For those curious about the start of Reduxion Theatre’s fifth-anniversary season, know this: There will be blood. While Shakespeare serves as Reduxion’s bread and butter year in and year out, founders Tyler and Erin Woods — who serve as artistic director and managing director, respectively — wanted to expand beyond their upcoming slate of Richard […]
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Posted inArts & Culture
Hostel / Hostel: Part II
From 2005, Hostel drops three collegians into Amsterdam for a debauched vacation of pot and poon, only to accidentally become victims in a bizarre business in which the wealthy pay big bucks to torture the kidnapped in an underground warehouse. Roth spares nothing, leaving viewers to cringe at every slice of the Achilles tendon, snipped […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Klown
In order to convince his pregnant girlfriend (Mia Lyhne) that he is indeed “father material,” the goofy, gawky Frank (Frank Hvam) essentially kidnaps her 12-year-old nephew, Bo (Marcuz Jess Peterson), who’s staying with them while his parents are on vacation, and takes the pudgy, timid boy on a planned canoe trip. This comes to the […]
Posted inMusic
Rock of ageless
It was as if the birth of Nirvana had never happened. It was as if music never stopped being fun. And catchy. And above all, horny. That’s the power of Lita Ford, Poison and Def Leppard. Maybe I had been living in Colorado too long. Maybe I had been too accustomed to concerts featuring Brooklyn-based […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Revenant
I was reminded of this by the trailer for The Revenant, which touts the zombie comedy as coming from “visionary filmmaker” Kerry Prior. If he’s so visionary, why wasn’t his film given a wide theatrical rollout? Why did it take three years for the 2009 production to hit video? And why does it bear so […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Goats
Based on an assumedly semiautobiographical novel and well-directed by a member of the Coppola filmmaking dynasty — Christopher Neil, nephew of Francis — Goats centers on Ellis (Graham Phillips, TV’s The Good Wife), who leaves the remote Arizona desert home he shares with his trust-fund hippie mom (Vera Farmiga, Safe House) for a prestigious prep […]
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The Victim
Someone needs to define “grindhouse” for Mr. Biehn, I’m afraid. The hardworking man who helped define the ’80s in early James Cameron films (Aliens, The Terminator) is a good actor and, as it turns out, a competent director. His script, however, is awful. For one thing, it’s hardly enough on which to hang a feature […]
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For a Good Time, Call …
If you bet that means a lot of one-liners about penises and vaginas, and maybe some sight gags involving zeppelin-sized dildos, I congratulate you on your clairvoyance. But there are surprises here, too, particularly how sweet-natured this film actually is, and how winning are its two stars. Lauren (Lauren Anne Miller, 50/50), the straitlaced product […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Crimson Petal and the White
Romola Garai (Atonement) plays Sugar, a 19-year-old prostitute pimped out by her own mother (The X-Files’ Gillian Anderson, almost unrecognizable) to the hoity-toity about town. One such uncool customer is William Rackham (O’Dowd), a soap titan married to a mentally ill woman (Amanda Hale, Bright Star). So taken is he by Sugar’s honeypot that he […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Naked Angels
The 1969 picture arrived at the crest of the biker-film craze, yet is so dull, it could’ve killed the genre. The plot concerns gang leader Mother (Michael Greene, The Harrad Experiment) being freshly discharged from the hospital, but in danger of going right back in as he seeks revenge on his rivals who put him […]