- Issue Archive for
- Oct 14-20, 2010
- Vol. 20, No. 41
News+Features
Getting the Picture
AIDS support group weighs use of surveillance cameras
Fixed Fight
City plays hardball in battle with CPRB
Meat-ing Halfway
Cleveland resident earns bread from sandwich-shop settlement
Setting Boundaries
This election will echo for a decade to come
Food+Drink
Putting the "Fun" in Fungus
Learn to grow your own mushrooms
Pittsburgh Marshmallow Factory
These aren't your granny's marshmallows.
Sababa
Both quick bites and full entrees satisfy at this Squirrel Hill Middle-Eastern eatery
Lin's Asian Fusion
A modern interior, but an old-school Chinese-American menu
Music
The Felice Brothers put some whiskey in your whiskey at Mr. Small's
Over the last few years, The Felice Brothers have proved themselves rightful heirs of The Band's musical tradition.
Performing Arts Exchange connects Pittsburgh performers with national opportunities
"I've come to learn what there is to do," says Erika May, "and I've met at least a couple dozen people I never would have met otherwise."
Improv quartet Chicago Luzerne Exchange plays Thunderbird Café
"It's definitely not narrative -- our work is not, 'OK, here's the story, here's the layout.' But there is some story being told."
Multi-instrumentalist Sheila Liming pulls double duty -- and then some
A consequence of Liming playing in both The Armadillos and Callán is musical cross-pollination between the groups.
A former grunger, A.A. Bondy is reborn as a stellar singer-songwriter
Like Elliott Smith's, Bondy's voice searches for light in the midst of terrifying darkness.
A Conversation with Greg Dulli
"The first time I played a barebones set, I did a couple benefit shows in Seattle. I ended up recording them both and it sounded really good."
The Ruby Suns create infectious pop that's part commercial, party arty fringe
Bereft of any purely organic sounds, it's at once coldly mechanical and brightly melodic, with plentiful nooks and crannies.
Pop-punk band Teenage Bottlerocket keeps it simple, stupid
For the band's Fat Wreck Chords debut, they have toughened up the sound and tightened the songwriting.
Richard Barone of The Bongos taps the best qualities of his 1980s output
Barone's newest album, Glow, incorporates a full-band sound and fulfils his long-standing dream of working with producer Tony Visconti.
On Screen
The Pittsburgh International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival
The 25th annual festival returns with entertaining and provocative feature films, documentaries and shorts highlighting gay, lesbian and transgendered experiences.
The Pittsburgh International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival
The 25th annual festival continues with entertaining and provocative feature films, documentaries and shorts highlighting gay, lesbian and transgendered experiences.
Jackass 3-D
Johnny Knoxville and his band of merry men are back for a third round of pranks, stunts and admittedly bad ideas, compiled for our entertainment and directed with intestinal fortitude by Jeff Tremaine. Frankly, I was hoping for more from the added third dimension, but most of this film still looks like it was shot on camcorders. (Do look out for that flying dildo, though.) It's everything you'd want in a Jackass movie: pee, poop, puke and sweat; little people and a hugely fat guy; repeated genital trauma; guys approaching middle-age wearing only thongs; and mind-boggling injuries. Also: Beavis, Butthead, Will Oldham, a donkey, an attack dog, a horned ram, a buffalo herd, two scorpions and 10,000 angry bees.
It's all wrong wrong wrong, but sometimes you need uncomplicated laughs. I find the stunts more entertaining than the pranks, which seem almost passé in our reality-is-fake-footage times. But man vs. jet exhaust, or pinning a tail on a live donkey: Where else can you see this stuff? I also dig the surreal, why-not nature of some throwaway bits: Who thinks of filling a closet with beach balls and "surfing" out of it? Good for laughs are the off-the-cuff remarks of the gang. It's one thing to see a flatulence master play a trumpet with his asshole. But when an adjacent Jackasser quips, "Bringing jazz back to the working man," that's a low-culture high point. The rating is for Jackass fans only; all others should stay away. (Al Hoff) [2 out of 4 stars]
Life as We Know It
Just because the premise is tragic doesn't absolve it from being idiotic: A mismatched couple wind up raising their dead friends' baby in this rom-com from Greg Berlanti. (Believe this: The parents never even informed the two that they were the child's appointed guardians.) Katherine Heigl is the control-freak new mommy, and Josh Duhamel plays the man-boy who's into sports. What few laughs this film supplies are early on, when the two clash or cycle through the predictable befuddlements of baby-managing. Then comes the long dry spell when the two (who have, of course, secretly fallen in love) miscommunicate, break up, pine and finally reunite. Heigl and Duhamel are both easy on the eyes (as are the triplets that play the baby) and have a nice comic chemistry. But it's not enough to raise this dumb idea up. Can't a rom-com just be two people who meet? (Al Hoff) [2 out of 4 stars]
Mesrine Part 2: Public Enemy No. 1
The misadventures of Jacques Mesrine continue in Part 2 of Jean-Francois Richet's bio-pic. Booted from Canada, Mesrine (Vincent Cassal) returns to France in the early 1970s. A bungled robbery lands him in handcuffs, but he makes a dramatic escape. Another arrest, then voila! -- another escape, this time from a maximum-security prison. The cops dub him "public enemy No. 1" and the charismatic Mesrine basks in the attention. He essentially spends the rest of the decade committing crimes and escaping from the law (both while employing a variety of amusing disguises). He gets a new accomplice (Mathieu Amalric), and a pretty young girlfriend (Ludivine Sagnier).
Part 2 is brisker and lighter than Part 1, with Richet presenting Mesrine's well-publicized life of crime as entertainment in and of itself. There is less brutal violence in Part 2, and Richet suggests that Mesrine's worst crime may be his own ego. Mesrine mulls over contemporary revolutionary gangs (such as Bader-Meinhof and the Red Brigade) who usurp his headlines, and his ponderings finally give us some insight into his chosen career path. Even if these revelations aren't particularly unique, it beats the automaton cipher of Part 1.
The end, when it comes (a shorter version of the sequence opens Part 1), is a nice bit of filmmaking that tips its hat to carefully edited crime films that create tension and suspense from simply ordinary behavior stretched out as we fret. In French, with subtitles. Starts Fri., Oct. 22. (Screens in a double-feature with Part 1, Fri., Oct. 29, and Sat., Oct. 30.) Regent Square (Al Hoff) [3 out of 4 stars]
Mesrine Part 1: Killer Instinct
Jean-Francois Richet's award-winning docudrama, which screens in two halves, tracks the career of France's real-life bad boy Jacques Mesrine. Part 1: Killer Instinct follows Mesrine (Vincent Cassell) from his time as a young soldier in Algeria through his initiation into robbery and assorted thuggery in 1960s Paris. (There he is mentored by a porcine Gerard Depardieu.) Tangentially, there are women, a wife and family, a divorce and an escape: The charismatic Mesrine dodges French law by relocating to Montreal with a new girlfriend, where he adds kidnapping, murder and a spectacular jailbreak to his rap sheet.
The film won several César awards (France's Oscars) in 2009, and it may be that the French, who love American gangster films, were just happy to have one of their own. My take was that I have seen this film -- and this story -- many times before, except in English. The ferrety Cassell has an actor's dream job -- portraying not just an evolving character over a lifetime, but one who also employs various fronts and disguises -- and he's good. Unfortunately, the narrative moves breathlessly forward -- lots of action and not much reflection as Mesrine does one crime, then another. The film is often choppy, but then Richet will settle in for some solidly executed thrills, such as the Quebec jail scenes.
It's a bit tricky to call the film, as this is a two-parter and Part 1 is clearly intended to establish Mesrine, who becomes a real "star," an infamous public figure, only in Part 2. But I'm a sucker for most crime pics, and curious about what's to come. (Mesrine Part 2: Public Enemy #1 opens Fri., Oct. 22.) In French, with subtitles. Starts Fri., Oct. 15. Regent Square (AH) [2.5 out of 4 stars]
Soul Kitchen
German-Turkish director Fatih Akin's time-jumping dramas (Head On, Edge of Heaven) usually take viewers to a sad corner of human relationships, where good is affirmed, but only at some devastating cost. Now, in this ensemble comedy set in rainy Hamburg, Akin takes a break: Not only does the slim story travel in a straight line, but it's all-over feel-good!
Zinos (Adam Bousdoukos, who co-wrote the script), a German of Greek origin, runs a funky café named Soul Kitchen. While he pines about his girlfriend moving to Shanghai and suffers through a back injury, his ne'er-do-well brother needs a work-release job and a scheming erstwhile school pal sets his sights on Zinos' real estate. These tribulations are played for laughs, with some set-ups verging on cartoonish. But Zinos is a likable fellow, and the film has a shaggy looseness that at least keeps the predictable plot afloat.
As always, Akin depicts contemporary Germany as a diverse place, with various cultures (as well as their cuisines and music) intersecting. It may always be raining and the rent may be due, but the universal pleasures of friends, food and a toe-tapping song prevail. In German, with subtitles. Starts Fri., Oct. 22. Harris (Al Hoff) [2.5 out of 4 stars]
Never Let Me Go
Mark Romanek's drama, adapted from Kazu Ishiguro's novel, is a moody jewelbox of a film that follows the oddly circumscribed lives of three childhood friends. Tommy (Andrew Garfield), Ruth (Kiera Knightley) and Kathy (Casey Mulligan) met at a very cloistered English boarding school in the 1980s. There, they were groomed for a specific occupation that will be mildly shocking to us. (The story, while set in the near past, has both elements of futurism and retro-nostalgia.) As in all threesomes, there are emotional struggles: Kathy loves Tommy, but Ruth is the dominant character. But these adolescent pinings and joys take on new sharpness when adulthood reveals the heartbreaking, inescapable nature of their lives. It's tricky material – a downbeat rumination on life and loss, melodrama with a dash of dystopic fantasy -- but well played by these three young actors, especially Mulligan. The film, a slim 90 minutes, felt light and heavy simultaneously, like a pretty watercolor that also makes one feel quite sad. Starts Fri., Oct. 15. Manor (AH) [2.5 out of 4 stars]
Waiting for 'Superman'
Filmmaker Davis Guggenheim, who brought us An Inconvenient Truth, now turns his lens on another hand-wringing topic: the state of public education in the United States. The film is a huge info dump, with lots of statistics, charts (albeit wittily illustrated) and talking-head interviews with many concerned parties. Guggenheim doesn't tell us anything that any reasonably informed person doesn't already know (or chose to ignore): Our public-education system is an unwieldy mess that fails a lot of our kids, especially if those kids live in low-income urban areas.
To personalize this monstrously huge crisis, Guggenheim follows five students -- four young minority kids from the inner city and a teen-age white girl from an affluent California suburb -- as they seek admission to high-performing charter schools. A couple of these kids will break your heart when their earnest, naked desire to learn hits a brutal reality: The few open spots at these schools are awarded by public lottery. Guggenheim structures his film so that viewers will feel they have seen the very moment this kid was lost to insurmountable failure, wasted potential riding on a plastic lottery ball.
The film offers a bullet-list of possible solutions -- from charter schools, more private investment and dropping teacher tenure -- but it's a lot of skimming on the surface. The charter schools presented here seem wonderful, but a blip of a statistic also presented admits that four out of five charter schools are underperforming. The need for "good teachers" is lauded, but neither that term nor how we'd measure it is ever explained. And Guggenheim focuses on elementary school -- where kids do first get off track -- without talking about high school, where the situation is catastrophic. Other unmentioned topics: parents, taxes, race, politics, sports ... sigh. This is simply too complex an issue to be covered in one movie, however engaging. It's sure to spur debate, and if that examination somehow adds to progress rather than continuing rancor, Waiting will have been a good thing. (Al Hoff) [2.5 out of 4 stars]
