The wonderful fact of watching “Mortdecai,” a runaway tomato truck of a movie, is that it will compel you to wonder throughout, Who the hell thought this was a good idea? And unlike asking that in so many other areas of life, the answer arrives immediately: Oh! These people on screen, is who! Johnny Depp, […]
To Brandon Brune, artistic director of Les Chatons Noir young actors collective, “Book of Days” by Pulitzer prize-winning playwright Lanford Wilson reminds him of another classic play… in an evil doppelganger sort of way. “In a lot of ways it’s similar to the classic ‘Our Town’ in that you have an ensemble cast and they’re […]
It’s hard to evaluate “American Sniper” on its merits alone, without considering its subject, the late Chris Kyle. The sharpshooter killed something like 255 people in Iraq, a stupefying total for a single lifetime, even if you accept only the confirmed number of 160. That’s a hell of a lot of humans to perforate across […]
If you ask North Carolina’s Lauren Faulkenberry how she would describe herself and her work, the owner of Firebrand Press would have a difficult time choosing between author, artist or artisan. “I do feel like I’m kind of a mishmash of a lot of things, but I guess primarily I’d say artist or book artist […]
Early in “Selma,” the story of the 1965 marches from that small Alabama town to Montgomery, we get a disagreeable meeting of two heavyweights. Lyndon Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) welcomes Martin Luther King (David Oyelowo) into the Oval Office to dissuade him, maybe, from the next act of social agitation, whatever that may be. King explains, […]
If you didn’t know that Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest, “Inherent Vice,” was derived from the 2009 novel by Thomas Pynchon, an author equally beloved and feared for the sprawl of his sagas, you could imagine its pitch meeting as Philip Marlowe meets the Big Lebowski, transported to early ’70s stoner Los Angeles. At its center, […]
At the end of a year that saw remakes of reboots and retreads of rehashes, a year of more ninja turtles and another Godzilla and a worse “Robocop” and all the rest, I found myself slinking into one of the only movies among the 50 or so I saw in theaters this year that wasn’t […]
“Traditional” has never been a word that’s been used to describe Le Chat Noir, Augusta’s “off Broad Street theatre,” so it should come as no surprise that they aren’t staging a sweet play or musical centered around the season. “Most holiday shows are sickeningly saccharine,” said LCN’s Executive Director Krys Bailey. “When we do a […]
“Exodus: Gods and Kings,” the second big-budget Biblical epic of the year, demonstrates on multiple fronts why we need more big-budget Biblical epics. For one, the source material is some of the most fantastic stuff in world literature: The Old Testament wouldn’t stand as the backbone of multiple major religions if it were not, at […]