Austin, Texas-based garage musician Orville Bateman Neely stays busy. He produces records for the likes of The Strange Boys, drums for A Giant Dog, co-fronts Bad Sports and runs sound at Austin venue Beerland. Oh, and currently on its first national tour, his own band, OBN IIIs, plays 10 p.m. Saturday at The Blue Note […]
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Barry spritzer
Rock has The Beatles, jazz has Miles Davis, rap has Tupac, and adult contemporary has Barry Manilow. The man who became an icon for molding “Mandy,” “Copacabana (At the Copa)” and “Can’t Smile Without You” into chunks of pop-culture history is a natural showman with a gleaming voice, penchant for flashy stage attire and a […]
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Grand Duel / Keoma
They should also take the back cover’s claim of “two masterpieces” with a grain of salt, even two for good measure, although both films are indeed better than average. That goes especially for Lee Van Cleef, who enjoyed another career in Italy cranking these things out, with little regard to quality. However, Grand Duel — […]
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42nd Street Forever: Blu-ray Edition
That adds up to nearly four hours of absolutely outrageous ads. Trust me: Whether you watch in a single sitting or several, it’s a real car-chasing, cycle-revving, bomb-exploding, fist-punching, karate-chopping, foot-kicking, gun-shooting, knife-throwing, laser-blasting, woman-screaming, race-baiting, acid-pouring, eye-gouging, head-chopping, phallus-castrating, breast-squeezing, bed-writhing, succubus-sucking, wrist-tying, drug-injecting, butt-whipping, panty-ripping, bikini-filling, disco-dancing, jail-busting, snake-attacking, robot-battling, voodoo-pinning, slime-invading, dominatrix-singing, […]
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Lucky Devils
Either that, or men just had bigger balls back then. You decide. This amenable little action-packed drama begins with a bang, in the form of a daring bank robbery gone sour: Guns blaze, a body tumbles down a stairwell, another falls from a third-story window. Then the camera pulls back to reveal it’s a movie […]
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Simply Red: Live at Montreux 2003
That was then; this is now. I no longer own Simply Red — in any format — so it’s only with sheer nostalgia that I gave the group’s Live at Montreux 2003 a spin. The Blu-ray presents a live concert of 18 tracks of jazz- and soul-inspired pop (and then seven more from a 2010 […]
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This Means War
• that a woman as beautiful as Reese Witherspoon can’t meet a guy;• conversely, that a man as handsome as Tom Hardy can’t meet a girl;• that Reese’s character would come to date Tom and Chris Pine — CIA partners — at once;• that video stores remain hotbeds of activity;• that Chelsea Handler is hysterical;• […]
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The Awakening
OK, to be honest, I kind of loved it. Based on arguably Bram Stoker’s second most famous novel, 1903’s The Jewel of Seven Stars, the movie casts Charlton Heston (Soylent Green) as Matthew Corbeck, just the kind of greedy, selfish archaeologist who unearths warnings of evil to be loosed upon the world, yet digs anyway. […]
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A Necessary Death
After 22 minutes of auditioning and logistics, Toma and team get down to business with their chosen “star,” Matt, a young British man who would prefer to kill himself before the fatal brain tumor he has reaches the unavoidable stage of unbearable pain. We watch as Toma films Matt talking to the camera about his […]
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Goon
This he-man display earns Doug a tryout for the Massachusetts farm team Orangetown Assassins. So what if he barely can skate? Donning a No. 69 jersey and the nickname of “The Thug,” Doug is quickly sent to an actual league, the Halifax Highlanders of Nova Scotia. Based on a true story, Goon aims to be […]