Snow Patrol : At the Uptown
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Snow Patrol doesn’t hide or deny its admiration or influences. Sometimes it even tours with them. After a summer of opening arena and stadium shows for U2 and Coldplay, the band is out on its own, playing theaters and concert halls. Tuesday night, they stopped at the Uptown Theater, where they drew nearly 1,000 devotees (the balcony was closed; the floor and seats were about 90 percent full).
Its music is all about size, melody and guitar textures. They write songs built for arenas and suitable for stadiums – songs with titanium hooks and supernal choruses, with big waves and skyscraping crescendos. In theaters like the Uptown, those anthems are even more epic and anthemic. But they’d be just another U.K./Brit-rock band if it weren’t for Gary Lightbody, an Irishman with an sharp wit and dry sense of humility.
Tuesday night, he helped make sure the crowd before him didn’t slip into any moments of stasis or ennui during a set that lasted 90 minutes, including a sing-along drill that went on too long. That would be the only smudge on an otherwise rousing and entertaining show. Read the rest of this entry »
The Invention of Lying : Comedy and Controversy
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The Invention of Lying is like an apple with a worm inside.
Set in a world where every man, woman and child is a congenital truth-teller, the film is being marketed as a goofy comedy, but it’s really a thought-provoking fable about religion.
In this truthful alternative universe, there’s no such thing as fiction or make-believe. A sign outside a retirement home identifies it as ¡°a sad place for hopeless old people.A waiter announces, I’m very embarrassed to work here. Even advertisers are forthright: Pepsi when they don’t have Coke.
Ricky Gervais (BBC’s The Office, HBO’s Extras) plays Mark, a screenwriter for films consisting only of experts talking about historical events. When he is fired from his job and then spurned by the beautiful Anna (Jennifer Garner), Mark discovers he has a special talent: He can lie.
And no matter how outrageous the prevarication, Mark’s credulous fellows buy into it. They’re total suckers. Read the rest of this entry »
Whip It : Humor, Emotion and Fulfillment on Roller Skates
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“Whip It” is an unexpectedly touching film about female empowerment.
Not interested? Try this:
“Whip It” is a raunchy comedy jammed with girl-on-girl violence.
Better?
However you describe it, Drew Barrymore’s directing debut is a hoot, a funny and oddly moving story about how one girl finds her way to fulfillment through roller derby.
It doesn’t hurt that the girl in question is played by Ellen Page, here less tart-tongued than she was in “Juno” but no less adorable.
Page plays Bliss Cavendar, a teenager in a “King of the Hill” Texas burg whose life centers on the beauty pageants her mail-carrier mom (Marcia Gay Harden) drags her to. Thing is, Bliss no longer cares about winning the Miss Bluebonnet competition. There has to be more to life. Read the rest of this entry »
Paranormal Activity : Low Budget, High Fear
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The time to tell your significant other that an evil force has been stalking you since childhood is long before you’ve moved in together. A demon/ghost/ whatever needn’t be a deal breaker, but it should at least get a mention.
Consider Katie (Katie Featherston) and Micah (Micah Sloat), the young couple at the terrifying center of “Paranormal Activity” (opening today at the Studio 30). By the time Katie tells Micah about her “problem,” the thing that goes bump in the night has built up a head of steam.
Before the lights go back up (and you may wonder if they ever will), a very tight coil of anxiety will bury itself deep in your gut.
Writer/director Oren Peli has created a psychological thriller of such small scale and yet such heightened effect that Hitchcock, wherever he is, must be smiling. Although the story does not have the complexity of that master, first-time director Peli understands that it’s what you don’t see — and the way in which you don’t see it — that counts. Read the rest of this entry »