Ellie Parker
To call this actor Scott Coffey’s four-year labor of love would insinuate that the movie was well-made, possibly exquisitely photographed or even meticulously edited. Ain’t so. Most junior-high class projects have higher production quality. *Ellie Parker* is very much evidence of what one well-connected man can do when he scrapes together a few big names…
Million-dollar baby
Matt Keil is the first one to admit that his day job, owner of a management consulting company for the automotive industry, isn’t exactly rock ‘n’ roll. But the truth is Keil’s overwhelming need to kick out the jams has been strong ever since he was a pup taking piano lessons and singing for his…
The World’s Fastest Indian
Anthony Hopkins sports a convincing New Zealand accent in his role as the eccentric and determined Burt Munro. Living in a cinderblock shed and endlessly revamping his custom-built 40-year-old Indian motorbike with homemade parts, Burt saves his pennies for a trip to Bonneville. Saddled with a bum ticker, bad hearing and more gruff charm than…
Talkin’ about a revolution
Author to give chat on Chavez in Detroit’s Cass Corridor
Something New
Forget the generic title and the opening sequence that looks like a Massengill ad. This film has a lot more to offer than the usual chick flicks churned out by Hollywood’s lily-white starlet machine. This handsomely shot first feature from former Mariah Carey music-video director Sanaa Hamri has the look and feel of a conventional…
Time for a press with a spine
We like to think of our press as the freest in the world — and for the most part it is. But it is far from the bravest. That was proved last week when newspapers across Europe stood up to the threat of terrorism and reprinted a dozen cartoons showing the Prophet Muhammad. (The original…
A Good Woman
Helen Hunt seems miscast from the first shot: Introduced in a shrouded, mysterious profile, she does manage to look like a femme fatale; but as soon as her chirpy voice and birdlike features come into view, the movie loses its footing and never recovers. Her Mrs. Erlynne is a gold-digger first seen fleeing New York…
Backslash
Crying uncles — Does the social stigma that grown men shouldn’t cry really still exist? Men have feelings too, you know. America’s latest larger-than-life badass, Tony Soprano, has proven once and for all that even the toughest mob bosses need to shed a few tears from time to time. The site oldmencrying.com is doing its…
When a Stranger Calls
Anyone with the most basic knowledge of horror films — or urban legends, for that matter — should know the secret to this film before they walk into the theater. A distracted teenage girl, babysitting a pair of slumbering kids on a dark and stormy night, gets a crackly phone call: “Have you checked the…
Proactive
Mission possible — Paul Rogat Loeb mortared together a sturdy book about hope in The Impossible Will Take a While. Subtitled A Citizen’s Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, Loeb’s 2004 publication is an anthology of poets, memoirists, essayists, fiction writers and others who loosely fit under a progressive umbrella. The writings of…
Buffett, not buffet
Taking its name, of course, from the Jimmy Buffett munchies anthem, the place is suitably decked out in mass-produced tropical fish art, palm-thatched trellises, seashells and regulation tiki bar stuff. They concoct all manner of fun boat drinks using Hershey’s syrup, lots of flavored vodkas, rums and sticky liqueurs, garnished with baby bananas, pineapple and…
Let ’em eat bratwurst
How the other half parties: Inside the Super Bowl fest for the homeless
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): Happy Valentine Daze, Aries! As I meditated on what advice would be most likely to energize your love life, I thought of what Clarissa Pinkola Estes said in her book *Women Who Run With the Wolves*. "The desire to force love to live only in its most positive form," she wrote,…
Gasbag deluxe
How serious are Bush’s plans to end America’s oil addiction?
Ask the Food Dude
Letting meat sit and slicing without sticking.
Under our skin
They say that spring Means just one thing To little love birds We’re not above birds Let’s misbehave. —Cole Porter, “Let’s Misbehave” (1928) ‘Cause I’m the jazzy type And I only let you eat it if you ask me right Well more juice than a grape when you peel the skin But yo it…
Art Bar
Poets are experts at holding mirrors to the world. Here Anne Caston, from Alaska, shows us a commonplace scene. Haven’t we all been in this restaurant for the Sunday buffet? But by zooming in on the joint of meat and the belly-up fishes floating in butter, she compels us to look more deeply into what…
Of Super Bowl zombies and my big fat ass
Nothing says “Are you ready for some football?” like a gaping head wound. Or legions of the undead, lurching through the Winter Blast in search of braaaaaaaiiiiiins. Maybe zombies and the Super Bowl don’t go together like peanut butter and jelly, or Rush Limbaugh and painkillers, but the official Zombie Walk of Super Bowl XL…
Head Cheese
The dark, haunting ballads of husband-and-wife duo the Handsome Family could rival the dusky, brimstone-besmirched songs of Nick Cave as downers, were it not for a pervasive sense of — if not redemption — possibility on the brink of apocalypse. Brett and Rennie Sparks populate their lingering, twilight country with murder ballads, allegorical animal stories…
Anatomy of an artwork
Pieter Brueghel the Elder — the name sounds like it belongs to a man who painted proud pictures in churches. But the truth is the 16th century Flemish artist was fascinated by the art of the everyday. He knew that how people act in public is a gauge of how their society functions, and that…
Getting lippy
You can smooch a man all you want in the Hoosier State — as long as you’re clean shaven. It’s illegal for a man with a mustache to "habitually kiss human beings" in Indiana. "Kiss my ass!" It’s a rare and special insult that still packs a punch after hundreds of years. This one dates…
Turning porn on its ear
In the animated film My Sexual Harassment, a young salaryman named Mochizuki is working at his computer late one night when his boss, Mr. Honma, gives him an unexpected reach-around while teaching him to use a mouse. “But Mr. Honma,” Mochizuki protests, “I’m not gay!” “Neither am I,” Honma chuckles, while probing farther into Mochizuki’s…
Man wants lowdown on going down
Q: I am a straight, monogamous man with normal sexual predilections. I don’t need to find someone to pee on me, paddle my butt, tell me about fucking other men or anything else too weird. So why am I writing to you? First, I wanted to thank you for printing all the letters from the…
Mondo libido
Buddha had it right. “Of all the worldly passions,” the gentle genius wrote, “lust is the most intense. All other worldly passions seem to follow in its train.” So it makes sense to open our series on the Seven Deadly Sins with everybody’s favorite, the one that made Jimmy Carter confess to a lot of…
Gore again?
Buzz starting to build around former vice prez
Night and Day
Wednesday • 8 Syncopation THEATER Allan Knee’s new romantic comedy, Syncopation, is an endearing story about a Henry, a Jewish meatpacker who dreams of becoming a championship ballroom dancer. When he places an ad for a dance partner, the floodgates are opened to a world of awkward interpersonal goings-on and old-fashioned hilarity. Opens Friday, Feb.…
Food Stuff
A full plate for local foodies.
Joker’s wild
He’s the “Black Hitler.” He’s the man who “dreamed of bloodbaths while he slept in math class.” He’s Esham, the Detroit rap icon who’d like to give his girl a rose, then “slit her throat and watch her shake until her eyes close.” And right now Esham’s fixin’ to make pretty for the camera. It’s…
Letters to the Editor
Throwing the book at him Re: Your story about James Frey, “King Con” (Metro Times, Jan. 25), I’m most entertained by the fact that readers of his book actually claim to have been “inspired” by this man, even after everything short of a confession has been produced to prove that their so-called “inspiration” is a…
A lynching unpunished
Keith Beauchamp’s film is a bare-bones documentary that boasts little style or artistry but profound relevance and importance. Using talking heads, period photos and archival footage, this by-the-book investigation lacks the finesse or insightful probing of more accomplished filmmakers, but benefits from the sheer visceral impact and historical weight of Till’s appalling death.
Lady on the edge
Billie Holiday, one of America’s greatest jazz singers, lived a life of hardship. She was forced to contend with racism her whole life, and died at age 44 after years of drug abuse. Her bittersweet story is told in Lanie Robertson’s short, sweet and sorrowful play Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill. Unfortunately, Plowshares…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid The Perry Bible Fellowship – by Nicholas Gurewitch
Caché
Nobody can wring terror out of the mundane like Michael Haneke. In the writer-director’s latest exercise in minimalist dread, the director puts the screws to yet another seemingly happy, upper-middle class Parisian family, and doesn’t let up, not even after the movie’s final credit rolls. Not a whole lot actually happens in Cache: If you’re…
Meeting place
At first glance around the gallery, George N’Namdi’s pairing of art by Gary Kulak and Allie McGhee might appear to be a strange one. Kulak, who was educated at theory-based art schools here and in New York City (Cranbrook and Hunter College, respectively), has always displayed welded-steel sculpture with an awareness of its status as…
Kinks and more kinks
More popular than yaoi, hentai (Japanese for “perverted”) is a catch-all term for comic books or animation about weird kinky sex, sometimes involving alien demons with tentacles. While yaoi is exclusively male-on-male, hentai can feature anything from male/female to female/female to female/tentacle beast. Thankfully, animated porn has one main advantage over the live version: Some…
