by Aaron Colter
This week I’m featuring artistic shit out of Portland, Oregon – the best city in America, but don’t fucking move here because it rains for eight goddamn months out of the year. Oh, and by the way, I hope you have a master’s degree and several thousands of dollars in savings, because the only thing a bachelor’s will get you in this town is a part-time job in a coffee shop as a barista-back to a thirty-three year old with a villain mustache straight out of a silent film, who has, apparently, been studying the art of java and thrift-store shopping since he was sixteen.
How charming is that shit, Portlandia?!
[..]
by A.J. Focht
The airwaves are going to get a lot less crowded over the course of the next year. Many long running TV shows are bowing out and opening up room for new series. Some big names including Smallville, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, and Entourage are currently in the process of wrapping up for good.
[..]
by Fred Topel
“You could say this is a mainstream film if an alien’s saying it”
– Greg Mottola
Our favorite Simon Pegg and Nick Frost projects were directed by Edgar Wright. That’s Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and the BBC series Spaced. While Wright made Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, Pegg and Frost wrote a script for the comedy Paul, and Greg Mottola got to direct them.
In Paul, Frost and Pegg play aspiring sci-fi authors and fans who begin a road trip at San Diego Comic-Con. After a montage of Comic-Con adventures, they take to the road again to visit America’s alien sites. Soon they meet a real alien, Paul (Seth Rogen), and have to help him get home.
[..]
by Fred Topel
“I think there has to be a nonviolent democratic revolution”
– Julian Schnabel
Julian Schnabel has never made easy films. Basquiat was a biography of the street artist who became a protege of Andy Warhol. Before Night Falls portrayed exiled gay author Reinaldo Arenas. And The Diving Bell and the Butterfly told the story of author Jean-Dominique Bauby – all from the point of view of the one eye from which he could see after a paralyzing stroke.
Miral is a story set in the midst of the Israeli-Palestine conflict, told through the eyes of a Palestinian girl. Miral (Freida Pinto) grows up in a Palestinian orphanage, where her teacher, Hind Husseini (Hiam Abbass), encourages her to stay out of politics. But young activists in the PLO like Hani (Omar Metwally) are powerful examples to Miral, and she wants to get involved.
[..]
by Helen Jupiter
“All this meaningless, worthless input beamed into kids brains. Where is…”
– Todd Rutherford
Gram Rabbit is not your average band. They’re not writing the kind of boring, junk pop standards that you hear on the radio or see performed on the ubiquitous “Late Night” shows. Instead, the Joshua Tree-based band is constantly striving to push the boundaries of rock, pop, and electronic music.
Their first two albums, Music to Start a Cult to and Cultivation, were lyrically inspired and musically complex. Their third album, Radio Angel and the Robot Beat, plays like the soundtrack to a darkly-edged dance party, and offers the same adventurous variety of styles and sounds.
You can listen to some of the tracks on their website, then pick it up on CDBaby and throw your own “naked dance party.”
[..]
by Erin Broadley
“We have chemistry that you spend your entire career trying to find.”
– James Michael, Sixx: AM
In Los Angeles, the music industry is more than just a business. For some it’s a game, a l’enfant terrible experiment of intoxicating proportions. For others, it’s an asylum. It’s a labyrinth of lunatics, all lost amongst themselves and all scrambling for something to protect them from the deafening roar of self-destruction. All too often drug addiction becomes the mute button. As Motley Crue’s Nikki Sixx details in The Heroin Diaries, it’s an industry that is mysterious and beautiful, as well as shattering, and one whose battles get waged right here, in our hearts, and often at the expense of our own artists.
[..]
by Ryan Stewart
“There’s a trickster in my noggin.”
– Guy Ritchie
This week will see the release of Revolver, the latest cinematic neckbreaker from 39-year-old British helmer Guy Ritchie. His previous gangster films, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and its follow-up, Snatch, were hailed as major events on both sides of the pond upon their release, and today are seen as cornerstones of a new film genre – the heightened-reality, super-kinetic gangster film, in which the most gruesome toughs and unlikely hoods imaginable all conspire in a near-comical, circle-jerk fashion to outdo each other and rack up the most impressive body count.
[..]
