Page 30 - Stop Making News Today

The guest introduces the film and explains why it means so much to them during a Q&A prior to the screening.  Stop Making Sense opens with lead singer David Byrne walking on to an empty stage with just a cassette tape player and an acoustic guitar. He performs track Psycho Killer to a backing track, and as the concert progresses more band members join him on stage. The groups set includes  Burning Down the House, Life During Wartime, Once in a Lifetime and Girlfriend Is Better, a...

A neon sign depicting an Ox is seen at a mall on Feb. 9, 2021, in Manila, Philippines. (Ezra Acayan/Getty Images) Check out a drive-in comedy show. Celebrate the Year of the Ox. Tune into a Black History Month celebration. Sip martinis with Nick and Nora. Peep some options for poon choi and heart-shaped pizzas for the holday weekend. Friday, Feb. 12 - Thursday, Feb. 25 Judas and the Black Messiah Cinelounge Drive-In 1625 N. Las Palmas Blvd., Hollywood Writer-director Shaka King brings the stor...

A dazzling blend of greatest-hits show, avant-garde ballet and timely political statement, David Byrne’s 2018 American Utopia tour was a natural candidate for an extended Broadway encore. Shot in late 2019 and premiered on HBO in October, Spike Lee’s film of Byrne’s sold-out Hudson Theater run is respectfully faithful to the stage performance, with a few deft embellishments. Stripping the stage down to an artfully minimal art-space, Byrne is joined by a multinational ensemble of 11 bare...

Clearly, blockbuster filmmaking is reliant on audiences nostalgia for familiarity, with sequels both beginning and closing the calendar year. The action-comedy sequel Bad Boys For Life was the last major blockbuster released before COVID-19 forced theaters to shut down, and the recent announcement that the comic book tentpole Wonder Woman 1984 is headed to HBO Max has signaled to many that the future of the theatrical experience is all but over. However, just because it was a bad year for stu...

Byrne, Belushi, Modern Mystery and More, Now Available to Stream This weeks recommended streaming titles include American Utopia, Tweet American Utopia 2020 is almost over. I shudder to even write that out for all to see, for fear of tempting fate. Doing so does seem like an invitation for the universe to step in and remind us that our attempts to demarcate the passage of time are a desperate coping mechanism for scrambling and destructive primates made cruelly conscio...

The Assistant, 2020(Film still) 2020 gave us a year of kind cinema when we needed it most – here are our independent and arthouse highlights December 18, 2020 One impact of Covid-19 has been that many major tentpole films were delayed until next year. Film festivals were cancelled, meaning many independent films lost out on an important showcase. However, some film festivals, such as the London Film Festival, progressed, holding a combination of virtual screenings and socially distanced event...

In 1979, David Byrne predicted Netflix. “It’ll be as easy to hook your computer up to a central television bank as it is to get the week’s groceries,” he told NME’s Max Bell, sitting in a Paris hotel considering the implications of Talking Heads’ dystopian single ‘Life During Wartime’. He predicted the Apple Watch in that interview too: “[People will] be surrounded by computers the size of wrist watches.” And he foresaw surveillance culture and...

18 Dec 2020 If you ever wanted to walk around in the brain of the tireless polymath and comfortably odd performer David Byrne, you would do well to watch American Utopia.  Byrne has previously brought his powerful tenor and angular frame to the screen in Jonathan Demme’s 1984 concert movie Stop Making Sense. Directed by Spike Lee, whose fiction work often contains a sublime marriage of image and music, American Utopia carries that same fiercely kinetic and ebullient energy (there’s even...

OK, so I snuck in one doc. Whether Spike Lees thrillingly immersive record of this sui generis theatrical concert is the best film of 2020 is open to debate. What I can say with absolute certainty is that the hyper-kinetic hymn to community and connection in a politically divided, environmentally ailing world is by far the most therapeutic time I had at a movie in this trying year of isolation and anxiety. Byrnes show was already something special on Broadway, with the silver-topped, professori...

Ella Kemp , December 14th, 2020 09:56 To mark the VOD release of Spike Lees film of David Byrnes American Utopia – Film Editor Ella Kemp and music writer Chris Taylor replicate the post-gig debrief to unpack the new films complex brilliance Irrespective of the year and its circumstances, unprecedented or otherwise, there is magic in the seams of every David Byrne performance. Its a pure, intelligent and often electrifying thing – and never more so than when trusted in the hands of the great...