Porkopolis
If Brecht had ever written a kiddie movie, it might have come out something like Chris Noonan’s Babe. Co-adapted by its producer, George Miller, from a book by Dick King-Smith, the 1995 Australian film about a runty but purehearted little pig who takes it into his head to work herding sheep, thus inverting the accepted…
KISS the Culprit
When the Rolling Stones staged the first genuine rock and roll circus in 1968, they distributed gold-embossed metallic tickets to their fan club members, fed them, gave them twenty hours of music, clowns, and amusements, and then arranged for buses to take everybody home. All free o’ charge! In stark contrast, anyone attending Kiss’s current…
Full Motion
If cinema is anything, it is filmed movement. And the movement in Lance Mungia’s Six-String Samurai is arresting: Jeffrey Falcon’s herky-jerky twitches in the title role of a guitar-plucking warrior are complemented by Mungia’s highly mobile sense of picture-making. Falcon, a veteran of Hong Kong action films, plays a bespectacled musician in a ragged tuxedo,…
Nordic Hell
“Like ER on acid” is how one critic described Lars von Trier’s epic 1995 comedy The Kingdom, a wickedly funny mix of soap opera, supernatural thriller, and satire set inside a Copenhagen hospital. Produced as a four-part television miniseries (the first installment of an eventual thirteen-part series) for Danish TV, the episodes were later spliced…
Realtiy Check
So I go to get my driver’s license renewed the other day, excited–as any Ohio motorist would be–at the prospect of owning one of those slick new models with not one, but two, ID photos and that cool hologram that reads “DON’T DRINK AND DRIVE.” I mean, talk about your helpful reminders! I’ve got my…
The Straight Dope
Exactly what occurs during the process of cremation? What exactly remains after the process is done? I hear all kinds of opinions on this, but I would really like to know the facts.–Lisa, via AOL My assistant Jane asked if I wanted her to visit a crematory so she could experience cremation in person. I…
Letters
More Freebies, Less Blasphemy During the past ten years I have picked up Scene every Thursday to see if there were any contests or free movie passes in it. I don’t read any of the articles or ads. Truthfully, I find some of them distasteful and offensive, so I just glance quickly to look for…
The Mouth
Political payoff or campaign contribution? In the casebook on campaign finance reform, this was a kinky new chapter. It started in a City Hall john with three councilmen and a wad of cash. It ended in court eight months later. In between, Akron Councilman Ernie Tarle was investigated, indicted, called “a bagman,” booted from office,…
A Thinking Man’s Star Wars
Angels in America, particularly in Dobama Theatre’s perfect miniaturization, is imperative viewing for all those who consider themselves to be thinking adults. Experiencing vast doses of political history, apocalyptic cosmology, pop references, mysticism, mythology, and sexual politics, one feels one should be handed a college degree on the way out of the theater. In two…
Something’s Fishy at the Ritz
Most Clevelanders associate the Riverview Room at the Ritz-Carlton with attentive service and flawless meals–it was, after all, a AAA Four Diamond Award recipient in years past. But after two recent visits, I’ve concluded that the restaurant may be resting on its laurels. The Riverview Room is the hotel’s only full-service restaurant, serving daily breakfast,…
Seen the Light
Country music in the ’90s is Alan Jackson hyping Ford trucks via a rewritten version of “Mercury Blues,” a venerable number covered during the early ’70s by Steve Miller (a space cowboy rather than the ropin’ and ridin’ kind). It’s Shania Twain, a singer whose producer-husband-Svengali, Robert “Mutt” Lange, made his name in British rock.…
The World According to Joe Queer
“The guys are getting coffee,” Joe Queer says into a cell phone. “I’m standing on the side of the road south of Eugene, Oregon. It’s kind of overcast, but we’re looking forward to getting out there–we always have a good show [in Cleveland]. But being in the punk rock business and having a cell phone?”…
Deep Blues
They call him Oilman–an ironic nickname, considering his association with an oil company nearly killed him. “I could hardly breathe,” says Big Jack Johnson, who drove a tanker truck for the Shell Oil Co. in Clarksdale, Mississippi, in the 1960s and ’70s. “It was something in the gasoline fumes that did it to me. It…
Second Family
Music scenes often play like soap operas, ripe with murky affairs and switched partners. Even Kent can’t escape the comparison. The college town quartet Channel formed in 1996 as the result of various band mergings and breakups. The entanglement began when drummer Tim Perzhan was left without either of the two bands he had been…
The A-Train Stops Here
The jazz purist in you is depressed. While browsing at the book mart, you spot a CD titled Next Generation SWING. You figure the recording is intended for TV-numbed teens, because above the first title, Louis Prima’s “Jump, Jive, an’ Wail,” there’s a big red arrow and this helpful mnemonic: “Gap TV Commercial Theme Song!”…
Celinesleeves
All right, I give up. After repeatedly dismissing news reports of studies showing that our world has evolved into a less serious (read: less fun) place, where Gen Xers don’t feel comfortable with the frivolity and whimsy of youth, this holiday season has thrown up a window and let some of that stale air in.…
Surviving America
Home is both a seat of power and a prison for the women in The American Chestnut, a work by America’s anti-Sweetheart, Karen Finley. “I think we feel more comfortable with women where we allow them to make choices and decisions in the home,” the performance artist says of the project. “And I think we…
Yeah, Baby, Yeah!
Lately the words “resurgence” and “Burt Bacharach” are finding their way into a lot of the same sentences. There’s been an avalanche of press coverage on Bacharach and the stepped-up use of his songs in hit movies like Austin Powers, My Best Friend’s Wedding, Forrest Gump, and The First Wives Club, but if lucrative copyrights…
NIGHT & DAY, 1998
Thursday 3 Prancer now goes by his stage name, Hollywood, and Rudolph’s in a catatonic state in a padded cell. But Santa’s the one with real problems in The Eight: Reindeer Monologues: He’s been accused of asking Vixen for sexual favors. When her antlered co-workers testify in the matter, lies, scandal (the elves once worked…
Livewire
Tori Amos The Unbelievable Truth Rhodes Arena November 28 Contrary to expectation, there was not a preponderance of adolescent girls at Rhodes Arena Saturday night. The devotees who came to worship Tori Amos ranged from culturally impaired fraternity jocks to the spastic high school theater crowd. And, yes, teenage girls with their moms, both with…
