- Issue Archive for
- Sep 3-9, 2009
- Vol. 19, No. 35
News+Features
Clearing the Air
Robinson residents get one more shot to block power plant
Something's Fishy
Local researchers pursue a new generation of pollutants in our rivers
Police Psychic
At G-20, city cops could bust you if they have a feeling you might do something wrong
Survivor's Tail
Tiger Ranch felines to get new life through adoption
Help Wanted
Activists want to make sure employment process is transparent
Food+Drink
Cornerstone
The contemporary American fare here offers a creative take on a traditional menu.
Eat, Drynk and Be Merrie
What royal victuals await those visiting the Renaissance?
Music
Local band The Elliots play Liverpool's Beatle Week
Rather than strumming plastic controllers to get an idea of what it feels like to be Sir Paul, Pittsburgh cover band The Elliots have found a more direct way to get in on the action.
Local band Good Night, States expands its sound with a new EP and techie tinkering
"One band member referred to this record as 'Good Night, States with the rock 'n' roll taken out.'"
Shoegazy Olympians Desolation Wilderness play ModernFormations
"I want to create imagery that's more futuristic and not so much memory-based."
Reunited art-punks Mission of Burma play Club Café
The band once labeled "too ahead of their time" decided to keep going.
On Screen
Adam
Max Mayer's debut feature, Adam, is hard to categorize: It's not quite a romantic comedy. It's a little funny, but also bittersweet. And while its titular protagonist has Asperger's syndrome, this is no inspirational (or preachy) Disease of the Week movie. Mostly, it's a coming-of-age story, with grace notes of romance. Adam (Hugh Dancy), a 27-year-old New Yorker, meets, Beth (Rose Byrne), a lively neighbor, and the two embark on a relationship. The film does run the standard rom-com obstacle course: the awkward first date, the moment the two "click," meeting the parents and the first big fight, followed by the reconciliation, in bad weather no less. And then there's the crux of all romance narratives: the lack of communication (or miscommunication) that must be resolved by the last reel, putting the lovers on the same emotional page. Needless to say, for Adam and Beth, effective dialogue about how each feels about the other is a challenge that may not be surmountable. When the big moment comes, how it plays out may surprise you. My chief criticism of Adam would be Mayer's tendency to have characters speak the obvious, or his occasional gilding of the plot. Despite these few clumsy patches, Adam is a winsome, engaging film, which owes much of its charm to its two leads. Manor [2.5 out of 4 stars]
An animated "Lazy Pear," an urban myth, boardwalk impressions and more at Film Kitchen.
"I figured he was easy to boss around because it wasn't something alive."
Soul Power
It was a concert born of big ideas and easy opportunism. With African Americans embracing their roots in the mother country -- and newly liberated African nations on the rise -- why not stage a concert celebrating traditional and contemporary African music, and such far-flung offshoots as R&B, jazz and salsa? It would be a global musical celebration of black power. And what better place than during the run-up to the "Rumble in the Jungle," the much-heralded boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, held in Kinshasa, Zaire? So in 1974, promoters (including the ubiquitous Don King) organized "Zaire 74," a three-day concert and (hopefully) a subsequent film.
Thirty-five years later, Jeff Levy-Hinte has compiled that film from the outtakes of Leon Gast's 1996 documentary about the bout, When We Were Kings. In that respect, Soul Power serves as a companion piece to that documentary and is a must for Ali completists. The Greatest is much in evidence, and as the cameras roll, so his mouth, offering opinions on subjects from America's racial inequities to his surprise at the modernity of Kinshasa.
Music fans will enjoy the onstage action, with top-of-their-game performances from The Spinners, B.B. King, Miriam Makeba, The Crusaders, Manu Dibango, and Celia Cruz and the Fania All-Stars, among others. Soul Brother No. 1 James Brown gets extra time -- as well as the first and the last word. (Levy-Hinte chose not to provide titles for the performers, but everybody is identified during the credits.) Some of the vértité-style concert camerawork is clunky, but the music -- and costumes -- more than make up for it.
To stretch out the star performances, Soul Power also hits the streets, where unidentified locals appear ready to turn a little percussion into an impromptu party. None of these people are interviewed, sadly. Likewise, today's viewer will have to fill in his own background about Zaire's troubled history.
Throughout, there's no mistaking the excitement and collective sense of pride that the concert and Rumble brought to both the streets of Kinshasa and the chartered jets of the celebrities. But from our vantage point, we see the hopeful future these participants envision through a glass darkly. There are tough times ahead for Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) and other post-colonial African nations, some of the performers, and the black-power movement. But for three steamy nights in the summer of 1974, soul power reigned -- and 35 years later, there's a time capsule you can groove to. Starts Fri., Sept. 4. Squirrel Hill (Al Hoff) [3 out of 4 stars]
Unmistaken Child
The titular child is the reincarnation of a recently deceased Buddhist master, and Nati Baratz's documentary is about the five-year quest to find this elusive entity. Tasked with finding the child -- a mere baby -- is 28-year-old Tenzin Zopa, a Nepalese monk who was the late lama's acolyte and close companion. What follows is a straightforward narrative driven solely by faith and belief in mysticism. Following his master's death, Zopa receives hints as to the identity of the reincarnated lama; some are physical, such as items retrieved from the funeral pyre, while others are as untraceable as dreams. He sets off into the gorgeous if impoverished Himalayan mountain region, where he "tests" infants for their past lives. With the camera in tow, Zopa is a welcome companion for us: gentle, guileless, deeply committed to his task even as he is troubled with grief, doubt and later, guilt. For if the child is discovered, he must be permanently removed from his family to a faraway monastery. Whether or not you subscribe to reincarnation and the ability to test for past lives, any viewer will surely see, even without explicit dialogue, that Zopa and the child's parents endure their own wrenching tests of faith regarding the deportment of the child. The film is quietly paced (as you might expect when trailing monks), but this journey -- really, a unique ethnography of a deeply intimate quest -- is often fascinating and moving. In English, and Tibetan, Hindi and Nepali, with subtitles. Fri., Sept. 4, through Wed., Sept. 9. Harris (AH) [2.5 out of 4 stars]
Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg
I'll confess: I'd never heard of Gertrude Berg or Molly Goldberg until I saw Aviva Kempner's documentary. I'm likely not alone, and that's a shame. It's hard to sell young people on long-ago history, but any of us who have ever enjoyed a television sit-com owe a debt to Berg, one of the pioneering women of 20th-century entertainment. This engaging doc is a perfect way to catch up.
In the 1930s, Berg created, wrote and starred in a radio show that followed the daily lives of a Jewish family living in New York City. On it, Berg developed her alter-ego, Molly Goldberg, the warm mother hen to her own family of youngsters and oldsters (from the Old Country) as well as confidante to her many nearby neighbors. Molly dispensed malaprops and kitchen-sink wisdom, along with a cleverly crafted overlay of social commentary. In 1949, Berg moved the Goldbergs to the nascent medium of television, effectively establishing the template of all domestic sit-coms to follow (including the unlocked-front-door plot device that lets dozens of other characters pop by). She wrote the scripts, crafted the embedded advertisements and portrayed the popular Molly. She was seemingly indomitable ... until the entertainment industry became a target of the Red Scare. While I wished the film -- composed of contemporary interviews and archival footage -- had delved deeper into how Berg pioneered her way in a man's world, it's easy to forgive this celebratory portrait. It's simply too fun to discover Berg and her myriad achievements. Starts Fri., Sept. 4. Manor (AH) [2.5 out of 4 stars]
