Can You Dig It? The Ultimate Isaac Hayes
Can You Dig It? The Ultimate Isaac Hayes Label: Stax Rated: NONE WorkNameSort: Can You Dig It? The Ultimate Isaac Hayes You haven’t heard Isaac Hayes until you’ve heard Isaac Hayes sing “Baby I’m-A Want You.” Originally the B-side of a single, its presence on this two-CD/one-DVD retrospective is somewhat surprising. But if “Shaft” is…
Recording a Tape the Colour of Light
Recording a Tape the Colour of Light Label: Rough Trade Rated: NONE WorkNameSort: Recording a Tape the Colour of Light More superb autumnal music exists than any one person would ever have time to experience, but Recording a Tape the Colour of Light isn’t quite part of this tradition. The debut from the Montreal-based quintet…
Another World Is Possible
Another World Is Possible Label: Uncivilized World Rated: NONE WorkNameSort: Another World Is Possible The delicious irony of this wonderful compilation of anti-globalism music and texts is that, without the acceleration of globalization over the past decade, the very logistics of uniting artists and writers from first- and third-world countries would have been nearly insurmountable.…
BULL DEVIL JACKET
Jarhead Studio: Universal Pictures Distribution Rated: R Website: http://www.jarheadmovie.com Release Date: 2005-11-04 Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard, Jamie Foxx, Lucas Black, Chris Cooper Director: Sam Mendes Screenwriter: William Broyles Jr. WorkNameSort: Jarhead Our Rating: 1.00 With Jarhead as the third strike against him, director Sam Mendes has gained our mistrust the old fashioned way: He’s…
DEPARTMENT OF TRUTH
Shopgirl Studio: 20th Century Fox Rated: R Website: http://shopgirl.movies.go.com/ Release Date: 2005-11-04 Cast: Claire Danes, Jason Schwartzman, Steve Martin, Frances Conroy, Sam Bottoms Director: Anand Tucker Screenwriter: Steve Martin Music Score: Barrington Pheloung WorkNameSort: Shopgirl Our Rating: 4.00 Even when it’s shot through with apology, a June-November romance like Shopgirl is full of unsavory implications.…
Chicken Little
Chicken Little Studio: Buena Vista Pictures Rated: G Website: http://disney.go.com/disneypictures/chickenlittle/ Release Date: 2005-11-04 Cast: Zach Braff, Garry Marshall, Joan Cusack, Steve Zahn, Don Knotts Director: Mark Dindal Screenwriter: Ron J. Friedman, Steve Bencich Music Score: John Debney WorkNameSort: Chicken Little Our Rating: 2.50 Yet another movie that lays the groundwork for being one type of…
Prime
Prime Studio: Universal Pictures Rated: PG-13 Website: http://www.primemovie.net/index.php Release Date: 2005-11-04 Cast: Meryl Streep, Uma Thurman, Bryan Greenberg, Jon Abrahams, Jerry Adler Director: Ben Younger Screenwriter: Ben Younger Music Score: Ryan Shore WorkNameSort: Prime Our Rating: 3.50 Don’t be fooled by the poster and gimmicky premise, which tend to lump this movie in with any…
The Weather Man
The Weather Man Studio: Paramount Pictures Rated: R Website: http://www.weathermanmovie.com/ Release Date: 2005-11-04 Cast: Nicolas Cage, Michael Caine, Hope Davis, Gemmenne de la Peña, Nicholas Hoult Director: Gore Verbinski Screenwriter: Steve Conrad WorkNameSort: Weather Man, The Our Rating: 2.00 Scuttling his reputation for liveliness, Gore Verbinksi (Pirates of the Caribbean, The Ring) proves that following…
GET CAUGHT UP IN THE MOMENT
I haven’t been fair to the Italian kitchens in town. Please try and understand – not only do I come from an Italian-American background, but also I recently lived in New York, the city that has the most Italian food outside of Italy. My neighborhood there was chock-full of hand-rolled pasta, freshly pulled mozzarella and…
NEVER MIND THE BALLS
John Albert’s oddly joyous new book Wrecking Crew: The Really Bad News Griffith Park Pirates profiles what may or may not be an emerging subculture: The Born-Again Jock. These are the guys who shunned sports as teens because the coach didn’t like their long hair, or because the idea of adult-supervised fun was no longer,…
ALL THE RING’S A STAGE
AJ Gallant looks like a mean son-of-a-bitch. It’s partly his barrel chest, his hefty arms, dotted with tribal tattoos, and the long ponytail pulled taut, leaving the shaved sides of his head exposed, but it’s his eyes that do the trick. Their near-bloodshot, glossed-over gaze when opened wide – and they almost always are –…
SOME PUBLICITY REALLY IS BAD
Wailing loudly and apparently incredulous at being ordered to jail, a scantily dressed Natalia McLennan, 25, was taken directly to lockup from a New York City courtroom in September, after being charged with prostitution; McLennan had recently posed for the cover of New York magazine, proclaiming herself to be the city’s top-grossing “escort” and acknowledging…
Happytown
At 10 a.m. Oct. 31, mayoral also-ran Samuel Ings stood on the front steps of City Hall and announced a campaign to recall Mayor Buddy Dyer. Trick or treat! “There’s still a dark cloud hanging over City Hall,” Ings told his audience, a gaggle of media and one demonstrably annoyed Dyer staffer. Ings was referring…
Rob Brezny’s Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19) I have not played the fantasy role-playing game Nox. From the review of it in Fortean Times, though, I surmise you might want to check it out. It could prepare you well for the coming week – maybe teach you a few tricks that would come in handy. The reviewer says…
A FICKLE PICKLE
I am not a fickle man. Once I give my allegiance to something, that something will almost always retain my allegiance. For example, I hate Nazis. I promise to keep hating Nazis, even though there are only about 27 of them left. (For those who are about to send me blistering, invective-filled e-mails – I…
SEX, DWARVES AND ROCK & ROLL
The Dwarves’ Blag Dahlia might have broken a bottle over your head, or perhaps his skull swallowed the glass. He probably has a scar by which to remember the band’s most chaotic concert in Orlando, but tracing his stage wounds back to their performance of origin has become impossible. So much mayhem, so many intertwined…
HITTING HOUSES OF THE HOLY
OCT. 25, 10:10 P.M.: A church patron was cruising by his holy house in the 6800 block of Lake Underhill Road when he spotted the preliminary phase of one downright sinful deed. Said parishioner noticed a peculiar and unknown person wandering in the church’s backyard and then entering a fenced compartment. Why would anyone rove…
FAT BUT FRISKY
I’ve been with my guy for almost eight years. He wants sex way more often than I do, but I don’t because I’m not attracted to his 80-pounds-overweight body. The one time I gently broke it to him why, he acted really hurt and didn’t sleep with me for a few weeks. He didn’t go…
BOO HUMBUG
“I’m sorry. I’m at some Holiday Inn right now.” These are the holiday-themed words that seem to bleed from my friend Tony’s Halloween mouth, but I could be wrong. I’m insisting to myself that I’m not even here right now, but rather at a swingers’ party with a naughty key bowl. Apparently, neither of us…
WE ID
According to the Orlando Sentinel, the Florida Sheriffs Association wants the state to issue special licenses to some drivers identifying them as registered sexual predators. Civil-liberties experts are predictably wary of the idea, but if they knew about some of the other control measures the association plans to push for, their hearts would really leap…
Matisyahu, Sage Francis, Molotov, Cole Bros. Circus and more
Thursday • 3 ORLANDO PUPPET FESTIVAL It may seem like cruel irony that Muppet writer Jerry Juhl passed away just weeks after Kermit the Frog’s 50th anniversary in show business, but to hard-core puppet appreciators like ourselves, it was yet another reminder that flesh and blood are transient, but felt lives forever. (For the record,…
Notable Noise
I have a friend I’ve nicknamed “The Dreamsmasher” because whenever I have a great idea, he’s the first one to tell me why it will all go horribly wrong. Well, the fine folks in Fantasie are probably wishing they had encountered The Dreamsmasher before last Friday night, Oct. 25, as that was the night that…
Letters
Leave the kid alone I have been an avid reader of your publication for quite some time. I consider myself to be a fair and open-minded individual. I have enjoyed your commentaries through the years and satire that has been intelligent on most occasions. But I felt it necessary to write to you after seeing…
Book Review
Infusing the personal into the political (or vice-versa), Soueif dances through the minefield of contemporary “Arab” identity in this remarkable collection of essays written over the past 20-plus years. She applies the same deftly descriptive style as her fiction work to these pieces, and whether she’s wondering if, “to be good for” her “smart and…
YOU’RE SO ORLANDO IF …
In launching our debut edition of the You’re So Orlando If … Contest, we were surprised to discover that, hey, our readers can write some funny stuff when prodded. So here are the responses, with the winners chosen by the measure of our own personal fun-o-meters. Read the top three winners, the honorable mentions and…
Book Review
Cleverly titled, interestingly premised and poorly written, Small Mediums at Large is as promising as it is frustrating. Iacuzzo is blessed with an admittedly unique life story and a family of outsized characters, but the dry, chronological style she uses to share it with the reader is stultifying, and her dependence upon long stretches of…
Book Review
This book is somewhat improperly attributed; although Milanich has done a fine job in collating and contextualizing the material, the “material” is a collection of newspaper articles written by Amos Jay Cummings for the New York Sun between 1873 and 1893. If you think Northerners believe Florida is fucked up now, wait until you read…
THE DAMAGE DONE
Sex, drugs, murder, suicide … the diary of this turn-of-the-20th-century Hungarian author is a tale so sordid and depraved it seems very nearly a concoction of the writer’s imagination. However, the events Csath documents did in fact happen to him, and the diary he left behind is a stunning document of the sort of self-involved…
