Summer Heights High: Schoolin’ and Foolin’ from Down Under
Some people hate it, but I’m a fan of the newish Comedy of the Uncomfortable (The Office, The Comeback, Flight of the Conchords, the occasional film feature). Anything is better than worn-out sit-com tropes (Two and Half Men causes me other sorts of pain), and let’s face it: Pain is the root of comedy, not…
Blackberry Studios’ Election Night party
Even if your candidate of choice didn’t win the presidency last week, odds are pretty good you woke up with an “Obamover” on Wednesday morning. (If you work for an alt-weekly, it was pretty much mandatory.) At Lawrenceville-based Blackberry Studios, spirits were high and “Black President” blasted from the soundsystem, as the studio and owner…
John Sokol’s Obama Portrait
Now that Campaign 2006-08: The People (Finally) Decide is over, in retrospect the most interesting piece of election art I saw is one with a Pittsburgh link. It’s poet and artist John Sokol’s portrait of Barack Obama, composed of hand-scripted excerpts from the 2004 Democratic Convention’s “A More Perfect Union” speech that made Obama a…
Celebrity Rehab: Taking the TV Cure
VH-1 struck ratings gold a couple years back with its Behind the Music series, mini “documentaries” that told the ever-popular rags-to-riches-to-rehab-to-rebound dramas of various rock stars. Let’s be honest: Folks tune in for the train-wreck footage of wasted musicians collapsing on stage, or the lurid tales of their guitar heroes vis-à-vis sex, drugs, booze, fast…
Paradise Lost
“At once with joy and fear his heart rebounds.” — Paradise Lost There’s an odd stillness where Brighton Road meets Davis Avenue at the crest of Brighton Heights. Despite the cars buzzing by, and the streets crowded with row houses, there’s no one around on this clear Sunday morning in mid-September. The intersection is…
Art itself is the subject for Dan Jemmett’s new show for Quantum Theatre.
He compares it to “a poem that doesn’t really release its secrets easily.”
Amigos
Familiar Mexican-American food with the quality and polish of a professionally run establishment
Role Models
If you don’t quite have the energy to process a brand-new story, but need a brainless laugh or two, David Wain’s raunchy comedy ought to fit the bill. In it, a couple of goofball underachievers get court-ordered to mentor two troublesome young teens. Dim-bulb party boy Wheeler (Seann William Scott) gets Ronnie (Bobb’e J. Thompson),…
Rocknrolla
If you dug Ritchie’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998), you should find his latest London-set crime comedy amusing; it’s virtually another version, but with more recognizable actors. Once again, Ritchie lines up an ensemble cast of interconnected thugs, gangsters, druggies, ordinary blokes who lean a bit dodgy and entertainers, mixed with some well-heeled…
Madagascar: Back 2 Africa.
If kids actually sit and watch an 89-minute cartoon about a talking lion, zebra, giraffe and hippo without screaming for Mountain Dew and asking every 10 minutes if it’s over yet, that’s a sign of a pretty good children’s movie. And so it was at the advance screening of Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath’s animated…
Happy-Go-Lucky
Poppy, the cheerful, bubbly young Londoner who is the protagonist of Leigh’s character study, is the sort of person we rarely see profiled in films: an ordinary person who is perfectly happy. The loosely sketched plot builds as Poppy (Sally Hawkins) enters into a series of weekly driving lesson with the extremely uptight Scott (Eddie…
Changeling
Director Clint Eastwood’s new movie is pretty much like his last few — somber, stylish, too long, less than meets the eye — but especially like one of them: As in Million Dollar Baby, Eastwood gives strong roles to strong actresses and examines a woman’s struggle against the patriarchy. In 1928, Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie)…
The Three Rivers Film Festival
The 27th annual Three Rivers Film Festival, presented by Pittsburgh Filmmakers, runs from Fri., Nov. 7, through Nov. 22. The program of more than 40 films includes foreign-language works, American independents, documentaries, shorts, local works and experimental cinema, as well as a sidebar of five Polish films. Once again, the popular Alloy Orchestra returns to…
November brings another harvest of literary readings.
Murray has published three novels including 2007’s Forgery (Grove Press), and wrote the screenplay for the 2004 film The Beautiful Country
The author of an acclaimed “novel in stories” about Russian-Jewish immigrants in Squirrel Hill reads here.
“‘Fabulous,’ I say. ‘Fantastic.’ I’m proficient in basic American pleasantries.”
Politics: Lecture examines American “obsession” with Islam
Op-ed writer and pundit Raeed Tayeh has lectured countless times since the events of Sept. 11, 2001 on the topic of how Americans perceive Islam — but the lecture and the audience questions after have lately been dominated by a single DVD. The documentary Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West sparked countless debates and…
Arts: Scrap thieves may have damaged sculpture project
It’s certainly no secret that times are tough these days. So tough, in fact, that even artists are getting robbed. For roughly a decade, artists from the Pittsburgh-based Industrial Arts Co-op (IAC) have been using steel from defunct local mills to sculpt a large sculpture paying homage to the industry. But on Oct. 24, artists…
This Just In: November 6 – 13
Highlights from the local TV news: Trick-or-treating returns to Oil City.
Pittsburgh n’@
Dispatches from the blogosphere
The Mystery of Irma Vep
The duo are simply not fast enough, not sharp enough, to give the production what it must have to succeed.
Lysistrata
Literally, the translation is awkward, like a Dr. Seuss poem written by saucy pirates.
No Place to Be Somebody
“Hip/cool” plays, which No Place must have certainly been at one time, tend to age badly, and this one most certainly has.
Long Story Short
No cheap tearjerker, this world-premiere musical romance is truly touching, i.e., touching the audience with merriment and passion as well as pain.
Radical Riffs series hosts composer and percussionist Lukas Ligeti
Ligeti strives to create electronic music with a sense of motion, a physicality that’s missing when musicians are simply touching buttons and turning knobs.
Jazz violinist Billy Bang revisits Vietnam in music for Veterans Day
“When I was writing that music, I remember actually crying again and seeing the nightmares I’d been trying to get away from.”
Jolie Holland conjures the supernatural with The Living and the Dead
“I never try to force it, I never get nerdy and say ‘I’ll write this kind of song now!’ I just let it happen.”
Broken Bats
Researchers across the state are keeping a close watch on Pennsylvania’s caves this winter for signs that a mysterious New England bat plague could be moving south. In the past two years, tens of thousands of bats in Vermont, Connecticut, Massachusetts and New York have died. And while the death toll is staggering, the scariest…
A new book by two Pitt grads argues that Western activists have the Darfur crisis all wrong.
Funk says that “the history of humanitarian intervention … is almost universally a history of government propaganda,” used to justify warfare.
A Sewickley gallery continues a tradition of showcasing work from the former Eastern bloc.
Such works are the equivalent of memento mori and a celebration of the inexplicable beauty of chaos as it emerges victorious over the order imposed by man.
Why is Bellefield Presbyterian Church in Oakland not located on Bellefield Street but Thackeray Avenue? Was the structure relocated to its current site?
Generally speaking, it’s a lot easier to move people than it is to move buildings. Unless, of course, the people are fundamentalists.
Haggis Holiday
The traditional Scottish sausage is the star of the party.
Balmoral Classic returns for second celebration of traditional Scottish music
The Classic concludes with an evening concert at the Hillman Center featuring Bodega, BBC Radio’s Young Folk Band of the Year for 2006.
Savage Love
I’m a 32-year-old female engaged to a 34-year-old man. Some months ago, when we were both drunk, he showed me some bestiality porn and told me how much the thought of me with a dog turns him on. He confessed that he was absolutely terrified that I would leave him over this, but said he…
In the Bag
I guess now that the election is over, we can look at that notorious Post-Gazette bag wrapper with a bit more detachment. I’m talking, of course, about the “Defend Freedom/Defeat Obama” message the National Rifle Association paid to have plastered on the P-G’s Nov. 3 delivery bags. As we all know, City Paper is in…
