POOR THINGS. Yorgos Lanthimos — born of the glorious, unholy, chimeric union of Luis Buñuel, Ken Russell and Terry Gilliam — has spent much of his storied career exploring parentage, innocence and humanity’s baser impulses through the bleak and delightful lens of his particular brand of absurdism. And now, having joined in a bizarre and […]
The Miniplex
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Might Have Beens
With the joys and horrors of our most recent, apolitical global cataclysm rapidly diminishing beyond the remembering, we return to some version of normal. Which is to say, many of the smaller, headier but nonetheless celebrated releases of 2023 are just now making their way to screens where country folk like ourselves can access them. […]
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Who’s Game?
SELF RELIANCE. Having not yet watched Minx — the Starz smut-mag series — I last checked in with multi-hyphenate Jake Johnson for Ride the Eagle (2021), a charmingly unassuming indie throwback from a time when, still in the throes of the plague, we could be forgiven for thinking the movie business might be in for […]
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Music Tonight: Wednesday, Jan. 17
Speaking of the Miniplex, new weekly free queer dance event Big Mood will be rolling out tonight at 8 p.m., with sonic bounce provided by the venerable DJ Pandemonium Jones. If you are looking for an older institution, the Harlem Globetrotters are in town at the same hour for a showcase face off against their […]
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Music Tonight: Tuesday, Jan. 16
One of the best outdoor backyard shows I caught in the last few years was an ecstatic drone set by the raga-metal group Biomass, headed by Open Head Records honcho Luke Aronie. Sadly, the group migrated to Los Angeles some time ago, but they’re back for a night of the good, soul-scouring loud and pretty […]
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Good Grief‘s Best Friends
GOOD GRIEF. With a brief break in the rain at last, I was in no mood to delve into the weedy waters of grief this week but here we are. Had it not been Dan Levy writing, directing and starring in the Netflix drama/comedy/romance, I would have spared myself all thought beyond what an 80-minute […]
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Music Tonight: Sunday, Jan. 7
The Miniplex is hosting a very special gig tonight at an early start time of 7:30 p.m. Rangda is a supergroup composed of Ben Chasny from Six Organs of Admittance and Comets on Fire, guitarist and avant folk composer Sir Richard Bishop, and New York City-based free jazz drummer and master improviser Chris Corsano. This […]
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Music and Silence
MAESTRO. Due as much to my penchant for low-culture goonery as anything else, Bradley Cooper’s decision to follow up his directorial debut — A Star Is Born (2018), admittedly also a thematic outlier to me — with a meditation on the life and times of Leonard Bernstein seemed anachronistic, to say the least. Shame on […]
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What’s Under the Hood
ANYONE BUT YOU might have been titled Shakespeare for Dummies, Starring Sydney Sweeney’s Decolletage. Earlier this year, a couple of studio comedies (Joyride and No Hard Feelings) threatened to revivify the genre with new perspectives and insightful, pointed writing in service of jokes that are actually funny; it felt like a moment. This, on the […]
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Looking Back, Maybe Forward
Being that the only notable new release (at least in local theaters) this past weekend was Wonka, a moment of reflection presented itself. Not to dismiss Willy’s origin story; to the contrary, I’ve long immersed myself in the source material and the revelatory 1971 adaptation. I’ll continue to skip Tim Burton and Johnny Depp’s portrait-in-rictus […]
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Music Tonight: Friday, Dec. 15
Hot on the heels of the Hip Hop Humboldt Holiday hoedown earlier this month comes another group cypher with a lot of the same names on the marquee. This one’s at Humbrews and it comes in two stages, so listen up. 6-9 p.m. is the free all-ages Fatbol cypher. After 9:30 p.m., however, it’s $10 […]
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Strange Escapes
LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND. A degree of healthy apprehension generally attends the adaptation of a very recent, very successful novel (this one published in 2020 by author Rumaan Alam). Of course, this is a formula as old as Hollywood, empowering the twinned cabals of movies and publishing to form a hydra and hopefully double their […]