Love him or hate him, Ed Koch was New York in the 1980s, and Koch‘s bio account of his mayoral tenure offers almost equal measures of celebration and censure. Director Neil Barsky‘s film never shies away from Koch’s controversies, exploring his third term’s devastating corruption scandal and giving voice to critics who viewed him as, among other things, a racist (thanks to his closing of Harlem’s Sydenham Hospital), a hypocritical homophobe (courtesy of persistent rumors of his gayness and his administration’s slow response to the AIDS crisis), and an opportunist. Still, Koch nonetheless also finds time to flirt with hagiography.
Archive for January, 2013
by Paul Clark
Let’s take a break from our regularly scheduled Muriels planning to focus on another Silly Hats Only tradition – The White Elephant Blogathon! Now in its seventh year of existence and its fourth year at its current location, the White Elephant has become a kind of April Fool’s Day mainstay for a certain strain of masochistic movie lover.
by Leonard Pierce
#1: FAMILY TIES
Panel 1: The Beast, Wasp, and Nighthawk are having coffee in the kitchen. Iceman enters through the rear door, taking off a heavy coat and scarf.
NIGHTHAWK: Hey, Bobby! Is it cold out?
Panel 2: Iceman pulls a stocking cap off his head.
ICEMAN: How would I know? My mom makes me wear this when we go out. She says ‘even a snow mutant can get the sniffles’.
So this is what it looks like when you cram half a season’s worth of plot into one hour. I’ve made mention of the accelerated pacing over the past couple of weeks, but nothing could have prepared me for the whiplash-inducing “Controlled Flight Into Terrain,” which sometimes played more like a clip show made from episodes we’ll never see than a proper series finale. And yet, despite some obvious patchwork and one or two howlers along the way, I have to say this was a much more satisfying, at times even moving, resolution than I was expecting to see.
Putting The Cabin in the Woods to shame on a fraction of the budget, Resolution dispenses twisty meta-horror without sacrificing tension and intrigue. The title of Justin Benson and Aaron S. Moorhead‘s film refers both to narrative solutions and visual clarity, which are slow in coming to Michael (Peter Cilella) after he travels to a dilapidated cabin on a Native American reservation to handcuff crackhead pal Chris (Vinny Curran) to a pipe to save him from an impending OD death. That Michael is compelled to take up this mission by an e-mailed video of Chris that the junkie couldn’t possibly have sent (he has no computer) is only the first of many mysteries.
Leonard Pierce Reviews Flying Cauldron Butterscotch Beer
Published January 23, 2013 Uncategorized Leave a Comment
According to the copy on the gaudy label (purple and gold is really only a color combination you can get away with if you’re the king of something), Flying Cauldron has been manufacturing this “magical brew” for “under age wizards” since 1374. Call us fun-hating skeptics if you must, but we sort of doubted that this concoction actually dated back to the Black Death and only now managed to find a distributor, so we did a little digging—that is, we looked at a different part of the label—and found out it’s actually made by Reed’s, the folks who make one of our favorite ginger beers.
by Leonard Pierce
For reasons I don’t enjoy being yelled at enough to go into, the subject of violence has been much on the minds of my fellow Americans the last few months. The current way of thinking seems to be that certain types of violence exist as a sort of protected category, and that the best way to deal with them is to focus our attentions on the proximate cause, in the form of firearms that hold 11 rounds in a clip rather than 10. A cynic, were any to be found lurking around this very serious subject, might detect the hand of magical thinking stirring the rhetoric of both sides.
Is there any chance that next week’s series finale of Last Resort won’tbe a crushing disappointment? There’s certainly plenty of reason to be pessimistic, beginning with the inconvenient fact that it was never intended to be the series finale, but rather inherited the position by default when ABC canceled the show many weeks ago. We’ve had indications that Shawn Ryan and company had time to course-correct to some degree and make enough alterations that the episode will wrap up the series in a satisfying way. But even though these last few episodes have gone off like firecrackers, I have my doubts.
by Leonard Pierce
When Laurie Anderson distilled elements of her ambitious, impressive performance piece United States into a single album and convinced bewildered Warner execs to release it as Big Science in 1982, it caught the critical establishment entirely by surprise. Here was a record by a quirky, unique, clever and intelligent female voice that grafted the bourgeoning electronic pop format with arty psychedelic elements to create something like—well, that was the point: there really wasn’t anything like it at the time. It was widely, and rightly, regarded as a minor masterpiece, with the cool, post-modernist ballad “O Superman (For Massanet)” singled out as representative of its unique and strangely appealing tone.
Has it really been almost 10 years since the original season of The Joe Schmo Show aired? How many hundreds of terrible reality shows have come and gone since that more innocent time? For the uninitiated, that Spike TV series followed a sweet-natured naif named Matt Gould as he competed in a Big Brother-style reality show called Lap Of Luxury. What Gould didn’t know, but everyone else did, was that the show was a hoax—an elaborate parody of the conventions and cliches that had already grown up around the then-young reality TV genre.
Screengrab In Exile 