Seeing double?
52 Pick-Up MGM John Frankenheimer skillfully translates Elmore Leonard’s amoral Detroit pulp to an excessive Los Angeles cityscape in 52 Pick-Up, one of the better American thrillers of the 1980s. Frankenheimer evokes the seediest environments of the sex-crazed L.A. underground, navigating his adulterous antihero, Roy Scheider, through a vortex of live nude shows, porno theaters…
Night and Day
Wednesday-Sunday • 27-1 Dancing in Summer DANCE The Ann Arbor dance company Terpsichore’s Kitchen (named for the mythological Greek muse of dance) presents an eclectic showcase of seven internationally lauded choreographers. The lineup includes the Brazil-based Lourdes Bastos, who has studied dance with Martha Graham and Alvin Ailey; Detroiter Megan Marie Brunke, whose quirky solo…
God save the party
Barely out of Cooley High School in 1989, Carl Craig began mixing and remixing tracks for Derrick May’s Transmat and Kevin Saunderson’s KMS labels. He was turned on to Prince and the Smiths, to space jazz and raw funk because Craig’s head was tuned into the best music of the day. But it was also…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid The Perry Bible Fellowship – by Nicholas Gurewitch
Pleasure not doubled
p> Q: I would love your advice on how to deal with some news I got recently. At my most recent gyno visit, I found out I have two vaginas. I’d had a number of routine pelvic exams with my old doctor, but she never discovered it. During my first visit with my new doctor,…
Awards a-go-go
New staff and fresh honors for MT
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Nukeout
This is Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout #125 with the news! SIZZLING PLATTER OF THE WEEK: Megadeth – United Abominations (Roadrunner) :: In 2004 Dave Mustaine released The System Has Failed, his damning indictment of the government. Now rock’s foremost political thinker is back with another chapter of his Mustaine Doctrine and he’s angrier than ever:…
Sharing herpes and excrement
I was freaked when my boyfriend gave it to me. He had cold sores on his face, he was a generous partner, they ended up where we might know is a bad place. Didn’t make me "marked," or a slut, or anything, but I still felt so dirty and ashamed that I was frantic when…
Don’t look away!
The idea that contemporary art actually wants to have a conversation might seem strange to a lot of us Tiger fans, American Idol viewers and Anna Nicole Smith buffs. After all, artists always come up with some weirder-than-ever riff on the world we think we know, and art often looks so foreign, so not real,…
Pizza stalwarts
If you’re looking for a thin-crust, fresh-tasting, garlicky, made-with-high-art pizza, Apizza’s ranks with the best in the area. The pies emerge from their brief sojourn in the brick oven irregularly shaped and unequally sliced. Avoiding a mass-produced look is always good, and a variety of big and small slices means that you can match your…
Considering the upside
Ansel Adams once said, “A good photograph is knowing where to stand.” Looking at Christine Hunold’s photographs, it’s often difficult to determine where, exactly, she has chosen to stand, especially when you are told her pictures have not been altered in any way. You know you are looking at something that exists in our world,…
Food Stuff
Full plates for local foodies.
American Life in Poetry
The subdivision; it’s all around us. Here Nancy Botkin of Indiana presents a telling picture of life in such a neighborhood, the parents downstairs in their stultifying dailiness, the children enjoying their youth under the eaves before the passing years force them to join the adults. Geometry All the roofs sloped at the same…
Hitting the G-spot
“To appreciate the Gore Gore Girls’ music,” writes schlock-film mastermind Herschell Gordon Lewis in the sleeve notes to Get the Gore, “you have to have a streak of wildness, a fierce independence of spirit, and an absolute belief in the unusual, the strange, the unpredictable, the offbeat and even the generally unacceptable.” Lewis, the guy…
Let’s pollute our water!
How would you like to drink some liquid pig poop? Sound appetizing? Well, the Michigan Senate voted a couple weeks ago to make it a lot more likely that you’ll do so. I assume you saw that covered in-depth on the news? Oops — silly me. I forgot that the media was tied up with…
Paprika
Connecting the metaphorical dots between dreams and movies, Japanese director Satoshi Kon offers this psychedelic head trip as an animated tonic to the monochromatic complacency of every day life. Boasting stylish animation, this hallucinatory film manages to present a surreal meditation on entertainment in the guise of a blockbuster sci-fi thriller. There’s murder, action, eye-popping…
Airing dirty laundry
There’s a little game I play with a friend via e-mail. When one of us finds news of some weird or outrageous criminal event, we send it to the other along with the question: black or white? It’s a guessing game in which we base our conclusion on the person’s name, where it happened, how…
The Golden Door
The immigrant experience was once a hallmark of cinema. But tales of hardscrabble, old-world families torn apart by feuds, disease and arduous ocean-liner journeys fell out of fashion, it seems, right about the time someone decided to retrofit the genre for a bunch of cutesy animated mice in an insufferable animated flick. But this new…
D-town volcano
It’s at least fascinating, life’s cyclical nature. You grow up in a harsh environment and overcome shitty, life-altering situations over the years. You manage to achieve something. And then, in the midst of success come the sucker punches, trying to knock you down. Jesse “Crane Novacane” Wilson knows this feeling. By the time this story…
1408
After a convincingly stern, ominous warning from a dapper manager played by Samuel Jackson — undisputedly the successor to James Earl Jones’ throne when it comes to stern, ominous warnings — Mike checks in to the offending room number of the film’s title, and begins what may very well be the last night of his…
Motor City Cribs
Aaron Dilloway and his crib with a … a crib!
You Kill Me
A monosyllabic triggerman for the Polish mob in Buffalo, Frank’s drinking problem has started to interfere with his work. In particular, he screws up killing rival Irish mob boss Edward O’Leary (Dennis Farina), who has started muscling in on the family business. Furious, Uncle Roman (Philip Baker Hall) sends Frank to San Francisco to get…
Get yer geek on
Shadowrun Microsoft Role-playing games haven’t changed much: magic, beasts and twentysomething virgins — oh, my! That is, until now. FASA Studios created, and recently released, a first-person shooter based on the cyberpunk (you know, high-tech, low-life) cult pen-and-paper fantasy game from the ’80s. The game also marks Microsoft’s first attempt at cross-platform gameplay between Xbox…
Evan Almighty
A disaster of near biblical proportions, here’s a film proving that faith, hope and massive special effects can’t always overcome the simple righteous virtues of a good script. Lately the heavens have been smiling on Steve Carell, but the proven comedic powerhouse struggles mightily just to keep this creaky vessel on course, though no one…
Harmonic showcase
Who said the music world had to be based on dog-eat-dog competition? Take Livonia-based Suburban Sprawl Music as the counter-example. It has a reputation as a musical collective and a record label where musicians from a seven-band roster all contribute to the operation. Adam Kempa is one of the major players in SSM. Not only…
Blow’d up real good
Veteran N.Y.P.D detective Mclane escorts super-hacker Matt Farrell (Long) to D.C. for questioning by the feds, when all hell breaks loose on the eastern seaboard. The goons who burgle Matt’s bachelor pad and kill his action figure collection are part of a huge conspiracy to short-circuit the nation’s entire electronic infrastructure. See, Matt inadvertently wrote…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): Welcome to Part Two of your outlook for the second half of 2007, Aries. We’re checking up on how you’re progressing with the long-term tasks you were assigned six months ago. I hope now you’re seeing how much you have to learn. This has been and will continue to be an…
Letters to the Editor
p> Thanks on Sicko Your piece today on Michael Moore (“Moore’s grand slam,” Metro Times, June 20) was terrific, really well done. In the past three years I’ve become a rabid health care reform advocate in California and Moore’s film is just what our single-payer campaign ordered. He also went out of his way to…
The Goonies
When this film came out, it was greeted with critical ambivalence and pretty respectable box office numbers, but in the decades since it has achieved cult status, where other Reagan-era romps like, such as Explorers and Monster Squad, have been mostly forgotten. What gives Goonies its legs? Aside from the raw power of nostalgia, the…
Night Tripper
Tonic for the troops I escape into the ladies’ room, where the boys are really missing the fun. Chicks powder each other’s noses, grab ass and insist “ohmygawdyoulooksohot!” with mouths full of bobby pins. It’s a racy mix — part titty-bar backstage, part beauty pageant dressing room, a runway of skimpy corsets, strappy camis and…
Shutter bugged
Photogs arrested over protest snaps await day in court.
A Mighty Heart
Michael Winterbottom is one of the world’s most fascinating directors. Do you know any other filmmaker capable of moving so gracefully from a witty, powdered-wig, literary satire like Tristram Shandy to a grimly authentic agitprop docudrama like Road to Guantanamo? Of course he’s also the bloke who made an awkward mess of indie rock and…
The daily grind
John Koegel on three generations of sausage in Flint.
Traction time
‘Vote caging’ stories snowball.
