One of the few reasons to have kids is to have somebody to clean out the garage. There’s nothing we would rather not do on a lazy Saturday than sift through dusty furniture, broken power tools and boxes of god-knows-what that were never unpacked from when we moved two years…
Q Cinema’s Annual Gay & Lesbian International Film Festival is a precocious little 8-year-old. Born in 1999, the slapdash weekend of gay-friendly screenings has steadily matured into a full-fledged cinema schmooze event, complete with nightly after-parties and live entertainment. Previous years have seen some hit-or-miss moments, more than likely a…
When I lived in Nashville, my girlfriend and I ran out of stuff to do. Sometimes we’d just drive around town literally looking for something—anything—to occupy our time for the evening, and all too often we’d wind up at the one independent movie house watching some foreign film about an…
Rod Dreher has coined the term “crunchy conservative” for those “right-of-center Americans who reject much of Republican orthodoxy and are seeking a purer form of conservatism.” And apparently they’re “crunchy” because Dreher thinks we don’t typically think of conservatives as the granola-eating, Birkenstock-wearing, organic food-buying types, but I think they’re…
Wheel watchers: Prepare your eyes! The Wheel of Fortune Wheelmobile is rolling into town, and it’s taking prisoners! Well, contestants. The event, free and open to the public, will allow fans to play a simulated version of WoF, win prizes and qualify for an audition to appear on an upcoming…
Wheel watchers: Prepare your eyes! The Wheel of Fortune Wheelmobile is rolling into town, and it’s taking prisoners! Well, contestants. The event, free and open to the public, will allow fans to play a simulated version of WoF, win prizes and qualify for an audition to appear on an upcoming…
The only thing worse than a slacker is one who doesn’t watch the entirety of The Price Is Right. (Talkin’ to you, negligent pet owners.) Maybe you just wanted to catch Plinko, or maybe you flip the channel the instant a Showcase Showdown winner is announced, but you keep missing…
The title of Photographs Do Not Bend Gallery’s new exhibit is, in my studied estimation, a misnomer. The collection is titled The Age of Innocence, and it features photos of kids, in all their adorable glory, by Keith Carter, John Albok, Bill Owens and others. Now, it may be just…
Chances are you already know everything there is to know about The Breakfast Club, so there’s nothing I can say that hasn’t been said a million times already. It’s a classic, and rightly so. Since its debut more than 20 years ago, teen movies have gotten brasher, sexier and more…
A friend once referred to my apartment as incapable of housing two people, saying such an arrangement would be as comfortable as a prison cell. I find my space to be less than roomy, sure, but generally comfy. I’m grateful for it, for my things in it, for my ability…
Comedian Russell Peters is supposedly renowned for his “quick wit and piercing mimicry,” which sounds kinda cool until you remember that the same thing used to be said about Robin Williams, who now is starring in a movie whose title, RV, is also its premise. Not exactly a high-concept alert,…
Art School Confidential is very much like every movie pilfered from the Saturday Night Live playbook, in which the slight giggles of a four-minute sketch are wrung into two-hour yawns. The work upon which it’s based is a four-page excerpt from a 14-year-old comic book called Eightball, written and drawn…
Our anemic movie industry recycles so relentlessly that even our complaints about such plasticized repackaging comes off as recycled product of its own, offered primarily to draw the line between concerned aging cinephiles and the target consumers who don’t care a whit. But still, we’ve become a culture not merely…
The “painting sculptures” and puffy green felt “islands” of Candace M. Briceño are alive with touch. The tactility of her work is at once warranted and unwarranted. The invitation to rub your fingers up against the tiny archipelago on the wall or to squeeze the heap of squid-shaped yellow banana…
Fateless (THINKFilm) I’ve no patience for the Holocaust docudrama — didn’t even see Schindler’s List till years after its 1993 release, to my parents’ everlasting shame. And so it was I avoided Lajos Koltai’s acclaimed adaptation of Imre Kertész’ Nobel Prize-winning autobiographic novel; are we not already gorged on the…
If you’ve gazed at a record player and imagined you could scratch as well as the next guy, you’re not alone. Guitars, drums, bass — all these instruments appear to require real skill or at least blisters. But who can’t drop a needle? The problem is, cutting beats and transplanting…
The Barbie Diaries Gift Set (Family Home Entertainment) Battle in Heaven (Tartan) The Best of Rocky and Bullwinkle: Volume 1 (Sony Wonder) Big Momma’s House 2 (Fox) Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist: Season One (Paramount) The Facts of Life: The Complete First and Second Seasons (Sony) Grandma’s Boy: Unrated Edition (Fox)…
When the subject of a documentary has been self-documenting himself for most of his natural life, it presents a filmmaker with no dearth of source material. It does, however, raise an obvious challenge: How do you condense decades of experience and introspection into a cohesive narrative? Given his subject’s near-mythical…
If the idea of attending a regular Jim Brickman concert makes your skin crawl, then the mere mention of a Brickman show featuring nothing but Disney songs such as “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah,” “Can You Feel the Love Tonight?” and “When You Wish Upon a Star” should induce panic attacks. If that’s not…
At my house, Mother’s Day lunch means one of two things: Cracker Barrel if we’re “lucky”; Luby’s (shudder) if we’re not. The mom-in-law is getting on in years, so the choice of food runs from bland fare in a country kitschy setting to really, really bland fare in a cafeteria…
You’ve done this: You’ve started telling a hilarious anecdote, only to see your listener stare blankly, unsmiling. “I guess you had to be there,” you say, flailing for dignity. In the case of the ladies from Tuna, Texas, the opposite may be true. Maybe you had to not be there…
There are good songs, there are great songs and there is “Hey Jealousy,” the ultimate anthem for slacker boyfriends, from the Gin Blossom’s debut album New Miserable Experience. Only a loopy, cheery guitar riff and a propulsive guitar solo could make a line like, “Tomorrow we can drive around this…
