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  • CD Review

    Thursday, Aug. 7, 2008

    After parting ways with guitarist and songwriter Kristen Hall following their 2004 debut Twice the Speed of Life, Sugarland’s Jennifer Nettles and Kristian Bush went in a more slickly commercial direction on 2006’s Enjoy the Ride, enlisting veteran producer Byron Gallimore to help them reach the top of the country charts. It worked wonders.

  • Film

    Thursday, Aug. 7, 2008

    After Pulp Fiction came out in 1994, theaters and video stores were flooded with legions of Quentin Tarantino knockoffs, second-rate crime dramas with self-consciously hip dialogue, flashy camera work and half-baked storytelling tricks.

  • Music

    Wednesday, Aug. 6, 2008

    From the moment they hit the stage at the nearly full Mandalay Bay Events Center with “Kickstart My Heart,” Mötley Crüe sounded tired and sluggish.

  • Film

    Thursday, July 31, 2008

    Set for no apparent reason in 1994, Jonathan Levine’s The Wackness at first comes off like a calculated exercise in nostalgia, full of forced period details (Nintendo Game Boys, Reebok Pumps, references to 90210) that add nothing to the story and serve only to remind viewers who were teens in 1994 that, hey, you used to think this stuff was cool.

  • Music

    Thursday, July 31, 2008

    Alice Cooper has always been one to go with the flow. Although his theatrical style and dark subject matter have influenced acts from Marilyn Manson to Slipknot, the heavy metal pioneer himself hasn’t been a hitmaker in decades. He dabbled in hair metal in the ’80s and industrial in the ’90s, to relative audience indifference.

  • Thursday, July 24, 2008

  • Reviews

    Thursday, July 24, 2008

    Christopher Bell may look like your typical meathead jock, but he’s got the outsider gadfly instincts of a Michael Moore or Morgan Spurlock in his debut film, Bigger, Stronger, Faster. A documentary about the use of performance-enhancing steroids in America, Bigger is very much cut from the Moore mold of snarky, confrontational filmmaking that puts the director front and center in the narrative.

  • Reviews

    Thursday, July 24, 2008

    Step Brothers demonstrates the inevitable negative effects of too much of a good thing by taking a bunch of stuff that has worked in previous Will Ferrell comedies—his chemistry with co-star John C. Reilly; his overconfident-boob persona; a loose, improvisational approach to scenes; jokes largely made up of bizarre non sequiturs—and unleashing them in a movie with barely any sort of plot or structure to contain them.

  • Noise

    Thursday, July 24, 2008

    "Miley Cyrus is the Coldplay of teen pop,” I said offhandedly to a co-worker the other day, trying to convey the level of anticipation and excitement surrounding the release of Cyrus’ “solo” debut.

  • television

    Thursday, July 24, 2008

    As they are in most areas of absurd cultural production, the Japanese are way ahead of the rest of the world in creating ridiculous game shows that encourage contestants to injure or humiliate themselves on a regular basis.

  • Saturday, July 19, 2008

  • Friday, July 18, 2008

  • Film

    Thursday, July 17, 2008

    After seeing Pixar’s dazzling, creative and heartfelt WALL-E, it’s a serious crash back down to Earth to watch Space Chimps, the clumsy, unfunny and aesthetically crude middle entry in this summer’s trio of animated movies about space (look for Fly Me to the Moon next month).

  • Music

    Thursday, July 17, 2008

    His latest album may be coming out on the Starbucks-owned Hear Music label, and his last hit may have been the soundtrack to a Chevy commercial, but John Mellencamp sounds crankier and more pessimistic than ever on Life, Death, Love and Freedom. T

  • television

    Thursday, July 17, 2008

    People like Heidi Fleiss tend not to stay in the spotlight once the initial frenzy surrounding their infamy dies down. It’s a little hard (though maybe not impossible) to imagine anyone making documentaries or writing lengthy magazine features about John Wayne Bobbitt or Joey Buttafuoco these days. But even 15 years after her initial arrest for running a high-priced prostitution ring in Los Angeles, Fleiss still generates plenty of interest, and the documentary Heidi Fleiss: The Would-Be Madam of Crystal (HBO, July 21, 9 p.m.) does a good job of showing why she’s still such a fascinating character.

  • Film

    Thursday, July 17, 2008

    The tiny Eastern European nation of Estonia gets its moment in the spotlight with The Singing Revolution, a blandly positive documentary about the nonviolent action that led to the country’s independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.

  • television

    Thursday, July 10, 2008

    Movies and TV shows about America’s current conflicts in the Middle East haven’t exactly fared well recently, either critically or commercially, but that hasn’t stopped The Wire creator David Simon and his producing and writing partner Ed Burns from following up their groundbreaking and highly praised cops-and-criminals series with Generation Kill (HBO, Sundays, 9 p.m.), a seven-part miniseries about a Marine unit during the early days of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

  • Reviews

    Thursday, July 10, 2008

    Perhaps someday, movies made in digital 3-D will be so commonplace that we’ll see relationship dramas, workplace comedies and psychological thrillers in three dimensions, but at this point the technology is so new that all it’s really useful for is showing off. Luckily Journey to the Center of the Earth director Eric Brevig has a background in special effects and experience working on 3-D movies/theme-park attractions Captain EO and Honey, I Shrunk the Audience, so his feature debut finds him perfectly at home with the showy aspect of 3-D cinema.

  • Music

    Thursday, July 10, 2008

    High School Musical star Vanessa Hudgens was most recently in the news for a fairly tame nude-pictures scandal, but her second album gives no indication that she’s looking to shed her otherwise squeaky clean image and play with the grown-ups.

  • Wednesday, July 9, 2008

  • Wednesday, July 9, 2008

  • television

    Thursday, July 3, 2008

    Whatever you think of VH1’s popular “celebreality” shows, you have to sort of admire their shamelessness. The participants on ABC’s The Bachelor all act like they really expect to find their soulmate on the show, and the producers encourage that fiction; on VH1’s matchmaker shows Flavor of Love, Rock of Love and I Love New York, the prospect of finding love always seemed dubious at best, and the producers were not at all above putting their eligible bachelors and bachelorettes on the block multiple times.

  • Reviews

    Thursday, July 3, 2008

    Based on the memoir by British poet and novelist Blake Morrison, When Did You Last See Your Father? is a low-key, somber account of the writer’s ruminations and memories as his father lays dying. Played as an adult by Colin Firth and as a teen by Matthew Beard, Blake comes off as a sort of sullen, mopey guy who never really gave his dad, doctor and somewhat boorish philanderer Arthur (Broadbent), the credit he deserved.

  • Music

    Thursday, July 3, 2008

    Katy Perry’s pseudo-debut album (she put out a Christian-pop release in 2001 under the name Katy Hudson) is a distillation of everything vapid and annoying about teen culture, filtered through the musical sensibilities of a gaggle of top pop producers and songwriters (Max Martin, Dr. Luke, Butch Walker, Glen Ballard, Cathy Dennis, etc.).

  • Reviews

    Tuesday, July 1, 2008

    Why does Will Smith always have to save the world? Wouldn’t it be nice, just once, to see the king of the summer blockbuster play, like, a regular dude? One who doesn’t become a larger-than-life hero by the end of the movie? Hancock, Smith’s latest box office-conquering action film, almost starts out that way: The title character isn’t exactly a regular dude, but he is a bit of a loser when we first meet him, passed out on a bench in a drunken haze.

  • Reviews

    Thursday, June 26, 2008

    Based very loosely on the comic-book series by Mark Millar and J.G. Jones, Wanted transforms a dark, cynical and even nihilistic story into a morally equivocating piece of action trash, directed as is his custom with maximum distracting flashiness and minimum narrative coherence by Russian wunderkind Timur Bekmambetov (Night Watch, Day Watch). Sure, some of it looks cool—there is one heck of a nutso car chase toward the beginning—but it’s so empty and condescending and superficial that it almost makes the repellent, smug source material seem decent by comparison.

  • Music

    Thursday, June 26, 2008

    Motley Crue’s first album in eight years (and first with their original lineup since 1997’s Generation Swine) is a conscious (self-conscious, even) effort to return to their ’80s glory days, both in sound and in lyrical references.

  • Reviews

    Thursday, June 26, 2008

    Showcased at Sundance back in 2005, How the Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer finally makes its way to theaters thank no doubt to the increased profile of star America Ferrera, better known these days for her role on Ugly Betty. Whatever the reason, it’s a welcome arrival and a nice alternative to what we typically consider summer entertainment at the movies. Writer-director Reidel’s film may be slight and it may be flawed, but it’s also a lovingly crafted portrait of a kind of life not often seen on the big screen.

  • CineVegas 2008

    Sunday, June 22, 2008

    Set for no apparent reason in 1994, Jonathan Levine’s The Wackness at first comes off like a calculated exercise in nostalgia, full of forced period details (Nintendo Game Boys, Reebok Pumps, references to 90210) that add nothing to the story and serve only to remind viewers who were teens in 1994 that, hey, you used to think this stuff was cool.

  • Saturday, June 21, 2008

  • Friday, June 20, 2008

  • Thursday, June 19, 2008

  • Thursday, June 19, 2008

  • Film

    Thursday, June 19, 2008

    The 1960s spy-parody TV show Get Smart was, contrary to its title, often very silly, and certainly not the most sophisticated bit of satire ever to hit the airwaves. But it was at least more concerned with cracking jokes at the expense of deadly serious TV and movie secret agents than with attempting to emulate them. The new big-screen adaptation recycles some of the show’s gimmicks and catch phrases, and has a handful of funny moments, but it suffers from unfortunate delusions of being an action movie that quickly overtake its potential as a comedy.

  • Music

    Thursday, June 19, 2008

    Just how cheesy is Judas Priest’s two-disc concept album about the life of 16th-century French prophet Nostradamus?

  • Tuesday, June 17, 2008

  • Tuesday, June 17, 2008

  • CineVegas 2008

    Sunday, June 15, 2008

    The filmmaking collective known as Sweaty Robot (Juan Cardarelli, Nick Gregorio, Ben Davidow, Matthew Sanchez, Eric Levy) write, direct and star in Happy Birthday, Harris Malden, but unlike other groups who’ve taken this route (Broken Lizard, Kids in the Hall, Monty Python), they’re less a sketch-comedy troupe (although they are known for comedic online short films) than a self-contained production company.

  • A&E

    Saturday, June 14, 2008

    Billy Corben’s 2006 documentary Cocaine Cowboys was an almost perversely entertaining look at the Miami drug trade in the 1980s

  • Saturday, June 14, 2008

  • Friday, June 13, 2008

  • CineVegas 2008

    Thursday, June 12, 2008

    Slight but entertaining—the documentary Women in Boxes takes a look at the unsung heroes of magic acts: the assistants. Female assistants of all ages, from a woman who came from a circus family and started assisting her magician father in the 1950s to younger second-generation assistants who hope to take center stage as magicians themselves.

  • Music

    Thursday, June 12, 2008

    What to expect from the new Alanis Morissette album?

  • CineVegas 2008

    Thursday, June 12, 2008

    These days, CineVegas is among the fastest-growing film festivals in the country, named by Variety in 2006 as one of the Top 5 “festival gems” and attracting more and more high-profile celebrities, filmmakers and press coverage each year. Ten years ago (December 10-13, 1998), the first CineVegas was held at Bally’s, with satellite events at the Huntridge and Gold Coast.

  • CineVegas 2008

    Thursday, June 12, 2008

    In a cramped office on the UNLV campus, filled with books and monitors and computers and DVDs, Francisco Menendez is conferencing via Skype with editors in LA working on a movie he directed. But it’s not Primo, the film 15 years in the making that Menendez will finally premiere at this year’s CineVegas film festival. It’s even older than that, a movie that the filmmaker shot 20 years ago and sent off to an LA lab to be processed.

  • Friday, June 6, 2008

  • Friday, June 6, 2008

  • Friday, June 6, 2008

  • CD Review

    Thursday, June 5, 2008

    Of all the mainstream rockers to undergo country makeovers recently, Jewel makes the most sense.

  • Reviews

    Thursday, June 5, 2008

    Kung Fu Panda opens with a dynamic and visually striking dream sequence, in which ancient Chinese panda Po (voiced by Black) imagines himself a great kung-fu warrior, taking on all foes and teaming up with a group of fighters known as the Furious Five. Directed by Jennifer Yuh Nelson, it’s full of bold colors, canted camera angles and a jagged animation style somewhat reminiscent of the TV cartoon Samurai Jack.