Troy
What we know for sure about ancient Troy and the Trojan War is barely enough for a decent daydream. We know Troy existed in what is now Turkey, and we know a war took place that lasted almost as long as America’s war in Vietnam. But most of our “knowledge” about that war comes…
The Haze of War
Congressional Rep. Melissa Hart (R-Bradford Woods) is a conservative Republican, and like many of the breed, she can come across as straight-laced, uptight. But it isn’t easy to get her to blush. The Bradford Woods Republican recently told the Beaver County Times that the “hand-wringing” over alleged abuse in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison had…
Latter Days
Christian is a lean, muscular Los Angeles waiter and party-boy slut who knows what he wants and always gets it, usually in sweaty two-hour chunks. Aaron is a fresh-faced Mormon missionary who’s just arrived in L.A. to spend two years away from his family saving souls. But the latter is hardly a saint: He’s…
Hard Goodbyes: My Father
In Penny Panayotopoulou’s debut 2002 feature set in Greece in 1969, 10-year-old Elias (Yorgos Karayannis) is sensitive and prone to fantasy, a situation engendered by his parents’ cold relationship and his salesman father’s long absences. In their brief moments together, Elias and his father delight in swapping tales of their imagined journeys, and eagerly discuss…
Shrek 2
When we last left Shrek, the green ogre with the fluted ears and the warm heart, he’d met his true love, Fiona, a sweet princess who’d been cursed to look something like a female ogre. Now happily married, the pair is summoned to Fiona’s homeland, Far Far Away, for a family get-together. Her parents aren’t…
City Paper’s 2004 Summer Guide
Welcome to City Paper’s 2004 Summer Guide. Other, more ambitious, papers might promise guides that help you “beat the heat this summer.” But let’s face it: “Beating the heat” is impossible. Beating anything — except maybe Pirates pitching — takes effort. And effort only makes things hotter. Thanks to the unbending laws of entropy and…
Bon Voyage
If you hate the French, then you’ll love Bon Voyage. Now there’s a tag line you won’t see any time soon on the posters for Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s tale of wartime romance and intrigue. Briskly paced, lushly filmed and insouciant to a fault, it’s actually a parody of movies like this — a kinder, gentler…
Death March
“We in Pittsburgh felt we had to have an emergency anti-war protest to draw attention to the new phase” of the Iraq War, says David Meieran, a member of Pittsburgh Organizing Group, reacting to April’s high casualties and the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. POG led about 70 people through Oakland on May 16, wearing…
Video-active
It’s hard to picture in our image-saturated world, but there was a time before streaming Web video, satellite TV and palm-sized minicams. Take the late ’60s: Television news meant your three major networks. End of story. But even then a technological revolution was brewing, one that might look familiar to the wired denizens of…
No Closure
Next fall, Pittsburgh’s schools might look a lot different. At press time, the final vote on the district’s school consolidation plan to reduce its excess capacity was scheduled for May 26 — a month earlier than originally anticipated, thanks to a waiver from the state education department. That’s way too soon, says state Rep.…
Breakin’ All the Rules
Not many rules get broken in the making of this mostly inoffensive comedy from Daniel Taplitz about a bunch of good-looking, lively, well-heeled, reasonably intelligent people who have trouble forming relationships. Jamie Foxx gets dumped by his vacuous model girlfriend (well, good riddance!), and in his fortnight of affected melodrama ends up penning a successful…
Miller’s Crossing
“The administration is pitting school against school,” says city school-board member Patrick Dowd. Teachers and parents of students at Miller African-Centered Academy in the Hill District were initially relieved when, on May 10, the board said this elementary school would not be closed but in fact expanded to a K-8 program. The Board…
Broken Wings
A fractured family of five in Haifa struggles to get by after the untimely death of its paternal head in this drama from writer/director Nir Bergman. Mom (Orly Zilberschatz-Banai) is stretched to the limit at her midwife job, and leaves much of the care of her troubled children to her 17-year-old daughter Maya (Maya Maron).…
Council Sics Board on Police Training
“If I’m a director or a chief, and someone offered more money for more training, I’d say, ‘I’ll take it,'” says Pittsburgh Council President Gene Ricciardi. That’s not exactly what happened on May 12, though, when council held a summit on police use-of-force training. Ricciardi wasn’t offering more money, which the city doesn’t have.…
Collective Call
While David Cherry is on the phone from his Oakmont home on May 17, talking up the Democrats’ de facto presidential nominee, John Kerry, his doorbell rings. It’s the UPS guy, delivering a package full of Kerry for President bumper stickers, buttons and signs. Kerry doesn’t have everyone’s phone bugged — that’s Homeland Security…
W Gets More Letters
Local members of Amnesty International’s “Group 39” are used to writing letters of protest to officials from China, say, or Vietnam who are holding political prisoners or torturing dissidents. So it was “not typical,” says Eve Wider, head of Pittsburgh’s Amnesty chapter, Group 39, to see a request go out from Amnesty’s London office on…
Bush League
“Iraq’d.” Self-identified “pro-war liberal” Spencer Ackerman’s blog on The New Republic Web site is designed for those who think that even though Bush invaded on what we later learned were flimsy pretexts, we’re still obliged to stay and fix the mess. In his May 13 posting, you can read how courageous Donald Rumsfeld is –…
A Conversation with Daniella Miller
What is More Than Mammal? Using recycled and reconstructed materials, I make clothing and costumes that have a theme — usually about something that’s being destroyed, whether it’s an idea or endangered animal or natural resource. Have you always designed and sewn clothes? I’ve sewn since I was a little girl; my mom taught…
The Post-Gazette’s “ON THIS DATE” column recently said that 50 years ago, five youths were reprimanded in “Morals Court” for crashing a party. What was Morals Court?
“Morals Court,” eh? That must have been some party … the kind I never get invited to, either. So should you bring a lawyer if you decide to go anyway? Not really: In Morals Court, you were more likely to get paired up with a spiritual adviser. Established in 1918, the court was created…
X Mars the Spot
Whoever said geography is destiny must not have been to Pittsburgh recently. Here we are with beautiful rivers and stunning topography, slowly recovering from a couple centuries of environmental exploitation: What could be more compelling symbolically than two rivers converging and heading west, joining forces and moving toward the future? Faced with economic decline, we…
The Streets
Charles Bukowski, William S. Burroughs, Irvine Welsh — these men have much to answer for. Perhaps in their own work, and probably in their own lives, but most certainly in the legacies picked up on by thousands of half-wit fans-cum-artists, people who believed that all it took were the stories, that having the lifestyle meant…
Nekromantix
From “Black Wedding” to “Dead By Dawn,” there’s a certain — shall we say — conceptual lyrical thread running through Danish psychobilly trio Nekromantix’ latest release, Dead Girls Don’t Cry. In fact, it’s the same conceptual lyrical thread that ran through Return of the Loving Dead, the band’s last Hellcat effort. And through most of…
