FIREWALL
Talk about taking work home with you. A hoary Harrison Ford stars as Jack Stanfield, a financial-security expert who falls victim to the one weakness in his labyrinth of digital protocols and passwords constructed to guard a bank’s virtual money: his own vulnerability. This combination technology, hostage and heist thriller kicks into gear when villains…
Paradise Cafe
Location: 3821 Willow Ave., Castle Shannon. 412-440-0244 Hours: Tue.-Thu. 5-10 p.m.; Fri. and Sat. 5-11 p.m. Prices: Soups and appetizers $4.95-10.95; entrees $14.95-22.95 Fare: Caribbean Atmosphere: Colorful and casual Liquor: BYOB Marty Pickholtz wants to tell you a story. It’s about a young chef from Mount Lebanon who gets on a plane to a tropical…
ONE
In 2002, a guy in Michigan with no film experience decided to make a movie examining life, death, spirituality — and what it means for a guy like him to make a movie on such topics. Director Ward Powers queries random folks and various religious figures, as well as a few spiritual heavy hitters such…
Art of Faith
There is no art on the walls in the prayer hall of Oakland’s Islamic Center of Pittsburgh. In fact, there is not much to signal that this is a prayer hall at all, except for a gazebo-like pulpit against the eastern wall. But in an hour, several hundred men will stand on these lines on…
THE PINK PANTHER
Frankly, most of the films in the long-running Pink Panther series weren’t very funny (and let’s never speak of the ones that didn’t even star Peter Sellers). So yet another episode with the bumbling French detective Jacques Clouseau would seem to be a fruitless idea. And it is: Shawn Levy directs Steve Martin as Clouseau,…
Panthers Face Pitt-falls Ahead
Heading into the final weeks before the conference tourney, the Pitt Panthers basketball team finds itself ranked 14th in the nation, with only three losses besmirching the record. How’d that happen? There are no real stars on this team, no consistent shooting threats. Not one Pitt player ranks in the Top 50 in any offensive…
THE UNTOLD STORY OF EMMETT LOUIS TILL
You can’t talk about Keith Beauchamp’s documentary without mentioning Stanley Nelson’s film The Murder of Emmett Till, which un-covered much of the same ground two years earlier. Both directors overlook the work of Dr. Clenora Hudson-Weems, who told the story first in her dissertation and books. The 1955 lynching of 14-year-old Chicagoan Till by white…
Why was the Ultraviolet bus loop called that?
Well, one obvious answer is that the bus, like UV rays themselves, is no longer visible. Targeted at college kids and young folks in general, the Ultraviolet Loop stopped running in September 2004. (You can, of course, still see the route marked on Port Authority bus-stop signs: Somewhere in town there’s probably a frat boy…
THE WORLD’S FASTEST INDIAN
In this inspirational charmer for the AARP set, a crusty but affable New Zealand pensioner named Bert Munroe (Anthony Hopkins) pursues his dream halfway around the world. In the mid-1960s, he takes his hand-tinkered 1920 Indian motorcycle to the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah to see just how fast the old bike will go. His…
Cope-ing Mechanism
Myron doesn’t like me any more. I’ve had a weird relationship with retired sportscasting legend Myron Cope ever since he came on my old TV talk show in the late ’90s. TV sportscaster Sam Nover suggested that I ask Myron about his real name, Myron Copleman. It seemed like a legitimate question; I wasn’t…
The Art of Improving Homewood
Homewood is one of the largest neighborhoods in the city and also one of the most economically diverse, with both the poorest and most affluent blacks in Pittsburgh. But there’s no thriving artery where its natives can eat and play: Businesses and amenities along main-drag Frankstown Avenue are few and far between. …
Without A Prayer
One problem with religion, says philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, is that we don’t question it enough. Dennett’s new book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (Viking), explores religion scientifically — what it is, what it does, how it does it. Applying the Darwinian logic of natural selection, the Andover, Mass., resident…
Farmers Market May Be Farmed Out
Traffic and polar bears will dislodge the largest of seven city-run farmer’s markets in 2007, but supporters of the Highland Park Farmer’s Market worry that the city’s Citiparks division will also make them move to a temporary spot for summer 2006, confusing (and ultimately losing) both farmers and customers. In 2007, PennDOT will take over…
Belle and Sebastian
To Belle and Sebastian’s cult following, devotion knows no bounds. Word-of-mouth buzz launched the group’s career in 1996, when the limited pressing of its debut, Tigermilk, shot off shelves in the U.K. Each subsequent release has expanded the group’s cabal of fervent admirers, although 2003’s Dear Catastrophe Waitress put fan loyalty to the test.…
Animal Rights: No Liver and Let Liver Here
Foie gras is back on the menu of at least one of the big Burrito group’s restaurants, and members of Voices for Animals aren’t going to let it go unprotested; they say they were told it was banished for good. Not true, says big Burrito executive chef Bill Fuller, who oversees Mad Mex, Kaya, Soba,…
East West Blast Test
Though the world has become so much smaller over the past decade, few have utterly obliterated musical genres, and boundaries between “high” and “low” art, the way John Zorn’s supergroup Naked City did in the late ’80s. But the second release from bi-coastal correspondence project East West Blast Test certainly comes close enough. EWBT…
CURIOUS GEORGE
Matthew O’Callaghan’s animated family film begins serenely enough: A monkey with creepily human features makes mischief in the jungle to the pleasant tones of a Jack Johnson soundtrack. Unfortunately, that scene doesn’t last long. In this adaptation based on the classic books by H.A. Rey, the Man with the Yellow Hat, a New York City…
A Conversation with Mike Carroll
It’s an old story: Mike Carroll, 22, moved to Pittsburgh five years ago to attend the University of Pittsburgh. He now has a degree in communications and is looking for a “real job” doing design for advertising. In the meantime, he’s taken a job as a waiter and joined the circus: The Zany…
EIGHT BELOW
In Frank Marshall’s family adventure, eight sled dogs attached to an Antarctic research facility are abandoned during an evacuation. While their trainer (Paul Walker) pines for them back in States, the plucky dogs make do through the long winter. The film is reputedly based on true events, though nobody can know for sure what the…
Seeds of Change
Joy Batera, it seems, has something in common with George W. Bush and his cronies. It might not look that way. For starters, Batera probably reads more than W: The bookshelf in his Lawrenceville living room is jammed with texts on anarchism as well as welding, woodworking and plumbing. And despite Bush’s globetrotting, Batera probably…
DJ Spike
Some deejays invest a lot in themselves. They buy the newest equipment, go online with the GEMMs and Myspaces, and pass out the glossiest fliers with the nakedest women draped around them. Their names and rides are pimped out. To the deejay, the world’s a dance floor. But none of the above makes it spin,…
Lots from Slots?
While Hill District residents can’t even buy a loaf of bread in their neighborhood, they may soon be able to drop a lot of bread in a nearby casino. Three casino developers are hoping that by early next year, the state’s Gaming Control Board will grant them the sole license to run a slots…
The White Countess
The reward of a good Merchant Ivory film — and there have been many — comes as much from the telling as from the tale being told. Now, for the last time, there’s The White Countess, directed by James Ivory, and produced by Ismail Merchant, whose death last year ended a collaboration that…
After Innocence
By the time Vincent Moto became Pennsylvania’s first convicted felon to be exonerated by DNA testing, he had served more than a decade in prison. Years later, the Philadelphia man who spent his 20s wrongfully incarcerated has a 7-year-old daughter, no steady work and a record he still struggles to prove is clean.…
Freedomland
It doesn’t take much in today’s tenuously strung-together world to tip social order into chaos. In Joe Roth’s moody thriller, Freedomland, the peace is shattered between two adjacent New Jersey communities — a poor, black housing project and a white, blue-collar neighborhood — when a distraught white woman claims a black man jacked…
FINAL DESTINATION 3
If you loved Final Destination 1 and 2, you’ll dig this: It’s exactly the same but with different unknown young actors (to be expected, since the death count in the first two films was “everybody”). Same premise: If you have an ominous premonition and disembark from some mode of transportation — plane, SUV, or in…
