Producer Jimmy Sutton’s precise attention to past details is Mad Men–esque in its re-creation of rockabilly guitar tones, plunking upright jazz bass, and the way it captures Jonathan Doyle’s tenor sax and McPherson’s voice, which is the kind of durable instrument that made an army of slick-haired, suit-wearing bandleaders famous in the 1950s. It’s more […]
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Norman, rock well
Portugal. The Man More so than most bands, Norman Music Festival 5 headliner Portugal. The Man has done a lot of growing. Born from a disbanded hard-core act, it championed a challenging brand of rock in its inaugural years. At least that’s what critics and listeners called it. Truthfully, it was far less heady than […]
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Donald Glover: Weirdo
Anyone who’s seen Glover’s work with the Derrick Comedy troupe — culminating in the 2009 instant cult film Mystery Team — knows his sense of humor is wonderfully skewed. In other words, although his act could be rated a soft R, it’s not for the lady who lives at home with her “Twilight DVDs and nine […]
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The Terror Experiment
This one takes place in a federal building on Christmas Eve. (For a federal building on Christmas Eve, the place sure is packed.) A terrorist manages to infiltrate security enough to bring in a bomb, which he detonates on the fifth floor. (The explosion’s aftershocks are depicted via tilted, shaking camera.) The airborne agent gets […]
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You say Hello
It comes as a surprise that power poppers Hellogoodbye formed more than a decade ago. Forrest Kline — chief songwriter, lead singer and sole remaining original member — started the band in 2001 as he was finishing high school. He never expected to be featured on MTV’s The Real World, have smash radio singles like […]
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The Divide
No sooner as the movie opened than a nuclear bomb has dropped. The precious few apartment building residents with the most recognizable, screen-friendly faces are those who conveniently find shelter in the basement, barricaded by a huge steel door that the supe, Mickey (Michael Biehn, Take Me Home Tonight), seals to keep out any radiation. […]
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The Case of the Black Parrot
Aboard an ocean liner depicted by really rough stock footage, intrepid journalist Jim Moore (William Lundigan, The Sea Hawk) and his ukulele-strumming cameraman/war buddy, Tripod (Eddie Foy Jr., The Pajama Game), are on a doozy of an assignment when they’re told about an impending strike of The Black Parrot, Europe’s master criminal. Explains old rich […]
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The Wicker Tree
The new film is based upon Hardy’s own 2006 novel, Cowboys for Christ, but here’s the deal: If you’ve seen the original Wicker, you know exactly where this new one leads, and without the benefit of having Edward Woodward as your guide. In The Wicker Tree, it’s young Christian country starlet Beth Boothby (newcomer Brittania […]
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Miss Bala
Maria was also full of praise, earning an Academy Award nomination; Miss Bala was Mexico’s official submission for Best Foreign Language Film at this year’s Oscars, but failed to make the cut. It feels like an inferior duplicate — not vastly inferior, but noticeably, thanks to a running time that grows as repetitive as those […]
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The Darkest Hour
Amid a citywide power outage, aliens fall from the sky in the form of orange fireballs that then turn more or less invisible, but immediately incinerate all humans they can get their “hands” on. As luck would have it, our heroes manage to survive by holing up, along with the aforementioned babes (Transformers‘ Rachael Taylor […]