by Jay Hathaway
“It’s volatile.”
– Maynard James Keenan
Maynard James Keenan thrives on the unpredictable. He’s famous as the lead singer of two hugely successful, yet almost completely different bands: Tool and A Perfect Circle. His current band, Puscifer, released its first album, “V” Is For Vagina, in 2007, and followed it up with a remix album in 2008.
“Onward and upward.”
– Brody Dalle
While fans of the Distillers and other next-generation punk bands should ultimately find this transition natural and easy to follow, Spinnerette — the new vehicle for former Distillers lead Brody Dalle — has a decidedly more gentle rock edge as debuted on their first release, the “Ghetto Love EP.”
“We’ve had 18 years of climate conferences…”
– Ondi Timoner
In her latest documentary, Cool It!, two-time Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winning director Ondi Timoner (We Live In Public and Dig!) sets forth the case for lowering the temperature of the global warming debate, and offers pragmatic solutions to what former Vice President and preeminent environmentalist Al Gore considers a moral issue.
by Fred Topel
“I do think there’s a real world parallel.”
– Gavin Hood
Gavin Hood became a political filmmaker with his very first movie. In Tsotsi he attempted to redeem a fictional criminal teen in South Africa, Hood’s country of origin. He tackled American foreign policy, for better or worse, in his follow-up film, Rendition. The ensemble drama about our government’s often overlooked policy of taking terror suspects to foreign countries where torture could be conducted legally, was not a hit financially or critically, but it asked the questions Hood wanted to ask.
The X-Men series has always kept politics in the metaphorical forefront. The comic books portrayed mutants as a persecuted minority. The films featured politicians proposing policy to round up mutants, exterminate them or even try to “cure” them, raising the moral question of who decides what needs to be fixed.
“I think it’s a question of vengeance.”
– Leonard Nimoy
The makers of Star Trek can thank their lucky stars that the spacetime continuum isn’t thought to be very continuous these days. The new Star Trek film turns its back on everything that Back To The Future ever taught us about time, and embraces the possibilities of infinite alternate universes that come along with the relatively recent science of string theory.
by Ryan Stewart
“Movies don’t matter anymore.”
-Steven Soderbergh
“If I’m such a commodity, how come nobody went to see The Good German,” Steven Soderbergh asks at one point during our conversation. He’s being half-facetious and half-serious when posing the question. At 46, Soderbergh has already earned every professional accolade a film director can, including the Palme D’Or for his debut, Sex, Lies and Videotape, and the Oscar for his drug war opus Traffic. His frequent collaborators now include George Clooney, Julia Roberts, and Brad Pitt (who is starring in his forthcoming adaptation of the controversial state-of-baseball tome Moneyball). Yet Soderbergh remains a stubbornly anonymous filmmaker, difficult to nail down in terms of style or subject, removed from the public eye, and without a cult following that can be roused to seek out his smaller, more experimental films.
by Jay Hathaway
“In the indie rock world, there’s never really any collaborating outside…”
– Matt Johnson
Matt Johnson of Brooklyn dance-punk duo Matt and Kim has been giving whirlwind interviews all afternoon, ten minutes at a time, but he still has energy to chat with SuicideGirls about his band’s new album, Sidewalks. The first single, “Cameras,” is so catchy that it’s led Matt to tell the press, “We don’t write songs anymore. We write anthems.”
