Rating: 3 stars (out of 4) Is The Town ‘Heat meets The Departed,’ as the ads portray? No—it’s better. Is it Gone Baby Gone, Ben Affleck’s scintillating first directorial effort? Not quite, although comparing anything with a Dennis Lehane adaptation (hello, Mystic River and Shutter Island) is unfair. Should it put the final nail in…
“Silence is the enemy.” At some point on this past August 11th, at Jiffy Lube Pavilion in Virginia, it all went away. At some indefinable moment, while realizing that time had seemed to stop as Green Day obliterated tedium on their way through a legendary, two-hour-and-45-minute show, while observing that Billie Joe Armstrong is a…
Boys Like Girls (2006) – 2.5 stars Love Drunk (2009) – 4 stars In the mid-to-late 00s, Boys Like Girls have piggybacked onto the pop-emo scene trail-blazed by bands like the (more talented) All-American Rejects. Their genre, emo, has now almost completely abandoned its intense, uncompromising Rites of Spring roots, now coming to rest somewhere in that spectrum between Jimmy…
Rating: 3 and a half stars (out of 5) Neon Trees opened for The Killers in 2008, inviting a natural comparison to a band they clearly respect. A couple years later, the Trees are playing a gig at the upcoming Lollapalooza concerts, their lead single “Animal” gets some radio play, and…they’re also plugging Las Vegas…
Rating: 4 stars (out of 4) “With Inception hitting theaters, we take a look at movies that take a dark view of the future.” So declared the Rotten Tomatoes website today, and in the same spirit, I revisit 2006’s criminally underappreciated sci-fi classic. Every once in a while, a movie comes out that puts together…
Arcade Fire, EP (2003) – 2 stars Funeral (2004) – 4.5 stars Neon Bible (2007) – 4.5 stars Within seemingly 5 minutes of breaking onto the music scene, the Arcade Fire lost anonymity. David Bowie immediately proclaimed himself a major fan, festivals like Lollapalooza snapped them up, and U2 not only asked them to share…
Culminating the recent stretch of graduation/high school/transition period movies reviewed with the best film of the ‘Your whole life is ahead of you, but what do you do?’ genre I’ve seen. Rating: 4 stars (out of 4) Garden State was the first movie I ever loved. It was the first film I remember seeing that…
Rating: 3.5 stars (out of 4) There’s not a teen movie made after Fast Times at Ridgemont High that doesn’t owe its existence to it, and there hasn’t been one since that’s any better. Fast Times captures the spirit of high school in ways that most movies about teenagers don’t even bother to try, which…
Rating: 3 stars (out of 4) When I finished Dazed and Confused the first time, I didn’t really know what I thought of it. But after some reflection and a second viewing, I understand its goals and can see how skillfully it achieves them. Dazed follows nobody’s rules. It’s flawed, unconventional, funny, and completely outrageous. …
Chain Gang of Love (2003) – 4 stars Pretty in Black (2005) – 2 stars Lust, Lust, Lust (2008) – 5 stars In and Out of Control (2009) – 4 stars Formed in Copenhagen, of all places, the boy-girl duo The Raveonettes re-envisions rock and roll’s past into one endlessly entertaining vision of the present. …