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(02/23/01 5:00am)
In an interview last week, moe. percussionist Jim Loughlin admitted to the band's distaste for the "jam band" moniker. He's right that the term is increasingly less useful for labeling an increasingly diverse group of improvisational bands. But the "jam-band" curse still holds true during the studio break between tours: The band tries to use the studio to add more to their sound-only they usually come out with less.
(02/23/01 5:00am)
For the better part of the last decade, America has been charmed by the near-yearly Tom Hanks Big Movie-each one essentially pre-sold as a smash without any question of its creativity, political daring or cinematic quality. Even if Hanks doesn't win an Oscar every time, the inevitability of his nomination is a bit disheartening. It doesn't seem that Hanks has earned his crown as All-American Everyman as much as he's been handed it by the divine intervention of the Hollywood machine.
(02/16/01 5:00am)
You guys are often labeled a "jam" band. What do you think about that?
(02/09/01 5:00am)
Until just a few years ago, the appearance of martial arts in mainstream American film was confined to bad action movies and spoof sequences in movies like Dumb and Dumber and Wayne's World 2. People fighting each other... without guns? It sounded downright un-American. The U.S. mainstream really didn't know what to make of martial arts movies' bad dubbing and nonsensical plots, so for many decades the kung-fu film remained a cult oddity.
(02/09/01 5:00am)
The Hong Kong film industry is infamous for churning out movies with insanely quick studio turnaround time, which means that most of the work put into a kung-fu film goes right to the juicy part-the fight scenes. The tradeoff for exhilarating action sequences is often jittery and fragmented plots and acting. (Quite like another diverse genre that knows what it wants and throws pretense to the wind: porno.) To help the uninitiated, we took a break from our porno to highlight some of the best of the martial arts genre, broken down by their big-name stars and originators:
(02/09/01 5:00am)
Mike, Freddy and Jason awaken one Friday morning as the smoke still rises from the charred remains of last night's spontaneous bonfire. They are seeking one of nature's sure-fire hangover cures: a bloody and dumb slasher flick.
(02/02/01 5:00am)
Going into Sugar and Spice already chuckling at the notion of cheerleaders with assault rifles, I was ready to enjoy my second cheerleader flick of the year and strike back against those who would libel me as elitist. After all, last year's Bring It On gave a surprisingly enjoyable mix of lighthearted self-satire and winsome perkiness to its trip through the pom-pom meat grinder. This movie, however, was just a setup for disappointment, taking a script that could have been edgy and nimble and making it as awkward as adolescence.
(01/26/01 5:00am)
Original music scores are rarely notable for anything but an Oscar category that most people fall asleep for. Usually they end up only making strong arguments against the commercialization of trance music: Search for the themes to Braveheart, Star Wars or even Terminator 2 on Napster, and then make your raver friends hang their heads in shame.
(01/26/01 5:00am)
Chalk another success up to Recess. Screenwriter Steven Gaghan won a Best Screenplay Golden Globe for Traffic, only a couple of months after a high-profile interview in these very pages. We don't think it's too hard to connect the two events, given our history as a springboard for promising artists, weird documentaries and now, smug screenwriters with bad haircuts. In fact, the only thing perhaps more potent than Recess props is our patented Recess diss-which brought down Kathie Lee Gifford last year and glamball chump Billy Corgan's band this summer.
(01/26/01 5:00am)
When Tarantino rocked the indie film world and dorm rooms across America back in 1994 with Pulp Fiction, pop culture suddenly became obsessed with its own irreverent style. Future indulgences in violence and pulp could be just as humorous and ironic as they were seriously grim. We got hitmen and gangsters, anal rape and severed ears-all in good fun, we were assured. What Tarantino brought to the revived fascination in the badass was a sexiness as cheeky as it was seductive and powerful. It didn't just glorify violence, but made it hip and cool in its very exploitation and celebration of that would-be criminal in all of us.
(01/19/01 5:00am)
Not to reminisce about the good ol' days of Mother Russia, but that Cold War was one hell of a narrative device-the perfect paranoid, apocalyptic fodder for all sorts of doomsday scenarios. Without those rascally Ruskies, poor old James Bond suffers quite an identity crisis when the biggest threat to world security that can be found is some media mogul; political dramas generally suffer even more with no red glow looming across the pond. If there are no clear bad guys, can we really have faith in the good ones?
(01/19/01 5:00am)
Here at Duke, we students don't have the freedom to access evaluations of the faculty that teach us. So much for consumer choice. However, Recess is committed to democracy and all that good stuff, so we looked for new and different ways to make Duke life a little more "interactive."
(12/01/00 5:00am)
Every night since seeing Darren Aronofsky's harrowing Requiem for a Dream, I have had cold-sweating, bone-chilling nightmares. Nightmares with nauseating images both unbearable and transfixing, that linger in the first moments of consciousness like the spine-scraping Kronos Quartet score. At the very least, I can vow never to do heroin ever again.
(12/01/00 5:00am)
America still doesn't have a president. Al Gore still doesn't have a personality. Dubya still doesn't have a brain. If you take a gander at the two goons still squabbling over who gets to sit behind the big desk next year, you get the sense that maybe there's a need for change in this country. And if you strolled down the Bryan Center walkway in recent months, you saw that somebody else at Duke was thinking the exact same thing-and scribbling it on the walls in colored chalk.
(12/01/00 5:00am)
Coming at the end of a particularly tepid year for movies, Traffic has been building anticipation with its controversial War On Drugs theme and its pairing of newlyweds Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Recess Associate Film Editor Greg Bloom caught up with screenwriter Stephen Gaghan as he was driving in his '66 GTO convertible through the mean streets of Brentwood....
(11/17/00 5:00am)
n a year when Spike Lee makes perhaps his most incendiary challenge towards racial discourse with Bamboozled-and is once again panned and dismissed for it-Hollywood chokes up sugar-coated, bleary-eyed fare like Remember The Titans and now Men of Honor. The movie provides another motivational pill about triumph over institutionalized adversity, and it's more needlessly long and mercilessly humorless. The life story of Master Diver Carl Brashear-the first black man to attain this highest rank in the Navy, and with a prosthetic leg, to boot-is inspiring, sure. But why do honor and triumph over adversity have to be so damn boring?
(11/17/00 5:00am)
he mythic figure of the film superhero-once an icon of strength and virtue-is perhaps too worn by slews of codpieces, bad puns and campy over-the-top villains on neon rollerblades to be of any potence. Is it possible for a man in tights to conjure up any shred of awe after shameful disgraces like Batman and Robin or tired satire like Mystery Men and even "The Ambiguously Gay Duo?"
(11/17/00 5:00am)
The buzz lately is that the Britpop scene is rearing its ugly head once more for another "invasion," after its first wave of Oasis, Radiohead, Blur and Pulp fizzled instead of banged. Hot on the heels of UK chart thrashers Travis, Coldplay release their debut, Parachutes.
(11/03/00 5:00am)
A point-for-point hybrid of A Simple Plan and the excruciating Very Bad Things, the new comedy Lucky Numbers has plenty of the latter's mean spirit, with none of the former's potent morality play. Russ Richards (John Travolta, continuing his systematic professional self-destruction) is a small-town bigshot television celebrity mired in debt. At the suggestion of a local strip club manager (Tim Roth, in a useless role), Richards hatches a half-brained scheme to rig the state lottery with the assistance of the station's Lotto girl and resident slut (ditzy Lisa Kudrow, bitchy and mean this time). The plot congeals rather than thickens, and various other characters meet violent ends as mediocre small-town satire sours into a bad attempt at black comedy.
(10/27/00 4:00am)
Time to open up the gates of movie hell and boot Bedazzled to the unholy level of piss-poor screwball comedy. There's nothing like high-concept lowbrow Hollywood dreck to spoil literature like Faustian legend. Inexplicably remade from the 1967 comedy pairing Dudley Moore as a random schmuck with Peter Cook as the Devil, this unfortunate update gives those respective roles to Brendan Fraser and the mildly attractive Elizabeth Hurley. Okay, so she's really attractive, but there's nothing else pretty about this hellhole.
