous and poorly told revenge fantasy on the HMO and hospital industry and a perverted cliché of a fanfare for the common man — with Denzel Washington.
Waste knot
Too stinky and dirty for Canada, Canflow Environmental Services regularly dumps wastewater into Detroit sewers, causing plumbing problems and illnesses for nearby residents who are fed up with the practice.
Freaks and geeks
Makeoutclub.com gets all the ink, but if indie-rock geeks on the Web are what you desire, point your browser to artofthemix.com and bask. Started in December 1997, Art of the Mix operates on the simple, genius premise that nothing starts discussion and community like finding out what’s on everyone else’s mix tape. There are already…
Blue-collar burgers
It may not be the best burger you ever ate in your life, but with 7 ounces of Black Angus beef and a crusty, French Vienna roll, it’s definitely one of the finer bar burgers out there. This basic neighborhood blue-collar bar also serves up a tasty, enormous steak sandwich, plus nightly specials like Wednesday’s…
Freaks and geeks
Makeoutclub.com gets all the ink, but if indie-rock geeks on the Web are what you desire, point your browser to artofthemix.com and bask. Started in December 1997, Art of the Mix operates on the simple, genius premise that nothing starts discussion and community like finding out what’s on everyone else’s mix tape. There are already…
Free will astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): When Time magazine reviewed Ralph Ellison’s book Invisible Man many years ago, it wrote: “Before [this novel] is over, the hero can face up to one of life’s bitterest questions, ‘How does it feel to be free of illusion?’ and give an honest answer: ‘Painful and empty.'” Your experiences during the…
Abandoned Shelter of the Week
This week’s house at 2592 Drexel only looks abandoned. Sure, the windows are boarded up and the padlocked front door has been kicked in. The back porch has collapsed, and there’s a burgundy Town Car sans wheels rusting in the drive. What’s not apparent to the casual observer is that, until Monday anyway, this property…
Building better balls
Deciding between silicone, saline or sagging … Cheesy ideas for lactating breeders … The relative safety of bodily fluids and other excretions … & more.
Tha Almighty Dreadnaughtz
Transcending the glitzy hype and big-pimpin’ bullshit of radio hip hop is nothing more than a course of habit for the Almighty Dreadnautz. Every verse bears witness to hard facts of Detroit life through mile-a-minute rhymes that are as skillfully delivered as they are brutally honest.
Fruits of passion
Q: One recent evening while watching TV and munching from a fruit bowl, my lover and I became amorous. That fruit was spontaneously incorporated into out lovemaking. I placed stemless cherries deep within my lover’s womb, much to her increasing delight. The more fruit, the more pleasure. The only glitch came while I was removing…
Sarah Slean EP
With one sagacious punch to the musical gut, Sarah Slean baffled me into bliss. What rock have I been living under, having not heard of this modern-day descendent of vaudeville’s pianist-torch singer until now? Dark, introspective, lush and with her heart on her sleeve, she’s pumping out cleverly executed and intriguing contemporary equivalents of barroom…
Btoom! btoom!
Alan Oldham’s comic future looks and sounds pretty damn cool….
Letters to a Young Contrarian
For all the sad stories we read of how churlish anti-intellectualism rules the schoolyard and the do-gooders of the PTA, Basic Books offers America’s youth a bracing corrective with its new Art of Mentoring Series. Christopher Hitchens, columnist and commentator extraordinaire, delivers the inaugural volume. Post-Sept. 11, his extended highbrow advice column for Vanity Fair…
Primal urges, panoptic splurges
A new season, a new Metro Galleryscope: An eminently doable art tour of five sites in the Cultural Center and Eastern Market, prepping you for the winds of March and the warm rays not far behind.
Global
Carl Cox is one of electronic music’s anomalies. One of the most popular DJs in the world, “Coxy’s” a ubiquitous presence in the biggest clubs and magazines. Unlike other European DJs who’ve earned his level of success, when you look at the stats (i.e., his record selection and DJ skills), it’s clear that Cox deserves…
Letters to the Editor
A fairer shake I don’t know much about exterminators, but I do know something about arbitration and your story ("Sprayed away," Metro Times, Feb 6-12) was a bit unfair. The story mentioned that pre-hearing exchange of information is more limited in arbitration than in litigation, that arbitration decisions are not a matter of public record…
Rock It to the Moon
Electrelane makes instrumental surf music for people who get existential nausea just looking at the ocean. The opener, “Invisible Dog” (which neatly calls up both the spirit and the word of the Stooges without quoting or aping), and delicately handled references to such synth cheese tunes as Hot Butter’s “Popcorn” keep a smile (or at…
Destroying Detroit’s future
The city’s school reforms aren’t working; teachers say things are getting even worse under the new regime. And until that changes, Detroit itself can never improve.
Capricornia
It seems Midnight Oil has its niche pretty well staked out on this, its 14th studio album. Nightmare Before Christmas-looking front man Peter Garrett spits political-environmental screeds at you as his band mates play some of the most anthemic music ever recorded. Midnight Oil’s music is all about the chorus — the group takes the…
Butterflies & broken glass
Spending Valentines’ Day with Niagara, fruity martinis and Padded Cells … plus exotic winged creatures and smokin’ bigwigs … & later in the week, a sweaty, bloody, triple bill of Detroit rock (we Kid you not).
Utopian Dream
Jimi Tenor may not be saddled with an arkestra, but he and Sun Ra have bought the same one-way ticket into space. The bespectacled underground Finn’s cult popularity multiplied with his mid-’90s jump to Warp and the release of Intervision. But Tenor has been carving his signature into sound since the late ’80s with Jimi…
A jury-rigged system
To allow a racially and socioeconomically biased criminal-justice system to sentence anyone to death is a crime all by itself.
Très cool
Poised between the last days of film noir and the beginning of the French New Wave, Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1955 cult item (translation: "Bob the Gambler") manages to seem both prescient and nostalgic. It’s the kind of film where the body count can be rather high but the overall mood remain one of easy insouciance.
Bar none
Rabih Haddad files his own lawsuit while awaiting trial in solitary confinement….
Crossroads
Who was it that gave popular singers carte blanche to act in films? Move over, girls, because the ubiquitous Britney Spears is following suit. She’s already got a built-in, primarily female teenybopper audience, so the obvious choice is to direct the film to what interests them. In this light, it’s just left of brilliant.
Can you say "ethics"?
Citizens hope to keep Wayne County officials on the straight and narrow with a new campaign contribution law….
Metropolis
Not a remake of the 1926 German silent classic by Fritz Lang, this Japanese anime explosion inspired by Osamu Tezuka’s 1949 manga comic of the same name is set in a sci-fi future and combines detective-story action with political intrigue on the way to foregrounding science-vs.-morality issues a la Frankenstein. It’s absolutely spectacular.
