The most noticeable thing about Argo —and this can’t entirely be the point —is that Ben Affleck, as a director, continues to grow into a confident helmsman. He trusts his actors (there’s not a weak supporting performance in the bunch), trusts the story, and doesn’t rush anything.
Stuart Davis is a man of many facets. You might even say he’s multi-faceted. He’s a musician with 14 albums to his credit, a comedian, a Bhuddist monk, a TV producer, a writer/actor, and a few dozen other things. The Minnesota-born punk monk is regularly referred to as the Twisted Mystic, earning his moniker with […]
No Doubt Push & Shove/Interscope Records From the mid-’90s into the mid-’00s, No Doubt was one of the hottest bands on the planet, and even when lead singer Gwen Stefani went solo she continued to burn up the charts. Now the band has released a comeback album, its first of original material since 2001 and it […]
Cameras are more widely available than they have ever been. There are estimates that 10 percent of all of the photographs ever taken were shot in the last year. 16mm and Super 8 may not have been as clean-looking or as professional as the 35mm film used in feature films, but it was cheap and […]
Taking the reins of an institution with deep community roots requires chutzpa, maybe even a little swagger, and in such situations, it is my understanding that the prevailing wisdom is to go big or go home. It does not appear that Live Arts’ new artistic director, Julie Hamberg, is headed home any time soon. Hamberg […]
At 2am in Williamsburg, the motorcade is already warming up. It’s not an atypical start for His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama. His schedule usually has him up at 3am for prayers and meditation. But today’s schedule is a bustling one, and His Holiness, his accompanying aides and representatives, and their police escort are racing down […]
Jason Pollock (former guitarist for grunge hitmakers Seven Mary Three) and his eponymous band of Albemarle-area musicians, carve out songs that sound like Tom Petty got his chocolate in The Smithereens’ peanut butter—resulting in familiar, flavorful tunes. The Pollocks roll out a new album, Life Of The Stars, and it crackles with the energy of […]
Raid your closet for those acid wash jeans and feather your hair back because the pop culture of the ’80s has come full circle. Naturally this requires a soundtrack, so Gordon Gartrell and Cru Jones, after hearing one too many bogus covers of their favorite decade, decided they weren’t gonna take it, gathered four similarly-minded […]
Barboursville’s eminent regional theater, Four County Players, is celebrating four solid decades of musicals, contemporaries, classics, 10-minute festivals, and all the various and delightful manifestations of staged drama with a one-weekend-only celebratory blowout, 40 and Fabulous. They’re bringing in some local heavy hitters to re-live the thrills in a musical revue: Jane Scatena, Joncey Boggs, […]
2011 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and the 2012 recipient of the Best Play Tony Award, Bruce Norris’ dark comedy Clybourne Park centers on two families–one black and one white–buying the same house in 1959 and 2009, respectively. Crafted as a response to the 1959 Lorraine Hansberry play, A Raisin In The Sun, it […]