Everybody Says I’m Fine
Rahul Bose’s hit-and-miss fantasy about a mind-reading hairdresser is set largely in an upper-class Bombay salon. Up to the point that Bose loses control of his material, this is an odd and interesting film.
Tragic twins
Everybody’s favorite existential prince of Denmark is once again bemoaning and bewailing onstage in Detroit. This time, however, his fate is not only sculpted by Shakespeare, but by the politically impelled pen of German playwright Heiner Müller in his radical, self-conscious and self-critical 1977 play, Hamletmachine. Director Jennifer George added her hand into the classic-modern…
Suddenly
Argentinian writer/director Diego Lerman’s feature debut, filmed in black and white, begins with a certain harshness and then melts into something bittersweet. The directorial choices go a great distance in making a slight story seem nearly profound, with a layer of visual drama and poetry to the film.
Heart on sleeve
It is, oddly enough, one of the most wasteful elements of the modern age, this unfortunate tendency to preserve every blip, fart, wonky note, missed cue, demo version and deleted scene produced in our nation’s film and music studios. How many have you seen?: DVDs featuring the screen tests of (nice enough but) thoroughly unremarkable…
Deathbed: The Bed That Eats
“I’ve been imprisoned behind my painting, in limbo, for 60 years now since my death.” Like a child in a closet peering at things he’s not allowed to see, a young artist stares out from behind a picture he drew of his own deathbed. Neither dead nor alive himself, he watches as the demon-seed bed…
No safety without freedom
Fourteen years ago this week an event happened that was so momentous it can’t possibly be overstated. East Germany threw open the Berlin Wall. If you never saw the wall in person, it was considerably more horrifying than television made it seem. Actually, it was two walls, with machine-gun towers and barbed wire and a…
Love Actually
I don’t know who invented the term "emotional pornography," but after seeing Love Actually, I know its definition. This movie by makers of Four Weddings and a Funeral and Bridget Jones’ Diary abandons story, logic and any connection with reality, throwing more than a dozen different characters on screen to make sure not a moment…
Distaff diaspora
Dr. Cynthia Jacobs Carter gave an assignment to students in her Howard University Africana Women’s Studies course: Find 20 biographies on black women — only 10 of whom could be from the United States. “They had to dig, dig, dig very deeply to find anything,” Carter says. “And they realized pretty quickly, ‘Oh, you told…
Elf
With Saturday Night Live alumnus Will Ferrell starring, Elf is a gut-buster of laughs, but little more. It smartly pays tribute, with some humorous effects, to the old favorites, such as Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer, but becomes a mostly predictable rehash of the Christmas-spirit-conversion story. Undeniably cute, but not destined to become a Christmas classic.
Bursting out
The cops, thinking it was a rave, came and busted up last weekend’s The Free Project at the Burst Building, which is really too bad because I was looking forward to the grand finale piano concert slated to climax with the piano igniting. It sucks for Gregory Holm, who must’ve had a fun time dragging…
Waxing on tracks
Obviously, novelist Nick Hornby loves pop music and understands music collectors. He’s also no slouch at writing. But his combined powers still aren’t sufficient to make an exceptional book about music itself, or so Songbook would appear to show. Hornby’s 1995 novel High Fidelity brilliantly used record collecting to explore how people fetishize in order…
Detroit deserves more retail
Why doesn’t Detroit have more retail shopping? Until last week, New Hits would have answered that question with a knee-jerk response: The city is too poor to support such stores. Then we read a new report students at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning produced for the City of Detroit’s…
Free Will Astrology
by Rob Brezsny ARIES (March 21-April 19): The latest movie from Aries filmmaker Quentin Tarantino received mixed reviews. Commenting on Kill Bill, Roger Ebert and Richard Roeper raved, "It’s amazing. Brilliant and stylized! Tarantino is at the top of his form." On the other hand, critic Mick LaSalle opined: "If this recycled, derivative nonsense is…
Dem Green success
If a presidential candidate declared him- or herself to be both a Democrat and a Green, one would have to wonder what drugs they were on. But in a small suburb such as Ferndale, pledging allegiance to both parties worked like a happy pill for City Council candidate — and top vote-getter — Craig Covey.…
Shindig
All too familiar with his retro-obsessed characterization in the music press, James Mercer would like to clear up one common misconception. Contrary to popular belief, the soft-spoken songwriter of the Shins insists that he does not have his ear planted firmly in 1968. “I certainly love the Zombies and the Beatles, but I like lots…
Falling Bush
If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Being shallow thinkers, the crew here at News Hits never quite grasped the significance of this staple query in Philosophy 101 classes everywhere. There is, however, another question worth pondering: When our soldiers arrive home…
Venus in fur
Rounding the corner to the back yard, the evening scene is like a midwinter’s daydream. A handful of musicians and boho hipsters cluster in the candlelit yard, sitting cross-legged on the grass or in lawn chairs. They joke in quiet voices, pass around acoustic guitars and light each other’s cigarettes. It’s August and the air…
Sounds of silence
Abandoned Shelter of the Week A lot of history dwells in the building at 14750 Puritan St. on Detroit’s west side. This is where Sound Suite Studios once held rank as Detroit’s premier recording facility. Now an abandoned, dilapidated shell of brick and overgrown weeds, the old studio was the first of its kind in…
Glamoured
Looking back (well, actually, listening back) Cassandra Wilson’s Blue Light Til Dawn is one of the signal records of the ’90s. Previously, Wilson had experimented with styles from revivalist (Blue Skies cast her as a latter day Sarah Vaughan) to convoluted jazz funk (Jump World). On Blue Light she settled into a musical sweet spot.…
Bauer’s lost blues
Behind the club, Judah Bauer steps out of the bright circle of light cast from a buzzy mercury lamp and into the shadows. With a stocking cap pulled down low and his hands jammed deep in the pockets of his jean jacket, his hunched posture is more that of a squatter punk than a blues…
Seattle rockists to local indie; DJ House Shoes gets to work
Load yer bongs The increasingly ubiquitous Small Stone Records owner/PR flack/head of A&R/in-house-skeptic Scott Hamilton phoned us to yak about a band he’s just inked, which, as it turns out, is major coup of sorts for the local Marshall ’n’ ganja indie. Made up of hirsute, Sabbath-adoring men of the oft-dipped Seattle gene pool —…
The Matrix Revolutions
Why aren’t the musings about artificial intelligence, control, power and consciousness really that important in The Matrix Revolutions? Because all the energy you expend in imagining this is really good sci-fi is thoroughly insulted by the 15-minute jujitsu/machine gun/crouching tiger jumps you have to swallow. Overkill city.
Night & Day Center
12 WED • MUSIC Blink 182’s “DollaBill Tour”— At a time when the average concert ticket will cost you $25 and the price of a CD ranges anywhere from 12 to 20 smackaroos, it’s hard to believe that American teenagers can even afford to rock out. That is why a huge metal sign, followed closely…
The Go
Get yer head outta that paper bag and pay attention because The Go harks back to the kind of slinky pop music that once was a hallmark of the late ’60s and early ’70s. Building on a strong fuzz-tone foundation, it’s got an underlying scattershot style which encapsulates the swervy choogling guitar groove of Marc…
Glass & steel
At 6100 Michigan Ave., just east of Livernois, sits an old, scarred building. Here, where coal and steel processing once thrived, the Nordin family has established two businesses, Detroit Design Center and Furnace Hot Glass Works. The first is an interior design fabricator, the latter focuses on glass production. The glass often features in the…
When will Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen be legal?
Site: When will Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen be legal? Site Unseen is a new feature at www.metrotimes.com. It highlights any sites that provoke weird, enlightening, introspective, eerie or downright repugnant reactions. Happy thoughts also frequent the piece. If you have clicked on an amazing site and would like to share it with our readers, please…
Sylvie Courvoisier
How many classical musicians does it take to make new-music jazz? No, this isn’t the setup line for a joke dissing our elegant friends on the “serious music” end of the spectrum. The answer, folks, is “three.” This double-disc set of excellent world adventures brings together “Four Compositions” by Swiss pianist-composer Sylvie Courvoisier and “19…
Captivating art
Rising from a plush purple chair at the Maniscalco Gallery in Grosse Pointe, artist Mark Wolak extends his hand with a warm smile. His baby face and soft voice are juxtaposed with a pair of linebacker shoulders wrapped in a sharp black-leather blazer. He gestures to his paintings hanging on the walls, noting each in…
Letters to the Editor
Desert of blight? Oh, you poor, gullible, misguided media souls. You actually still believe MGM and Motor City casinos’ plans for building new hotels in time for the 2006 Super Bowl. (“The inn crowd,” Metro Times, Oct. 15-21) Talk about blind faith! What incentive do they have to build expensive motels that would sit mostly…
World Series of Love
It’s hard to imagine now but only a few years ago, at the turn of the new century, Ann Arbor’s Ghostly International was struggling to find its way through the vast electronic music maze somewhere out there. Though earlier releases by Matt Dear, Tadd Mullinix (and one of his aka’s, James Cotton) did begin turning…
Tethers unleashed
The Albanian man was at home when immigration officials arrived last month and placed an electronic tether on his ankle. The 34-year-old father of three, who asked to remain anonymous, entered the U.S. illegally in 1999 and has an asylum case pending. He says immigration officials have ordered him not to leave his home except…
Here’s the beef
Steak dominates the fare and there’s nothing on the menu that would make a meat-and-potatoes lover squirm. Six dishes under the heading “VIP” are flambéed at two stations in the dining room. All of the entrées we tried were very good: seafood strudel ($16.95), fettuccine carbonara (prepared with chicken), veal Marsala, seafood marinara ($17.95). Sides…
Candyband
Just consider for a moment how much cooler the world would be if more moms were in rock ’n’ roll bands. If your playgroup growing up was progeny to mommy’s bandmates, you could actually yell, “Hey! Keep it down down there!” to your mom. And you’d at least have something in common and would likely…
Let’s get small
Perhaps Detroit artist Chido Johnson’s site-specific wall painting says it best. His incredibly shrunken figure, painted hunched near the bottom of the back wall of detroit contemporary’s second floor, brings things to scale. To Johnson’s little guy, the 4.25-inch by 5.5-inch works displayed all around him are vast murals, mesmerizing magnum opuses. But it doesn’t…
Elephant
Gus Van Sant’s latest film follows its young cast as they walk through an insipid high school journey. You’ve read and seen all there is to read and see about the Columbine High School slaughter, but this film will make you “feel” it. It is a terrifying, beautiful thing to witness.
Using your head
Q: My fiancee is having trouble going down on me. She can usually last five minutes before her jaw starts hurting. It’s big — what can I do? When we try, she has me lie down on my back while she kneels between my legs. Is there another position that might work better and not…
