Josh Bell
Story Archive
-
Film
The Duchess
Thursday, Oct. 9, 2008 Eager to participate in the political sphere despite not having the right to vote, Georgiana (Keira Knightley) campaigns for the Whig politicians her husband finances but can’t stand to talk to, soaking up the rhetoric of freedom and even delivering some of her own.
-
Music
Nikka Costa
Thursday, Oct. 9, 2008 Nikka Costa’s third album delves even deeper into the hardcore R&B, soul and funk influences she’s been indebted to for her entire career, and in the process sacrifices some of the pop appeal of her earlier work.
-
TV
Lost in translation
Thursday, Oct. 9, 2008 The show is an awkward mix of police procedural and sci-fi mystery, with plenty of winking jokes about things that didn’t exist yet in 1973 (“Diet Coke? Wouldn’t that be something”).
-
Film
A Man Named Pearl
Thursday, Oct. 9, 2008 Pearl Fryar is an unassuming African-American guy in his 60s living in a small South Carolina town, who spent decades working in a factory and now devotes his time to working in his garden. So why is he the subject of a documentary?
-
Film
Cardboard plots! Wooden acting! The occasional gem!
Thursday, Oct. 9, 2008 Walk along the new-release shelf at your local Hollywood Video or Blockbuster these days, or log on to Netflix or Blockbuster Online and check out the new-release page, and you’re bound to see dozens of movies that you’ve never heard of.
-
In defense of ambitious failures
Thursday, Oct. 2, 2008 Las Vegas Weekly Associate Editor T.R. Witcher returns to chat with Josh about new theatrical releases Blindness, Appaloosa, How to Lose Friends & Alienate People, Religulous, Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist and Flash of Genius (it's a busy week), plus a plea for a second chance for M. Night Shyamalan with The Happening on DVD.
-
television
A clone of a clone
Thursday, Oct. 2, 2008 The Star Wars: The Clone Wars animated movie that came out this summer was meant to stoke anticipation for the new Star Wars: The Clone Wars animated series (Cartoon Network, Fridays, 9 p.m.), which premieres this week. But the movie was derided by critics and even by many hardcore Star Wars fans, and made little money at the box office. So the show arrives with diminished expectations and probably even a bit of resentment on the part of Star Wars completists.
-
Film
Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist
Thursday, Oct. 2, 2008 Look out, Cameron Crowe: While you’ve been busy with arty remakes of Spanish horror flicks and self-indulgent trips through your CD collection, someone’s come along and made the Cameron Crowe-iest movie in years, and you weren’t even involved.
-
Film
Heroes
Thursday, Oct. 2, 2008 It’s never pleasant to sit through a local feature film and realize that it’s failing on almost every conceivable level.
-
Film
Flash of Genius
Thursday, Oct. 2, 2008 The college engineering professor invented the intermittent windshield-wiper system in his basement, pitched it to Ford and was then ripped off by the monolithic automaker, which introduced its own version of the system without crediting Kearns.
-
Film
A few words with local filmmaker Malcolm Brooks
Thursday, Oct. 2, 2008 Local filmmaker Malcolm Brooks is showing his new movie Heroes at the Galaxy Neonopolis this week. Josh Bell stole a few minutes of his time to hear about what it took to make this film.
-
Music
Foo Fighters
Thursday, Oct. 2, 2008 About a week prior to his band’s show this past Friday at the Joint, Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl announced that the group would be taking an indefinite hiatus following the conclusion of their latest tour; other than appearances at the Austin City Limits festival and an upcoming Southern California benefit, then, the Joint gig was the Foos’ last for potentially a very long time.
-
Music
Jennifer Hudson
Thursday, Oct. 2, 2008 Jennifer Hudson’s self-titled debut album opens with a song perfectly pitched to her unique sensibilities and strengths: “Spotlight” is a slinky, old-fashioned torch song, marrying Hudson’s traditional vocal talents to an understated dance beat and lush keyboards. It seems to announce an album that will capitalize on Hudson’s success in the old-school musical Dreamgirls while giving her a subtle pop gloss
-
How to make a thriller (and how not to)
Friday, Sept. 26, 2008 Fellow Las Vegas Weekly film critic Tasha Chemplavil joins Josh to discuss new theatrical releases Eagle Eye, Towelhead, Tell No One, Choke and The Lucky Ones, plus Iron Man and Forgetting Sarah Marshall on DVD.
-
Reviews
Eagle Eye
Thursday, Sept. 25, 2008 Apparently in just four short months we’ll have a government surveillance system so extensive that it is linked up to literally every electronic device in the entire country, and can monitor people’s conversations simply by reading their lips or picking up the vibrations in their coffee cups. That’s not even the height of the absurdity to be found in Eagle Eye, which takes place in January 2009, although to chronicle all of its far-fetched speculation would delve too deeply into spoiler territory.
-
television
Judging the judges
Thursday, Sept. 25, 2008 There are three new judge shows premiering in syndication this season, all of them hosted by no-nonsense women, all of them following the well-worn format with little deviation.
-
Reviews
Tell No One
Thursday, Sept. 25, 2008 On the eighth anniversary of his wife’s murder near a secluded lake, pediatrician Alex Beck (Cluzet) receives an anonymous e-mail with a seemingly present-day video of her getting off an escalator, along with the titular admonition.
-
Music
Jem
Thursday, Sept. 25, 2008 It’s been four years since Jem’s excellent debut, Finally Woken, and from the way her follow-up, Down to Earth, sounds, the singer probably could have made several vastly different albums in that time. Earth is a schizophrenic mix of pop styles, flirting with a number of familiar sounds but never settling on its own identity.
-
Reviews
"Choke" mixes sleaze and sweetness
Thursday, Sept. 25, 2008 Fans of kinky sex, weird urban legends and mild blasphemy will get their fill, but underneath all that seediness is a story that turns out to be rather heartwarming and sweet.
-
Screen
Three questions with "Choke" director Clark Gregg
Thursday, Sept. 25, 2008 I started out by kind of trying to just do the world’s most faithful adaptation of a book I already loved, despite the fact that [Chuck Palahniuk] had told me to be careful of that, that adaptations that are too faithful rarely are any good.--Choke director Clark Gregg
-
Music
Janet Jackson
Thursday, Sept. 25, 2008 Janet Jackson’s last few albums haven’t exactly been huge sellers or spawned memorable hits, but at the Mandalay Bay Events Center this past Friday, she treated all of her releases more or less equally, packing 37 songs into a career-spanning two-hour-and-15-minute show that was a bit dizzying and unwieldy.
-
Cynicism and redemption
Friday, Sept. 19, 2008 -
Noise
Metallica
Thursday, Sept. 18, 2008 Metallica’s last album, 2003’s St. Anger, with its raw, messy, unfocused songs and dingy production, was like group therapy on CD, and spoke to the personal demons that the band members were dealing with.
-
Reviews
Ghost Town
Thursday, Sept. 18, 2008 Ricky Gervais makes a serious play for Jim Carrey-level stardom in Ghost Town, a resolutely mainstream comedy that just barely gets by on Gervais’ sarcastic humor and prickly charm.
-
Burn after listening
Thursday, Sept. 11, 2008 Brian Black, formerly of X-107.5-FM’s Xtreme Disorder, joins Josh to chat about the Coen brothers’ Burn After Reading, Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in Righteous Kill and the remake of The Women in theaters, and Speed Racer, 88 Minutes and TV shows Chuck and Pushing Daisies on DVD.
-
Music
Kasey Chambers & Shane Nicholson
Thursday, Sept. 11, 2008 After drifting away from her roots on 2006’s Carnival, Australian alt-country singer Kasey Chambers returns to basics on Rattlin’ Bones, a collaboration with her husband, singer-songwriter Shane Nicholson.
-
Reviews
Feel the "Burn"
Thursday, Sept. 11, 2008 In the twisted but strangely sensible logic of brothers Joel and Ethan Coen, the perfect way to follow up an intense, brutal, Oscar-winning psychological thriller like No Country for Old Men is with a goofy lark of a comedy like Burn After Reading.
-
Reviews
Modern "Women"
Thursday, Sept. 11, 2008 George Cukor’s 1939 film version of Clare Boothe Luce’s play The Women is a magnificent piece of cinema, but it’s a movie very much of its time, and even if Diane English’s remake weren’t a failure on a number of aesthetic levels, it’d still have a tough time remaining true to the spirit of the original without coming off as horribly retrograde and anti-feminist.
-
Josh Bell hates children
Friday, Sept. 5, 2008 Michael T. Toole, writer for the Turner Classic Movies website, award-winning short filmmaker and former Las Vegas Weekly contributor, joins Josh via phone to talk about theatrical releases Baghead and The Little Red Truck, plus the decline of Nicolas Cage, new DVDs Baby Mama and The Fall and ... Jamie Kennedy hates Josh Bell?
-
television
"Fringe" benefits
Thursday, Sept. 4, 2008 Anointed this year’s Heroes or Lost before even premiering, thanks to online buzz, a screening at Comic-Con over the summer and the presence of co-creator J.J. Abrams of Lost and Alias fame, Fringe (Fox, Tuesdays, 9 p.m.; premieres September 9 at 8 p.m.) arrives with a daunting amount of hype to overcome, and its solid action/sci-fi execution isn’t quite as revolutionary as some may have hoped.
-
Reviews
Mumbling toward success
Thursday, Sept. 4, 2008 Baghead bears many of the hallmarks of mumblecore—it’s about relationships among intelligent but inarticulate 20-somethings, it’s shot in a rough, hand-held style, it’s plotted loosely and simply—but it also aspires to something more, making a meta-commentary on the indie-film world and even functioning as a sort of low-grade horror movie.
-
Screen
The Little Red Truck
Thursday, Sept. 4, 2008 It seems almost cruel to criticize The Little Red Truck, an earnest, cheery documentary about the Missoula Children’s Theatre.
-
Music
DragonForce
Thursday, Sept. 4, 2008 It can be hard to know whether to take DragonForce seriously. The songs on the British power-metal-throwback band’s fourth album, Ultra Beatdown, mostly push the seven- or eight-minute mark, and have titles like “A Flame for Freedom” and “Inside the Winter Storm.”
-
The Tao of Cheadle
Thursday, Aug. 28, 2008 Las Vegas Weekly Managing Editor Ken Miller joins Josh to discuss new theatrical releases Traitor, Elegy and America the Beautiful, plus a trio of movies not screened for critics.
-
Film
Elegy
Thursday, Aug. 28, 2008 For a movie about an alleged hedonist and libertine, and one that stars one of the most beautiful women in the world, Elegy is remarkably dour and unsexy.
-
Film
Terrorism lite
Thursday, Aug. 28, 2008 After a 2007 filled with serious, weighty dramas about the war on terror, all of which ended up more or less tanking at the box office, this year has been relatively quiet on the terrorism-movie front. Enter Traitor, a slick political thriller from screenwriter and director Jeffrey Nachmanoff, which uses the fight against terrorists as the backdrop for a twisty suspense story that manages to wholly sidestep the war in Iraq.
-
Music
The constancy of Motorhead
Thursday, Aug. 28, 2008 We were going to write a review of Motorhead’s latest album (it’s their 20th), Motorizer, to preview their upcoming concert, but then we realized there’s really no need. Motorhead have been an unchanging juggernaut for 30 years, and their loud-and-fast mix of metal and punk is pretty much immovable.
-
A&E
Anarchy on TV
Thursday, Aug. 28, 2008 In the new FX drama Sons of Anarchy, a group of tough, macho guys work and hang out together, doing their intense, sometimes violent jobs while dressed in similar outfits declaring their affiliations. The women mostly watch from the sidelines.
-
CD Review
Slipknot
Thursday, Aug. 28, 2008 The mere existence of a new Slipknot album is something of a miracle; getting all members of the Iowa nonet onboard is a notoriously difficult prospect, and every one of the band’s albums seems poised to be its last.
-
Crowing at Planet Hollywood
Saturday, Aug. 23, 2008 -
Sexy deities and exploding heads
Thursday, Aug. 21, 2008 Roger Erik Tinch, art and online director for the CineVegas Film Festival, joins Josh to assess the relative deficiencies of new theatrical releases Hamlet 2, Death Race, The Rocker and The House Bunny, plus What Happens in Vegas and Redbelt on DVD.
-
television
Sweet hypocrisy
Thursday, Aug. 21, 2008 An important part of watching MTV’s reality sensation My Super Sweet 16 is wishing horrible, unpleasant things on the bratty, pampered teenagers who whine and throw fits about petty, insignificant things and demand royal treatment from their family members and anyone around them.
-
Music
Staind
Thursday, Aug. 21, 2008 Believe it or not, Staind was at one time one of the most promising metal bands in the country. Their 1999 sophomore album, Dysfunction, integrated the pummeling, heavy sound of bands like Pantera with nu-metal’s focus on laying bare emotional pain (courtesy of singer Aaron Lewis).
-
Film
The Rocker
Thursday, Aug. 21, 2008 Is it possible for a movie to actually kill rock n’ roll? Probably not, but The Rocker certainly comes close.
-
Film
Definitely not to be
Thursday, Aug. 21, 2008 The play-within-the-movie that gives Hamlet 2 its title comes off like a bizarre, twisted, campy mash-up of Shakespeare and The Rocky Horror Picture Show, complete with big, silly musical numbers, a giant time machine and Jesus in blue jeans and a wife-beater.
-
It's satire, stupid
Thursday, Aug. 14, 2008 -
Music
Jonas Brothers
Thursday, Aug. 14, 2008 Teen heartthrobs the Jonas Brothers are a lot closer to Hanson than they are to fellow Disney-groomed stars like Miley Cyrus and Hilary Duff, and thus their third album, A Little Bit Longer, sounds more like the work of an organically formed group of musicians than the product of a prefab pop factory.
-
television
Welcome Back, WB
Thursday, Aug. 14, 2008 Ratings are down and speculation runs rampant that The CW may not even survive one more season. Meanwhile, Warner Brothers has quietly begun resurrecting the WB brand with a new website at TheWB.com that is currently in its beta phase (it launches officially August 27).
-
Reviews
Woody Allen’s European Vacation
Thursday, Aug. 14, 2008 The fourth (and apparently final) film in what might be called Woody Allen’s European period, Vicky Cristina Barcelona is the closest to what fans of his classic relationship comedies keep hoping the writer-director will produce again.
-
Every pineapple has its spikes
Friday, Aug. 8, 2008 Freed from the confines of radio, Weekly film critic Josh Bell chats with a different guest each week about new releases in theaters and on DVD. This week, comedian/filmmaker Jason Harris of the Frat Boys of Comedy joins Josh to discuss Pineapple Express, Encounters at the End of the World and more.