© 2008 Drew Tewksbury: Multimedia Journalist. 
Terminator Salvation’s action sequences satiate the hungers both of explosion-craving, old school action aficionados and quick cut, first-person violence voyeurs of Generation X-Box.
If sequel mania and action overload has worn you thin, film festivals offer an antidote to the big budget blockbusters that trounce theaters during summertime. In the summer, many critics look to Europe to enjoy the fruits of international auteurs, but some of the most unique festivals can be found Stateside. As an homage to the homeland, we present this list of American film festivals that are worth checking out as the weather starts to sizzle.
A slice of the Los Angeles music community visited the dark basement space of the Echoplex for a benefit concert intended to raise awareness and money for children with cancer. All proceeds from the sold-out Silversun Pickups show, which was announced only three days in advance, went to the Pablove Foundation, an organization supporting cancer research and arts, music and play programs for young cancer patients.
Polly Jean Harvey has carved out a lot of dark spaces on her albums. From the evocative and harsh Riot Grrl-ish lashings of her early-to-mid ’90s works Dry and To Bring You My Love, Harvey has stomped headfirst into the cock-heavy world of rock ’n’ roll.
Dirty Projectors are entirely unpredictable leading listeners through forests of strings and valleys of distorted bass guitar, and into psychedelic crazy pop.
It’s brother against brother for control over their destinies, in a film about soccer, Mexico, and the way we try to live our dreams.
Shawn Mortensen, the visionary photographer who captured countless iconic images of artists, celebrities and musicians, died this week. I had the distinct pleasure of meeting Shawn when I worked at Flaunt Magazine. He came into our office to talk about shooting for our 90′s issue. As he leaned against the wall in the art department [...]
Downriver Revival showcases the double lives that hid in the troubled town of Ecorse, Michigan; where a church secretary could wail out the blues at night, or a mechanic’s hands could crawl across the keys of a Hammond B-3 organ.
Two Fingers takes on the template of late 90’s era electronica (primarily drum ‘n’ bass and trip hop) and cross-pollinates it with hip hop aesthetic, creating a sonic middle ground palatable to enthusiasts of either genre.
Bagayoko and Mariam Doumbia live in a world where sound is everything. They met as teenagers at the Institute for the Young Blind in the West African nation of Mali, where Doumbia cultivated her blithe, songbird voice and Bagayoko developed his playful guitar plucking. They fell in love soon after, and, in 1980, they married and became known as “the blind couple from Mali.”
In 1971, brothers David, Bobby, and Dannis Hackney cooked up Death in their Detroit garage. Little did they know that more than three decades later, their efforts would become the stuff of music lore. Death’s album, set for release thirty-eight years after the band’s birth, is now a must-have for proto-punk enthusiasts. (For the metalhead [...]
If the avant-garde is dead, then These Are Powers plays in its graveyard. These ghostly dancescapes, although not exactly avant-garde, certainly toe the line of experimentalism, if the term actually means anything anymore. After all, “experimental” music (as many bands choose to label their sounds on MySpace) is a nebulous catchall for music that breaks [...]
An Animal Collective album usually takes some time. Call your secretary, cancel your afternoon meetings. Take a rain check for that dinner date, tell your girl you’re staying in. Animal Collective albums hijack your life. But on Merriweather Post Pavilion the collective offers its most accessible release to date. The bouncing beats of “My Girls” [...]
Without people, a neighborhood would just be a bunch of buildings. Or so argues Explicit Ills, the directorial debut from actor Mark Webber, which weaves together four residents’ stories in a rough part of Philadelphia. The movie opens with snapshots of abandoned buildings, composed as poetic portraits of urban landscape, but like these exterior shots of the destitute Philadelphia neighborhood, the movie never really invites the viewer inside.
“You’ll be done in 20 minutes,” the bailiff tells the jury, who are responsible for deciding the fate of a Chechen kid who allegedly murdered his adoptive father, a Russian army officer. But at the last minute of what will be a unanimous guilty vote, one man slowly raises his hand to vote “not guilty.” With this act of defiance, the captivating story of 12 slowly opens like an origami rose in water.
The Devil appears in many forms, and in the West African nation of Liberia, the Devil is Charles Taylor.
When Andrew Bagby was killed on November 5th 2001, he left behind much more than his memory. Childhood friend and filmmaker Kurt Kuenne set out to create a loving documentary about Bagby that illustrated the life of his quirky friend for the child he left behind, Zachary. The result, Dear Zachary, is as an emotionally [...]
A Christmas Tale (Un conte de noël) The holidays are meant to be joyous occasions where families come together to rejoice in each other’s company—in theory, at least. In practice, families are far more bizarre than the outside world could ever know. The holidays can be a time of awkward encounters, airing of family drama, [...]
If America’s greatest art form is film, then Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho is the Mona Lisa of horror. Arguably Hitchcock’s most watched work by contemporary audiences, Psycho connects with viewers on a visceral level seldom achieved by any film. The plot is deceptively simple. A woman (Janet Leigh) steals money from her work, goes on the [...]
Twenty-seven years ago, Raiders of the Lost Ark introduced the world to an unconventional archaeologist named Indiana Jones. With the DVD release of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, we pick up with the adventures of Indy (Harrison Ford), his former love Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen), and a young man named Mutt [...]