Playback
Public Enemy There’s a Poison Goin’ On . . . (Atomic Pop) Public Enemy deserves the benefit of the doubt. Even after a couple of bum records, there’s still enough vitality to the group’s career that a complete dismissal of each new work is both unfair and unjustified (unlike the situation for, say, the Stones…
Honey, I Shrunk the Roller Coaster
If the cheerily painted rides at Memphis Kiddie Park were flavors, the rockets — splashed with white stripes and shooting stars — would be orange Popsicle. And the Little Dipper roller coaster, sleek and silver: peppermint. Probably sometime during the history of the pocket-sized amusement park, an enterprising Hansel or Gretel has tried to lick…
Million-Dollar Men
In the spring of 1998 the Barenaked Ladies finally began to receive the accolades that had eluded them throughout their ten-year career. In addition to releasing their fifth and most popular record to date, Stunt, the Canadian band had heavy radio airplay with the album’s first single, the three-minute pop/rap ditty “One Week.” A prime…
Fly Film Guy
So you think you’ve got what it takes to be the next Scorsese, Tarantino, or the two guys who made The Blair Witch Project? Let Dov S-S Simens be the judge of that. As the founder of the thirteen-year-old Hollywood Film Institute, the former line producer who “stumbled into teaching” offers a crash-course, two-day film…
Livewire
Bif Naked Project Simon Falling Blind Grog Shop August 19 As the story goes, Bif the Canadian punker has fronted punk bands, drugged it up with punks, dated punks, married punks, divorced punks (quickly thereafter), and even quit a pair of punk bands that apparently weren’t quite punk enough for her. That’s hardcore, dude. But…
In Deep Sh–
LL Cool J is God, at least to the characters of In Too Deep. He’s crime lord Dwayne Gittens, otherwise known as “God” to his peeps on the street; he acts as life-giver, protector, and judgment-maker for the inner-city dwellers of Cincinnati. He dotes on his newborn son, throws Thanksgiving dinner for an entire ghetto,…
Soundbites
The message on the envelope is printed with childlike determination. HAPPY BIRTHDAYS is handwritten in one corner, MERRY CHRISTMAS’S in another. The contents of the envelope must be precious to cover two gift-giving occasions in perpetuity. TEN THOUSAND COPIES PLUS MADE. TO MOM WITH LOVE. FROM BILL JR. Bill Schlegel Jr.’s mother didn’t open the…
The Play’s the Thing
As a filmmaker, actor John Turturro clearly believes in drawing from personal experience: His directorial debut, 1992’s Mac (which won the Camera D’Or at Cannes), was avowedly based on his father’s life. For his second feature, Illuminata, Turturro takes a look at the theater, showing us the ambitions, fears, and vanities of actors, writers, theater…
Casting the Stone First
What is it they say — that even a flea can reach Mount Olympus riding in Pegasus’s mane? Well, in the case of the new Albert Brooks comedy The Muse, Brooks is the flea and Pegasus is his delectable co-star, Sharon Stone. But I get ahead of myself. In The Muse, which the director/star wrote…
The Road to Nell
Fortune has smiled on Brendan Fraser. The star of the new Dudley Do-Right may just have the most pleasant lot of any young male actor in American movies right now. He looks great in or out of his clothes, he has an easy, self-effacing likability on screen, and maybe most important, he seems unafflicted by…
Upstaging the Klan
Additional reporting provided by Frank Kuznik, Mark Naymik, Mike Tobin, and Laura Putre. Jacqueline Marino can be reached at jmarino@clevescene.com.
Edge
J’accuse! Executives at Medical Mutual remained tight-lipped during Week One of the credibility crisis sparked by the company’s ties to Jerry Patrick, its deposed marketing head and alleged Lothario. As reported on this page last week, Patrick is still working for Medical Mutual, despite serious charges of sexual impropriety. The news came as a surprise…
Campus Confidential
To the casual observer (and naive freshman), we live amid a leafy expanse of academe, a well-mannered world of noble thoughts and higher learning pursued by budding young scholars strolling cheerily across sun-dappled Midwestern swards. Or so it appears in the viewbooks. The truth is, behind that facade lurks another world, of nasty dorms and…
Style and Substance
Although Jacques-Henri Lartigue’s photographs of French aristocrats and their friends during the Roaring ’20s are full of sports cars racing around European tracks, his main theme is not the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat, but the lives of the upper-class men and women who frequented such events. After all, competitions in that…
Watch the People Spin!
Cleveland once again proves to be a hotbed of artistic activity, supplying home-grown ushers for the latest tour of Les Miserables (familiarly dubbed Les Mis) at the State Theatre. To understand the phenomenal impact of this 1987 “pop opera” of Victor Hugo’s great epic novel, one must turn to that bastion of reliability, the press…
Encore
Measure for Measure. One of Shakespeare’s darkest, surliest, and most intriguing works, Measure for Measure is a verbally ornate scandal sheet, cataloguing every moral failing short of flatulence. Cleveland Public Theatre’s production is youthful and vibrant. The performers in the five leads are so highly charged they could light up a skyscraper. Director Timothy Saukiavicus…
Crazy Like a Fox
Hail to thee, suburbia! We honor you for your endless shopping plazas, multiple mini-malls, and innumerable drugstores. Of course, your smooth, broad highways have paved over our shady country lanes and have given us easy access to nothing more interesting, from a culinary perspective, than chain pizzerias, fast-food joints, and generic family restaurants oozing phony…
Teen Idylls
Some people call me a Teenage Idol/Some people say they envy me/I guess they got no way of knowing/How lonesome I can be. — Ricky Nelson, “Teenage Idol” Teenage angst has paid off well/Now I’m bored and old. — Kurt Cobain, “Serve the Servants” I love Britney Spears. I cherish ‘N Sync. I adore the…
Been There
Jeff Tweedy sounds like death in full, bone-clinking sprint. Keeping to his Midwestern sensibility, he doesn’t complain about it. Only when asked — and one can imagine the mucus in his nasal passages plowing through steel wool — does Tweedy, by phone from San Antonio, admit to having a sniffle. It was pretty tough yesterday,…
