THE BREAK-UP
Watching couples squabble typically isn’t entertaining. But when the players are unlikable … Gary (Vince Vaughn) for his inability to leave the couch and Brooke (Jennifer Aniston) for her inability to dump him already … it’s almost unbearable. Director Peyton Reed’s romantic comedy revolves around Brooke’s attempts to change Gary’s lackadaisical ways and get some simple appreciation.…
Left-Hander Compliment
Pirates fever traditionally begins to wane here by the end of April, but there’s one place on Earth where Bucco baseball is about to experience a sudden surge of fandom, if only for one day: Belfast, Northern Ireland. Belfast’s only native-born Major Leaguer, Henry McIlveen, also known as “Irish” and “Lefty,” made his pitching debut…
KEEPING UP WITH THE STEINS
With his son’s bar mitzvah looming, a status-obsessed Hollywood agent (Jeremy Piven) gears up to rent Dodger Stadium and widen the gift-bag gap; the boy himself, soft pliant Benjy, tries to hide by secretly inviting his long-ostracized free-spirit grandfather (Garry Marshall) to distract Dad from his one-upsmanship. The Mark Zakarin script mocks how rites of…
Folino’s Ristorante
Location: 1719 E. Carson St., South Side. 412-488-8108 Hours: Mon.-Thu. 11 a.m.-10 p.m.; Fri. 11 a.m.-11 p.m.; Sat. 9 a.m.-11 p.m.; Sun. 9 a.m.-10 p.m. Prices: Appetizers, soups and salads $3.25-7.95; sandwiches, subs and burgers $6.95-8.95; pasta and entrées $10-18 Fare: Traditional Italian plus upscale deli, grill and pub grub Atmosphere: Casual with optional elegance…
THE OMEN
It’s been said that the ’70s was the last decade of consistently good movies. As a disgruntled film freak (and ’70s survivor), I’d say that assessment is a bit optimistic … but that one of the greatest was Richard Donner’s The Omen (1976), about a young boy who’s really the Anti-Christ. So here comes an…
A Bill of Goods
There is a word for the Pittsburgh City Council: embarrassing. Council’s May 31 “debate” about new spending limits was laughable. Councilors Bill Peduto and Doug Shields introduced a measure that would have stopped an absurd practice. Currently, as Shields put it, if a councilman wants to, he can take, say, $500 out of his miscellaneous…
ON A CLEAR DAY
Laid off when his Glasgow shipbuilding job goes overseas, Frank (Peter Mullan) tries to offshore himself … by swimming across the English Channel. His training regimen allows Frank, and the eccentric mates who assist him, to reassert his manhood; it also gives him a chance to redeem himself for the loss of a dead son…
Rick Santorum’s Home Front
“Privacy. Neutrality. Free Expression. None of these terms is in the Constitution. … [T]hese ‘philosophical’ tenets are pure abstractions.” — Rick Santorum, It Takes a Family I wasn’t going to say anything about the most recent chapter in Rick Santorum’s residency fiasco. Far be it from me to dredge up a tired story just to…
ROAR: LIONS OF THE KALAHARI
Tim Liversedge’s 40-minute IMAX film is basically a giant version of a nature special. Not that much happens at the centerpiece waterhole: Zebras, giraffes and elephants make their cameos, but most of the time we’re watching jittery antelopes skirt around things as two lionesses practice their pouncing. Even during climactic fight scenes it’s hard not…
Penn, Interrupted
Proponents of long-planned Penn Avenue improvements believe the mayor can be convinced again to fund the project, even though his administration recently stopped the effort by shifting money away. Six years in the making, plans for the major repair of streets, sidewalks and sewers along the crumbling Lawrenceville-to-East Liberty section of…
A conversation with Eileen Luba
A night-shift ICU nurse at UPMC Shadyside, Eileen Luba, of O’Hara Township, unwinds on the lawn-bowling green. An ancient game, in which a series of balls called “bowls” are aimed at a smaller ball, lawn bowling was originally brought to this country by British colonists. It fell from favor after the Revolution, but was…
In Between
At first glance, Transition’s show is an ordinary, if above-average, rock concert. The stage is awash in glowing color, strobes and cameras flash, and video-camera booms sweep out over the crowd, then in for close-ups of the five-piece band. The miniscule bass player is a flying mop of long blond hair, whipping around an oversize…
DrugsTaking Names, Losing Customers
If newly proposed county regulations for needle exchange are passed as currently written, Renee Cox has a prediction: “We’ll be seeing a lot of George Bushes in Oakland, picking up needles.” Cox is the executive director of Prevention Point Pittsburgh, which since 2002 has let drug users exchange dirty hypodermic needles for clean ones…
Gay Rights/PoliticsStonewall Dems’ Message: Fight on Both Fronts
A national gathering of gay Democrats here concluded that activists need to push their party in both directions … to be stronger in opposing anti-gay measures and louder about promoting other issues the party professes to support. The Stonewall Democrats, who held their national convention at the University of Pittsburgh June 2-4, vowed to…
525,600 More Minutes of Fame for Warhol Prints
An Andy Warhol Campbell’s Soup can print sold last month for $12 million at Christie’s, the New York City auction house. But a local Walgreens drugstore has managed to rent five Warhol prints for a lot less. In place of toilet paper and detergent, the Warhol prints of a turtle, a cantaloupe,…
Prairie Home Companion
Garrison Keillor’s live radio show, A Prairie Home Companion, began some 30 odd years ago (and continues today) as a fictional reality and a gentle Scandinavian-Midwestern farce. Each week, a group of real entertainers would get together and really perform … except there was something a little unreal about it all. Their tongues…
The Death of Mr. Lazarescu
You needn’t be psychic to figure out the ending of Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, and you needn’t be a literary scholar or historian to guess at what it means: As former Communist countries recover from decades of stunted growth, so does the health of their national cinemas. This is Romania’s…
The Proposition
The Proposition, a western set in Australia, starts by dropping us in the middle of a gun battle. We don’t know who’s shooting who, or why … just that we’re with some imperiled people inside a rude wooden structure that’s rapidly getting ventilated by rounds of fire. The fusillade of pings,…
Diary of a Filmmaker
The popular notion of how filmmakers work, derived from the Hollywood model, is that they all start with scripts, then haul out the cameras and lights to realize those visions. But many independent artists, especially those working in an experimental vein, don’t function that way. Often they just shoot stuff that…
Electronic Voting Machine Doubts Persist
Activists who still want the county to use a paper ballot … or at least to have a paper record of every vote … say the few pages spit out by the county’s newly purchased electronic voting machines during last month’s primary show why we can’t trust this new voting technique. As required by federal…
