newcritics

Recently, I had a chance to see “Elizabeth Rex” performed at Nicu’s Spoon Theater in NYC, written by Timonthy Findley and directed by Joanne Zipay. The play’s principle motivation attempts to unravel the struggle universally experienced by men and women who seem to lack a […]

What to make of John Adams, the highly-promoted mini-series now unwinding through the late 18th century on HBO? The formula of the weekly episode is well-set and sadly telegraphed: Adams unsure and agitated as portrayed by a bewigged Paul Giamatti, some heinous medical procedure filmed in gruesome detail, tension in the long-suffering but strong Adams […]

We have the terrorists on the run. We’re keeping them on the run. One by one, the terrorists are learning the meaning of American justice.–George W. Bush, State of the Union address, January 28, 2003
We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We’ve got to spend time in […]

It’s undoubtedly an oversimplification, but to me there are two fundamental models for rock bands–the first involves a style that is tight, punchy, and carefully arranged, the second involves a more ad hoc approach, a style that wheels and sprawls played by a band coloring outside the lines, piling lick upon lick, squealing uncomfortably to […]

For all the heat they take from critics, and even from audiences when genre-busting and general disregard for the rules of storytelling are significant elements in the appeal of some of the past year’s best movies, there is something to be said for formulas. Because when they work, when the director is alive to the […]

I always found it odd that of all pop music, it’s Sheryl Crow’s that is most likely to send my 16-year-old into paroxysms of abhorrence.
On it’s face Crow’s music is unexceptionable: it’s unpretentious and catchy; well written, well played, and well sung (even my daughter would admit). Perhaps for some, Crow’s Sara Lee quality is […]

The last few months have been fertile times for those interested in seeing and hearing rock and roll on the big screen, and for those compelled to investigate and/or dismantle its mythologies, self-perpetuated or not. Todd Haynes dug into six sides of the publicly orchestrated persona of Bob Dylan, and exploded the conventions of the […]

We Philly kids grew up with great rock and roll radio in the 60s. You’d switch on the transistor and you had it all, from the Supremes and the Four Tops to the Stones and the Beatles to the more obscure but fantastic Dyke & the Blazers and the Shadows of Knight and the Seeds. […]

I almost hesitate to recommend readers to make an effort to see The Seafarer, since it’s booked for a limited run at Broadway’s Booth Theatre. Sort of a cruel joke, like the Devil coming to collect the soul of a sinner who has just made his best effort yet to turn his life around. There […]

Until recently, I could find little tolerance for anyone’s “love me, love my favorite rock band” attitude. It harked back to when I was a teenager and a serial girlfriend to guitar-playing boys. The guys talked about their favorite music for hours. If I disagreed out loud, I would leave the scene an ex-girlfriend. Their […]

Todd Haynes wheeling, kaleidoscopic Bob Dylan biopic, I’m Not There, is so dazzlingly fresh and original that it makes me wonder what went wrong with movies over the past thirty years.
How did cinema turn from an enterprise entered into by the bravest creative minds–people like Welles, Fellini, Buñuel, Goddard or even Warhol, people willing to […]

”If Southland’s smugness doesn’t get to you, then its barriers of built-in self-protection should. The film is designed so that any of the obvious critical grenades one can lob at it can be deflected with the force of a fly swatter: try “scattershot,” “messy,” “inelegant,” “politically confused” and its defenders will follow the Richard Kelly […]

Last summer, another occasional blogger on this site gave me a sterling backstage view of Parliament, a thoroughly enjoyable excursion through wood-lined passages and old stone arches, into robing rooms and vaults and the like. So I was thinking of that very tour as The Deal unfolded on my screen recently - a tight, well-acted […]

What set New York’s Funniest Stand-Up contest winner Wil Sylvince apart from the rest of the field during Monday night’s finals at Caroline’s was the Haitian material.
The material was funny–particularly the bit about Haitians making lousy pimps because of their elfish, pipping speech and squeaky falsetto voices.
But what made the material fly was the way […]

New York City in the early 1970s was a grim and pitiless place–filthy on its surface, venal and corrupt at its core. Riven by poverty and racial strife, it was a town that pushed its inhabitants to the wall–either you were a hustler or a mark, a hipster in the know or a rube so […]

There is a moment in Alan Bennett’s wonderful novel in miniature, The Uncommon Reader, recommended here by Maud Newton, when the royal literary figure in question realizes the joy of discovering a favorite writer has been hiding in plain sight, awaiting only discovery and a hundred or so quiet evenings. A few years ago, I […]

This is the time of year when I get caught up on records I missed and my old new record of the moment is Bright Eyes‘ Cassadaga, released this past spring.
This is an enchanted record. A confessional, grandiose, oratorical, piece of Americana that mixes the pretentious and the personal in the grand, Whitmanesque tradition. It’s […]

After the success of Heroes last year (which I didn’t watch - anyone have the DVD for me?), NBC has re-discovered SciFi as a valuable TV genre. Perhaps it has been sharing DNA with the folks from sister network, the NBC Universal-owned SciFi channel. The first week of NBC’s season looked like “Must Geek TV” […]

Americans are an optimistic people. Most of us are descended from men and women who came over here because their lives in the old country sucked, and so they uprooted themselves and their families and left everything they knew to come to a country in which they hoped to have a better chance for happiness. […]

Shaker Dr. Nick emailed me this weekend to tell me about having inadvertently tuned into and then watched “one of the bizarre shows I’ve ever seen” in which ten former high school cheerleaders, now ranging in age from 25 to 42 and in weight from 136 to 175, go to “cheerleading camp” to be bullied […]

A few weeks ago I found a first edition hard-cover of Stuart Dybek’s I Sailed With Magellan in a bin of unwanted books selling for a dollar apiece. A week later, Dybek won the Macarthur Foundation “Genius” award, worth $500,000, and on its heels, the 2007 Rea Award for the Short Story, worth $30,000.
Dybek’s artistic […]

Beating 50 Cent is not the only feat Kanye West achieved with the release of his third album, Graduation. He also charted as the highest first week sales of the year to date.
West’s and 50’s battle began when 50 claimed that if Graduation outsold his album Curtis, (both released September 11), he would quit rapping. […]

Not all fall shows are direct rip-offs from past successes; sometimes they are spins on old standby genres, like Life, NBC’s new twist on the police procedural. In Life, Charlie Crews is a police detective who was convicted of a homicide and sentenced to life in prison. Twelve years later he is exonerated […]

Here’s the lead: Bruce Springsteen’s deep and nourishing Magic, released today, isn’t on a par with Born to Run or Darkness on the Edge of Town. But it’s firmly on the next level down, alongside The Wild, the Innocent & the E-Street Shuffle, Nebraska, The River and Tunnel of Love. And that’s saying something for […]

The Shamus has listened to Bruce Springsteen’s “Magic” a couple of times now (praise be to free streaming at AOL) and I don’t want to write in terms of a review, but just offer a few impressions. All artists (or all worthy ones) go through phases. Springsteen lost me, for the most part, in the […]

The fall season has begun, which means there are lots of new shows that are re-hashing premises we’ve already seen before. In Moonlight’s case, we are seeing another version of Angel, a vampire turned PI in Los Angeles. It takes the noir concept serious on a superficial level, which is maybe as good […]

Romance & Cigarettes, a movie probably not coming soon to a theater near you, is a messy, juicy stew of a movie about sexual lust—the kind that upends marriages and, in the words of Muddy Waters, “makes a preacher put his bible down.” It also happens to be over-the-top hilarious.
Written, directed, and completed by John […]

Bernie Gunther is a classic noir figure: an ex-cop turned private investigator. He has a propensity for worn trench coats and pithy quips and a weak spot for women in trouble. Of course he was a cop in Weimar Berlin and turned PI after the rise of National Socialism. Instead of imagining […]

Most of the characters in Claire Messud’s lush and vicious fourth novel, The Emporer’s Children, are funny, bright, entitled New Yorkers - and they’re all fairly horrible human beings. You recognize them, you walk along with them, but you don’t sympathize. And why would you? The “emporer” of the title is lordly literary genius Murray […]

When Imperial Teen opened for The Breeders in 2002 they caused quite a sensation. The San Francisco indie-pop band nearly stole the show at Irving Plaza. Lucky for the Deal sisters that John Cameron Mitchell made a special appearance on stage that night.
After a five year hiatus from recording and touring, Jone Stebbins, Roddy […]

(Cross-posted at The Sawpit.)
Since the recent death of Swedish director Igmar Bergman, I’ve been thinking of his many films I’ve seen over the years. The one that still haunts me today is his 1961 Academy Award winner, The Virgin Spring. I first saw it twelve years ago, shortly after being laid off from my print […]

I have been listening to Superfly, the movie soundtrack album by Curtis Mayfield, since it was released in 1972, and loving it every time I hear it. The album tells a gritty, bittersweet story that I have imagined, start to finish, countless times in my head. A Harlem cocaine dealer tries to “get over,” and […]

Last night we attended the most upsweeping, coolest, most thrilling live jazz show I’ve had the joy to get captivated by in ages. Archie Shepp’s tenor sax carries the old-school sweetness you hear in classics by Ben Webster and Coleman Hawkins. His tone is that mellifluous but his performance is wild, ecstatic, and a political […]

Saw The Simpsons Movie with my son over the weekend, and though we both enjoyed it, this isn’t the best Simpsons effort to date. There are a lot of truly funny and clever bits, inescapable when the likes of George Meyer, John Swartzwelder, Ian Maxtone-Graham, and Jon Vitti are contributing. But as a film, it […]

Yesterday I took a day off work to see Sweet Smell of Success (1957), one of my all-time favorite movies. Starring Burt Lancaster as the virulent newspaper columnist J.J. Hunsecker and Tony Curtis as the lapdog press agent Sidney Falco, the film famously bombed at the box office but is now generally considered a […]