Magically funny: The Incredible Burt Wonderstone exceeds low expectations The advertisements for The Incredible Burt Wonderstone make it seem like it will be the least funny, most egregious, and patience-trying movie of Steve Carell’s career. A movie comedy about Las Vegas performers and street magicians? News flash: The David Blaine jokes stopped being funny the moment […]
Magically funny: The Incredible Burt Wonderstone exceeds low expectations The advertisements for The Incredible Burt Wonderstone make it seem like it will be the least funny, most egregious, and patience-trying movie of Steve Carell’s career. A movie comedy about Las Vegas performers and street magicians? News flash: The David Blaine jokes stopped being funny the moment […]
Of the festival’s myriad non-fiction topics, one of the hottest will be Thomas Jefferson. This is Charlottesville, after all. Three separate programs focus on T.J., including Jefferson’s Legacies with Henry Wiencek and John Ragosta (Friday at 4pm at CitySpace). Wiencek’s Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves received much attention for its highly-charged topic. “There was so much about Jefferson I didn’t understand,” Wiencek said. “There’s a saying among authors, ‘I write to find out.’”
Nasal passages: Although Edmond Rostand’s theatrical classic Cyrano de Bergerac needs no other proof of success beyond the introduction of the word “panache” into the vernacular, the folks over at Play On! have done him another favor. In local playwright Peter Coy’s take, Mostly Cyrano, a troupe of actors prepares to tackle the gargantuan piece only to have its themes […]
“It would be easy enough just to sit down and watch TV every night, but instead we work together on cool shit,” Dave Gibson said.
“Why isn’t Charlottesville Athens?” James Wilson said, repeating a question I had posed to him. “They have R.E.M. We have Dave Matthews. We both have about the same amount of venues, same size. It’s a tough one. It really is.” It was clear, watching Wilson, that it wasn’t the first time he’d considered the subject. […]
Celtic couture King Golden Banshee is mysterious in the vein of traditional Irish folklore. With a limited presence online, the only information gleaned from the band’s Facebook description is a collective interest in Guinness. The five-piece counts flutes, fiddles, banjos, the bodhran, and tin whistles among its instrumental repertoire and uses them skillfully to recall […]
Buffeted by the chaos of war and reinventing themselves in America, the women of The Joy Luck Club draw closer by sharing their stories, even if the endings change in the retellings.
Faithful foursome While the eleventh studio album by the well-established Christian southern rock band seems the result of hard work and posterity, Third Day has made it a goal to prove that its latest release falls into another category: miraculous. After a troubling start with a suspect record deal, Miracle, released in fall 2012, became […]
Behind the curtain: Oz the Great and Powerful is a playful take on the wizard’s rise In this day and age, when everything in life—movies, television, sporting events, you name it—seems rooted in money, a prequel to The Wizard of Oz feels like, perhaps, the most cynical of moneymaking schemes. Is there a more surefire […]
Django untamed A guitarist who learned his craft in gypsy campsites scattered across the French countryside sounds like the stuff of myths, but Stephane Wrembel’s colorful beginnings define his artistic career. His fifth album, Origins, was released last year and finds him reaching into that history to incorporate a broader palette of sound into his […]