Cross Purposes
News flash: Jesus isn’t at the Wal-Mart. He isn’t at Sears. He isn’t at Target. If you believe in him, you may find him in your heart and your soul, and maybe even down at that A-frame structure with the cool colored windows and that pointy chimney thing. But you won’t find Jesus…
THE FAMILY STONE
When Everett Stone (Dermot Mulroney) brings his uptight girlfriend (Sarah Jessica Parker) home for the holidays, his large and proudly unconventional family treats her shabbily. This is the unpleasant nut at the center of what purports to be an affirming holiday treat; the meanness exhibited by the otherwise warm and caring Stones is just one…
Expletives Repleted
About 20 years ago, when I worked at a small-town daily newspaper, my colleagues and I got bored on a slow night and decided to come up with a list of alternative words for “sexual intercourse.” It didn’t take long to round up the usual offensive suspects. But a little ingenuity,…
FUN WITH DICK AND JANE
Director Dean Parisot’s remake has each of its hearts in the right place, but at least one too many of them. With their Beamer and suburban dream house, Dick (Jim Carrey) and Jane (Tea Leoni) seem poised for a satire on conspicuous consumption, an impression that’s only deepened after Dick’s employer Enrons out and the…
Wholly Spirited
Photography and interviews by Renee RosensteelText and additional interviews by Marty Levine Nearly four months after Hurricane Katrina, widespread destruction remains along the Gulf Coast. In some of the hardest-hit areas — Waveland, Miss., and New Orleans — the aid effort is being undertaken jointly by two groups who have formed an unlikely alliance: evangelical…
GENESIS
Nine years after their wondrous, super-close-up film essay on life in a field, Microcosmos — which found drama in the travails of insects and snails — filmmakers and biologists Claude Nuridsany and Marie Perennou present new views of our world and of ourselves. With African griot Sotigui Kouyaté as narrator, Genesis sketches out life -…
DJ Rawls and J. Sands: Lone Catalysts
When I reach J. Sands on the horn, at his home in Baltimore, he’s reading the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette online. He hasn’t lived here in years, but he still claims it, reps it, loves the Steelers and all ‘n’ ‘at. He’s reading about the arrest of Leslie Mollett, accused of killing state policeman Joseph…
USHPIZIN
In this gentle comedy-drama set in Jerusalem, an Orthodox Jewish couple, Moshe and Mali, who have renounced their more secular ways, fret over the upcoming Sukkoth holiday. They’ve no money for the rent, much less a sukkah, a temporary structure in which to host friends and dine. The pair pray earnestly for a miracle, and…
A Conversation with Nathaniel Doyno
If you’re stuck in traffic on Penn Avenue and the distinct odor of fried foods wafts into your window from the exhaust pipe of a nearby pimpin’ deep-blue Mercedes 300D Turbo, you’re riding behind 22-year-old Wilkinsburg resident Nathaniel Doyno, founding partner of the fledgling non-profit operation Steel City Biofuels (nathaniel@steelcitybiofuels.org). What are the various…
WOLF CREEK
Plenty of domestic horror flicks set youth deep in the country, at the mercy of colorful locals with goofy accents and poor hygiene. Now, Greg McLean’s low-budget shocker from Down Under hoots: “Dude, check out our scary middle-of-nowhere.” Three campers set out for a three-week trip across the Australian outback (they’re going to a party).…
Bus Rout
Did you ever have one of those moments you wanted to remember forever; a moment so special you wished your brain were a digital camera? Maybe it was hitting a game-winning home run or kissing your first love. I had one of those moments when the Chicago Bears were in town and Jerome Bettis’…
Silver Jews
“I’m gonna shine out in the wild kindness and hold the world to its word.” David Berman nearly always makes good on this chorister’s promise — holding the world to its wordplay, that is — when he makes a Silver Jews record. A venerable Moses of melody, Berman translates his poetry into lo-fi avant-country ballads…
Lady Sovereign
Take a minute to Google the phrase “U.K. grime” and you’ll find reams of pseudo-intellectual critical analysis — a lot of it written by Americans — about how the genre was formed, why it’s important, and why you’re too stupid to know anything of significance about it in the first place. But I’d rather…
Ghislain Poirier
Oh, to live in a city where bands without electric guitars perform on a regular basis. Such as Boston, say, where late last month the Montreal-based producer and deejay Ghislain Poirier appeared on tour with his current labelmate, the emcee Lady Sovereign. Think of Poirier as the introverted, somewhat more cultivated yin to Sovereign’s provincially…
Munich
Germany hosted the summer Olympics twice in the 20th century, and both times, things didn’t quite turn out the way the Germans had hoped. In 1936 Berlin, with a rising Führer’s Aryan master race on display for the world, Jesse Owens, a fleet black American, showed them a thing or two. And in 1972…
King Kong
It takes some cojones to remake a classic like 1933’s King Kong. Certainly, coming off the wild critical and financial success of his Lord of the Rings trilogy, director Peter Jackson’s got the juice. His King Kong is a loving homage to its predecessor, gussied up with state-of-the-art digital effects and top-shelf actors, and presented…
Memoirs of a Geisha
Rob Marshall’s Memoirs of a Geisha, based on Arthur Golden’s novel, will surely give a lot of people an opportunity to round up the usual adjectives: elegant, sumptuous, exotic, opulent, [your adjective here]. In fact, Marshall’s second film — after his vivacious Chicago — never rises past lush Hollywood hokum. “A story like mine should…
Hill District: “Growing” Group Forced to Wind Down
For 13-year-old Terry Taylor, there were only so many places he could go for recreation while growing up in the Hill District: the YMCA, the Martin Luther King Reading Center, the city’s Robert E. Williams Recreation Center, and the Growing With Trust male mentoring program on Bedford Avenue. However, the Williams rec center was among…
Bigelow Grille: Regional Cooking and Bar
Location: Doubletree Hotel, One Bigelow Square, Downtown; 412-281-5013. Hours: Breakfast 6-11 a.m.; lunch 11 a.m.-4 p.m.; dinner 4-11 p.m. Prices: Starters $6-12; entrées, $14-26 Fare: Haute Pittsburgh Atmosphere: Contemporary and classy, but relaxed Liquor: Full bar A laudable trend in local fine dining is the showcasing of local fine ingredients. A few area farms –…
Shock: Toxics Reporting Rules May Be Eased by EPA
Six-hundred-and-fifty different toxic chemicals. Twenty-four-thousand industrial plants emitting them nationwide. That includes 24 on Neville Island alone, responsible for a quarter of Allegheny County’s air pollution, according to local environmental groups. All of this is detailed in reports filed with the Environmental Protection Agency and made public every year for the past 20 years. …
Empty Net
If only Mario Lemieux were still generating such excitement when he’s on the ice. Maybe the Penguins wouldn’t be one of the worst teams in the NHL. Just look at what he accomplished with a few choice words on Dec. 14. That’s when the Penguins owner told local reporters that “we’re really running out…
Military Recruiting:And the Surveillance Says: Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh’s anti-military-recruitment activists are not surprised, but still disturbed, by an NBC News report that shows protesters’ earliest activities caused the Department of Defense to label them a “threat.” The Dec. 13 NBC report revealed what the television network labeled “secret” documents, including a database of more than 40 anti-war and counter-recruitment actions, both…
The 40th Street Bridge is decorated with a series of alternating seals, which I haven’t seen on any other Pittsburgh bridge. What are they?
You haven’t seen these seals on other Pittsburgh bridges for a simple reason: Almost no Pittsburgh bridge was designed with as much consciousness of its own history. Most bridges in Pittsburgh were dedicated with very prosaic names: Consider such flights of poetic fancy as the 16th Street Bridge, the 10th Street…
CHEAPER BY THE DOZEN 2
Steve Martin and Bonnie Hunt take their brood on a lakefront vacation, where the gang enters a competition with another large family, headed by the hyper-successful Eugene Levy and his fourth wife, Carmen Electra. Excepting the fact that screening a summer holiday movie in the dead of winter feels wrong, Adam Shankman’s Cheaper 2 is…
