There were red flowerpot hats on each of the seats. The “Energy Domes,” as they used to call them, were Devo‘s headgear of choice during the early 1980s, back when the band went from extremely bizarre, unclassifiable group to extremely bizarre, slightly more classifiable (postpunk, New Wave, geek rock) group …
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Eternal You, a new documentary premiering at Sundance about the nauseating new world of digital afterlife technology, opens on a woman, Christi Angel, staring into a computer screen. She’s messaging with a dead loved one and tears are streaming down her face. “This experience… It was creepy,” she says. “There …
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All film noirs start with a bad decision. Love Lies Bleeding, Rose Glass’s follow-up to her cult horror movie Saint Maud and the most case-hardened Southwestern pulp this side of Jim Thompson, kicks off with a doozy. Lou (Kristen Stewart) cleans toilets and works the desk at a gym in …
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Stop us if you’ve heard this before, but there’s a true crime docuseries on Netflix that has tongues wagging. The appetite for such endeavors appears bottomless; it seems we really enjoy depraved and aberrant behavior so long as we can hit pause and take a bathroom break every now and …
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You know the Tolstoy quote about all happy families being the same, but “every unhappy family is unhappy in their own way?” The quartet at the center of Steven Soderbergh’s ghost story Presence has refined their own particular brand of dysfunction to perfection. The mom, Rebecca (Lucy Liu), is a …
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You can never step in the same river twice. And, unless you are blessed with an infinite amount of patience, time, and mortality, you can never see the same version of the Sundance documentary Eno twice. This is by design. Brian Eno — former Roxy Music member, legendary recording producer, …
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The Bay Area was a weird place in 1987. You had the remnants of the Me Decade’s cults of touchy-feeliness bumping up against Silicon Valley’s computer-nerd capitalism. Competing D.I.Y. music scenes meant you could surf between S.F. Thrash, East Bay rap, and pockets of punk popping up from everywhere; shows …
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It is a truth universally acknowledged (or at least it should be by now) that America is a country founded upon — as well as cursed, colonized, and fertilized by — a bedrock of racism that continues to this day. Should you be unable to wrap your head around that …
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For a character who is at the center of one full-length story, The Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade is as iconic as it gets in the world of detective fiction. Dashiell Hammett’s book, and John Huston’s 1941 movie adaptation with Humphrey Bogart, loom impossibly large over the gumshoe genre, to the …
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It’s just another day on the mean streets of Judea circa 33 A.D., where people hang out on sunbaked corners talking smack, working-class stiffs scramble to get by, and Roman centurions — the LAPD of their day — stop and frisk anyone who they feel matches the description of a …
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