Emotion in Motion
For slightly more than a decade, Chinese martial arts films have — directly and indirectly — gained a growing audience in America. Now the genre may find its greatest breakthrough coming from an unlikely source — director Ang Lee, best known for such comedy-dramas of social manners as Sense and Sensibility, The Wedding Banquet, and…
Questioning “The Answer”
A matter of hours after torching the Seattle Supersonics for 41 points and another matter of hours before punishing the Cavaliers with a 54-point performance, Philadelphia 76ers guard Allen “The Answer” Iverson was at Metropolis, the dance club on the West Bank of the Flats, getting his party on. “It’s his party,” a box office…
Unlucky Thirteen
Thirteen Days is a suspenseful look at the American government in the grip of a crucial, minute-to-minute, real-life crisis that threatened to destroy the country. No, it’s not about the recent election struggles . . . or the 1998 impeachment . . . or the Watergate hearings, but rather about the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.…
Johnny Socko
Indiana’s ska sensations hark back to that magical time when bands actually attempted to entertain a crowd while on stage, as opposed to staring at their shoelaces and moping for an hour and a half, offering the occasional pelvic thrust in lieu of audience interaction. With this six-man crew, you get dance contests, intense choreography,…
GWH2: The Revenge
Finding Forrester is the latest film from Gus Van Sant, one of the true American originals to emerge in the ’80s and ’90s. When at his best, he gives us stories and images we’ve never seen. Finding Forrester, however, is not Gus Van Sant at his best. Novice actor Rob Brown stars as Jamal Wallace,…
Insane Clown Posse
ICP fanaticism remains one of the great perplexing phenomena of our time. How did two white dudes from Detroit with no beats, skills, or intelligence build a veritable Kiss Army of Juggalos who devour every insipid word and tuneless note? At this point in the game, you’re either a fanatic with every album, T-shirt, and…
House of Stiles
Skeptics will not take easily to the optimism in Thomas Carter’s teen love story Save the Last Dance, and outright cynics may find the whole thing absurd. The notion that a sheltered white girl from shopping-mall country and a knowing black boy from the inner city can dance their way over the social barriers put…
Isotope 217
Part of the artsy Chicago post-rock scene that includes Tortoise, Trans Am, and all those Gastr del Sol refugees kicking around town, Isotope 217 has slowly started to gain the attention of more than just students of the minimalist school of John Cage. The group, along with the rest of the Windy City’s experimentalists, was…
Klieg Lights in Vermont
Playwright-filmmaker David Mamet has the sharpest gift imaginable for shooting down the sins of American greed, the con games people run to get ahead, and the corruption that comes with success. Whether he’s haunting a secondhand junk shop, a poker room, or an outlying real-estate office, he always finds enough horror-tinged folly to go around.…
John Pizzarelli
Though John Pizzarelli may have been up to it before Harry Connick Jr., it was Connick’s nice-looking-young-guy-sings-good-old-jazz-tunes routine that first cracked the pop culture consciousness. Nevertheless, Pizzarelli, a good-looking guitarist with a self-effacing sense of humor, has been singing and playing the good old jazz tunes for quite some time and may yet out-Connick Connick.…
Justice Undercover
Justice, or at least what passes for it, is supposed to be done in full public view. This stems from the quaint notion that, since it’s your government, you have the right to scrutinize its every act. And that’s very much true in Cuyahoga County — except in 98 percent of the cases. Television would…
Matthew Shipp
Pianist Matthew Shipp is perhaps best viewed through the prism of David Ware’s performing and recording quartet, in which he is a longstanding member. As Ware has sculpted his own sound through a series of complex albums, Shipp has steadfastly remained the band’s frontal lobe, adding a harmonic counterpart to Ware’s tumultuous free flights. His…
Unidentified
The lights appeared sometime around midnight. There were just two at first, blinking on the road ahead. Then the three people in the car, driving home to Ashtabula on a deserted stretch of Route 11, noticed more red flashing lights to their left and right, just above the trees. And suddenly, the biggest one of…
Palace of Oranges
While the ’80s indie rock scene spawned a number of notable bands and unheralded achievements, nothing stood out so much as the unbridled sonic guitar fuzz that seemed to permeate every disc, both acclaimed and long-forgotten, during the era. Bands as disparate as My Bloody Valentine and Dinosaur Jr. exposed a singular affection for swirling,…
Heights and Depths
For years the motto “The Friendly City” has graced signs around Warrensville Heights. It may not be the flashiest slogan for a town, but it’s as good as the “Geranium Center of the U.S.,” which was the theme 75 years ago, when Warrensville was just another tiny village south of Cleveland, distinguished by an abundance…
Plena Libre
The majority of the Hispanic population in Northeast Ohio has its roots in Puerto Rico, which has been a U.S. commonwealth for over a century, but retains its Spanish- and African-derived culture. The island’s most well-known folk music form is the plena, which often contains topical lyrics and employs hand drums called panderos. Plena has…
The Edge
No doubt Governor Taft would like to see some Ohio Republicans filling the ranks of the Bush administration, if for no other reason than to dilute the merry band of lunatics making their way to Washington. But the smart money sees an auxiliary motive behind Bob’s push to get a Justice Department post for Lieutenant…
Yellow No. 5
It’s hard to dislike the down-to-earth guys in Yellow No. 5, an alternative rock act out of Lucas, Ohio, with realistic aspirations. They don’t pretend to be rock stars and aren’t ashamed of their day jobs — one’s a high school teacher, another works in telecommunications, and the other two have office jobs. In their…
Fear of Comics
At the time, it was meant to be read as a great compliment: Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez create comic books for people who don’t read comic books! A publisher or pitchman couldn’t have come up with a more glorious phrase, one magical sentence that would reel in the literate and their loot. Finally, it was…
Niesel Is Exactly Nobody
And Creed is damn well insufferable: Questions: Who exactly is Jeff Niesel anyway? What are his credentials? And most important, has he ever actually seen the Zachary Walker Band perform? Answers: Nobody. Nothing. Never. How else could one explain the senseless trashing of one of the best bands on the local scene today [Soundbites, December…
Play Parade
This time of year, you can wind your watch by Cleveland theater. First, there’s the holiday blitzkrieg of Yuletide bombs dropped from snowy skies. Then comes the post-New Year’s famine, during which our show people go into hibernation, dreaming of their next go-round with The Sound of Music. Fortunately, James Levin’s Cleveland Public Theatre goes…
No-Flub Grub
Ah, the friendly neighborhood pub: A spot where the vibe is relaxed, the staffers are friendly, and the dress code is nonexistent . . . Where the food is good, the bartender is generous, the prices are modest, and the wait for a table is never too long. In other words, the perfect dinner-and-drinks joint…
Flour Power
Chef Bev Shaffer knows there’s more than one thing to do with a bottle of vodka. “Slit two Madagascar bourbon vanilla beans and pop them into the bottle,” instructs the spoon-wielding expert. “Leave it alone for about three weeks, until it starts to smell really good. For seven bucks, you’ve got a big bottle of…
Tandoor Swings Open
The tandoor is sizzling once again at the Clay Oven (5747 Chevrolet Boulevard, Parma; 440-888-6490), Kuldeep Singh’s popular northern Indian restaurant that recently relocated from Fairview Park. The new spot celebrated its grand opening on December 18 in spacious quarters in Snowville Plaza, right down the street from the Chevy factory. So far, the move…
A Woman of Influence
In a country where every genre of music is an amalgam of others, sorting out influences can make for convoluted genealogy. For singer Mollie O’Brien, who gathers songs from several American musical bloodlines, the lineage is especially rich. You might say R&B met bluegrass and jazz in a musical ménage à trois that begat O’Brien’s…
Pocketful of Rock
No matter how you simplify it on paper, Jason Ringenberg’s career path has taken a number of detours. His longstanding band, Jason & the Scorchers, has been an alt-country favorite since its debut in 1981 and has regularly been picked to be the next big thing, a fate that has so far sadly eluded it.…
Bona Fide
If M. Night Shyamalan makes movies to be seen twice, Joel and Ethan Coen make films to be pawed over a dozen times. O Brother, Where Art Thou?, an opulent and often slapstick updating of Homer’s The Odyssey by way of Preston Sturges, Robert Johnson, and Clark Gable, sneaks up on you, revealing its myriad…
Rumor Mills
When Chris Mills played at Fado in the Flats back in October, about a dozen people were in attendance and only half of them actually paid attention. Too bad, because the Chicago-based singer-songwriter is a sharp wordsmith whose yearning songs are filled with a sense of heartbreak and introspection that often belie his 26 years.…
