Payneful picture
Tyler Perry, welcome to television. If this medium routinely eats its young, what kind of career devastation could it inflict on Hollywood’s latest self-made success story? Let me tell you, Madea, it ain’t pretty. Tyler Perry’s House of Payne, Perry’s first foray into the half-hour sitcom format, premieres at 9 p.m. tonight (Wednesday, June 6)…
Humble docs to star power
For the past nine years, the Waterfront Film Festival has turned the west Michigan resort town of Saugatuck into prime celebrity gawking territory for one weekend a year. Sure, it’s no Cannes or Park City, but it is filled with moments of “Hey, isn’t that the dude from the Apple vs. PC commercials hanging out…
Crazy or lying?
Q: I’ve got a confusing issue with my girlfriend. Our relationship was going great until I caught her having an emotional affair via MySpace. She swore to never hurt me again. Well, I recently found out that she posted an ad looking for no-strings-attached sex. She responded to several people who contacted her. When confronted,…
Cult appeal
Suddenly First Run Features Critics have compared Diego Lerman’s Suddenly to the work of Jim Jarmusch, and, like Stranger Than Paradise, it’s a road movie involving a distant relative. It’s also shot in grainy black and white and is so funny you forget to laugh. The humor here is dry as a desert, and the…
What’s old is new again
Divisadero, the latest book from Michael Ondaatje, of The English Patient fame, can be looked at as a marvelously poetic skewering of the novel form, or a gigantic game of bait-and-switch. Count me as one of the victims of his sleight-of-hand/slight-of-plot approach. I enjoyed the parts of the book that took place in 1960s northern…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): "Surreal hope" means having faith in a future opportunity that at first appears in an out-of-context situation. Say, for example, that you have an unsettling initial exposure to a stranger who, you will eventually realize, is an important ally. Maybe when you see this person for the first time, he or…
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout #122 spits in the face of records that aren’t cool! The Young Gods — Super Ready / Fragmenté (Ipecac) :: A .44 Magnum on the front cover? That’s not cool. A pile of coke on the back cover? That’s not cool. A whole lotta snotty sleazoid electro-distorto rock in between? Now…
In The Flesh
“Detroit! You’ve waited 24 years for this!” shouted Meatmen frontman (and Touch and Go records founder) Tesco Vee, resplendent in fuzzy white overalls with a bulbous (plastic?) ass protruding out his backside. The sold-out St. Andrew’s crowd who waited almost vainly for the legendary hardcore band Negative Approach were not let down. Though not the…
Motor City Rides
The Muldoons cruise Corktown on Schwinn choppers.
Finding Mona Lisa
Kylan Burrell, 18, is as big as a linebacker, trying to hide his huge frame behind a crowd of petite blond tourists wearing pink cotton. He wants a few minutes away from his friends, who are hyper with excitement, to think about what he’s about to do. If he’s actually man enough to do it.…
Drawing ire
A quick browse through the regular roundups of political cartoons on Slate.com shows why America needs Mikhaela Reid. Let’s be generous and blame format restrictions, deadline pressures and ossified traditions for the general lack of substance and originality, never mind humor, on the daily editorial pages. In any case, in a batch of 200-some cartoons…
Space is still the place
You know that static on the radio dial between stations, where there’s a little bit of a country tune that sounds like it’s being broadcast from 1962, and further in the distance a big band and a conservative crank, but it’s mostly a raging storm of white noise? Well, the other night I heard this…
Dr. K & other suicides
When Dr. Jack Kevorkian walked free last week, years after he should have been released from prison, the sneering armchair critics instantly began bashing him, before he had a chance to utter a word. That’s what happens to any pioneer. There were many who said piously that, yes, Kevorkian may have got the debate going,…
Night and Day
Thursday • 7 Images from Detroit’s Cass Corridor FILM Surrounded by the worst kind of urban blight, an intimate community of artists flourished in Detroit’s Cass Corridor. This documentary by Kathryn Brackett Luchs and Shaun Banget features the perspectives and reminiscences of many of the Cass Corridor artists from the 1960s and 1970s. A 9:30…
From school bells to doorbells
From the porch of her three-bedroom, 1,180-square-foot house, Katherine Maggi looks across the front lawn of one of Royal Oak’s oldest schools, sees a neighborhood of 1950s-style bungalows, towering trees and a park and questions the school district’s plan for transforming it into a block of newer, bigger homes. “We don’t need four-bedroom, huge houses…
The girl’s gone green
It’s an ordinary aluminum-sided house that sits on a packet of grass. Shrubs frame stone steps and metal banisters that lead up to an awning-covered porch. The Ferndale home’s interior is quaintly decorated. A glass cabinet in the corner of the family room is crammed with dolls and figurines; more knickknacks and dolls rest on…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid The Perry Bible Fellowship – by Nicholas Gurewitch
Letters to the Editor
Right about hate Re: Larry Gabriel’s editorial, “Black Christian hate” (Metro Times, May 30) — thanks for telling it like it is. Hate and discrimination are the same no matter how you try to spin it. Growing up fatherless and Baptist in Detroit, I was so confused by the church as a child. I knew…
Rockin’ the bass
It would be easy to pigeonhole bassist Hakim Jami as just an avant-garde musician. For starters, the man played tuba and the bass with Sun Ra’s arkestra. He’s on a number of classic jazz albums, such as trumpeter Don Cherry’s Brown Rice and saxophonist Archie Shepp’s Attica Blues. He wrote the anti-war anthem “Vietcong,” which…
Food Stuff
Full plates for local foodies.
Coccyx power, baby
Jesus. Sexual tension is one thing. So’s groove and grind and funked-up singsong done with enough furrowed-brow fervor and sweat that one can’t help but slide in. These Betty Davis records are like that. The lissome chick who youthified Miles Davis (the years-ahead-of-its-time BDSM anthem “He Was a Big Freak” is said to be about…
Topping it all
Coach Insignia, perched spectacularly on the 71st and 72nd floors of the Marriott Hotel in the Renaissance Center, is not as pricey as rumored, despite the fact that there is no such thing as a cheap lunch at Coach since it is only open for dinner and parking may cost as much as $10 with…
Shrunken Heads
Ian Hunter, the ex-Mott the Hoople mainman, brings us the most American, most “grown-up” rock ‘n’ roll album of the year. And what a sweet, hook-filled gem it is. His last, 2001’s Rant, had a decidedly British political tint to it — Shrunken Heads is 100 percent made-in-the-USA. With guitarist Andy York (Hunter’s current Mick…
Jarvis
After a quarter-century fronting vastly underrated Britpop act Pulp, Jarvis Cocker makes his debut, delivering the best British solo turn since Elvis Costello left the Attractions behind for King of America. Like Costello, Cocker’s become quite the literate pop craftsman, and nary a song goes by that isn’t gilded with a catchy hook or inescapable…
Mr.Brooks
The titular Mr. Brooks (Kevin Costner) is Portland, Ore.’s man of the year, a box mogul (not kidding) with a beautiful house, a beautiful wife (Marg Helgenberger), a beautiful daughter (Danielle Panabaker), and a private studio where he works on ceramics. Oh, and he’s also got this alter ego/invisible friend/whatever named Marshall (William Hurt) who…
Would you myth me?
Despite the death, tragedy and child abuse that usually befall the characters, we read our children fairytales before they go to sleep in hopes that it will send them into slumber full of hope and imagination. As adults, we deny ourselves this luxury, as life’s too-real ordeals make castle-building moot. But there’s something to be…
Mirth defects
Seth Rogan steps from supporting-role shadows to star as Ben Stone, an unemployed slacker who’d rather get stoned with his wise-cracking housemates than anything. With $117 in his bank account and the noble desire to create an Internet web site that documents every cinematic moment of celebrity nudity, Ben is the definition of underachiever. But…
I Love You … For a While
James Auker’s I Love You … For a While is a portrait of a dysfunctional on-again/off-again romance, Auker’s film charts the four-year odyssey of two self-obsessed lovers who seem to have very little in common. Jake is a short and nebbish middle-aged video producer and Morgin is a screwed-up statuesque blond, 15 years his junior.…
Gracie
The latest tribute to the glorifying power of shin guards and gutsy goals, has the heart of a winner, but lacks the flash and skill to be a real box-office contender. The story, and stop me if this sounds familiar, involves a soccer-obsessed suburban family in the late 1970’s, rocked by the death of their…
