A world of P.U.R.E. imagination
You know that sinking feeling you get when a good friend hands/sends you a manuscript and they utter those dreaded words, “Will you read my first book?” You know how it’s always accompanied by a half-smile and the age-old condescending convo about how “so few people ever finish a book” and “it’s great that you…
KFC double down: the iPad of fast food.
The KFC Double Down sandwich â?? either the long-awaited messiah of crunchygreasy tastebud gratification or a diabetes-and-strokeâ??layered harbinger of the end of the world, depending on the politics of your particular plate â?? dropped today. (In fact, many of them are on the way to their second drop already, based on the number of tweets…
Divine Miss Mâ??s
A passionate proprietress gives this café its allure
Bad replication
The most boring rock & roll movie ever made
A night to remember?
Hilarious â??Date Nightâ?? an instant classic
Florida Film Festival:4-10-2010
April 10 The Secret of Kells (***) Last year’s surprise nominee for Best Animated Feature is an undeniably gorgeous film, but the true-life tale behind the ornate Book of Kells has been too eagerly molded to include Irish forest sprites who never speak above a grating whisper, a multi-culti band of sidekick monks, and daddy…
Florida Film Festival:4-11-2010
April 11 Don’t Let Me Drown (***) E.J. Bonilla and Gleendilys Inoa play Latino star-crossed lovers in New York, one month after 9/11 in this unimposing story of fledgling teen romance. Writer-director Cruz Angeles presents a sweetly naturalistic lower-class setting that’s far from both Neil Simon’s sparkling city and the exploitative squalor of Precious, and…
Florida Film Festival:4-12-2010
April 12 Lost Sparrow(*****) “Lost sparrows” are what the Crow tribe calls children taken away by the government. Young filmmaker Chris Billing investigates an untold chapter in his strange-but-true WASP family of 10 children -— half of them adopted Native Americans. Biological son Billing exquisitely edits the footage of the discovered secrets — incest, abuse,…
Florida Film Festival:4-13-2010
April 13 The Wind Journeys (****) Ciro Guerra’s film starts out painfully slow, but once it kicks into gear it turns into a sublimely paced, magical road movie about a weary traveling musician trying to return a cursed accordion to his master, and the poor teenager who follows him across Colombia on his task. The…
Florida Film Festival:4-14-2010
April 14 Racing Dreams (**) Where do NASCAR drivers come from? Indulgent parents who spend years hauling them all over the country to compete in go-kart races. This is a time-honored story in the vein of countless docs about youth beauty pageants, except these kids are racing around in circles instead of selling it on…
Happytown
While we have already held up a malfunctioning stage light to the gutted (and arguably faulty) premise of the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts (“Keeping up appearances,” March 25), we did not trouble you with the geeky economic cat’s cradle of just how that whole $129 million in bond issues could be a…
Florida Film Festival:4-15-2010
April 15 Waking Sleeping Beauty (*****) Don Hahn produced Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King, making him as qualified a witness as any to relay the tales of turmoil behind the Walt Disney Animation renaissance that spanned from 1984 to 1994. Between the rich archival footage and candid interviews,…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): It would be a good week for you to perfect your ability to crow like a rooster, Aries. I also recommend that you practice your skill at leaping out of bed in the morning fully refreshed, with your imagination primed and ready to immediately begin making creative moves. Other suggested exercises:…
Florida Film Festival:4-16-2010
April 16 The Sun Came Out (***) Try not to envy the artists brought together for Crowded House’s Neil Finn’s experiment to record an album in three weeks, with the proceeds going to charity. As if hibernating in a studio with some of music’s finest musicians — Lisa Germano, Jeff Tweedy, Radiohead’s Ed O’Brien and…
Savage Love
I’m a young, straight feminist male and I’ve been dating my feminist girlfriend monogamously for almost two years. Recently, I’ve been coming to terms with the fact that I am turned on by rape fantasies. I sent out some feelers with my girlfriend by initiating a conversation about kinks and asking about what types of…
Florida Film Festival:4-17-2010
April 17 The Warlords (*****) A harrowing, emotionally involving Chinese war film by veteran director Peter Chan, The Warlords takes on the unfilmable Taiping rebellion and tames its subject by focusing on a disgraced General (the phenomenal Jet Li) who bands together with a den of thieves-turned-soldiers and teaches them to fight back and win.…
Police Beat
March 23 (2010-137582) 9:54 p.m.: Police found a man shot several times in the back of a housing complex in the 1000 block of Carter Street. He was taken to the hospital, but was “uncooperative” with police. Maybe nobody shot him. March 24 (2010-138587) 11 a.m.: Someone broke into a closet at the Citrus Bowl…
My best friend is an alien
Drones 9:15 p.m. Saturday, April 10 at Regal Winter Park 4:30 p.m. Friday, April 16 at Enzian Theater Back in the early-to-mid-1990s, Amber Benson and Adam Busch were a couple of teenagers trying to find work in Orlando with Nickelodeon, by then the only Hollywood player left in town. Benson spent 9th grade at Dr.…
Live Active Cultures
Sane people head south for spring break, trading sucky weather for sunshine. I passed Passover doing the opposite, dodging Manhattan’s rainiest weather on meteorological record. Make what you will of my compo mentis recollections. • I sat two rows behind Bill Murray during the extraordinarily exuberant Broadway musical Fela!, starring Sahr Ngaujah as Afrobeat revolutionary…
Florida Film Festival:Making faces
Florida Film Festival 2010 April 9 — April 18 at Enzian Theater, Regal Winter Park Village 20 and Plaza Cinema Café 407-629-1088 www.floridafilmfestival.com $10 (individual screenings), $600 (Platinum Pass) Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer once said, “Nothing in the world can be compared to the human face. It is a land one can never tire…
Culture 2 Go
Holy healing The Adventists 10 p.m. Friday, April 9 WMFE-TV www.wmfe.org With a clear view from I-4, locals and travelers are familiar with the towering constructions rising into the skies at Florida Hospital Orlando. From Mills Avenue, near Loch Haven Park, the buildings loom large over picturesque Lake Estelle. When it comes to healthcare, Florida…
Guitar anti-hero
Punching the Clown 9 p.m. Monday, April 12 at Regal Winter Park 4:30 p.m. Thursday, April 15 at Regal Winter Park How many times has a memorable story from your everyday life prompted you to suggest to a friend, “You know, this would make a great scene in a movie?” For musical comedian Henry Phillips,…
Food porn
T&T&A by Tony Stamolis www.tandtanda.com (Sump Books) (Sump Books) (Sump Books) Photographer Tony Stamolis just made a book about his favorite things. His favorite things happen to be naked ladies and tacos, and his new photo book T&T&A (you figure it out) places images of Suicide Girl—esque nude models alongside gloppy, cheesy heaping plates of…
DVDs Nuts!
The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call — New Orleans This not-really-a-remake of Abel Ferrara’s seedy 1992 film stars Nicolas Cage as Terence McDonagh, a coke-snorting, hooker-banging Louisiana cop on the hunt for drug dealers … or something. The script by TV cop drama veteran William M. Finkelstein is standard procedural stuff, but the reason to…
This Little Underground
A moment of silence for Garage Days, please. Despite earning a following and graduating beyond a stopgap to plug the summer concert lulls, the semi-regular Monday-night series in the Social’s back room has come to an abrupt and somewhat mysterious end. Too bad, because summer is coming back around soon and Garage Days was a…
Uncaged bird
Red Sparowes The Fear is Excruciating, But Therein Lies the Answer (Sargent House) with Doomriders 8 p.m. Thursday, April 8 The Social, 407-246-1419 www.thesocial.org $12 After three years away, L.A. instrumental rockers Red Sparowes reemerge this week with a third album of titanic expression, and their signature, compelling artistry remains untouched. Their songs are defined…
The long goodbye
Copeland with I Can Make a Mess Like Nobody’s Business, Person L, Deas Vail 8 p.m. Saturday, April 10 and 7 p.m. Sunday, April 11 The Social, 407-246-1419 all ages www.thesocial.org $15 It was at a late-March concert in Pomona, Calif., when something occurred to Copeland guitarist and Orlando resident Bryan Laurenson that he hadn’t…
Florida Film Festival:4-9-2010
April 9 Paper Man (*)This debut film from writer-directors Kieran and Michele Mulroney (who are slated to write the Sherlock Holmes sequel) plays like a direct crib from a chapter from David Cross’ mock “free list of quirks for aspiring independent filmmakers.” Laughably self-serious and diced in the editing bay to the point where some…
