Month: January 2012
SB Dance Sugar Show
On January 21, the Steven Brown Dance Company presented The Sugar Show at the Rose Wagner Blackbox Theater. This was the latest in a series of annual exhibits of local talent. The show took the form of a competition between choreographers, each responding to the same prompt. This year’s prompt was ‘story and narrative,’ and the show featured five different dances meant to exemplify and explore that theme. … read more
Chamber Music Society of Salt Lake: Pacifica Quartet @ Libby...
From the Violist’s black-haired bow and sail-in-the-wind body gestures to the St.Teresa-like contortions of Ms. Ganatra, the event had the gestalt (minus the gore, of course) of a butterfly tearing free from its chrysalis—a scene of real, emotional events out of important but little movements. … read more
Soundcheck Series with Joshua James and McKay Stevens of Northplatte...
The Soundcheck Series workshops are a monthly affair, held at Metcom Studios right in downtown SLC. I had never been to one before, but this workshop was a good first-y for sure. … read more
Bindlestiffs
A riotous and irreverent tale of three high school virgins and their quest to “fuck shit up,” Bindlestiffs is like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Superbad on crack—literally. Suspended from school for graffiti after The Catcher in the Rye is banned, Andrew, Luke and John check into an inner-city motel, determined to experience the world, Holden Caulfield style. What follows is a week of debauchery as the boys go looking for love, good times and poon. … read more
Wild in the Streets
Peter Baxter, the current president of Slamdance and one of its founders, revealed his latest documentary in a special screening during the Slamdance 2012 festival. Narrated by Sean Bean, Wild in the Streets focuses on the town of Ashbourne, Derbyshire, England, built along the Henmore River, where the townspeople have been playing a game called Shrovetide for over 1,000 years. … read more
Hope. You Like Crap.
20 years ago, Shaun Parker made a horrible student film. In Hope. You Like Crap., Parker shows the film in its entirety, talking shit on it and his former pretentious self with amusingly scathing, self-depreciating commentary. … read more
Nova Chamber Series: Contemporary Cold @ Libby Gardner 01.22
The Nova Chamber Music Series concert on Jan. 22 started with Eliot Carter’s Elegy for Viola and Piano, whose humid and sunlit tone of joy swept the dust right out of my eyes. … read more
Danland
“I’m in love with the concept of being in love,” says amateur porn producer Dan Leal, aka Porno Dan, in the beginning of this documentary following his unrelenting search for love amid porn conventions and gangbangs. But for co-dependent sex addict Porno Dan, love is hard to come by when sex with hundreds of women is business as usual. … read more
I Want My Name Back
Roger Paradiso documents the rise and fall of hip hop pioneers Wonder Mike and Master Gee, original members of The Sugarhill Gang, the group responsible for the seminal record “Rapper’s Delight.” After the release of the world’s first commercial hop hop composition, Wonder Mike and Master Gee’s artistic credit and monetary earnings were taken by Sugar Hill Record execs, throwing the two into a 30-year struggle to reclaim their place in hip hop history. … read more
Kid-Thing
Ten-year-old Annie is an aimless child with an emotionally absent father who lives outside of Austin. Her dad is a goat farmer who spends his time scratching lotto cards, shooting fireworks with his dim-witted friends and competing in demolition derbys. He doesn’t do much parenting. Annie fills her time with a variety of destructive activities such as smashing birthday cakes, hucking dough at cars, paint-balling dead cows and wandering the woods near her home … read more