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Nina Simone’s name and presence had occasionally penetrated my consciousness and always piqued my interest. Happily, this well done documentary finally brought her consequential music and politics alive. Dubbed the High Priestess of Soul, she was a unique and uniquely transfixing artist, fusin…
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Liz Garbus on her Nina Simone doc
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Even the great Maggie Smith can’t save The Lady in the Van. Let’s repeat: Dame Maggie can’t save it! Perhaps that’s because she plays an angry old woman who’s beyond saving, sad as that common sight is. Disclosure: I saw The Lady in the Van on the little tilt-down screens of a 737. It kind…
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Dame Maggie gets wasted.
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Engaging and true against-all-odds tale about 4 men who survived on the capsized trimaran Rose-Noelle for 119 days in 1989. As it was at the time, it was hard to believe, but truth is stranger than fiction; or so they say. Dynamite job by the cast conveying what it must have been like to float a… |
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National Lampoon – the maidenhead of post-modern comedy – was the ultimate risqué magazine for “well-to-do nobodies” in the Seventies. Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon lists in its title four conditions associated with the Lampoon, another being being ROFL. This gr…
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Doug Kenney, comedy genius
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An all-time great college comedy, EWS!! riffs on pre-PC male privilege in all its semi-decadent glory. It imagines a nationally-ranked baseball team at a third-tier Texas college – the Bad Habit Bears, basically. As a guy who was a sophomore in 1980, when Richard Linklater’s movie is set, I …
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Rappers Driving
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Sing Street is a perfect rock-n-roll movie, set around a band who defies authority, gets popular and wins The Girl. She’s played by Lucy Boynton, who makes an indelible first impression – ruby lips half-parted, cigarette hanging out one side. She turns out to have a tough situation herself, add…
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Pitch Perfect 80s Music
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Now this is what a marvelous blockbuster should be. No surprise, as Marvel Entertainment always delivers. And talk about a monumental origin story, one that also harks back to existing plots! Wow. Plus, given that all the X-Men come out to play – all of them – it’s also a sequel in a way. Double …
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JLaw's sexy mutant goes nightstalking.
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Eat That Question is well titled. Frank Zappa in His Own Words is FZ waxing loquacious, repeatedly. Zappa, the pugnacious, contradictory and iconoclastic rockstar, indeed the consummate rockstar, trades heavily on his privilege and arrogance, by turns funny, shocking and ridiculous, a Trump t…
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Václav Havel was a big Zappa fan.
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Coke culture from its Eighties heyday comes alive in The Infiltrator, a biopic that profiles the Medellin Cartel’s apparent money launderer. This guy lived la vida loca in all its money grubbing, slimy glory. Bryan Cranston is nails as real-life U.S. Customs agent Robert Mazur, who went de…
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Cranston talks Infiltrator with Colbert
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Hands of Stone is a ham-fisted biopic of boxing great Roberto Durán. Raging Bull it’s not, notwithstanding Robert De Niro in a major role. That said, it does provide clear insight into Durán’s impoverished childhood, rise to prominence and fall from grace after his “No Mas” capitulation to Suga…
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Ana de Armas has star quality.
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