The Wednesday Fiver
Posted on March 25, 2009 at 5:07 am | No Comments
A few bits of film, music, and tv-related goodness to mark the mid-week…
The 7th annual Independent Film Festival of Boston has just shared its initial list of films (narrative, documentary, and shorts), and unsurprisingly, it’s packed with gems. Take a gander, put in for vacation days with your boss (April 22nd-28th), and come back here in a couple days when I hope to have a full list with links and other info on each selection. Festival passes are also on sale, so have a look at your options. To tempt you further, the starter list of celebs who will be attending this year includes Chris Cooper, Benjamin Bratt, Bobby and Peter Farrelly, Kevin Corrigan, and Red Sox pitching legend Luis “El Tiante” Tiant. Many more are sure to be added.
Attention Joss Whedon fans, and more specifically, those of you who live in the Boston area: Joss is coming to town, and we’re invited. On Friday night, April 10th, the creator of Buffy, Angel, Firefly, and Dr. Horrible’s Sing-A-Long Blog (and yes, Dollhouse) will stop by the Harvard campus to accept the “3rd Annual Lifetime Achievement Award in Cultural Humanism” (or as Salman Rushdie, the 1st recipient, referred to it: “Athiestmas”). He’ll be speaking, playing clips from his work, taking questions (and, one assumes, providing amusing answers), and doing a signing as well. Everything but a hugging booth, although with Joss, you never know. While tickets have apparently been on sale for a few weeks, they’re shockingly still available as I write this they sold out while I was writing this, partially due to an early-day Twitter update that spread across the Boston-verse, and a Newbury Comics email. Essentially rendering the preceding paragraph nothing but a tease. Sorry ’bout that.
If you’ve been following director Edgar Wright’s blog, you know that filming for his on-screen adaptation of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim comics is underway, and he’s been teasing us daily with random images from the set. Well, Saturday’s entry was for the music fans. Two columns of post-it notes with band initials on them: From the comic, we’ve got fictional bands “SBO” (Scott’s band Sex Bob-Omb), “CATB” (Crash and the Boys), and “TCAD” (The Clash at Demonhead). The rest of the initials include “Bss”, “KT”, “MP”, “DN”, and the hard-to-guess “M” and “C”. Since the entire affair is so Toronto-centric, I’m going to assume “Bss” is for Broken Social Scene, and since Metric has already been mentioned in association with the film, let’s cross off the “M”. The others? Guesses are welcome. But what does the grid mean? A simple list of all the music? Or does it match up fictional bands with the real bands that will be providing their sounds? In which case: BSS would be Crash and the Boys; Metric would be The Clash at Demonhead (which makes sense, given the matching female lead singer/keyboardist of those bands). Food/sounds for thought. Bring it on.
Had enough time to digest that lots-to-swallow Battlestar Galactica finale yet? Given the near-instantaneous speed of view-review-analyze-criticize-recriticize that happens nowadays (thanks, internet!), you may have had enough reaction and reaction-to-the-reaction already, less than a week later. But if you haven’t, here’s a list of my favorite follow-ups to the two-hour conclusion of the sometimes-great-usually-good-occasionally bad sci-fi series…
Creator/writer Ron Moore’s farewell blog post A report from the final episode’s cast screening The Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s Q&A with Ron Moore. Alan Sepinwall from the Star-Ledger has a Q&A with Moore as well. The New York Times writes up the finale, along with the special Battlestar Galactica-fueled panel discussion that took place at the United Nations a couple weeks back. You can watch the two hour video of that UN presentation right here. The Chicago Tribune’s Maureen Ryan writes up the finale. The SFGate’s Tim Goodman reviews the finale at his Bastard Machine. Here’s Entertainment Weekly’s finale recap. EW’s PopWatch blog wonders what’s next for sci-fi on television? NY Magazine’s Vulture entertainment blog asks if the finale answered certain questions. Answer: Kinda. And when I want to talk teevee, I head to the TV Forum at the VHive, where you can find a healthy BSG discussion (both pro-finale and con, and everything in between). Start here.
TONIGHT! I’m heading to catch John Vanderslice vs. John Darnielle at the Somerville Theatre, for what I assume will be the polar opposite of a musical cage match. Expect shared songs, witty banter, and an overall air of mutual admiration. Will it be enough to fully exorcise any lingering pretension that Bono and his boys may have left behind on the theater’s stage? Yes, I do believe it will.
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