The Reel Truth
If you go to Rotten Tomatoes, the website that compiles more than 100 film critics’ reviews each week, you will find at the top of the “Certified Fresh” list a single movie that was the very best-reviewed of 2005. It was not a remake or a sequel, nor did it cost $200 million and star…
This Game Bites
With a Blade TV show in the works from Spike TV and powder-faced My Chemical Romance fans carrying the goth torch at Hot Topic, this would seem the perfect time to resurrect the Castlevania franchise. Castlevania debuted 20 years ago on the Nintendo Entertainment System and was an instant classic, worthy of shelf space next…
Rogues’ Gallery
When your movie critics’ tastes range from Jane Austen to Rob Zombie, there’s bound to be some turbulence come award time. Perhaps not surprisingly, determining the year’s best films is something of an imprecise science here: Our top movie was anything but a unanimous pick among the five critics — Luke Y. Thompson, Melissa Levine,…
Generation Next
Microsoft isn’t described as an underdog very often. But in the world of videogames, Sony’s PlayStation is king, and all others fight for scraps. While Microsoft’s Xbox managed to bump the once-great Nintendo into third place, it nevertheless remains a distant second to the PS2, which commands an installed base of almost 100 million units.…
Little Misses
Amid Hollywood’s zillion-dollar explosions and computer-enhanced trickery, plenty of quieter, better films sneaked into theaters virtually unnoticed this year. Following are our reviewers’ favorite overlooked movies of 2005. Some of them never made it to local screens, but many have since made it to the video store. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress — A…
They’ve Got Game
2005 may be the last hurrah for this generation’s aging consoles, but sugar, they’re going down swingin’. The PlayStation 2, Xbox, and Game Cube age gracefully, pushing their hardware to the limit one last time and developing some brilliant games in the process — from tear-jerking, giant-slaying adventure to piss-in-your-pants zombie horror. The Highlander swore…
Homo on the Range
It’s not hard to predict how Ang Lee’s controversial Brokeback Mountain will play in John Wayne country. This romantic tragedy about a pair of lean, wind-burned cowpokes who secretly live to poke each other flies in the face of everything that most people in Casper or Riverton or Laramie think about the West and about…
The week’s best releases from the pop-culture universe.
CD — Greatest Hits: Thankfully short on dick and fart jokes, this 17-track Blink-182 compilation focuses on the other thing these pop-punk boys do well: teen angst. Songs like “All the Small Things” and “First Date” capture both the awkwardness and giddiness of those formative years. Never mind the fact that all three guys said…
Swearing In: Year of the R-Rated Comedy
It’s an unavoidable trend — if two movies make a trend, that is — so much so that if you Google the phrase “the return of the R-rated movie,” the first hit takes you to the tsk-tsking Family Media Guide’s article on that very topic, along with its list of some 3,000 titles touted as…
Cult Hit for Nobody
Nowhere Man (Image Entertainment) There’s good reason why you’ve never heard of this UPN show from the mid-’90s, which lasted 25 episodes before getting shuttled off to, well, nowhere. It’s a convoluted mind-fuck that owes its existence as much to The Prisoner as The Fugitive, and if you missed one episode, nothing else made much…
Exit Stage Right
The local theater scene in 2005 was like a giant tiramisu, dense with riches and goodies, but with the occasional gummy bits that necessitated careful excavation by toothpick. Herewith, a free-ranging summary of the year that just flashed by. Today is the first day of the rest of your life, unless you’re dead. There’s nothing…
Our top DVD picks for the week of December 27
Ab-Normal Beauty (Tartan) Art of the Devil (Tokyo Shock) Bram Stoker’s Dracula/Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (Sony) Caged Heat (Buena Vista) Dark Water (Buena Vista) Diary of a Mad Black Woman: The Play (Lions Gate) Empire of the Wolves (Sony) 15 Things You’re Not Supposed to See (Xtreme) Happy Here and Now (MGM) Into the Blue (Sony)…
Capsule reviews of current area theater presentations.
Black Nativity — Karamu’s annual presentation of Langston Hughes’ gospel extravaganza has less of a plot than other versions. But the combination of spectacular singing and emotional, energetic dancing makes the evening memorable on many counts. In two clearly differentiated acts — the first recounts the story of Jesus’ birth, and the second takes place…
Pop Rocks
In 2005, pop music was rock music. Between Kelly Clarkson’s tarted-up “Since U Been Gone,” Ashlee Simpson’s raspy, Courtney Love-after-a-bender vocals, and Hilary Duff’s collabs with her Good Charlotte boy-toy Joel Madden, even the biggest Top 40 starlets liked their guitars cranked up to a sassy 11. Elsewhere, rockers in eyeliner (word up, My Chemical…
Capsule reviews of current area art exhibitions.
ONGOING Design for the Modern World: The Arts and Crafts Movement in Europe and America, 1880-1920 — The art museum’s first major arts-and-crafts show in years is notable not only for its enormous size, but for the many far-flung cultures (included are works from Germany, Scandinavia, Scotland, and Hungary) that share space. But what really…
Let There Be Rock
My undying love for Dudes with Guitars Who Think Way Too Much About Girls is now a critical liability, as Rockism has recently become grounds for public execution. I can only hope my final hours (before I am decapitated by Missy Elliott) are as graceful, poignant, and unabashedly melodramatic as the odes to insecure dudeliness…
The Lola Effect
For followers of the local dining scene, the top news of 2005 — and one of the few stories coming out of Cleveland to gain national attention — was written in Tremont, where Michael and Liz Symon decided to uproot their wildly successful Lola, a casually upscale salon with a contemporary American menu, and move…
Down-Home Delights
In 2005, Nashville hunks-in-arms like Toby Keith tuned down their jingoist jingles, the Muzik Mafia treaded water, and most of alt-country’s best contenders simply looked back. But as these 10 albums from country’s mainstream and underground demonstrate, these quiet scenes were still full of ferment beneath the surface. Only the top two finishers count as…
Eat & Run
Comings and goings are nothing new — some eateries fold, others spring up, and plenty of existing spots reposition themselves to control costs, increase market share, or more. Here’s a rundown of this year’s more notable happenings: Downtown, the popular white-collar lunch spot Vico’s closed, only to be replaced by equally sleek Porcelli’s. A little…
Hip-hop, Year Two AJ
If hip-hop had a theme song in 2005, it wasn’t “Gold Digger” or “Lose Control” or “Candy Shop,” or any tune that contained Mike Jones’ phone number. Instead, it was that old standard by the original rapper himself, Lou Reed: “I’m Waiting for the Man.” The man in this case being Jay-Z. All claims (including…
Heady Metal
When it comes to heavy metal, 2005 will be remembered as the year the promising Sounds of the Underground tour debuted, metalcore dominated the scene popularity-wise, and Iron Maiden got egged at Ozzfest. There weren’t a lot of big hits (only nü-metal holdovers Disturbed and Mudvayne cracked the Billboard Top 10), but the underground thrived…
Changing of the Guard
We spilled lots of fresh blood this year. There are more new faces than ever on our roundup of the top 10 local releases of 2005. Most of the bands that made the cut haven’t appeared before on our annual best-of list, which signals an infusion of strong up-and-coming bands. The old guard had better…
We Sing the Body Electric
While hip-hop continued to get mo’ live in ’05, and indie rock further honed post-punk/emo’s affectations into something more genuinely affecting, the arch-paradigms from the last 12 months of electronic composition seemed more concerned with cobbling together old genres than with molding new ones. For the most part, top producers haven’t seemed as worried about…
Women of Rock
Sugar sounds familiar and looks familiar, with good reason: Guitarist Rose Khuel — pronounced “cool,” and it fits — played bass in Cherry Bomb, which you may recall from the Akron-Cleveland scene of the mid-’90s. After a few attempts at a new band failed to take flight, Khuel finally found chemistry with singer D. Cruise,…
Overlooked in ’05
Listening to every single thing that comes across my desk is by and large a painful if not soul-killing experience, but it does occasionally land a few diamonds in my lap that wouldn’t get there any other way. Most of these CDs are by artists you’ve probably never heard of (I hadn’t); a couple are…
New Year’s Eve Pig Roast
Forget the tux, forget the VIP room, forget the martinis, forget all that hoity-toity business. Here’s the best way to end your year and ring in 2006: The Closing Room wraps up 2005 with a New Year’s Eve Pig Roast, presided over by Mel Pig, a nationally renowned, 75-year-old roasting vet from the hills of…
They Did What?
As Curtis Armstrong’s Miles tells Tom Cruise’s Joel in the 1983 smash-hit comedy Risky Business, sometimes you just gotta say, “What the fuck.” In Joel’s case, this phrase is employed with a shrug of the shoulders and a sly smile: “What the fuck, let’s go for it.” In mine, as directed toward those in the…
Fourplex of Evil
The Quakers have long been pacifists known for their commitment to nonviolence, justice, and oatmeal products. But their actions were a carefully planned ruse. In reality, they were a sleeper organization that patiently waited 200 years for the right moment to destroy America. So says a recently leaked Pentagon document, which outlines the Department of…
