Reviews
Metal Lords Review: Game of Thrones’ D.B. Weiss Delivers A Light Comedy About Heavy Metal
The Pitch: Heavy metal, with its knowingly ridiculous embrace of deafening volumes and over-the-top violent imagery, and predominantly young male audience, has been fertile territory for comedy since This Is Spinal Tap. And over the last few decades, some enduring comedies have irreverently paid tribute to hard rock bands and the adolescents who love them, including School of Rock, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, and Detroit Rock City. Screenwriter D.B. Weiss, best known as the co-creator and co-showrunner of Game of Thrones, has brought us a potential new addition to that canon with Metal Lords. In 2019, Weiss and his Game of Thrones creative partner David Benioff inked a $200 million deal to produce films and series for Netflix. And while some of Benioff and Weiss’s more ambitious ...
Ambulance Review: Some Deranged Grandeur, Courtesy of Michael Bay
The Pitch: In his 2019 Netflix film 6 Underground, Michael Bay stages an opening car chase where his heroes smash through the streets of Italy, goring bad guys and yelling nonsense at each other. “I’m conducting surgery!” one character screams while, essentially, just tending to a wound. But maybe that moment stuck in Bay’s head. Maybe he regretted not making that set-piece more surgical, to the point where he built an entire movie called Ambulance around the premise: What if you were performing life-saving surgery during a car chase? Technically, Bay did not come up with this premise. Ambulance is a remake of a 2005 Dutch film, and Bay is not a credited screenwriter. But his penchant for breaking tension with over-explained jokes, or breaking jokes with melodramatic bombast, transcend any...
Father John Misty’s Chloë and the Next 20th Century Shines With Its Old Hollywood Palette
Father John Misty is something of an online discourse generator. You never quite know what to expect from him. He used to have a tremendous presence on the internet and social media at large, but he has receded a bit in recent years. Around the album cycle for 2017’s epic Pure Comedy, it seemed like Josh Tillman, who has been performing under the Father John Misty moniker for a decade now, couldn’t stop over-explaining his music. The following year, however, he became notably less loquacious on the understated, masterful, and personal God’s Favorite Customer. He’s keeping that up for his fifth record as Father John Misty, Chloë and the Next 20th Century. Although Tillman’s music is fun to talk about online because of its excess and decadence, his delightfully outsized personality has taken...
Better Call Saul Season 6 Review: The Beginning of the End Is As Exquisitely Stressful As Ever
The Pitch: “Meticulous.” “Chilling.” “Engrossing.” There are so many words that come to mind when sitting down with a new installment of Better Call Saul, the Breaking Bad spin-off which has somehow soared to a whole new tier of quality over the years. No spoilers (for fear of the Salamancas knocking at the door), but it can be said that the first two episodes of Season 6 keep this proud tradition going. As the show gears up for its last hurrah (the first seven episodes of the final season debut starting Monday, April 18th, with the second half of the season returning in July), every element of one of TV’s best-made shows is working hard to invest us in so many of the show’s biggest questions, including the most important one of all: How’s it going to end? Where Were We? Season 5 of Saul e...
Bon Jovi Kick Off Spring 2022 Tour in Omaha: Photos, Recap + Setlist
Arena rock is a genre of music that will never die, as long as crowds convene inside hockey arenas around the country to sing along to our favorite anthems from our favorite artists. That’s exactly what took place when Bon Jovi kicked off their 2022 tour in Omaha, NE at the CHI Health Center on Friday, April 1st, for their first public in-person concert since the pandemic started. Ione, a singer from Sioux City, IA, was the contest winner of the opening slot for the Omaha tour date. With a full backing band — two guitar players, a bassist, a drummer, and a keyboardist — Ione filled the arena with her soulful voice, reminding one of ‘70s singer-songwriters like Linda Ronstadt and Stevie Nicks. She emitted a free-spirited energy on stage, and captivated the audience with her pure, unadultera...
The Bubble Tests Positive for Tone-Deaf Tedium: Review
The Pitch: It’s 2022, which means that we’re now getting the kind of movies that weren’t just filmed during COVID, but conceived during it (see also: Soderbergh’s Kimi, Doug Liman’s Locked Down). For Judd Apatow, that meant a long, hard look at the ways that mainstream studio filmmaking has adjusted to the times: masks aplenty, social distancing, and the much-vaunted “bubble” of fully quarantined people who are trapped together until, well, all this stuff is over. And that’s the environment under which the latest entry in the hit blockbuster franchise Cliff Beasts, Cliff Beasts 6: The Battle for Everest: Memories of the Requiem, is to be made, says the film’s producers (including Peter Serafinowicz and Kate McKinnon). But of course, throwing a group of temperamenta...
Dom Deshawn Weathers the Storm on Tale of Two Seasons
Dom Deshawn’s latest album Tale of Two Seasons captures the almost helpless feeling of passing through the seasons, undergoing a change that you can’t control but is happening all around you. Like last September’s Maintainin’, the project emerges from the Columbus rapper–born Dominique Mattox–processing personal struggles within the larger global catastrophe of the COVID-19 pandemic. Deshawn captures this still-new struggle with isolation through the process of moving from fall to winter, with recent struggles of heartbreak and loneliness giving way to new opportunities for growth. Through the candor of his verses and the visual sharpness of his music videos, Deshawn’s music reflects on the many seasons of his own creative journey. Deshawn started rapping at age 18 after music overtook a p...
Morbius Review: Maybe It’s Time for Sony to Give Marvel Back Its Toys
The Pitch: The first trailer for Morbius, the newest effort by Sony Pictures to hold onto the Marvel characters to which it still owns the rights, originally premiered in January 2020, in anticipation of its planned July 2020 premiere. That premiere didn’t happen for, y’know, reasons, but in the literal years since, new trailers for the film have continued to appear online and in theaters, with one of them buttoned by a reasonably funny joke: Its central character, in full monster face, growling “I… am… Venom!” at a thug, then abruptly shifting to a smile to say, “I’m just kidding! Dr. Michael Morbius, at your service.” That moment didn’t just name-drop a previous Sony/Marvel collaboration, but showcased a clever reversal on expectations, not to mention star Jared Leto doling out some very...
Marvel’s Moon Knight Review: An Odd, Perhaps Inessential, But Often Fun Ride
The Pitch: When Moon Knight viewers first meet Steven Grant (Oscar Isaac), he’s a simple man living a relatively simple life in London, working a menial job as a museum gift shop employee and struggling to connect with the people around him. While a bit of an odd duck, personality-wise, Steven has a good heart but a big secret: He keeps experiencing missing time, waking up in strange locations no matter how hard he tries to stay awake or chain himself up in his sleep. The cause for these lapses, as we soon learn, is that Steven shares his body with an entirely separate personality — that of a man known as Marc Spector, who’s caught up in some complicated business involving a golden scarab, a cult leader named Arthur Harrow (Ethan Hawke), and as we eventually come to discover, the modern-da...
Oscars 2022 Review: Well, That Was a Hot Mess
“There’s, like, a different vibe in here.” So remarked host Amy Schumer towards the end of the 94th annual Academy Awards, after an emotionally exhausting night that did deliver a lot of surprises. Perhaps not the kinds of surprises that anyone watching was hoping for, because as the show creeped past the three-and-a-half-hour mark, what was striking was how the Oscars managed to make the handing out of actual Oscars feel like an afterthought. In the minutes before the Oscars began this year, the vibes were not great due to the controversial choice to eliminate eight categories from the live broadcast (instead handing those awards out an hour before the official ceremony started, and then editing the winning acceptance speeches into the show later). In concept, an idea which might trim som...
Daddy Yankee Makes His Claim as the G.O.A.T. of Reggaetón in Legendaddy
After setting the reggaetón genre ablaze with “Gasolina” in 2004, Daddy Yankee is getting ready to hang up the nozzle. With news of his impending retirement from music this year, the Puerto Rican icon released his final album, Legendaddy. Across 19 tracks, Daddy Yankee reasserts his position as the King of Reggaetón while collaborating with the new generation of stars that he inspired, like Bad Bunny, Myke Towers, Sech, and Natti Natasha. He also celebrates how global the genre has become with artists like Lil Jon and Nile Rodgers. Legendaddy is an impressive amalgamation of reggaetón’s legacy and present with Daddy Yankee at the helm. In the quirky “X Última Vez,” he’s joined by Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny. Backed by computerized beats courtesy of Tainy, the reggaetón dream team trad...
Soul Glo Turn In a Landmark Hardcore Album with the Political and Personal Diaspora Problems: Review + Stream
In the roiling summer heat of 2021, Philadelphia hardcore act Soul Glo took to their practice space to record the 12 songs that would form Diaspora Problems. The material was conceptualized over a five-year period and harnessed in true punk fashion, under tumultuous and budget-conscious conditions. In many ways, Soul Glo have followed the tried-and-true punk trajectory, gradually building a fanbase via touring, DIY releases, and EPs. It’s culminated with the band inking a deal with storied punk label Epitaph Records, home to legends such as Bad Religion, Rancid, Social Distortion, and many more. But Soul Glo are far from your average hardcore band. With predominantly Black band members, the band is inherently distinguished among a scene long dominated by whiteness — a topic Pierce Jordan d...
