DVD Review: Violet & Daisy

By Less Lee Moore

With more than 300 films screening in a ten-day time period, the Toronto International Film Festival makes time management a challenge. Rumor has it that some film critics will leave a screening after ten minutes if they’re not fully engaged. I’m going to bet that there were quite a few who walked out on Violet & Daisy at TIFF 2011. That would have been a big mistake.

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Music Review: I Break Horses, Chiaroscuro

By Less Lee Moore

Chiaroscuro is defined as “the technique of using light and shade in pictorial representation.” It’s a ideal name for the second album from I Break Horses, the musical project from Swedish singer/songwriter Maria Lindén. Rather than a contrast between light and shade, however, the songs on Chiaroscuro are a study in the interplay between the retro synths of ’80s shoegaze and the more contemporary flavors of techno and EDM. In a way, Chiaroscuro reminds me a lot of School of Seven Bells’ Ghostory, but while that album was crystalline ice, these songs are like smoldering embers.

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VHS Visions: The Kindred (1987)

By Brad Henderson

Like I’ve said countless times already, there are thousands upon thousands of movies that have never been released on DVD or Blu-Ray. That’s kind of the whole point of this VHS Visions feature: to make people aware of some amazing films that have never seen the light of day and hopefully shed some light on them, so that distributors are aware that there is a market for these movies.

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DVD Review: The Invoking

By Brad Henderson

Making a film is hard no matter what subject matter or genre you tackle, but some genres are harder than others. When it comes down to it, I believe most people would rather watch a bad horror film rather than a bad drama or comedy because watching a bad horror film is just easier on certain levels.

Indie horror is something hard to pull off for many reasons. The story and acting have to be solid or you will just bore your audience. If you have special effects in the film—either CGI or practical—they also have to look solid or you have a problem. I’m pleased to say that The Invoking is an indie horror film that gets things right.

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Waxing Nostalgic: Steely Dan, “My Old School”

By Jeffery X Martin

Seventies band Steely Dan has long been relegated to the dark cellars of soft rock FM stations, buried in long blocks of classic songs you can sing along to at work, brought to you by some weight loss clinic on the other side of town. It’s an unfair sentence for a band that combined rock and roll with jazz riffs and topped the charts doing it.

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The Unseen: The Forsaken, Asylum Blackout, The Party Animal

By Brad Henderson

We all have those films that have slipped under our radar or those that we just didn’t get around to seeing yet. These films could be blockbusters, indie flicks, or just films that weren’t publicized or spoken about enough. In this feature, I’m going to be discussing three films you need to see that you probably missed or maybe even forgot about.

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Music Review: Shelly Bhushan, Something Out Of Nothing

By Melissa Bratcher

With a voice as soulful as Shelly Bhushan’s, Something Out Of Nothing could have taken a straight R&B route, and she could have thrown in boatloads of melisma to impress. Instead, she’s turned in an album full of interesting, unexpected arrangements and thoughtful lyrics, and presented them with her gorgeous, versatile voice. Something Out Of Nothing is a stealth charmer.

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Blu-Ray Review: Night Of The Demons (Collector’s Edition)

By Brad Henderson

Angela is having a party; Jason and Freddy are too scared to come. But you’ll have a hell of a time.

That is the freaking tagline to Night Of The Demons. The box art for this movie always stuck with me when I passed by it and its sequel numerous times at my local video store as a child. My mom let me watch a lot of R-rated films but this one was off limits . . . until I was ten or so. Yeah, my mom is a badass and let me watch R-rated films when I was five, but it had to do with the content.

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DVD Review: Wakefield Poole’s Bible!

By Brad Henderson

When we see the rating X or XXX, what is the first thing that comes to mind? Hardcore porn? Or a film that has so much sexual content that it isn’t fit for an R rating? Sometimes neither of these things can be the case. Back in the 1960s and ’70s films that had sexual content were rated X because in that day and age it was considered too much. Those films are nothing compared to what we have today between porn and R-rated films that are deemed “extreme.”

Vinegar Syndrome is probably a name that you aren’t familiar with yet, but take note because these guys are true fans of vintage/art cinema. I was fortunate enough to watch one of their reissues, an X-rated film from 1974 called Bible! directed by Wakefield Poole. Just looking at the synopsis or reading about it you might think it’s a hardcore porno or maybe a sexplotation film. I’m here to tell you that it’s neither.

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DVD Review: Blue Caprice

By Less Lee Moore

Reviewing a narrative film based so closely on real-life tragedy is a challenge. If it were a documentary, it might be easier to analyze how the filmmaker’s possible agenda influences the way the events were presented and if the recounting of history was done responsibly.

Blue Caprice opens with what seems like a documentary cliché: a montage of news footage covering the Beltway Sniper attacks from 2002. Immediately, we feel a distance from the subject being addressed. Then, the film cuts to a series of scenes of a teenage boy in Antigua, trying to cope with his mother’s departure to find work in the United States. The visual dichotomy between grainy newsreels and the lushness of the Caribbean is as profound as the tonal one. There is no reporter documenting what we’re seeing so we’re forced to make sense of what’s going on.

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