The unconventional marriage of playoff baseball fever and music artistry go hand-in-hand in Pearl Jam: Let’s Play Two, an excitable and sentimental documentary that chronicles Pearl Jam gleefully situated in the middle of the hysteria surrounding the Chicago Cubs 2016 dream season which saw the team overcome a century-old dry-spell and win the World Series….
It’s hard to believe that Road to Hell is Albert Pyun’s 50th movie, and even harder to believe that he still can’t make a decent film. Originally shot in 2008, it’s surely a labor of love for the micro-budget auteur, although I’m not sure how much love it’s likely to receive beyond the initiated. Heavily…
The core of any filmmaker’s soul is to commit and explore the realm of a targeted subject matter regardless of said filmmaker’s familiarity with the material at hand. Well, Irish filmmaker Graham Jones (“How to Cheat in the Leaving Certificate”) does not disappoint with his latest go-around regarding adventurous youth and the creative spirit in…
This latest Disney picture, Beauty and the Beast, joins a growing list of live-action movies which traces its origins to animated films, including “The Jungle Book,” “Pete’s Dragon,” “Cinderella” and “Maleficent,” among others. The bar here, however, is just a bit higher, considering the 1991 edition became the first animated feature to earn a Best…
At the point in which Yoshiki, musical ombudsman, drummer, keyboardist/pianist and main songwriter of the Xtremely popular X Japan (simply X in Japan, though not in Japanese, for this is no ideogram, but only an alphabetic, apathetic X), Xtremely so in their Pacific archipelago, mythical prophets in their own land . . . at the…
With a cut and a kick and an upbeat note, Damien Chazelle sure paints a pretty picture of classic Hollywood musical nostalgia, but La La Land is more plastic pastiche than poignant portrait. It’s a technical marvel that’s dramatically weightless, a boldly bravura effort from writer/director Damien Chazelle and his crew that’s also too cutesy…
Florence Foster Jenkins singing voice was flat and off-key, yet her generosity to others, friendship with music greats such as Arturo Toscanini, and love of music brought happiness to many during the dark days of World War II. Labeled by some intemperate critics as “the worst singer in the world,” she is given something of…
