Grizzly Man
It sounds bucolic: how Timothy Treadwell, amateur naturalist, spent 13 summers in Alaska’s back country, living nose-to-snout with the wildlife. Less so when you learn that he chose to camp among grizzly bears or that, in October 2003, he was killed by one of his ursine neighbors. Werner Herzog’s fascinating documentary-cum-character study, Grizzly Man, attempts…
Ibiza
Location: 2224 East Carson St., South Side. 412-325-2227 Hours: 4-11 p.m. Prices: Tapas $5-12; entrees $12-29 Fare: Tapas and Spanish entrees Atmosphere: Urban sophisticate Liquor: Full bar Until recently, the building that houses Ibiza was an odd paradox: Both utterly nondescript and, simultaneously, one of the most prominent structures on East Carson Street by dint…
9 Songs
Michael Winterbottom’s short, serious, tedious sex drama 9 Songs begins with a somber introduction to Matt (Kieran O’Brien), a British glaciologist flying over an Antarctic landscape and remembering Lisa (Margo Stilley), the 21-year-old American woman with whom, for the rest of the film, he will attend rock concerts and have sex in London. It’s…
Non Prophets
If nothing else, Pittsburgh City Council has found a way to get back at local charities for all those dinner-time telemarketing calls. Just as Mayor Tom Murphy and the city’s nonprofits were sitting down at the table together, Council President Gene Ricciardi has intruded with a proposal sure to put them off their food. …
The Crispin Glover Project
“I think most people have an experience when they look at the face of someone with Down syndrome,” says Crispin Hellion Glover, whose new film, What Is It?, is cast almost entirely with actors who have the condition. “They see a history of someone who has lived outside of the culture.” “Living outside of…
The Young and the Relentless
“They want to scare, intimidate and punish and blacklist anyone who’s connected with our organization.” — Chris Lilik Several state lawmakers are shitting their pants over a pissing contest with a piss-ant snot-nosed young conservative. He’s making their lives a living hell. I took great pride last year in snickering at…
ASYLUM
That a mental hospital should be the locus of a sexual psycho-drama and doctor-patient power struggles is just one of this film’s thuddingly obvious plot set-ups. And that the dissatisfied wife of one of the doctor should embark on a wildly destructive affair with a notorious inmate. Or that it all ends rather badly, if…
Harry, Tom, and Father Rice: Accusation and Betrayal in America’s Cold War
We tend to think of the anti-communist witch hunts of the 1940s and ’50s the same way most of us think of the “war on terror”: as something that happened to other people. We remember McCarthy tormenting a handful of government officials, or Congressional show trials for show-business celebrities. But as…
THE CAVE
The best thing Bruce Hunt’s ludicrous film has going for it is are the fantastic cave sets. Whether CGI or cardboard, the cavernous rooms, stalactites (never mind that these aren’t generally an underwater phenomenon), slot canyons and crevices, wall of ice and room of fire (no, really) are cool. The plot — high-tech spelunkers encounter…
Shortly after passing through the Squirrel Hill Tunnel, you pass underneath the Greenfield Bridge, and also a second bridge underneath it. What is this strange bridge that doesn’t lead from or to anywhere?
It’s true that this squat, metal “bridge” was never built to carry traffic. But it isn’t going anywhere either. Built in 1922, the Greenfield Bridge was a graceful, if perhaps overly ornamented structure, as befit its status as an approach to Schenley Park. But the ensuing years were not kind to the span (whose…
UNDERCLASSMAN
Like most films aiming to please both action aficionados and comedy buffs, Underclassman begins with a wholly insipid premise: A Los Angeles bike cop (Nick Cannon) is assigned to go undercover at a prep school, where trust-funders are stealing Hummers and sports cars during weekend pool parties. Ultimately, of course, justice prevails, and along the…
Trials and Trib-ulations
“We don’t offer a lot of money, but we do offer a lot of opportunity,” Pittsburgh Tribune-Review deputy managing editor Jim Cuddy Jr. told me during my October 1999 job interview. Indeed, the salary was a significant pay cut from what I was making as a writer for Dow Jones in Jersey City, N.J. But…
A Conversation with Luke Skurman
As a business major at Carnegie Mellon with an emphasis in entrepreneurship, Luke Skurman was required to put together a mock business plan for a class project. His idea, a publishing company that would write brutally honest guidebooks about the biggest American colleges and universities, became a reality. College Prowler, as the company is known,…
Demonstrating Peace
One week after the Aug. 20 confrontation between protesters and police in front of Oakland’s military recruiting office, the bi-weekly picket in the same Forbes Avenue spot drew more participants than ever. “It’s been a big shot in the arm to the anti-war and counter-recruitment movements nationally,” said organizer Alex Bradley of Pittsburgh Organizing…
Will Kaufmann’s Clock Be Dearly Departmented?
With Pittsburgh’s storied Downtown Kaufmann’s department store facing new ownership, local preservationists are weighing plans to protect the structure and its most prominent feature — the legendary Kaufmann’s clock at Fifth and Smithfield. One likely option: having the building designated as an historic structure under city law. “We’re still weighing our options right…
New Shuttle Promises Workers Can Land Jobs
Hundreds of jobs available on mega-retail campuses like South Side Works and The Waterfront in Homestead won’t amount to much for low-income workers if they don’t have the wheels to get to these job sites. So say environmental-justice and public-transit advocacy groups, like the Pittsburgh Transportation Equity Project, which has been screaming about the problem…
Abstinence Program Loses Funds, Gains Defender
“We want to make sure that being a Christian doesn’t mean you have a disability,” says Joel Oster, senior litigation counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund. On Aug. 23, the Arizona-based law firm, champion of many right-wing causes, announced it was riding to the legal defense of Silver Ring Thing, an Ohio Township-based abstinence-only…
Dead Night Dies
“I don’t mean to sound crazy or anything, but the Grateful Dead are like a religion,” says Stephen “pUNK” Cunningham of ’80’s jam-band Sandoz and Grateful Dead tribute band Fungus — two bands who, over the years, have played a lot of shows at Thirsty’s bar in North Oakland. For the past 17…
Various Artists
If it’s tough for an artist to create an album that manages to push your emotional buttons and still sound good at the same time, imagine how doubly difficult soundtrack producers have it: In the theater, their product needs to mirror the sentiment of its accompanying film. And when it’s then released in album format,…
Neon Blonde
It’s practically common knowledge that side-project groups of already successful bands don’t often produce music much worth listening to, but you wouldn’t know that these days. There’s The Postal Service, for one — Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie’s electronic project that for years now has had everyone from the Village Voice to Rolling…
The Constant Gardener
In our age of perpetual information, where nothing remains a secret for very long — even if nothing changes when it comes to light — it’s virtually impossible to write a political thriller that can shock us more than the evening news or the Internet’s watchdog blogs and dot-orgs. And yet, the British spy novelist…
