Traditional Chinese celebrations have been mentioned several times in News of the Weird, including the annual Tombsweeping Festival in April, which calls on people to visit relatives’ graves and leave offerings that will improve the afterlives of the deceased. Actual objects (such as jewelry and money) are no longer required, as paper representations are considered […]
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Posted inArts & Culture
Disturbia
Reviewers’ grade: B The season of Shia LeBeouf “? we’ll see him again July 4 in “Transformers” “? begins with this surprisingly effective update of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window.” LeBeouf stars as a high school kid who is under house arrest for the summer. Bored, he begins spying on his neighbors and is soon […]
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Michael Shayne Mysteries: Volume 1 2007
These days, Michael Shayne is all but forgotten, but at one time he was among the coolest things going in crime fiction “? so much so that 20th Century Fox bankrolled a series of feature films featuring Brett Halliday’s detective character. Four of these 12 genial crime dramas are collected in the two-disc “Michael Shayne […]
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The Doors – The Doors, Et Al
Rhino Before you hit the snooze button on another batch of vintage reissues, dig this: The 40th anniversary mix of the debut Doors album plays at the correct speed in comparison to slightly slow and off-key previous versions. Add a reinstated Jim Morrison vocal on the opening track, “Break on Through (To the Other Side),” […]
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Pathfinder
Reviewers’ grade: C- The Indians take on the Vikings in this pulpy, Conan-esque historical mishmash. Karl Urban stars as Ghost, a Viking child left behind on a raid to Vineland. He’s brought up by Indians and when the Vikings return 15 years later to show what pillage idiots they are, Ghost lays into them. […]
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Latest Rights
Di Yerbury, the retiring vice chancellor of Australia’s Macquarie University, is embroiled in a dispute with her successor over her spending habits, leading the successor to seize 1,000 pieces of art that Yerbury tried to take with her as she left. She has asserted that many of the works she had on display are her […]
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Perfect Stranger
bisi) seeks incriminating e-mails by hacking into Hill’s computer. The movie ladles on increasingly ludicrous plot and backstory. While it all leads to a preposterous climax, director James Foley deserves some credit for ratcheting up the tension as Rowena edges closer to Hill. R “?Phil Bacharach View trailer
Posted inMusic
Dewey Jackson – Live at the Barrel
Delmark Dewey Jackson (1900-1966), a trumpet player and contemporary of Louis Armstrong, specialized in the hot, swinging, New Orleans-style jazz of the Twenties and Thirties that Armstrong made famous. Though Jackson tried the New York scene, then the pinnacle of the jazz world, he eventually opted to return back home to St. Louis. It was […]
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Black Christmas 2006
Yet another horror remake, “Black Christmas” turned out to be a lump of coal at the holiday box office this winter. Granted, releasing a slasher film during the season celebrating the birth of Christ may not be the wisest move, but “Black Christmas” isn’t sacrilegious. Nor bad at all. As it turns out, it’s more […]