Top 10 Double Features
1. Deranged Defenders: Nurse Betty and The Specials Neil LaBute’s best film so far could be chalked up to the ingeniously wry script by John C. Richards and James Flamberg, but massive credit also goes to Renée Zellweger’s pitch-perfect performance as the delirious wannabe R.N. Meanwhile, Thomas Hayden Church and Rob Lowe will drop your…
Soundbites
On the surface, the local scene went through a tumultuous year. Bands broke up (Pleasure Void) and were rumored to have broken up (Rosavelt), reunited (Breaker) and were rumored to reunite (the original Pere Ubu, sans David Thomas), got signed to major labels (Sinomatic to Atlantic) and got signed to indie labels (Disengage to Man’s…
Art for Art House’s Sake
1. Quills — One of many films this year that falls into the love-it-or-hate-it category. I loved it for its wit, style, top-notch acting (by Joaquin Phoenix, Kate Winslet, and Geoffrey Rush), and the many shades of gray that director Philip Kaufman brings to his subject matter. 2. Girlfight — A remarkable directorial debut from…
The Firebird Band
For the past three years, the Firebird Band has been one of those vaporous, revolving-membership projects that periodically surface and disappear within the indie noise-pop community. As prime mover Chris Broach became increasingly occupied with touring and recording commitments for his main band, Braid, time allotted for the same activities for the Firebird Band were…
Kicking and Screening
1. Tomorrow Night — I always used to hate it when critics would pick some movie I never heard of as their number one, so please forgive me. Tomorrow Night is the tale of an uptight photo store owner with a fetish for rubbing his bare ass in ice cream. There’s a lot more to…
Michael Stanley
Last month’s all-star tribute to Michael Stanley at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame served only to confirm Stanley’s enormous and eternal presence in the Northeast Ohio rock and roll scene for the past 30 years. Old-school rock and rollers as diverse as Donnie Iris and Joe Walsh, and an entire slate of Michael…
In It for Laughs
1. Almost Famous — How could critics not love a movie about a critic who, while still a teenager, saves the soul of rock and roll and gets deflowered by a gang of groupies to boot? That surely accounts for some of the extremes of praise heaped on Cameron Crowe’s coming-of-age boast. 2. Requiem for…
Sammy DeLeon
Sammy DeLeon and his Orchestra, one of the best Latin bands in this area, is led by timbales player DeLeon, a former music director at the popular Impacto Nuevo. DeLeon has performed in New York, Chicago, Miami, and San Juan, Puerto Rico, as well as locally, and has opened for Tito Puente, whose praise he…
Regrets Are for Sissies
1. Chicken Run — In the tradition of Babe, this hysterical piece of plasticene animation from Nick Park and Peter Lord probably gave me more pleasure than anything else I saw this year. Simply by being a feature, it is less compactly perfect than Park’s shorts, but it’s still pretty damn good. 2. Wonder Boys…
Cave In
Meet Cave In, a band of merry Massachusetts indie-metalers with one foot in the hardcore grave and the other slamming down on a King Crimson art-rock guitar pedal. After nearly five years in metal purgatory — all those jagged guitars, double-kick-drum explosions, and incomprehensibly screamed vocals — the quartet is poised for indie stardom with…
Away with Conventions
1. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon — Once we marveled at the flying gymnastics of Bruce Lee. Now it’s Ang Lee who moves us — with a martial arts movie that defies the laws of gravity and blows away the conventions of the genre. It is balletically choreographed, elegantly shot, and brimming with intelligence. 2. Wonder…
The Art Modell Awards
Newspapers and magazines like to strike a reflective pose during the holiday season. It’s our chance as thoughtful journalists to look back on the year that was, assessing its significance, its lessons left. We do this not for ourselves. No, this involves a higher calling. By chronicling our times, we leave a record of the…
The Year of Living Foolishly
Our Man of the Year Award goes to Screamin’ Jay Hawkins for his commitment to the pro-life movement. Before he died in February at age 70, the R&B singer and native Clevelander estimated that he fathered some 75 children in and out of wedlock. But Hawkins wasn’t the only parent to make the highlight reels…
Precious Moments
Consider yourself fortunate to live in Ohio. While other states may bray about their quality of government, how they go about the serious work of the people with dour efficiency, they overlook a central component: entertainment value. Not in Ohio. Here, elected officials understand that, after a hard day’s work, Mr. and Mrs. Greater Cleveland…
The Edge
In the continuing saga of Mike Versus The Plain Dealer, we found the mayor once again defending his honor last week. This time, our hero felt attacked by an innocuous PD story that said Cleveland’s decade-long drop in crime appeared to be leveling off. In an apologetic tone, the master of understatement began a hastily…
Big Wins Beget Big Heads
Big losses beget big music conservatories: I enjoyed reading the story that was featured in the November 30 issue about the losing Oberlin football team [“The Ream Team”]. I found it interesting to see how schools with constantly defeated football teams treat their programs. I am currently attending Mount Union College, a school that has…
Blow Up the Box
Thank God for old Jews with shaky hands and the inability to tell the word G-O-R-E from the word B-U-C-H-A-N-A-N. Without them — and Survivor Richard Hatch, that self-proclaimed “fat naked fag” who, as is turns out, is just a really concerned parent and not at all, uh, abusive — it would have been damned…
One Cool Cat
There are no more than a dozen tables inside Fat Cats, Tim Verhily, Ricardo Sandoval, and Franco Boffice’s tiny Tremont restaurant, and none of them is a good one. The seats in the front room, near the dark wooden bar, are lashed by the cold night air each time the door flies open. Sit in…
Winter Wins
Ten years ago, Andy Schmetzer signed with the Cleveland Crunch and was named that season’s “Unsung Hero.” Last season, after a decade with the team, he again garnered “Unsung Hero” status. But the truth is, in the world of sports, all indoor soccer players tend to be unsung heroes. “I’ve been playing soccer long enough…
Whine and Roses
This is the time of year when pundits and prognosticators natter on about the happenings of the old year and make superfluous predictions for the new. From our little perch on the caboose-end of the gravy train, we’re happy to let more serious minds chew over weightier matters. As for us, we’ll spend the final…
Hunger Pangs
Fuddy-duds in gowns and tuxedos slurping highfalutin champagnes in rented halls may enjoy Dick Clark’s “rocking” annum nuevo, but what are your typical disenfranchised Midwest punk-rock celebrators to do? Screw the new millennium and dial back the clock a couple of decades, of course. “We’ve got some balls to drop in Cleveland, too, and it’s…
Crap Rotation
What was most disappointing about music in 2000: that only a baby’s handful of albums really mattered, or that that baby’s not-too-much-older sibling was commanding the industry? It didn’t matter if the kids consuming the music were acting on their best behavior and setting sales records by gobbling up over two million copies of ‘N…
Ten the Hard Way
Maybe it wasn’t such a bad year for filmgoing after all, if only because it’s far harder to assemble a top-10 list this year than it was last year. Or maybe the best of 1999 towered so far above the worst (and the middling, which includes the grossly overrated American Beauty) that ranking them was…
Boxing Daze
Due to new technology and a marketplace presumed to value the remastering of each note and outtake, the music on the reissues and boxed sets released in 2000 sounded better than ever. But just because it sounds good doesn’t mean it is. Even as downloadable music began to nip at the heels of the CD…
