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  • Film

    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

    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

    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

    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

    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.

  • 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

    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

    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

    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

    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

    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

    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

    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

  • 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

    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

    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

    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

    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

    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

    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

    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.

  • Friday, Sept. 19, 2008

  • Noise

    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

    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.

  • 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

    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

    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

    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.

  • 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

    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

    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

    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

    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.”

  • 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

    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

    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

    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

    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

    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.

  • Saturday, Aug. 23, 2008

  • 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

    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

    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

    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

    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.

  • Thursday, Aug. 14, 2008

  • Music

    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

    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

    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.

  • 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.