- Issue Archive for
- Aug 28 - Sep 3, 2008
- Vol. 18, No. 35
News+Features
Living the Dream
Will Obama live up to his promise, or prove to be another disappointment? That depends on us.
Up on the Roof
Chatham students want to really green up the City-County Building
Crime Prevention: City approves surveillance cameras, but who's going to be in charge of the tapes?
The city has approved the use of surveillance cameras, but are community groups really the ones who should be playing the role of Big Brother?
Activism: POG lending a hand at RNC blockade
The Pittsburgh Organizing Group, regionally famous for its various protests and blockades, is taking its show on the road to the Republican National Convention.
Hard to Sustain
Local woman learns tough lessons about environmental sustainability
Food+Drink
Spak Bros.
Healthier pizza and subs sure to please veggies and meat-lovers.
JD's Pub
A comprehensive menu of familiar pub grub fails to transcend
Music
Locals band together for The Key Party Presents ... Playing Favorites
"Many bands share members, some share roommates and most everyone involved knows each other."
Indie legends Silver Jews make a rare stop in Pittsburgh
"To tell you the truth, I was afraid I would be accused of stealing land."
NYC groove-masters Ratatat keep it simple
Guitarist Mike Stroud and synthesizer maestro Evan Mast quickly develop a groove and explore it like a dentist looking for cavities.
Oakland's disquieting avant-rockers Xiu Xiu visit Garfield Artworks
Ches Smith is actually credited on one track for playing the guillotine.
Bad-boy Brits The Fratellis offer laddish jams with Here We Stand
The Fratellis are tagged as a "lads' band," but the coy writing is far sharper than any favored by America's askew-ballcap contingent.
On Screen
Hamlet 2
This account of a disastrously bad high school play, directed and co-written by Adam Fleming (Nancy Drew), trundled along missing its comedic marks for over an hour, before resolving in an over-the-top, 10-minute-long set piece that would have saved us all a lot of trouble if it had just been posted to an Internet funny-film site without all the preamble. Our hero is Dana Marschz (Steve Coogan), a failed actor turned drama teacher, who enlists his students in an original work, a musical sequel to Hamlet. It sounds like it should be funny, but these silly ideas never translate into real laughs, and there's an air of trying too hard throughout, with Coogan leading the overly frantic charge. If you slog it out, the final third of the film holds a few slim rewards, including the staging of the musical "Hamlet 2," with its showstopper number "Rock Me, Sexy Jesus." [1.5 out of 4 stars]
My Winnipeg
The Winnipeg-based filmmaker Guy Maddin's work is a maddening mix of Chris Marker, Jean Cocteau and John Waters. He's always at once highly intellectual and yet something of a put-on, creating art films that unapologetically, even gleefully, deconstruct themselves. Our protagonist (Darcy Fehr) is, like Maddin, a Winnipeg native. But it's Maddin the director's voice we hear narrating, and who accompanies his alter ego's musings with scenes of people at work and play, sledding and dancing, riding trains and driving cars down shadowy back roads. There's no story in the conventional sense, but as the musings go on, a portrait emerges of a man who's both inside and outside of himself, searching for answers yet acutely aware that there are none. It purports to be true, but it's all tongue-in-cheek, much of it played like a cheesy '40s melodrama, and rarely amusing. [2 out of 4 stars]
Death Race
Webteaser: This prisoners-race-cars-to-their-deaths actioner from Paul W.S. Anderson is a loose update of the 1975 drive-in classic Death Race 2000 (which added anarchic dark humor and hapless pedestrians to the mix). Now it's the year 2012, and in the hard gray light of cinematic dystopia, we follow our anti-hero, Jensen Ames (Jason Statham), as he's framed, sent to prison and then bribed to race a souped-up Mustang for Team Good Guys (relatively speaking). A pair of decent actors -- Ian McShane, as Ames' crew chief, and Joan Allen, as the hard-bitch warden -- lend a teeny bit of heft (though the presence of high-brow Allen is a real head-scratcher); Anderson wisely gives these two the best lines. For those less concerned with dramatic skills, Death Race offers the well-built Statham and Tyrese Gibson, both of whom do a lot of bare-chested flexing; heavily armored cars in a race-slash-demo-derby; explosions and wrecks galore; grisly head-poppin' deaths; and large-breasted women walking in slow motion. For maximum enjoyment, all are advised to disregard plot holes, and to blindly accept the story's premise that suggests that in just four short years, our penal system will be in the pay-per-view, snuff-entertainment business. Unlike, say, this facsimile version of nonstop thrill-killing we've paid for. (AH) [1.5 out of 4 stars]
Elegy
When Manhattan college professor David Kepesh (Ben Kingsley) becomes enamored of a new student, the distinctively beautiful Consuela (Penelope Cruz), he waits until the grades are in before bedding her. That's the measure of Kepesh's minimal maturity in the pursuit of his frequently triumphed personal freedom. Isabel Coixet's (My Life Without Me) drama, an adaptation of Philip Roth's novella The Dying Animal, follows Kepesh's ongoing relationship with Consuela. Elegy is meant to be an examination of one's emotional and philosophical perceptions, and how they inevitably change over time. But Kepesh is not particularly sympathetic, and the slow-moving film often plays like an extended pity party for a self-absorbed man who refuses to grow up emotionally. (Your mileage may vary: Elegy can't help but underscore the long-admired cultural conceit that older, wiser men deserve gorgeous, malleable young women.) The performances are good, though the few supporting characters don't get much to work with. (Dennis Hopper has a nice little turn as Kepesh's poet friend, though his role is mostly to serve as Greek chorus.) Consuela is ferociously presented as an objet d'art for much of the film, and neither Consuela (nor Cruz) seems to chafe particularly hard against this shallow characterization. The film's last act finally delivers some emotional depth, even if the catalyst is a melodramatic cheat. Starts Fri., Aug. 29. Manor (AH) [2.5 out of 4 stars]
Art
With cabinetry, glass and tableware, the SCC highlights past masters of the arts of craft.
What makes these trays extraordinary is that Cederquist has used anamorphic perspective, so that the trays, although two-dimensional, appear 3-D when seen at the correct angle.
The Miller Gallery's internationally renowned new curator, Astria Suparak, debuts her first Pittsburgh show.
Her hiring, in March, makes her arguably the biggest underground art star to move to Pittsburgh in years.
Views
Stop the Madness
What's wrong with public transit? Sometimes it's the public.
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Pittsburgh n'@
Dispatches from the blogosphere: a roadtrip to Pittsburgh.
