Story Archive

R.I.P. TRL

Thursday, Nov. 20, 2008

MTV managed to pack Times Square one more time this past Sunday for the last episode of TRL, dubbed Total Finale Live, although nostalgia was pretty much the only reason for anyone to show up.

Fangst

Vampire romance Twilight makes an awkward leap from page to screen

Thursday, Nov. 20, 2008

Twilight is all about a perverse kind of wish-fulfillment: Average teenager Bella Swan falls madly in love with perfect, ageless vampire Edward Cullen, who sweeps her off her feet (often quite literally), protects her from harm and loves her unconditionally.

Bolt

Thursday, Nov. 20, 2008

Hollywood canine Bolt (voiced by Travolta) doesn’t realize that he’s not really the superpowered dog he plays on a popular TV show.

Hinder

Take It to the Limit

Thursday, Nov. 20, 2008

Thanks to their dreadful, inescapable power ballad “Lips of an Angel,” Hinder have been lumped in with the grim post-grunge likes of Nickelback, Puddle of Mudd and 3 Doors Down.

More helpings of "Soup"

Two new franchises expand the world of pop-culture snarkery

Thursday, Nov. 13, 2008

Snarking on pop culture has become a national pastime, and its TV standard-bearer is The Soup (E!, Fridays, 10 p.m.), hosted by comedian Joel McHale.

Spacebabes, aliens, pimps, prostitutes and wounded soldiers

A roundup of local movies released on DVD in the past year

Thursday, Nov. 13, 2008

Not known for its film making scene, Las Vegas has been responsible for at least five films released to DVD in the past year.

Madonna

Thursday, Nov. 13, 2008

At 50, Madonna's in better shape than ever, and she kept pace move for move with her much younger troupe of dancers, all while singing just about every word to every song.

Queen + Paul Rodgers

The Cosmos Rocks

Thursday, Nov. 6, 2008

We’d all like for our most beloved rock stars to age gracefully; barring that, they can always die young, leaving a body of work largely uncompromised because it was cut off abruptly.

Role Models

Thursday, Nov. 6, 2008

Role Modelsis a thoroughly audience-friendly movie, a predictable, formulaic buddy comedy with a feel-good message.

The future is now

Two new reality shows bring us closer to dystopia

Thursday, Nov. 6, 2008

By the time we get to 2017, we may indeed be forcing convicted criminals to outrun sadistic gladiators with souped-up chain saws on national TV.

Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa

Thursday, Nov. 6, 2008

Melman becomes the giraffes’ doctor, Gloria is seduced by a hippo lothario, Marty blends in with the zebra herd, Julien tries to become king of the savannah, and the penguins get busy fixing the plane.

Please kill me (in a ridiculously convoluted fashion)

Nine hours at the Saw marathon

Thursday, Oct. 30, 2008

A Saw marathon culminating in Saw V sounds like a good idea, right? Wrong.

RocknRolla

Thursday, Oct. 30, 2008

It’s easy to accuse Guy Ritchie of making the same movie over and over again, but in the case of his latest, RocknRolla, that may be for the best.

Pink

Funhouse

Thursday, Oct. 30, 2008

Funhouse, Pink’s fifth album, opens with “So What,” a catchy, upbeat party tune about heading out for a night on the town. It’s also about giving the middle finger to haters, gossips and her ex-husband, motocross dude Carey Hart.

A "Porno" with heart

Kevin Smith finds a successful balance between raunch and sentiment

Thursday, Oct. 30, 2008

With Zack and Miri Make a Porno, Smith has fully appropriated both the Apatow aesthetic and one of Apatow’s top collaborators, actor Seth Rogen, while maintaining a hold on what made his own movies distinctive in the first place.

High School Musical 3: Senior Year

Thursday, Oct. 23, 2008

The good news for fans of the series is that everything about it makes the transition pretty much intact; the bad news for everyone else is that everything about it makes the transition pretty much intact.

Sex, lies and cardboard acting

Lifetime’s Ted Binion movie is a characteristic waste of time

Thursday, Oct. 23, 2008

To those of us in Las Vegas, the scandal surrounding the death of casino mogul Ted Binion is a historical event. But to the rest of the country, it’s just another salacious sex-drugs-and-violence story.

Police story

Pride and Glory mines familiar cop territory

Thursday, Oct. 23, 2008

Constructed almost entirely out of cop-drama clichés, Pride and Glory is a meat-and-potatoes thriller with very little meat (it does at one point feature a potato used as a silencer, though).

Flow: For Love of Water

Thursday, Oct. 23, 2008

Like a lot of advocacy documentaries, Flow takes on an important issue in the broadest manner possible, making sweeping, scary statements about dangers facing the world while offering up few answers.

AC/DC

Black Ice

Thursday, Oct. 23, 2008

It’s a little absurd to think that it took eight years for AC/DC to crank out Black Ice, since it sounds like it was created by a particularly adept AC/DC-simulating computer.

Don’t misunderestimate him

Oliver Stone delivers a surprisingly nuanced portrait of W.

Thursday, Oct. 16, 2008

Oliver Stone may be known as a provocateur, but the most remarkable thing about W., his quickly-put-together biopic of George W. Bush, is how aggressively even-handed it is.

Lucinda Williams

Little Honey

Thursday, Oct. 16, 2008

Ever since her classic 1998 album Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, Lucinda Williams has been getting more and more experimental with her sound.

Sex Drive

Thursday, Oct. 16, 2008

A dude in a giant doughnut costume with a big dildo stuck on it. A sarcastic Amish guy who parties with Fall Out Boy and fixes cars.

Look away

The TV version of Crash isn’t even a fascinating mess

Thursday, Oct. 16, 2008

Successful TV shows based on movies tend to forge their own identities to such a degree that people forget the movies even existed; recent examples include Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Friday Night Lights. Starz's new series based on the movie Crash, however, lives up to its name a little too closely.

"Woke me the F up"

Talking with the Las Vegan behind Ghost Adventures

Thursday, Oct. 16, 2008

For a long time Las Vegas filmmaker Zak Bagans thought ghosts were "bullshit." But after a paranormal wake up call he is now chasing ghosts for a living, and not just the friendly ones that go "boo."

Eat like a rock star

Or at least like the Denny’s version of one

Thursday, Oct. 9, 2008

When I was in high school, I’d travel to California to visit a friend, and we’d spend hours late at night loitering in and just outside the local Denny’s, rarely eating anything more substantial than a side order of french fries or a short stack of pancakes.

Cardboard plots! Wooden acting! The occasional gem!

Direct-to-DVD is a burgeoning industry. Here’s our six-part beginner’s guide.

Thursday, Oct. 9, 2008

Walk along the new-release shelf at your local Hollywood Video or Blockbuster these days, or log on to Netflix or Blockbuster Online and check out the new-release page, and you’re bound to see dozens of movies that you’ve never heard of.

A Man Named Pearl

Thursday, Oct. 9, 2008

Pearl Fryar is an unassuming African-American guy in his 60s living in a small South Carolina town, who spent decades working in a factory and now devotes his time to working in his garden. So why is he the subject of a documentary?

The Duchess

Thursday, Oct. 9, 2008

Eager to participate in the political sphere despite not having the right to vote, Georgiana (Keira Knightley) campaigns for the Whig politicians her husband finances but can’t stand to talk to, soaking up the rhetoric of freedom and even delivering some of her own.

Lost in translation

The American version of Life on Mars is mostly lifeless

Thursday, Oct. 9, 2008

The show is an awkward mix of police procedural and sci-fi mystery, with plenty of winking jokes about things that didn’t exist yet in 1973 (“Diet Coke? Wouldn’t that be something”).

Nikka Costa

Pebble to a Pearl

Thursday, Oct. 9, 2008

Nikka Costa’s third album delves even deeper into the hardcore R&B, soul and funk influences she’s been indebted to for her entire career, and in the process sacrifices some of the pop appeal of her earlier work.

Heroes

Thursday, Oct. 2, 2008

It’s never pleasant to sit through a local feature film and realize that it’s failing on almost every conceivable level.

A few words with local filmmaker Malcolm Brooks

Thursday, Oct. 2, 2008

Local filmmaker Malcolm Brooks is showing his new movie Heroes at the Galaxy Neonopolis this week. Josh Bell stole a few minutes of his time to hear about what it took to make this film.

Foo Fighters

September 26, The Joint

Thursday, Oct. 2, 2008

About a week prior to his band’s show this past Friday at the Joint, Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl announced that the group would be taking an indefinite hiatus following the conclusion of their latest tour; other than appearances at the Austin City Limits festival and an upcoming Southern California benefit, then, the Joint gig was the Foos’ last for potentially a very long time.

Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist

Thursday, Oct. 2, 2008

Look out, Cameron Crowe: While you’ve been busy with arty remakes of Spanish horror flicks and self-indulgent trips through your CD collection, someone’s come along and made the Cameron Crowe-iest movie in years, and you weren’t even involved.

A clone of a clone

The new Star Wars animated series dilutes the franchise even further

Thursday, Oct. 2, 2008

The Star Wars: The Clone Wars animated movie that came out this summer was meant to stoke anticipation for the new Star Wars: The Clone Wars animated series (Cartoon Network, Fridays, 9 p.m.), which premieres this week. But the movie was derided by critics and even by many hardcore Star Wars fans, and made little money at the box office. So the show arrives with diminished expectations and probably even a bit of resentment on the part of Star Wars completists.

Jennifer Hudson

Self-titled

Thursday, Oct. 2, 2008

Jennifer Hudson’s self-titled debut album opens with a song perfectly pitched to her unique sensibilities and strengths: “Spotlight” is a slinky, old-fashioned torch song, marrying Hudson’s traditional vocal talents to an understated dance beat and lush keyboards. It seems to announce an album that will capitalize on Hudson’s success in the old-school musical Dreamgirls while giving her a subtle pop gloss

Flash of Genius

Thursday, Oct. 2, 2008

The college engineering professor invented the intermittent windshield-wiper system in his basement, pitched it to Ford and was then ripped off by the monolithic automaker, which introduced its own version of the system without crediting Kearns.

"Choke" mixes sleaze and sweetness

Thursday, Sept. 25, 2008

Fans of kinky sex, weird urban legends and mild blasphemy will get their fill, but underneath all that seediness is a story that turns out to be rather heartwarming and sweet.

Janet Jackson

September 19, Mandalay Bay Events Center

Thursday, Sept. 25, 2008

Janet Jackson’s last few albums haven’t exactly been huge sellers or spawned memorable hits, but at the Mandalay Bay Events Center this past Friday, she treated all of her releases more or less equally, packing 37 songs into a career-spanning two-hour-and-15-minute show that was a bit dizzying and unwieldy.

Tell No One

Thursday, Sept. 25, 2008

On the eighth anniversary of his wife’s murder near a secluded lake, pediatrician Alex Beck (Cluzet) receives an anonymous e-mail with a seemingly present-day video of her getting off an escalator, along with the titular admonition.

Judging the judges

Three new contenders arrive to compete for Judge Judy’s bench

Thursday, Sept. 25, 2008

There are three new judge shows premiering in syndication this season, all of them hosted by no-nonsense women, all of them following the well-worn format with little deviation.

Jem

Down to Earth

Thursday, Sept. 25, 2008

It’s been four years since Jem’s excellent debut, Finally Woken, and from the way her follow-up, Down to Earth, sounds, the singer probably could have made several vastly different albums in that time. Earth is a schizophrenic mix of pop styles, flirting with a number of familiar sounds but never settling on its own identity.

Three questions with "Choke" director Clark Gregg

Thursday, Sept. 25, 2008

I started out by kind of trying to just do the world’s most faithful adaptation of a book I already loved, despite the fact that [Chuck Palahniuk] had told me to be careful of that, that adaptations that are too faithful rarely are any good.--Choke director Clark Gregg

Eagle Eye

Thursday, Sept. 25, 2008

Apparently in just four short months we’ll have a government surveillance system so extensive that it is linked up to literally every electronic device in the entire country, and can monitor people’s conversations simply by reading their lips or picking up the vibrations in their coffee cups. That’s not even the height of the absurdity to be found in Eagle Eye, which takes place in January 2009, although to chronicle all of its far-fetched speculation would delve too deeply into spoiler territory.

Metallica

Death Magnetic

Thursday, Sept. 18, 2008

Metallica’s last album, 2003’s St. Anger, with its raw, messy, unfocused songs and dingy production, was like group therapy on CD, and spoke to the personal demons that the band members were dealing with.

Ghost Town

Thursday, Sept. 18, 2008

Ricky Gervais makes a serious play for Jim Carrey-level stardom in Ghost Town, a resolutely mainstream comedy that just barely gets by on Gervais’ sarcastic humor and prickly charm.

Kasey Chambers & Shane Nicholson

Rattlin' Bones

Thursday, Sept. 11, 2008

After drifting away from her roots on 2006’s Carnival, Australian alt-country singer Kasey Chambers returns to basics on Rattlin’ Bones, a collaboration with her husband, singer-songwriter Shane Nicholson.

Modern "Women"

An iconic film gets an update in style, but not in class

Thursday, Sept. 11, 2008

George Cukor’s 1939 film version of Clare Boothe Luce’s play The Women is a magnificent piece of cinema, but it’s a movie very much of its time, and even if Diane English’s remake weren’t a failure on a number of aesthetic levels, it’d still have a tough time remaining true to the spirit of the original without coming off as horribly retrograde and anti-feminist.

Fall A+E Guide: Movies

Thursday, Sept. 11, 2008

Weekly film critic Josh Bell previews this fall's blockbusters, Oscar hopefuls and guilty pleasures.