Film Review: Battle of the Sexes

Stone and Carell serve up a winner in still timely ’70s tennis drama      

Billie Jean King (Emma Stone) and Bobby Riggs (Steve Carell) play to the crowd at a press conference preceding the Battle of the Sexes.

Opening nearly 44 years to the day after the famous tennis match it’s named after, Battle of the Sexes chronicles the much publicized and widely watched (90 million viewers tuned in worldwide) 1973 match between then 29-year-old women’s champion Billie Jean King and former men’s champion 55-year-old Bobby Riggs. Billed as the ultimate Battle of the Sexes, the match became much more than just an exhibition game; it took on a life of its own, and, after King’s resounding defeat of Riggs, it became a touchstone for the growing women’s equality movement of the early 1970s. Husband and wife directing team Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (Little Miss Sunshine) and screenwriter Simon Beaufoy (127 Hours; Slumdog Millionaire) wonderfully capture the zeitgeist of the period down to the smallest details, and have assembled a stellar cast to bring this often infuriating but always engaging true story to life.
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Film Review: Brad’s Status

A midlife crisis worth watching: Stiller shines in funny and poignant story  

Brad (Ben Stiller, l.) reflects on his life while touring colleges with his son Troy (Austin Abrams). 

Ben Stiller, who can play middle-age angst like no one else (see While We’re Young, for example), is in fine form in writer/director Mike White’s new film Brad’s Status. Although the film’s premise about a soon-to-be-50 straight white man facing an existential crisis as he grapples with his life choices may sound like the epitome of naval-gazing white privilege, the picture touches on some universal themes with sensitivity and wry humor, thanks in large part to Stiller’s well-tuned performance and White’s sharp screenplay (White is perhaps best known for the 2000 cult hit Chuck and Buck and this year’s social satire Beatriz at Dinner).
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Film Review: mother!

If a stranger knocks at your front door…

Jennifer Lawrence’s Mother struggles with hostess duties as Javier Bardem’s poet entertains.

Standing before an unpainted bedroom wall, a young and thoroughly domesticated woman ponders which shade of eggshell will look just so. She mixes up a tester, applies a strip, and steps back to regard her work. Elsewhere an older man inhabits his writing study, conjuring magic onto the page and thence to his readers. Later the two will enjoy her hearty meal, and settle into reading by the fire.

But something isn’t right. A sound, or maybe a feeling, forces the woman to cock her ear. She moves as quietly as possible, propelled by a feeling she can’t explain, to peek in on the man. He isn’t writing. He’s just sitting, waiting, watching. Something isn’t right.

Such is the ominous atmosphere of Darren Aronofsky’s latest film mother!, which only partly succeeds, through the use of the horror genre overlaid with biblical themes, at offering a portrait of female anxiety.

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Film Review: Home Again

Reese goes home again, but that doesn’t mean you have to    

Lillian (Candice Bergen, l.) and her daughter Alice (Reese Witherspoon) delightedly share breakfast with the three total strangers that Alice has let in her home (from l., Nat Wolff, Jon Rudnitsky, and Pico Alexander).

With Home Again, writer/director Hallie Meyers-Shyer’s debut feature, we see that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. The daughter of filmmaker Nancy Meyers (The Intern; It’s Complicated; The Holiday; Something’s Got to Give), Meyers-Shyer here copies her mother’s patented feel-good glossy, Pottery Barn-infused style to create a romantic comedy that is blandly harmless at best and ludicrously insipid at worst. That Meyers herself produced the project is no surprise, as the entire picture feels like Mom just handed her daughter the keys to the family car and admonished her to drive it exactly as Mom would.
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Spinning Platters Interview: Corin Tucker & Peter Buck of Filthy Friends

You have 15 minutes in a room with two of your idols to ask them whatever you want. Here’s how that goes…

Photo taken at The Independent in SF on 8.29.17

R.E.M. changed my life. If it weren’t for them, I probably wouldn’t have found rock ‘n’ roll. At least they were my gateway band, the band that introduced me to punk, folk, power pop, and even hip hop. Sleater-Kinney are a band I found in high school, and they quickly became my favorite band. Little did I expect that cofounder Corin Tucker would form a band with R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck many years later. That band is Filthy Friends, and they recently released a fantastic record. We had the opportunity to chat with them just before they played the Independent. I tried not to geek out too much. Continue reading “Spinning Platters Interview: Corin Tucker & Peter Buck of Filthy Friends”

Show Review: Dead Cross, Qui, Secret Chiefs 3 at El Rey, 8.21-22.17

“Nothing stops this tour!”

Dead Cross-20

Since supergroups seem to be the big deal right now, it’s hard to recognize any band who comes together in collaboration as anything but. However, it becomes crystal clear, when the band performs live, that “supergroup” is not as appropriate of a term. When talking about Dead Cross it is completely fair to say that this is a band, not another one-off album release. The self-titled album, recently released on Ipecac Records, is a blistering hardcore punk set that injects a new vitality into the genre.

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Film Review: Patti Cake$

Straight outta Jersey: Portrait of an unlikely rap star makes for one of the summer’s best films    

Aspiring rapper Patti, AKA Patti Cake$, AKA Killa P (Danielle Macdonald), makes a grand entrance at the pharmacy where her friend Jheri works. 

New Jersey filmmaker Geremy Jasper got his start making music videos, so it makes sense that his first foray into feature films is a picture about an aspiring musician. With Patti Cake$, Jasper draws on both his New Jersey upbringing and his music video experience to bring us the thoroughly entertaining story of one Patricia Dombrowski. She’s Patti to her friends and family and Patti Cake$ or Killa P in her brilliantly constructed rap songs, but, either way, Patti is one of the most unique and unforgettable characters to grace the silver screen this year, and her story makes for a great way to close out the summer film season.
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Outside Lands Night Show Review: Sleigh Bells, Jel at The Independent, 8/11/17

It may not be winter, but Sleigh Bells are always lovely

The music festival night show: a time honored tradition, when nightclubs around town host a band playing said festival to also play a smaller show after curfew is over at the main event. There is good and bad with these; the good side is that you get your band playing a full length set, in a crowd of just fans in a smaller venue than you’d normally see them at; the bad side is that these shows start really late, you have to get to them from the festival (which is never an easy affair), and it also means that you’ll be working on very little sleep the next day. This might, however, just be because I insist on showing up at doors, and leaving when the last note has played; I guess not everyone else is crazy like me.

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Outside Lands Journal: Day 3, 8/13/17

Karl The Fog even showed up to see Lee Fields

We arrived at Day Three of Outside Lands, commonly known as “Sunday” to the real world. There was definitely a different energy in the air within the park, as much of the crowd was unaware of the extent of the activity happening in Charlottesville, VA the day before, and you could kind of see that a lot of people were trying to muster up the motivation to be there. There was really only one person on this Earth capable of taking that feeling when humanity has let you down, and it seems like there is nothing left to look forward to — so we were damn lucky that he was booked to play at 12:15 on the Lands End stage. Continue reading “Outside Lands Journal: Day 3, 8/13/17”

Film Review: Ingrid Goes West

Tonally uneven film obscures provocative premise   

Social media obsessed Ingrid (Aubrey Plaza) moves to L.A. with a plan to befriend her Instagram idol.

If you sometimes worry you may be checking your Facebook and Instagram feeds just a little too frequently, rest assured that you’ve got nothing on Ingrid Thorburn. As portrayed by an exceptional Audrey Plaza, the social media obsessed heroine of Ingrid Goes West becomes a poster child for smart phone restraint. Unfortunately, first time feature writer/director Matt Spicer and his co-writer David Branson Smith run into tone problems, turning what could have been a brilliant satire into something mildly amusing but ultimately unsatisfying, almost to the point of troubling.
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