Month: July 2002

Here’s 18 reasons to stay out of the sun and revel in dark places and icy paranoia. We start with a couple of little-known Bogart flicks, High Sierra and Dead Reckoning , that might be of interest to Bogey fanatics but are mostly little-known for good reason. But the other four films are much better…

Victor Hugo’s sprawling, tragic novel was an instant sensation when it was first published in 1862, and its star has never really dimmed. It’s been put on film many times, as early as 1909. But its greatest popular success came in the 1980s, when Parisian songwriters Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg decided to break out…

Sad, scruffy lions held at bay with whips, embarrassed elephants performing pratfalls for a peanut. Let’s face it, old-style circuses seem fairly tawdry these days. Not so with Cirque du Soleil, which breathes new life into the big top by focusing on its dazzling array of human stunt artists—aerial acrobatics and daring trapeze-work, leavened with…

Okay, we’re playing a trick here. Guster actually plays warm-up to John Mayer, the singer/songwriter responsible for “No Such Thing”—an atrocious piece of bland, radio-friendly pablum you probably know as the “I-wanna run-through-the-halls-of-my-high school-and-scream-at-the-top-of-my-lungs” song. We can’t explain this ditty’s popularity, and we won’t hold it against the various local radio stations that insist on…

Most of us around the office have now admitted that our first “Stadium Rock” concert experience took place at the State Fairgrounds. Not as cool as seeing Prince in the Main Room, or the Hüskers at Duffy’s to be sure. But hardly worth being embarrassed about anymore. In fact, the more we think about it…

Thanks in part to the industry-wide implosion of the alt-rock genre they rode in on, Soul Asylum’s days as platinum rock gods are almost certainly behind them. We get the impression they find this to be a relief: no more snarky stories about Dave Pirner’s hair or celeb girlfriends, no more carping about the lack…