The Three Rivers Film Festival
The 24th annual Three Rivers Film Festival, presented by Pittsburgh Filmmakers, continues through Thu., Nov. 17. The program of more than 40 films includes foreign-language works, American independents, documentaries, experimental cinema and a restored silent classic, as well as new works from local filmmakers. Tickets for the films are $7 each, except…
CHICKEN LITTLE
Disney is hoping this animated comedy from Mark Dindal (The Emperor’s New Groove), about a young chicken who encounters an alien invasion, is gonna jumpstart its new 3-D division. It might sell a few tickets, but mostly Chicken is a mess. Despite years of labor, it plays like a hasty pastiche: It offers little freshness…
New Leaf
Jeremy Mercer started out as a victim of “golden handcuffs”: Like many of us, he was trapped in a mundane cycle of privilege and bill-paying, working to maintain a lifestyle. As a crime reporter for the Ottawa Citizen, he fought a rising sense of job dissatisfaction. “I was reporting on rape, pedophilia, murder, drunk driving,”…
DERAILED
Protagonists in thrillers must not watch such films in their own lives, or they’d never make the same dumb decisions re: adultery and cover-up. Maybe Chicago ad man Charles (Clive Owen) was too busy tending to his ill daughter or his bored marriage not to see that striking up an affair with fellow commuter Lucinda…
PRETTY PERSUASION
A popular and promiscuous student at a tony Beverly Hills prep school, Kimberley (Evan Rachel Wood), enlists two classmates in a scheme to get back at a teacher (Ron Livingstone) by accusing him of sexual harassment. This black comedy from Marcos Siega lifts its plot and varying tones shamelessly from its superior bad-teen-girl antecedents –…
WHERE THE TRUTH LIES
While employing the director’s familiar nonlinear style and touching on such tried-and-true themes as truth obscured by history, guilt, subterfuge and messy sexuality, this period show-biz drama is comparatively light fare for Canadian Atom Egoyan. Adapted from Rupert Holmes’ novel, Truth unravels the sudden and unexplained break-up of the comic duo Morris and Collins (an…
ZATHURA
Two bored, sparring brothers — Josh Hutcherson and Jonah Bobo — play Zathura, an old board game they find in the basement, and whoosh! — suddenly their house is launched into outer space, where they must band together to fight robots, aliens and gravity issues, in order to return home. Not surprisingly, this game-come-to-life is…
Mon Fayette Expressway: Hazelwood’s Hopes: Raised or Razed?
At a community meeting on Nov. 1, Hazelwood residents anxiously perused a map showing a gash running the length of their neighborhood that would be 25 feet deep and approximately 100 feet wide. Into this hollow would go the Turnpike Commission’s long-sought Mon-Fayette Expressway — a toll road that will finish its last section,…
Immigration: Center of Storm Relief … and More
Before Hurricane Katrina, Kishor Pokharna seemed unlikely to need help and unlikely to ask. His business card says he is president of “Global Diamonds, importers and wholesalers.” He is also an attorney and an accountant who was running a tax business and a computer company alongside the family jewel trade. His wife had completed medical…
A conversation with Sue Johanson
Sue Johanson may look grandmotherly — she is one — but she’s been tackling topics that might make the savviest youngster blush for the past 30 years. Johanson, a registered nurse, started teaching sex-education classes in the early 1970s in Canada, after noticing the education her teenaged children were receiving seemed lacking. Her wit and…
Film School Confidential
Kevin Kerwin got into movies to write screenplays. But to make his first feature-length film, the film-school satire Filmic Achievement, he found he had to surrender to improv. The comedy, a burgeoning hit on the festival circuit, premieres locally Nov. 10 and 12 at the Three Rivers Film Festival. Kerwin, a 35-year-old Mount…
Jarhead
The opening passage of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan may be the most vividly realistic modern war movie ever made. The denouement of Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket may be the most profoundly metaphoric. Everything else falls somewhere in between, often very close to these two bookends, which frame the genre in an era of…
Paper Trails
Eli Horowitz is coming to town to talk about how aspiring writers can break into the national literary scene. But he won’t necessarily be able to offer much in the way of personal experience as a guidepost. Horowitz, managing editor of the hip McSweeney’s publishing concern, got where he is to a considerable…
The DIY Music Guide
Step 1: Setting up local shows Step 2: Recording a studio-quality album in your own bedroom Step 3: Getting the Word OutStep 4: Booking regional toursHow to operate a venue There’s obviously no such thing as an instant-success formula when you’re trying to make things happen with your music career. But at the City Paper,…
Global Rhythms
Various Artists Guitars of the Golden Triangle: Folk and Pop Music of Myanmar Vol. 2 Sublime Frequencies Various Artists Choubi Choubi! Folk and Pop Sounds from Iraq Sublime Frequncies Various Artists Radio Pyongyang: Commie Funk and Agit Pop from the Hermit Kingdom Sublime Frequencies It’s absolutely true that we’re living in the golden…
A Conversation with Dennis Looney
Emergency USA (www.emergencyusa.org) is the U.S. branch of Emergency, an Italy-based group that builds hospitals and provides medical care for civilian victims in war-torn lands. Currently the group operates in countries including Afghanistan, Cambodia, Iraq and Sudan. Another focus is land mines, a ban on whose manufacture Emergency successfully pushed for in Italy. One local…
Death Toll Is Wake Up For Protesters Too
“America, I don’t know what to do with you anymore,” said Jeremy Shenk, reading a poem at an Oct. 26 demonstration to mark the 2,000th American soldier killed in the Iraq War the day before. “You’ve broken my heart too many times … We’re breakin’ up. But I won’t leave you alone. I’m going to…
Neighborhoods: Tougher Times for Development Groups
“We didn’t even know we weren’t going to get funded until we read about it in the newspaper,” says Judith Ginyard, executive director of the Lincoln-Larimer Community Development Corporation. Ginyard’s group, which facilitates development in the Lincoln-Larimer neighborhood between Homewood and East Liberty, has received between $20,000 and $25,000 in previous years via the…
Sports: Pink Slip Blues
“If you go back and review the history of Dave Wannstedt and look at the pattern of what happened in his career,” says Miami Dolphins fan and Orlando resident Bob Flanders, “I think it’s probably a pretty good bet that Pittsburgh Panther fans are going to need to buy my Web site.” Flanders started www.firedavewannstedt.com…
Activism: Watchfulness Rewarded
“Our greatest enemy in the U.S. is ignorance,” says Father Roy Bourgeois, founder of the School of the Americas Watch. “When people hear about a school like this being run in our name, the vast majority of the people oppose that. They have heart, they have compassion.” Bourgeois is due in town on Thu., Nov.…
Mass Movement: Civic Rights
On Oct. 30, the body of Rosa Parks — the woman who catalyzed the civil-rights movement in 1955 by refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man — was brought to the U.S. Capitol Rotunda to lie in honor, the first woman and one of the few civilians so honored. Following…
The Three Rivers Film Festival
Beyond the Rocks The Squid and the Whale SQUONKumentary Reel Paradise Breakfast on Pluto The 24nd annual Three Rivers Film Festival, presented by Pittsburgh Filmmakers, runs from Fri., Nov.4, through Thu., Nov. 17. The program of more than 40 films includes foreign-language works, American independents, documentaries, experimental cinema and…
Dear Wendy
The Danish director Lars von Trier has never been to America, and yet, for at least the fourth time now, he’s made a movie about the place — or at least the state of mind. Written by von Trier, and directed by Thomas Vinterberg (The Celebration), Dear Wendy is another parable of von Trier’s America.…
Page and Screen
Jim Daniels is a word guy. The Carnegie Mellon University professor of English has published eight books of poems and two of short stories, and he’s director of CMU’s creative-writing program. But something keeps drawing him back to making movies. No Pets, the feature-length film whose screenplay he adapted from one of his…
The Mighty Oak Barrel
Location: 939 Third St., Oakmont. 412-826-1069 Hours: Tue.-Sat. 5-10 p.m. Prices: Entrees $15-29 Fare: Contemporary American and European Atmosphere: Tuscany in a box Liquor: Full Bar People talk about restaurants all the time, but when they get to raving about them, it’s usually one of two types. There’s the fine dining establishment, which you anticipate.…
Video Sketchbook
Jerry King Musser was lying on his back, dreaming awake. “Well,” he thought, “it would be great to have a chair bolted upside down [to the ceiling].” Shortly the vision was also populated by baby dolls, and roses. Soon the vision became “Reluctant Angels,” a three-minute blossom of video art in which cherubic hunks…
Unintelligent Debate
For weeks now, a York County courtroom has provided a nationally staged debate about whether “intelligent design” — the belief that life is so complex a supernatural designer must have shaped it — should be taught in public schools. But after reading the testimony in the case, I no longer think that’s the question.…
NINE LIVES
Director and screenwriter Rodrigo Garcia presents nine brief snapshots in the lives of nine Los Angeles women, episodes that run in real time and are captured in a single take. Some are key moments in life — Kathy Baker awaits her mastectomy; Amy Brenneman attends a funeral. Other segments show how the everyday can be…
I have a picture showing Downtown the early 20th century. The picture had a building with a sign that I recognized from my youth — the Nixon Theatre. However the location seemed different than I remember. What’s going on here?
I’m going to go out on a limb and guess you are something less than 90 years old: City Paper appeals to Pittsburgh’s sprier set, after all. If that’s true, the Nixon you remember was probably a somewhat squat structure along Liberty Avenue. The one you have a photograph of, I…
SHOPGIRL
In Anand Tucker’s prettily shot adaptation of Steve Martin’s novella, Mirabelle (Claire Danes), a vaguely bored and emotionally skittish clerk at Saks’, courts two suitors: Jeremy (Jason Schwartzman), a slovenly, unsophisticated slacker who might be a diamond in the rough, and Ray (Martin), a suave, wealthy middle-aged man. Mirabell’s ultimate choice is never in doubt…
