Mag-nificent reading
Notable news pieces of the summer.
My Best Friend
Antiques dealer François Coste (Daniel Auteuil) is an expert at building and maintaining professional relationships, but oblivious to the inner lives of those closest to him (including both his teenage daughter and girlfriend). Yet François is shocked when, at a group dinner, his business partner Catherine (Julie Gayet) asserts that he has no real friends.…
Finding the button
Introducing the man in the boat.
Letters to the Editor
Light bulbs changed Your recent piece, “Too reel for words,” included this quote from Tom Verlaine: “Once during an interview, Byrds founder Roger McGuinn explained to me that the difference between digital and analog sound is like the difference between an incandescent light bulb and a fluorescent one. The incandescent one is cycling, going on…
Cannibal! The Musical
Based on the infamous true story of Alfred Packer, a lone survivor of a disastrous 1870’s prospecting expedition, Cannibal is just as goofy and macabre as is title; a bizarre, violent collision of Ravenous and Oklahoma!, with immortal songs like “Let’s Hang the Bastard!,” “Shpadoinkle,” and the tender, “When I Was on Top of You.”…
Boys of summer
Oh, Detroit brothers and sisters, where art thou? When we say Detroit, we mean Detroit as a soundscape with a bass-drum pulse, where a city’s bleak reality was remixed with grand myths and legends to create the greatest technopolis the world has known. From here the music spread virally from parties in west side backyards,…
Night and Day
Wednesday-Saturday • 18-21 Ann Arbor Art Fair ART High art and haberdashery clutter Ann Arbor streets for the 48th year in a row, providing the near-500,000 annual visitors ample outlets to expand their minds and empty their wallets. In addition to tents and booths filled with craft and sustenance, street performances range from belly dancing…
The 7th Voyage of Sinbad
Ray Harryhausen, protégé of King Kong creator Willis O’Brien, was the grand master of the grueling process of stop-motion animation, creating fearsome monsters by hand and giving them life through ingenuity and sweat. Among the most beloved of the Harryhausen canon is this immortal 1958 adventure, an action-packed, candy-colored spectacle that retains its charm even…
Potter gets played
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix EA Games Movie-based video games are but a facet of the corporate entertainment marketing machine. See, movie studios pay millions to marketing firms to produce a surplus of hype — commercials, newspaper ads, billboards, press etc. This, in turn, translates to free advertising for the game developer…
Lick it up
“Acting is a reee-ally interesting thing to do,” Juliette Lewis says slowly of her “other” profession, in the same way an accountant might answer when asked if he digs his mind-numbing gig. That’s probably why the actress — probably best known as serial killer Mallory Knox in Natural Born Killers — traded Hollywood for the…
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout
What do Danzig and Alice Cooper have in common?
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid The Perry Bible Fellowship – by Nicholas Gurewitch
Colder than ice
My two designated drinkers and I were sitting in Roseville’s Club 11, talking to the owner about our mission. With digital thermometers in hand, the whole Metro Times editorial department had fanned out across the Detroit area, hitting bars, taverns, lounges, pubs, saloons and at least one former speakeasy in search of the region’s coldest…
Quick pours
Outdoor living Sidetrack has a split-personality: Scowling regulars swill brews at the bar, but grandparents in matching polos order hamburgers on the balmy patio outside under party-colored umbrellas. But on this warm weeknight in Ypsi’s Depot Town, the light conversation and clinking glasses are suddenly interrupted by a leather-clad motorcyclist lighting up his cherry-red hog…
What the ‘riot’ meant
Forty years on, the root problems remain.
Shock treatment
Kansas City Confidential MGM Phil Karlson’s Kansas City Confidential is a veritable wax museum of film noir heavies, faces etched in the B-movie lexicon but rarely attaining A-list status. Look, there’s Preston Foster as an ex-cop turned criminal mastermind who’s rallying together three deadbeats with nothing left to live for except a foolproof bank heist.…
The cold facts
Why Americans like it like that.
Goodbye
Ambient music is hard to do right. For every Aphex Twin or Global Communication — or Brian Eno for that matter — there are plenty of records that are so chilled-out, they’re cold and amount to little more than sonic wallpaper. Ulrich Schnauss has been an exception. Through no fault of his own, his introduction…
Out of jail — then what?
Back on the block, Detroit’s ex-felons have few options.
Deal of a meal
Syrian-born owner Ziad Atasi’s take on Middle Eastern standards compares favorably with those found in many of his white-tablecloth, sit-down competitors. Not that you can’t sit down in his plain, tiny storefront — he can accommodate 10 diners at the narrow counters along the walls and windows. But most of his patrons are happy to…
Paint by colors
Hugh Masekela joins Detroit’s Concert of Colors
The Velvet who?
This is a psychedelic pop record in the most attractive sense. Not the soft California weirdness of Brian Wilson, though that’s what the name suggests — this is heavier, noisier; “dangerous” in an immediately palpable way. A Velvet Underground comparison is hard to avoid, and in this case that’s good; Heroes & Villains have taken…
Surge in denial
Reading the White House’s report, released last week, on whether the January 2007 “surge” of 30,000 troops is working, you’d never know that a real-life, flesh-and-blood war is being waged in Iraq, with hundreds of people maimed and killed every day. You’d never know that May 2007 was the most violent month in that violent…
Motown Remixed Vol. 2
Motown Remixed Volume 1 was a treat because it let remixers and musicians take the originals and jam them out without reinventing the wheel. King Britt turned Edwin Starr’s “War” into a Fela-ish bit of Afro-beat, sure, but the Roots pretty much just jammed along with Martha and the Vandella’s version of “I Heard It…
Stage door
Summer’s supposed to be a time when people hit the great outdoors, but nobody seems to have told it to metro Detroit’s small theaters, many of which are continuing to produce plays and hold inventive gigs as summer wears into its dog days. At Detroit’s Zeitgeist Gallery, there’s more new art than the 10-foot-tall sculptures…
Daydream Nation Deluxe Anniversary Edition
Four years before Nevermind made alt-rock mainstream, Daydream Nation put alt-rock in the underground unconscious. Until then, Sonic Youth was a regional phenomena, a New York art-damage combo whose droning guitar tunings and dirge-y songwriting saw them lead a soon-to-influence scuzz-rock scene that included Swans and Live Skull. Twenty years on, Daydream Nation sounds more…
When in Rome
Design matters Anyone who says that civic life doesn’t matter to Detroiters hasn’t driven down Michigan Avenue during a summer afternoon, when folks flock to sit in lawn chairs and barbecue in Roosevelt Park, in front of the abandoned train station. Those who assume Detroiters have no appreciation for well-designed urban spaces haven’t been stuck…
Native son
Ten Canoes is an intoxicating look at the pre-colonial world of Australia’s aboriginal people that never falls into the staid ethnography of a National Geographic project. Director Rolf de Heer (The Quiet Room, The Tracker) seems to have simply wandered onto a timeless landscape and captured the inner workings of a tribal community. Ten Canoes…
Motor City Cribs
Starling Electric moves across town.
Introducing the Dwights
Why is it that movies about comedians are never very funny? In the Aussie import Entertaining the Dwights, Brenda Blethyn plays Jean, a once-promising stand-up queen whose routine is full of hoary old puns involving ironing, menopause and sack-of-shit husbands. To watch her, you’d think Roseanne never happened: Her jokes sound more like crusty Henny…
Food Stuff
Full plates for local foodies.
Eagle vs. Shark
Lily (co-writer Loren Horsely) is a painfully timid fast-food cashier with a mad crush on video game store clerk, Jarrod (Jemaine Clement). Crashing his “Come As Your Favorite Animal” party, she ends up sleeping with the slack-jawed blowhard and inexplicably falls in love. Their relationship is tested when Jarrod reveals his deepest secret: He has…
Tiger tales
Stadium decision postponement a good call.
Joshua
Occupying a space somewhere between psychological drama and full-blown horror, the film is — for about two-thirds of its running time, at least — a terrifically queasy examination of what happens when parental neglect, pre-teen curiosity and the suffocating sanctimony of in-laws collide, just after the arrival of a newborn. Director and co-writer George Ratliff,…
