The kids are all righteous
Michiganfest 2000 is a weekend-long celebration of the do-it yourself youth scene, mixing indie and punk rock with politics and community activism.
Affairs of the heart
Balancing heartfelt lyrical honesty with angst-filled pop-punk, some might call it emo… but Chicago’s Alkaline Trio would rather not be shoved into any particular category.
Burning the midnight rubber
Go Kill Mice is what happens when worlds collide. Comprised of Northern Californians transplanted to the heart of Detroit’s Woodbridge neighborhood, Starlite Desperation is that rare, freakish rock ‘n’ roll animal that stands astride garage-punk tradition and howling, postmodern paranoia, and actually manages to pull the best from both worlds. Go Kill Mice is a…
A fine romance
Folkie offspring Rufus Wainright belts out pop arias to love….
Barest essentials
Cranbrook reconsiders minimalism: its pare-down strategies and mega-attitudes….
Earth
Writer-director Deepa Mehta’s Earth takes place in India in 1947, when the British withdrawal from that country allowed the long-brewing animosity between the Hindus and the Muslims to boil over into a bloody religious war. Careful not to take sides (and how could it with so much mutual bloodshed?), the film is both overly schematic…
Erin Brockovich
Julia Roberts does two things really well – smile and sass – and her best performances are in roles which utilize her sweet tartness (Pretty Woman, Mystic Pizza). In a film such as Mary Reilly, where her character is glum and passive throughout, Roberts is rendered utterly lifeless. But in Erin Brockovich, Roberts’ trademark spunk…
Final Destination
Final Destination, a film about outwitting death, is an example of a good concept in the hands of a filmmaker who goes over the top to appeal to the low expectations of its teen audience. Soon after Alex Browning (Devon Sawa) and his classmates board a plane headed to Paris, Alex gets a vision of…
Such a Long Journey
Canadian director Sturla Gunnarsson’s latest film is like some ill-advised mix of Arthur Miller and Kafka, a strange combination of domestic drama and shadowy intrigue that never quite gels. The film is set in Bombay in 1971 – the year that rebellious struggles in East Pakistan were leading to the foundation of the independent state…
Sick sad world
Dave Cooper is among those artists, from Bosch to R. Crumb, whose aesthetic celebrates unsightliness. His work is so disturbing that Weasel #2 has been banned in Cooper’s native Canada. The centerpiece of Weasel involves an unsatisfied children’s book illustrator who receives a grant for a gallery showing of erotic fine art. He calls the…
Pastor Hall
The most impressive thing about Pastor Hall, an obscure British film directed by Roy Boulting and first released in 1940, is its explicitness in depicting Nazi brutality and its specificity in presenting Jews as the prime target. In the years prior to the war, movies tended to treat the subject of Hitler’s Third Reich rather…
