Category: music

  • Stop Me Before I See More Movies!
    Full Frame Documentary Film Festival 2016 Thursday The Jazz Loft According to W. Eugene Smith  ***   Forever, Chinatown **1/2 The 100 Years Show **** The Many Sad Faces of Mr. Toledano ****   By Sydney Lumet  ***1/2   Weiner **1/2 Friday  The Black Belt *** Trapped ****   Dancing for You ***** Dixieland  **   Tarikat ***** Horizons ****   Two Trains Runnin’ **** Saturday  Following Seas ***** Life, Animated **** Raising Bertie ** Hours spent standing in line, sometimes ...
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  • Save Me a Spot in the Caboose
    Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘N’ Roll Music by Greil Marcus.  A Plume Book.  424 pp.  $17.00 I read this book because Dwight Garner—my favorite reviewer at the New York Times—named it as the book he’d most like to read again for the first time.  Greil Marcus is a rough contemporary of mine, just ...
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  • Portrait of a Turd
    Steve Jobs  A Film by Danny Boyle I’m a little slow on the uptake, often don’t read reviews of movies before I see them, so I was into the final third of Steve Jobs  before I realized that this was a drama in three acts, that it focused on three specific moments, that the same characters ...
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  • White Like Me
    The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem. Vintage. 509 pp. $14.95 In reviewing the fourth of the Jonathan Lethem novels that I’ve read in the past couple of months, I’m thinking two things. I’m somehow glad I waited to read this one last. It feels like a culmination, the most deeply personal work in Lethem’s oeuvre, ...
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  • Just Say Nope
    Dope (2015) A film by Rick Famuyiwa. The first thing to say about the three protagonists in Rick Famuyiwa’s new film “Dope”—Malcolm (Shameik Moore), Jib (Tony Revolori), and Diggy (Kiersey Clemons)—is that they’re adorable! (I sound like my wife here.) As three geeks at a ghetto high school in Los Angeles, where guys routinely rob you ...
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  • Was This the One with the High Voice?
    Love & Mercy  A film by Bill Pohland. “How did he die?” my wife said, as we were waiting for the opening of “Love & Mercy,” the new movie about Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. “I don’t know.  I think he drowned.  But I think everyone drowned.” I had previously told her Audrey Hepburn drowned.  I was ...
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