Its ending reportedly tampered with since Sundance, the indie-scented dysfunctional-family comedy Our Idiot Brother winds up flattering its complacent middle-class audience, but not for any real reason—there’s no medicine going down with this sugar. To try and imagine what the Weinstein Company might have worried about is to find oneself quoting the movie’s own doofus parolee hero: “You know what? You know what? Wow.”
Its ending reportedly tampered with since Sundance, the indie-scented dysfunctional-family comedy Our Idiot Brother winds up flattering its complacent middle-class audience, but not for any real reason—there’s no medicine going down with this sugar. To try and imagine what the Weinstein Company might have worried about is to find oneself quoting the movie’s own doofus parolee hero: “You know what? You know what? Wow.”
“Star Trek: The Next Generation” Friday 8am-8pm, Saturday 1-6am, SyFy It’s Labor Day weekend, which means two things: Summer is officially over, and there’s nothing on TV until the new season starts next week. So why not spend the holiday simultaneously going to the past and the future with this “Next Generation” marathon. “Next” originally […]
By modern movie standards, the polite action comedy of bumbling criminals seems awfully quaint. Might some refreshment be had from the rude slacker comedy of utterly imbecilic criminals? Aziz Anasari (left) and Jesse Eisenberg star in the chuckle-worthy bank heist flick 30 Minutes or Less. Not from this one. Given the actual 2003 incident in […]
When Stephen Steinbrink thinks of Charlottesville, he thinks of a trip to a swimming hole in torrential downpour, and how “drunk” locals are on the good shows that come to town. After a string of tour dates was canceled in 2009, the Arizona songwriter lingered here for a few days and played in some of […]
“Buried Treasure” Wednesday 8pm, Fox You may have noticed that our country’s not doing so hot at the moment. We’ve got a $14.5 trillion national debt. We just finished that whole debt-ceiling drama and had the resulting drop in credit rating. And unemployment is around 9.1 percent nationwide. The average American family is hurting, and […]
“The Hour” Wednesday 10pm, BBC America Likely encouraged by the critical and ratings success of AMC’s “Mad Men,” the period drama has seen a major re-emergence in the past couple of years. You’ve got “Boardwalk Empire” on HBO, “Pan Am” and “The Playboy Club” set to debut this fall, and this new British spy thriller […]
As a title, Beginners sounds a note of humility, albeit self-consciously. Certainly that makes it the right name for writer-director Mike Mills’ touching, autobiographical new film. In it, a commitment-phobic graphic artist is supportive but bewildered when his father comes out of the closet at 75—just in time to face a terminal illness.
When I’m writing I usually pull lyrics from proverbs. I also scribble a lot in notebooks and journals. I might show the recording to the guys in the band and we’ll rock on it for a while.
As we approach the August 20 Democratic firehouse primary for City Council, a question that’s been asked on the state and federal levels is worth asking here. What should be the city government’s role in supporting the arts? I asked the 12 candidates to respond by e-mail to a prompt: Should the city fund the […]
For more than a decade, guitarist and songwriter Ben Chasny has held the unofficial title of Busiest Guy in Indie Rock. In addition to playing with the MC5-inspired psychedelic act Comets of Fire, Rangda and a number of other groups, Chasny is the architect behind Six Organs of Admittance, which plays Wednesday, August 17 at […]