The saxman cometh
John Lurie explains goose bumps, fishing and stinky Lizards….
HYPERLITERATE HAMTRAMCK BRIT-POP
Detroit’s most unabashed Brit-pop outfit, Ethos, has finally released this long-overdue debut full-length after a year-plus of recording. For the most part, Me & You’s 12 songs are worth the effort — theirs and ours — and there is plenty needed from both. Singer Christian Burke is part Oscar Wilde and part Morrissey, and he’s…
Welcome to my garage
Wiping away Birmingham’s old-town flavor like a stubborn stain….
One True Thing
Director Carl Franklin’s One True Thing invites its audience inside places of the heart where the story of the Gulden family unfolds with the intensity of a great poetic event. Learning that his wife has cancer, university professor George Gulden (William Hurt) asks his daughter, Ellen (Renee Zellweger), to quit her job as a New…
James Ellroy: Demon Dog of American Crime Fiction
“Tragedy can’t be taught,” says neo-noir crime writer James Ellroy, the subject of Reinhard Jud’s 1993 documentary profile. “I think the writer has to bring (to their work) his or her own sense of the world as a crazy, sexed-up, brutal, awful, horrifying, delightful, wonderful place.” Ellroy ought to know. When he was a child…
Touch of Evil
Like every other film Orson Welles made after Citizen Kane, Touch of Evil (1958) manages to be memorably impressive without being particularly good. Crammed, even more so than his other post-Kane films, with virtuoso visual passages and lively, eccentric performances, it doesn’t so much transcend the dime-store crime-melodrama origin of its story as ignore it.…
Pecker
A young man named Pecker (Edward Furlong) begins snapping photographs of his fellow Baltimore denizens, capturing their grotesque beauty in a gripping yet seemingly artless fashion. He becomes the next big thing in New York City’s art world, celebrated as a naïf genius. Everything is hunky-dory, until Pecker’s notoriety begins to distort everything that once…
A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries
Preconceived notions of a movie — based on subject matter or filmmaker — can all too easily create the wrong impression. A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries, based on the autobiographical novel by Kaylie Jones, daughter of novelist James Jones (From Here to Eternity, The Thin Red Line), is the latest film from the Merchant-Ivory team…
