The Miniplex has yet another local band showcase tonight and the line-up is smoking. Swingo Domingo is a duo with everything in the name, so expect swing and pop, boppin’ tunes. Icarus and Suns holds down the funk with an Afro and Central American style of melody making, and House of Mary takes you to […]
The Miniplex
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Devils and Do-Overs
LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL. After a brief, pleasantly surprising period of infatuation with modern, low-budget horror, my enthusiasm precipitously — maybe inevitably — declined. But as it has been, so shall it ever be, and the “breakthrough,” every few decades or so, of a group of inspired, well-executed movies will typically be followed in […]
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Music Tonight: Wednesday, March 27
Derek Monypeny from Joshua Tree plays music that fills the horizon, in a manner of speaking. His tightly articulated and mildly treated guitar billows out shimmers of sounds like a heat mirage, and, much like a heat mirage, will take the observer to places that do not exist with the spectral promise of hallucinatory fumes. […]
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Love Lies Bleeding‘s Genre Breakthrough
LOVE LIES BLEEDING. One might not have suspected there was room to develop new sub-genres within film noir, much less imagined that hyper-stylized, ultra-violent, Southwestern lesbian romance bodybuilding revenge noir could prove such a fertile and vibrant one. This lack of vision is forgivable, both because almost nobody could have foreseen this development and because […]
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Oscar Worthy
So as not to be accused of bad faith arguments, a disclosure: I did not watch the 2024 Academy Awards presentation ceremony. In fact, I don’t think I have watched the thing in over a decade. This year, I second-screened — I know modern things! — while I prepared meals and watched Cocktail (1988) on […]
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Spectacle and Substance in Dune: Part Two
DUNE: PART TWO. Looking back, it seems almost egregious not to have reviewed Dune (2021) at greater length upon its release. But then I remind myself that we live in genuinely crazy times and the times of two and a half years ago were maybe even crazier. Late 2021 was a brief era of momentary […]
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Women on the Run
DRIVE-AWAY DOLLS. With the dissolution of the artistic and commercial enterprise that was the Coen Brothers sometime in the beginning of the end of the world (2018-ish), one of the most innovative and imitated dynasties in American cinema came to its apparent end. And with it, perhaps, an epoch of satirical invention transcending form and […]
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Music Tonight: Monday. Feb. 26
Bolero! from San Francisco is a group dedicated to remembering the psychedelic rock sounds and Latin vibes that briefly made that city a beacon of youth culture in the 1960s and 1970s. A memory stone from an age before four decades of Reaganomics and venture capital turned that once-beautiful peninsula into a shittier version of […]
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Swan Dive
FEUD: CAPOTE VS. THE SWANS. Whoever said, “Hating someone is like drinking poison every day and expecting the other person to die,” clearly never saw The Princess Bride. Of course, there is a caustic burn going down, but a good low-stakes grudge can be energizing, feeding competition and giving focus to the day’s million scattered […]
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Music Tonight: Saturday, Feb. 17
The Miniplex is the place to go tonight if you are hankering for a showcase of local bands, courtesy of Lighthouse Records. I can vouch for Pill for Thrills as a solid chunk of fun, and have yet to enjoy the works of Queen Karma, Porcelain Dog and Dinner Service, but I look forward to […]
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Not Valentine’s Day
Some might say I am not a romantic. I don’t think it a fair criticism, nor do I think it’s true. At the same time, though, I don’t intend to write anything here about Valentine’s Day movies. And even though I’m sure there is something in Lisa Frankenstein — a neon-tinged reanimation teen rom-com — […]
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Zone of Interest‘s Horrors, Seen and Unseen
THE ZONE OF INTEREST. Presented with the briefest description of this, e.g. a glimpse inside the domestic life of the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, one’s mind might immediately go to Hannah Arendt’s commentary regarding the “banality of evil.” Which is a reasonable leap, as that phrase has so frequently come into use when […]