Bad News Bears
Like the sandlot baseball team it portrays, Bad News Bears ain’t perfect. But Richard Linklater’s remake of the 1976 comedy is a pungent antidote to feel-good sports movies past and present. Rejecting both civility and the concept of role models, the story’s default father figure is Buttermaker (Billy Bob Thornton), an…
Stealth
The U.S. Navy’s newest recruit is a mixed bag. Oh, he’s a crack fighter pilot, fearless and deadly accurate, but his know-it-all attitude makes him a troublesome team player. In the extended actioner-cum-recruiting tool Stealth, the new guy’s gotta get ship-shape PDQ — or the whole freakin’ world might explode. Meet…
Dean Sells Dem Senate Selection, But Not Everyone’s Buying
When Howard Dean, chair of the Democratic National Committee, visited Lawrenceville’s Church Brew Works for a July 18 rally, he barely noticed the Young Republicans holding a derisive “scream contest” nearby. “I don’t blame them,” Dean said in a telephone interview the next day. “I’d scream too if I elected a president…
Jitneys Still Necessities, Black Residents Say
“We’ve desegregated schools, [we’ve] desegregated the housing lists, but I still can’t get a cab from the mayor’s office to the Hill House,” Richard LeGrande told a forum on local taxi and jitney service held by state Rep. Jake Wheatley (D-Hill District) on July 25. LeGrande is founder or member of a…
Long-Shot Bill Bets on Exposing Gambling’s Cost
In his more than 20 years of dealing with casinos, Bill Kearney has come to a realization: “These people can do whatever they want, because nobody wants to fuck with the gambling industry.” That’s not exactly true: This Philadelphia native, author and recovered gambling addict will continue to fuck with casino owners as…
The Bridge
Location: 2302 E. Carson St., South Side. 412-381-7707 Hours: Sun.-Thu. 11 a.m.-midnight; Fri.-Sat. 11 a.m-2 a.m. Prices: Sandwiches and appetizers $6-8; entrees $10-21 Fare: Updated traditional Atmosphere: Laid-back Victorian Liquor: Full bar When it’s time to eat, drink and be merry, it’s time to head to the South Side. Of all our fair city’s commercial…
New TV HQ A-OK
Pittsburgh Community Television is leaving its headquarters for a new community. Pittsburgh cable’s public-access channel has signed a lease on a building on Penn Avenue in Friendship, a move designed partly to make the facility’s equipment and programming more accessible. Since 1986, PCTV’s headquarters has been located in a corner of the North Side,…
Bible Versus
Surprise, surprise: A conservative state Republican, one who strives to defend marriage from gays, has been undermining marriage on his own. Don Sherwood, a Republican Congressman from the eastern part of the state, recently admitted a five-year-long affair to his constituents. “Although it was intermittent and ended last year, nothing I say can diminish…
HEIGHTS
Chris Terrio’s directorial debut is a light drama, adapted from Amy Fox’s play, that tracks an autumn day in the lives of four bright young artistic things — and one middle-aged diva — in Manhattan, as their lives criss-cross and get disordered. There’s the photog, Isabel (Elizabeth Banks), whose fiance might be g-a-y; an aspiring…
Ark-itecture
Maybe because we used to be the smoky city and didn’t always have the opportunity, our new generation of green buildings in Pittsburgh, such as the David L. Lawrence Convention Center and PNC Firstside Center, take great pleasure in using extensive daylighting. Architects now tout natural light over the electric kind as an…
MURDERBALL
Henry Alex Rubin and Dana Adam Shapiro’s documentary about wheelchair rugby upends — literally — what you might think about those living with severe disabilities. The sport, played by paraplegics in modified wheelchairs, demands an athleticism and determination that makes other pro sports pale in comparison. “Murderball” is the sport’s original name, and it makes…
Other cities have had songs about them: Has Pittsburgh?
There’ve been a bunch, many of which never really got much further than the city limits. I assume you’re not referring to those — or to booster anthems like WPXI’s “Stand Up and Tell Them You’re From Pittsburgh.” A song, incidentally, that is based on a jingle originally developed for a TV station…
Smoldering Debate
What drove Cathy Lodge and her husband to move to a 25-acre farm was simple: They no longer wanted to see the air they’d been breathing. The couple had started their lives together in Carrick, but after the birth of their fourth child, their dream of a life in the country led them to a…
A conversation with Sal Wilcox
Sal Wilcox, 31, was born in El Salvador and adopted by a Chambersburg-area family at age 9. From his Highland Park home, Wilcox is the volunteer head of Education Innovations, a nonprofit planting a “NatureLAB Community” garden on Fifth Avenue, Uptown, to help the neighborhood feed itself (as well as patrons of the…
‘Where You Stand Is What You See’
Tim Vining, 41, became executive director of The Thomas Merton Center, on Sept. 4, 2001. A week later, the Garfield social-justice organization was thrust to the forefront of local activism with the government’s reaction to the attacks of Sept. 11. Born in Cut Off, La., Vining was a pre-law student in…
Various Artists
It’s a plain fact that most every dedicated music-obsessive has a guilty pleasure or two, stuffed away in the bottom of a CD case, or hidden on a years-old unlabeled tape. My own guilty pleasure — a sincere fondness for Sublime albums — has morphed more accurately into a plain-old “pleasure” over the…
Me and You and Everyone We Know
In her exhilarating debut as a feature-film writer/director, and also (naturally) as her own star, the conceptual artist Miranda July tells a story of everyday life in which danger stalks her plaintive characters like a shadow at sunset. Yet nobody finally gets hurt, except in the emotional sense. And even then, all it…
Soma Mestizo
When a band known and beloved for organic, multiculti vibe music, for didgeridoo and tribal rhythms, for slam poetry-inspired earth-mother vocals and an onstage sea of ‘locks and spiraling tats steps outside itself with something like the “Gutter-tech Mix” of “Nasty Boy,” it might seem at first as though the music-biz terrorists have…
Annie
By the time you read this, nearly two months will have passed since the major-label debut from Norwegian electro-pop princess Annie first appeared on CD-store shelves. And while that’s a veritable eternity in the ever-fickle record-selling business, it’s still a bit early to determine if she’s destined to join the ranks of other female soloists…
