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The Greatest Stories Ever Told

Abduction: ‘Batman’ It’s not the darkest of Dark Knight sagas, yet this high-camp thriller has disturbed me ever since I first saw it. Between my tender ages of 3 and 4, my preteen sibs and a gaggle of Swedish neighbor kids walked me to see my very first film in a movie palace. We passed…

by Kate X Messer

TV Eye

The IFC Media Project returns for another season of inventive and inspiring investigative journalism

by Belinda Acosta

Kites

This Bollywood film made in America mixes elements from crime thrillers, love stories, and Westerns in a big flashy bundle designed to win over viewers dwelling far from the Indian subcontinent.

by Marjorie Baumgarten

Girl in a Coma

5:50pm, Hierba Stage When Girl in a Coma did “Cherry Bomb” with Cherie Currie at South by Southwest in March, it was one of those circle-closing moments. Even though it was a tie-in with The Runaways movie debuting that week, it served as torch-passing from one generation to the next. “As soon as she jumped…

by Audra Schroeder

The Greatest Stories Ever Told

Self-Sacrifice for Kin: ‘All That Heaven Allows’ Cary (Jane Wyman), a well-to-do widow of a certain age, tries to do all the right things that society and her family expect of her after her husband dies. But there is something … you know … missing from her life. Like a man. Before she resorts to…

by Stephen MacMillan Moser

Phases & Stages

Julieta Venegas Otra Cosa (Sony Music Latin) In any language, Julieta Venegas’ new millennial showing qualifies the 39-year-old Long Beach-born, Tijuana-brazed singer as an Artist of the Decade. Otra Cosa seals the deal. Her fifth LP following 1997’s accordion-pumped pop pulsation Aquí, Venegas continues her campaign of getting more with honey (Tanya Donelly) than with…

by Raoul Hernandez

The Greatest Stories Ever Told

Obstacles to Love: ‘A Night at the Opera’ High art collides head-on with a kinder, gentler, but no less absurdist Marx Brothers, and art gets the stuffing knocked out of it (no surprise, but still sublime in its stupendously anarchic way). Groucho, Harpo, and Chico are cast as madcap Cupidians to a pair of star-crossed…

by Marc Savlov

Day Trips

The Vietnam War Memorial Garden honors those who served in Vietnam and the Fort Worth-built Huey helicopters

by Gerald E. McLeod

The Greatest Stories Ever Told

Falling Prey to Cruel­ty or Misfortune: ‘The Last Picture Show’ The Last Picture Show could easily suffice for a dictionary definition of Georges Polti’s thesis of misfortune, but a mere entry would miss the film’s dusty elegance. Peter Bogdanovich made his directorial debut at age 32 with this near-epic tale based on Larry McMurtry’s novel…

by Margaret Moser

Phases & Stages

The Dead Weather Sea of Cowards (Third Man/Warner Bros.) The Black Keys Brothers (Nonesuch) Jack White betrayed his Achilles’ heel in the White Stripes’ tour documentary Under Great White Northern Lights: an innate need for harsh restrictions in creation. For the Dead Weather, that constraint is time – or a lack thereof. The quartet’s timid…

by Austin Powell

The Greatest Stories Ever Told

All Sacrificed for Passion: ‘Splendor in the Grass’ Deanie Loomis and Bud Stamper are in love and fueled by the kind of passions and surging hormones that are the provenance of American teens. They are in love but not lovers. This is the late 1920s in rural Kansas, and there are proprieties to be upheld…

by Marjorie Baumgarten

The Greatest Stories Ever Told

Involuntary Crimes of Love: ‘Brighton Rock’ A decade ago, Richard Attenborough was in a public feud with Guy Ritchie. The Oscar winner had accused the Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels director of promoting “the pornography of violence.” Some people accused the Oscar-winning knight of being a fuddy-duddy. Nonsense, he replied: A big fan of…

by Richard Whittaker

Phases & Stages

Band of Horses Infinite Arms (Columbia) A debut (Everything All the Time) and sophomore smash (Cease to Begin) 19 months apart means the other flip-flop had to fall sooner or later for Band of Horses, and Infinite Arms fumbles its Birks like a weary hippie. First off Sub Pop for Sony, disc three opens in…

by Raoul Hernandez

Willie Alvarado

5:30pm, Chicano Stage Willie Alvarado grew up singing in the fields as one of eight children of migrant farmworkers from the Mexican state of Coahuila and its largest city, Torreón, where he was born Juan Guillermo Alvarado. “We were very poor,” says the singer when asked where his ancient voice of classic Mexican balladry comes…

by Raoul Hernandez

Phases & Stages

Thee Oh Sees Warm Slime (In the Red) Prolific isn’t the right word for John Dwyer’s affliction. He’s on an indefinite Master Cleanse, and music flows out of him as such. The sound of his San Francisco-based group has changed more than once over the last decade, but the last two Oh Sees LPs –…

by Audra Schroeder

The Greatest Stories Ever Told

Daring Enterprise: ‘Ferris Bueller’s Day Off’ I don’t mean to brag, but I was valedictorian of my grade school class of 15 students. In my rousing speech to fellow students and parents, I quoted the immortal Ferris Bueller: “Life moves pretty fast. You don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss…

by James Renovitch

Phases & Stages

The Hold Steady Heaven Is Whenever (Vagrant) The Hold Steady perfects the rock & roll edge that doesn’t actually cut, a sound embedded in enough classic rock to be instantly recognizable while evoking youthful restlessness more nostalgically celebratory than wanton. In other words, the now-Brooklyn quartet (minus Franz Nicolay on keyboards) has always been more…

by Doug Freeman

The Greatest Stories Ever Told

Madness: ‘The Red Shoes’ It’s the ultimate internal battle royale for members of the creative class: Art vs. Heart. Emergent ballerina Vickie Page (real-life British ballerina Moira Shearer) must choose between her love of dance and the love for the man whose music inspires her – her company’s young, talented, and impetuous composer, Julian Craster…

by Kate X Messer

New in Print

Hornet’s Nest still satisfies – especially in its revelation-larded final third – but it leaves one a little wistful for the gosh-wow newness of the first book

by Kimberley Jones

Phases & Stages

Gogol Bordello Trans-Continental Hustle (American Recordings) Portuguese, Italian, French, Spanish, Gypsy, and/or tongues unknown – Manu Chao, Shane MacGowan, Joe Strummer? Eugene Hütz. And for album No. 5 from comrade Hütz’s East European blackout – NYC’s Gogol Bordello – comeback kid/producer Rick Rubin, American lama. Mostly indistinguishable from 2007’s Super Taranta!, which no one mistook…

by Raoul Hernandez

Grupo Fantasma With Larry Harlow

7:30pm, Pavilion Stage Were it not for Larry Harlow, Grupo Fantasma wouldn’t have received a Grammy nomination for 2008’s Sonidos Gold. That’s not to overstate the NYC-based pianist’s guest contributions to the album but rather to emphasize the magnitude of his stature in the Latin music community. “In 1974, I picketed the Grammys with about…

by Austin Powell

Phases & Stages

Black Prairie Feast of the Hunters’ Moon (Sugar Hill) If you think you’ve heard it all, Black Prairie could prove you wrong. From Portland, Ore., and featuring three Decemberists, the quintet’s music wends from cinematic to newgrass, Eastern European klezmer to ghostly folk – with a touch of the Decemberists’ theatrical pop. Except for a…

by Jim Caligiuri

The Greatest Stories Ever Told

Rivalry of Kin: ‘Ran’ “Father, there are ways to break even three arrows together,” warns Saburo, the youngest of the Ichimonji clan in the 1985 epic Ran, using his knee to snap the metaphorical bond between himself and his two brothers, Taro and Jiro. “Consider the times in which we live. To survive, one must…

by Austin Powell

Phases & Stages

Caribou Swim (Merge) Dan Snaith’s electro-mathematical mind has produced an intricate body of work, from 2003’s Up in Flames through 2007’s swirlier Andorra. The Canadian’s color patterns often change with the tide, and on his latest disc, he’s kind of blue, but it makes for an engaging listen. The pulsing weirdness of opener “Odessa” and…

by Audra Schroeder

The Greatest Stories Ever Told

Supplication: ‘Black Sunday’ By the time a practically heaving Goodyear blimp pokes its enormous red nipple over the lip of Miami’s Orange Bowl in the third act of Black Sunday, we’ve already been treated to quite a few doses of mama dread. In this terrorism thriller inspired by the Black September massacre of Israeli athletes…

by Cindy Widner

Headlines

� Austin City Attorney David Smith is retiring as city officials try to sort out the controversial handling of the KeyPoint report on the May 2009 shooting of Nathaniel Sanders II, much of which was kept under wraps until it was leaked to the press. Smith said he “take[s] full responsibility for any mistakes we…

by Chronicle Staff

Roberto Pulido y Los Clasicos

9:15pm, Pavilion Stage Roberto Pulido doesn’t talk the way he sings. The Edinburg native, who’s been performing Tejano music since “19 throw it away,” speaks with a comforting cadence that’s part Texas twang, part supple yawn of a wood floor, with a spark of pickled jalapeño. But when he sings – wow. He’s been singing…

by Belinda Acosta

The Greatest Stories Ever Told

Crime Pursued by Vengeance: ‘Freaks’ Vengeance is a dish best served by Prince Randian, the armless, legless human torso who wriggles, mud-encrusted but for the killing blade clutched between his teeth, and squirms his way beneath the wheels of a benighted and rainswept circus caravan in pursuit of the damned, doomed, duplicitous trapeze artist Cleopatra.…

by Marc Savlov

Phases & Stages

Broken Social Scene Forgiveness Rock Record (Arts & Crafts) The New Pornographers Together (Matador) Two Canadian supergroups, one release date, and no clear winner. Broken Social Scene’s long-awaited Forgiveness Rock Record opens with “World Sick,” a euphoric guitar rave-up that condenses the collective’s sprawling urgency into seven minutes of communal ecstasy. That tightly wound energy…

by Austin Powell

Record Review

Piñata Protest Plethora (Saustex) There are many ways to attempt description of Piñata Protest, but let’s just start with the tried and true: “If the Pogues were Latino and from San Antonio ….” No secret the city south of Austin is undergoing a musical renaissance, thanks in large part to the Saustex label and bands…

by Margaret Moser

Hausu (House)

This 1977 Japanese film is a surreal, indefinable piece of horror/comedy, a must-see film for lovers of the inscrutable, the grotesque, the funky, and the eccentric.

by Marc Savlov

Luv Doc Recommends: Pachanga Latino Music Festival

There is no equivalent of Ellis Island anywhere along the Mexican border, no outstretched torch of Lady Liberty lighting the way for clandestine nighttime border crossings, no bronze plaque beckoning tired, poor, huddled masses and wretched refuse through the golden door. Really, would it have killed Panama to pop for a big copper statue as…

by The Luv Doc

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