// Category Archive for: Reviews

Cillian’s Bounty: Toronto International Film Festival

By Less Lee Moore

This piece originally appeared on the The CillianSite.com on September 14.

For our review of Perrier’s Bounty, go here.

Toronto, Ontario is a big city. And as befits such a place, it has its share of big buildings, big festivals, and sometimes, big celebrities. They descend on the city every year for the Toronto International Film Festival, and for those two weeks, one cannot escape news coverage of which films are playing, what parties are being held, who was seen where (and with who), and what they said/did/were wearing.

For film buffs and celebrity spotters, it’s a dream come true. Truth be told, I’m one of the former not the latter. . . with one exception. Cillian Murphy has been my favorite actor for several years now, and for several of those years, one of his films has premiered at the TIFF.
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District 9

By Michelle Patterson

A car windshield splattered and smeared with the guts of bugs and men and swirls of dust and haze appears in front of the camera, doubling as a means to lessen the intense sun of South Africa. The bloody spray of horror married with the vroom-vroom of the action film—all in the midst of a bleak near-future within the science-fiction genre. It adds to the grime of this particular dystopia.
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Halloween 2, Written/Directed By Rob Zombie

By Danny R. Phillips

I am a fan of the horror genre, everything from Lon Chaney’s silent classic Phantom of The Opera to slasher gems like the first A Nightmare on Elm Street. Of all the on-screen killing machines director John Carpenter has created, the wordless, soulless Michael Myers is my all-time favorite. The first Halloween movie from 1978 is without question a classic of style, suspense, violence, and good writing. It stands in a class with George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, House of Wax (the Vincent Price original, not the Paris Hilton piece of shit), Evil Dead, and Bride of Frankenstein.
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Kid Congo & The Pink Monkey Birds, Dracula Boots

By Julie Finley

Kid Congo Powers (a.k.a. Brian Tristan) has been around. . . and around! If you know the name, you know his pedigree! If you are reading this, you probably dig at least one of the following: The Cramps, The Gun Club, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, Congo Norvell, Knoxville Girls, Kid & Khan, Fur Bible, Botanica, Mark Eitzel, The Divine Horsemen, The Angels of Light, Die Haut, etc. (or possibly all of them). He’s sort of a renegade musician—he shows up in a lot of things—but in the past few years, he’s finally doing his own thing, where he’s the focus.
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Warped Tour in Kansas City: I’m Too Old For This Shit

By Danny R. Phillips

Prior to August 4th, it had been eleven years since I had last joined the tattooed masses as an attendee of The Vans’ Warped Tour. I was younger then in both body and mind. Standing on the boiling pavement this year watching the crowd pass me like a pierced, dyed, rainbow bedazzled tsunami, I saw two distinct classes, scratch that, generations, go by.

One was an older, punk-appreciating culture with fading tattoos and greying hair that grew up on Bad Religion, The Descendents, Fugazi, Bad Brains, The Zero Boys, and the Circle Jerks (I, obviously fall into group A) and the other was the day glo “skittle core kids” who worship The Devil Wears Prada and Attack! Attack! like they were the Dead Milkmen or The Ramones.

Dragging myself between five stages and countless bands, it dawned on me (and my trusty photographer) that at 15, the Vans’ Warped Tour was experiencing a midlife crisis of sorts and was, in fact, no longer the festival of years gone by. It is clear that I am a dinosaur stuck in a tar pit named Hot Topic. Like Danny Glover in the Lethal Weapon flicks, “I am too old for this shit!”
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Jay Reatard, Watch Me Fall

By Less Lee Moore

Maybe he’s grown up a bit since the days when the Memphis music scene dubbed him “Little Lord Punkleroy,” but thankfully, Jay Reatard hasn’t become boring.

In a recent article on the Matador Records blog, he noted:

“A lot of bands these days, they approach the making of an album like it’s collecting songs, they don’t think about how all of the songs are going to work together. They sequence their albums on iTunes, wondering what songs sound best next to each other rather than putting them together as they were written. That’s not an album.”

If these songs were written in the order they appear on the album, then Watch Me Fall is a great achievement for Jay Reatard. If you listen closely enough, you can actually hear the sound of an artist evolving.
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Whip It

By Laura L.

For the past few years, I’ve been a member of a roller derby league in St. Louis, MO: the Arch Rival Roller Girls. When I heard Whip It was in the works, I hoped they would do the sport some justice. It had previously been portrayed in the Raquel Welch film Kansas City Bomber and the short-lived A&E reality series Rollergirls, in addition to an episode here and there on a number of other shows. Yet rarely did I come away from any of these with a good feeling in the pit of my stomach. While not perfect in its portrayal of modern-day roller derby, Whip It left me with that good feeling.
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Bloody Sheets, Bad Sweaters, and Broken Hearts: The Wisdom Of Crocodiles

By Jemiah Jefferson

Jude Law, tasty son-of-a-bitch.

Originally this was going to be a gushing review of a very beautiful, very sexy vampire film that I remember loving the hell out of, but hadn’t seen in a very long time—ten years or so. Within 30 minutes of rewatching, though, this became much more of an exercise in “the golden glow of memory masking the flaws of fact.” Filmmaking, vampire movies, and I were all in somewhat different eras in 1999; we’ve all come a long way, and The Wisdom Of Crocodiles hasn’t really kept up. Unjustly obscure, the film also suffers from having been titled Immortality for its US release, and the shitty production values used when slapping its American title on the screen makes it look like it’s just a very expensive episode of the new Outer Limits.
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Bat For Lashes, Two Suns

By Julie Finley

I’d heard of Bat For Lashes last year, and the name didn’t grab me, so I ignored it. I had inadvertently absorbed the info that the act was critically acclaimed. Big Deal, right? So when I was on vacation earlier this year in Dublin, I saw promo posters in almost all of the record stores I went into. . . still ignored it!

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Wave Of Adulation: Black Francis

By J Howell

The Riot Room, Kansas City MO
July 27, 2009

Sometimes the universe works in peculiar ways. Barely a week before Black Francis’ solo show at the Riot Room was announced, my girlfriend and I were having a discussion about the best shows we’d seen, during which I raved about the Pixies live and she related a story to me about sneaking into an amazing sold-out Frank Black gig in San Francisco years ago. We both lamented that the Pixies were playing shows in the UK at the time, but none Stateside. A few days later, I was in joyous disbelief that Black Francis was not only coming to town, but also playing in a tiny venue where we could be literally two feet away. Thanks, universe!
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