Who’s On First? Not God
At Burgettstown High School, the team mascot is the Blue Devils. But for the past two years, the baseball team has been playing with God on its side. In the process, the Washington County district violated its own policies and, arguably, the Constitution. At the start of this year’s season, varsity baseball coach Jamie Howell…
A Conversation with Heather Wood
North Hills native Heather Wood will soon be graduating from the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. But her public debut as a fashion designer will come even sooner … at the Mr. Roboto Project Arts Fair being held April 8 at the Spinning Plate Gallery. There, the 22-year-old graphic designer will retail her line…
American Gun
A few years ago, in Elephant, Gus Van Sant told an arty, fictionalized account of the Columbine shootings that did more than just not look for answers. It positively frustrated you with how it didn’t try. That’s become the modus operandi for movies about high school gun violence: Be at once…
Thank You For Smoking
Satiric movies have two big hurdles. They’ve got to upstage reality, which remains on a rigorous program of auto-satirization. And they must avoid having a heart. Should goodness prevail in some way, the satirist suggests that mankind is redeemable — the kiss of death to effective satire. Jason Reitman’s Thank You…
BASIC INSTINCT 2
This follow-up to 1992’s erotic, twisty drama finds the novelist Catherine Tramell on the job in London … that is, writing, screwing and (oh, quite probably) killing. Sharon Stone reprises her role as the naughty, man-eating scribe; this time out, it’s a psychiatrist (David Morrissey) ensnared in her web. Despite an outrageous and wonderfully ridiculous…
Locker Room Bar & Grill
Location: 1825 E. Carson St., South Side. 412-390-1910 Hours: 11 a.m.-2 a.m., daily Prices: Appetizers $6-7; sandwiches and burgers $8-10 Fare: Bar food Atmosphere: Nice bar and grill with a zillion TVs Liquor: Full Bar Smoking: Smoking downstairs, nonsmoking upstairs When the Steelers won the AFC championship game in Denver, sealing their trip to the…
FIND ME GUILTY
Sidney Lumet’s cockeyed courtroom Mafia drama, based on a real RICO case involving New Jersey’s Lucchese family, has the misfortune to open just as Tony Soprano is back in our living rooms. Comparisons are inevitable, and while Lumet tries to craft a humanistic drama out of the story of one colorful mobster … Jackie DiNorscio,…
Razing the Bar
What would Doc Holliday say? My God, what would the Duke say? I’m talking about the raids the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission (TABC) recently made in 36 Dallas bars that bagged 30 customers for public drunkenness. (Isn’t a bar private property?) Talk about great detective work. I mean, who’d have ever thought they’d find drunks…
JOYEUX NOEL
Inspired by a real event in 1914, this film finds Scottish, French and German soldiers fighting for a strip of French farmland but laying down their arms to share the Christmas holiday. Very heartwarming indeed, but one can’t quite shake how calculated and manipulative Christian Carrion’s film feels. Did one man’s song really rouse an…
Pitt Women’s Basketball Worth a Look
Don’t look now — most people probably won’t — but the University of Pittsburgh women’s basketball program is showing a pulse. In fact, they just made their way to the Final Four of the WNIT. I know what you’re thinking: Women’s sports and the NIT tournament equals this being the page of the City Paper…
LITTLE JERUSALEM
While this domestic drama is nominally about two Jewish sisters living in a mostly Jewish suburb of Paris, its real protagonists are faith and desire. Elder sister Mathilde (Elsa Zylberstein) is so devout as to be sexually repressed, only to discover that religion can’t rein in the passions of her husband. Younger sister Laura (Fanny…
Lynn Swann Skating By On Issues
Finally, gubernatorial candidate Lynn Swann has found an issue he doesn’t have to punt on: who should win a license to build a slots casino in Pittsburgh. On March. 29, Swann announced that, of the three gambling interests hoping to build a casino here, he favored giving a license to Isle of Capri. The company…
LUCKY NUMBER SLEVIN
A gentle wiseacre of a hitman (or is he?) named Slevin (Josh Hartnett) surfaces in New York City, and initiates a complicated dance between two warring crime bosses. Paul McGuigan’s postmodern noir is exceedingly complicated … the story unfolds in a nonlinear fashion, and the large cast of seemingly disparate characters turn out to be…
From NGHS to Gods
“I’ll be in synch with the moon, while you run from the sun. / Life of the womb reflected by guns. / Worshipper of moons, I am the sun. / And that’s why, I, am public enemy number one. One. One. One … ” When Saul Williams completed that verse, freezing a prison…
SLITHER
James Gunn, who wrote 2004’s smart update of Dawn of the Dead, makes his directorial debut with this comedy-horror thriller about a small Southern town under attack by crazed slugs from outer space. Slither is a throwback to the simply plotted squirmfests of yore … a decent cop, a nice girl and some local goobers…
Root of the Problem
It’s a warm, sunny Sunday afternoon as a dozen people gather for a potluck meal at a Squirrel Hill home. Though they are strangers — the gathering was arranged almost entirely through the Internet — they are greeted by three bouncy, cheerful little girls in pink, the children of the hosts. As guests begin to…
Pittsburgh’s Close-Up
In 1969, Robert Haller returned to Pittsburgh for a job. He was just in time … not for a career with the Journal of Economic Literature, but to participate in a remarkable decade on the local scene in the art form he loves. The 27-year-old experimental-cinema enthusiast found a local community that was about…
Up on the Roof
“At the Union Trust Building,” my e-mail source stated simply, but with hushed excitement, “the penthouse space might have architectural significance.” Might?! The whole building is architecturally significant. Located at Fifth and Grant streets, it’s Frederick Osterling’s 1917 masterpiece for Henry Clay Frick, now officially known as Two Mellon Center. Its stunning 11-story atrium,…
On-the-Job Training
Will Zavala was a kid when he made his first film, a stop-action animation about dinosaurs who get wiped out by a volcano. He shot it with classmates in a San Diego summer-school program. If this were a typical filmmaker’s story, you could hum the rest: Addicted to movies, he commandeered his parent’s…
Good Brother Earl
With its second album, Perfect Tragedy, Pittsburgh’s Good Brother Earl brings a touch more AOR pop-rock polish to its alt-country and classic-rock roots, yielding a real Pittsburgh crossover sound — meaning one that crosses between WDVE and WYEP. The disc’s opener, “Fighting Gravity,” rides Paul Fitzsimmons’ slide-guitar hook before Skip Sanders’ piano…
ATL
Prolific rap-music video director Chris Robinson makes his big-screen debut with this comedy-drama about Atlanta teens. Tip Harris (a.k.a. rapper T.I.) plays Rashad, a decent kid struggling in a rather benign hood to raise his little brother and keep his homies together. In the waning days of their senior year, their lives revolve around the…
PKP
The name PKP may not really stick with you, but its new album Sleepless contains plenty of jukebox-rockers … modern rock tunes you’d sing along with in a crowded bar, asking your friends, “Who is this band, anyway?” Formerly easier to remember as Pete Killed Pete, the Pittsburgh-area group isn’t playing the most revolutionary…
TAKE THE LEAD
Think Dangerous Minds meets any of the ballroom-dance-craze films released in the past two years. Considering the underdog tropes highlighted throughout, at least director Liz Friedlander introduces the film as “inspired by” instead of “based on” a true story. Antonio Banderas stars as real-life ballroom-dance humanitarian Pierre Dulaine, a man so suave he rides his…
Coliseum May Be Key to Neighborhood Revival
For years now, bingo has been the lifeline for one of Pittsburgh’s larger special-events facilities: the Greater Pittsburgh Coliseum. With 27,500 square feet and a 1,700-person capacity, the former skating rink and bus and trolley station has hosted gatherings of fraternities and sororities, countywide political conventions and religious gatherings. Still, it hasn’t been all it…
Wecht Tries New Fund-raising Shot … or Shots
“Dear JFK Assassination Researcher,” reads the letter from Cyril Wecht, the long-time Allegheny County coroner who resigned in January following a federal indictment. “By now, I’m certain you are aware of the serious legal problems with which I have been confronted in recent weeks,” the letter opens: Wecht faces 84 counts for allegedly using…
