EVERYTHING COUNTS IN LARGE AMOUNTS
You’ve experienced this scene before. An absurdly attentive waiter with a thick Italian accent keeps returning to a flabbergasted customer’s table, bearing plate after plate of delicacies in quantities no ordinary diner could possibly deserve. Got it? It’s a bit in Albert Brooks’ great film comedy Defending Your Life. (“You like pies? I’m a-gonna bring…
RESISTANCE YOU CAN’T REFUSE
Movie: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
Movie: America’s Heart & Soul
Our Rating: 3.00 Disney is pushing this flag-waving documentary as optimistic counterprogramming to its discarded Fahrenheit 9/11. Given the latter film’s jaw-dropping opening-weekend take, it looks as if the mouse is once again riding the wrong horse. Essentially a theatrical cousin to one of Tomorrowland’s old wide-screen travelogues, America’s Heart & Soul makes brief, almost…
Review – Ashé a Go-Go
Artist: Sonic Liberation Front
Review – Bamnan and Slivercork
Artist: Midlake
Review – Bebel Gilberto
Artist: Bebel Gilberto
This Philly misses the juice
They’re heavy on the Philly at Famous Phil’s: names of city landmarks on the wallpaper, photos of the city everywhere, recent issues of Philadelphia magazine on the tables. The connection’s even in the slogan, just in case you missed it: “Real Philly people making real Philly cheese steaks.” (The editor in me wonders: Are they…
EIGHT ARMS TO HOLD YOU
Movie: Spider-Man 2
RESISTANCE YOU CAN’T REFUSE
Movie: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
Movie: America’s Heart & Soul
America’s Heart & Soul Length: 1 hour 24 minutes Studio: Walt Disney Pictures Website: http://disney.go.com/disneypictures/heartandsoul/flash.html Release Date: 2004-07-01 Cast: Roudy Roudebush, Ann Savoy, Marc Savoy, Mosie Burks, Minnie Bates Yancey Director: Louis Schwartzberg WorkNameSort: America’s Heart & Soul Our Rating: 3.00 Disney is pushing this flag-waving documentary as optimistic counterprogramming to its discarded Fahrenheit 9/11.…
Movie: Baadasssss!
Baadasssss! Length: 1 hour 48 minutes Studio: Sony Pictures Classics Website: http://www.sonyclassics.com/badass/ Release Date: 2004-07-02 Cast: Mario Van Peebles, Ossie Davis, David Alan Grier, Nia Long, Paul Rodriguez Director: Mario Van Peebles Screenwriter: Mario Van Peebles Music Score: Tyler Bates WorkNameSort: Baadasssss! Our Rating: 3.50 In dramatizing the most significant episode in his father’s filmmaking…
Review – Ashé a Go-Go
Artist: Sonic Liberation Front
Review – Bamnan and Slivercork
Artist: Midlake
Review – Bebel Gilberto
Artist: Bebel Gilberto
Review – Ashé a Go-Go
Artist: Sonic Liberation Front
Review – Bamnan and Slivercork
Artist: Midlake
Movie: Baadasssss!
Our Rating: 3.50 In dramatizing the most significant episode in his father’s filmmaking career, Mario Van Peebles turns in a historical account that’s frenetic, self-important, overacted and stuffed with unnecessary directorial flourishes – in other words, a perfect match for its subject matter. The 1971 revenge drama Sweet Sweetback’s Baad Asssss Song was hardly subtle,…
Review – Bebel Gilberto
Artist: Bebel Gilberto
EIGHT ARMS TO HOLD YOU
Movie: Spider-Man 2
The Philly misses the juice
They’re heavy on the Philly at Famous Phil’s: names of city landmarks on the wallpaper, photos of the city everywhere, recent issues of Philadelphia magazine on the tables. The connection’s even in the slogan, just in case you missed it: “Real Philly people making real Philly cheese steaks.” (The editor in me wonders: Are they…
Don Howard and US Express
Our happy town is infused with a maddening puritanical streak. Here in the land of the mouse, we breathe an unhealthy atmosphere of religiosity and moralism. Orlandoans are, to be blunt, prudes. Need proof? Look no further than the case of Don Howard. Howard is a septuagenarian Winter Park artist who creates Mayan-influenced wood carvings.…
THE CASH BOOMERANG
Noted engineer Simon Heyworth painstakingly transferred the original analog masters of Brian Eno’s seminal (and legendarily meticulous) early works – Here Come the Warm Jets (1973), Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) (1974), Another Green World (1975), and Before and After Science (1977) – for a long-awaited and much-hyped set of reissues released in May. Then…
CLINK OF COSMOS
I hate to admit this, but I’m a lying drunk – a flip placebo purveyor in a world of actual science. I am, my friends, the veritable flatline shooting through all that truly matters. I know this, because of a lesson (not) learned in both the seventh and eighth grade science fairs – the prepubescent…
WAKE UP AND FEEL THE SLEDGEHAMMER
The War on Choice by Gloria Feldt (Bantam Books; 352 pages, $12) George W. Bush talks a good line about wanting to promote a “culture of life.” It”s his favorite bit of stock rhetoric next to his “evildoers and thugs” and “terrorists hate freedom” speeches. He recites the “life” speech at each annual anniversary of…
THE NUMBERS DON’T LIE
Until recently, the philanthropic works of Orlando attorney Sally Blackmun have been largely uncelebrated, especially in terms of connecting her with her famous father, the late Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, responsible for the momentous Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. But every day, fresh links to published national stories pop up on the Internet,…
THANK GOD FOR THE BOMB
Waiting for the End of the World by Richard Ross (Princeton Architectural Press; 144 pages, $19.95) Dirty Bomb: Weapon of Mass Disruption by Gilbert King (Chamberlain Bros.; 184 pages, $19.95) The very last image in a stunning new photo essay, Waiting for the End of the World, is that of a refrigerator on which three…
SHUTTING DOWN THE CONVEYOR BELT
Two days after the death of Ronald Reagan, Amy Goodman sits in a Chinese antique store/coffee shop a block from the “Democracy Now!” studios and about a quarter mile from Ground Zero. Meanwhile, from towers moved from the World Trade Center to buildings all over Manhattan, radio and other media are busily broadcasting their rewrite…
SUMMER BOOKS: Read ’em and weep
Spurred perhaps by the unexpectedly lucrative oeuvre of Michael Moore and the realization that they were missing half the gravy train by only serving the neocon side of the cultural divide, publishers are now gambling big on a more humane, leftward view. The result: a quasi-cottage industry operating beneath the dumbed-down radar of a mainstream…
FLORIDA VS. ORKIN
The state attorney general’s office has launched a racketeering investigation into Orkin Pest Control, Inc., the Orlando Weekly has learned. This is the latest legal problem for the nation’s second-largest pest control company, which last fall lost a $3 million binding-arbitration judgment to Collier and Peggy Black, a Jacksonville couple who alleged Orkin did shoddy…
SWEATING FOR KERRY
It’s early – far too early, at 8:45 a.m. – on a Saturday morning, and I’ve filed into the Chinese pagoda at Lake Eola Park, which is now filled with more than 100 Democratic activists, gathered to kick off the local “John Kerry for President” campaign. When this confab breaks in about an hour, these…
DEMOCRACY BLUES
In May, former Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, who presided over the state’s 2000 presidential recount, revealed that her absentee ballot in a March 2004 local election was not counted because she forgot to sign it. And in March, Afghan President Hamid Karzai, trying to persuade traditionalist men to let women register to vote,…
“Close, Sesame”
“We can learn from the experiences of other countries when it comes to a good program to prevent the spread of AIDS, like the nation of Uganda. They’ve started what they call the A.B.C. approach to prevention of this deadly disease. That stands for: Abstain, Be faithful in marriage, and, when appropriate, use Condoms.” –…
