“Thank you and goodnight” is what you could hear after the opening track, “EKG,” on Wilco’s new surprise ninth record Star Wars. The disjointed instrumental affair is loose and free and would fit nicely into this veteran groups encore to say goodbye. Instead, it is the greeting and welcome mat on this solid and free…
It might just be me, but I feel like I’ve seen a lot of films lately about overcoming past trauma. Noted actor Robyn Wright makes her directorial debut in Land, another entry in that canon. She demonstrates a strong aptitude for visual storytelling. But her distinctive style can’t hide the thinness of the script. As…
The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart takes a detailed and profound look at the legacy of the Bee Gees. In my opinion this is one of the finest music documentaries yet made. It charts the brothers’ meteoric rise to stardom and the many highs and lows that followed. Hearing the hits…
Coping with death and significant illness resulting in death isn’t easy for anyone. When it affects one’s nearest and dearest it is particularly harrowing. What if inside two years both your spouse of nearly four decades and adult child pass away? How would/could you handle that? In an instant, life as you had known it…
Many a prairie oyster has been consumed at Buckingham Palace over the years. Perhaps done none better than by the popular matriarch of the Windsors, Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother. With a penchant for a lunchtime gin and Dubonnet, she was a real advocate for ‘drinkypoos’ in the Royal household. This, and other ‘secrets’ of…
From the hand bill for this production at the New Theatre, of an adaption, by Richard Roxburgh and Justin Monjo, of Tim Winton’s 1986 novel, That Eye, The Sky: In a small Western Australian town 13 year-old Ort Flack is coming to terms with terrible changes in his world. His father lies paralysed in a…
Motel Beds are easily one of the best bands to come out of Dayton, Ohio in some time and they back that statement up with their new release; Mind Glitter. The record has slowly been simmering in the Gem City, as it has been a year-and-a-half since their career-spanning compilation, These Are The Days Gone…
The novels of British author Daphne du Maurier have provided a great source of material for filmmakers with their deft mix of intrigue, mystery, murder, mistrust and romance. Alfred Hitchcock captured the gothic atmosphere of her novel Rebecca, while he brought a sense of unease and menace to his adaptation of The Birds, a tale…
The satire about the film and publishing industries in Sydney (the Emerald City of the title) is also about marriage and its strains, especially when it is of two competitive partners trying to find a balance in life. This is Australia of the late 1980s, full of entrepreneurial optimism and materialism, that see antihero protagonist…
There is no subtlety in Sleepless, a gritty crime thriller starring Jamie Foxx (Django Unchained) and Michelle Monaghan (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang). Almost everyone is dirty or corrupt, or both. It is simply a case of determining the wood from the chaff. When Las Vegas cop Vincent Downs (Foxx) and his partner Sean (Tip “T.I.”…
