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Federico Guarascio: Mining the Senses through Film

In Film, The Menu by Quiet LunchLeave a Comment

Film Producer Federico Guarascio seeks to make the hidden apparent. His intuitive style of film production spans across both his art films and short documentaries, linking the human experience to a higher philosophical worldview. From his art film projects to his work as part of the Brooklyn Film Festival-winning team behind The Fourth Kingdom, Guarascio explores the diverse range of …

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Kwesi Abbensetts Publishes Poems.

In Film, The Menu by Akeem K. Duncan.Leave a Comment

The multifaceted Kwesi Abbensetts recently released Poems. A film about a couple traveling through Jamaica, Poems is a far cry from your average artsy cinematic offering. Poems doesn’t break the rules, it simply ignores them. Poems possesses an enduring but delicate dichotomy that teeters on the edge while still remaining tethered to a safe, warm place that could only exist …

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5 Shows That Made White People Move to NYC.

In Film, The Menu by Akeem K. Duncan.Leave a Comment

Let us start by addressing the term “white people.” In no way are we attempting to be derogatory when we use this term. We are simply referring to migrating caucasians. But beware! This article will not kowtow to white fragility and will, in all, be an observant joyride of pop culture and sociogeographical trends. In New York City, as well …

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The Others: What Really Happened to Charles Stewart?

In Film, The Menu by Akeem K. Duncan.24 Comments

The Others is a classic horror film with an famous twist that never gets stale. Although The Others partly mirrors the groundbreaking twist of M. Night Shyamalan’s Sixth Sense, the film’s nuanced narrative and neoclassical pace has made it a standout not only in the horror genre, but in cinema overall. Alejandro Amenábar’s third large film, The Others won eight …

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Get into the LOOP with who's who in TIME BASED MEDIA

In Film, The Menu, Visual Arts by Nico KosLeave a Comment

This is the best fair I have ever been to. Staged across three floors of the Almanac Hotel, LOOP Barcelona Fair (20-22 November) sits within the context of LOOP Festival which takes place across multiple venues (Galleries, Foundations, Museums) throughout the city 12 – 22 November. Established in 2003 at the dawn of hyper-connectivity (two years before YouTube), this is …

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Fire on the Hill

In Film, The Menu, Visual Arts by Eben ParkerLeave a Comment

Fire on the Hill chronicles the struggles of the urban cowboys of South Central LA. Coming from a community ravaged by gang violence and drug addiction, many found an escape in horseback riding and rodeo games. However, when a fire damaged the urban stable beyond repair, the riders are forced to fight to regain what they lost and reflect on …

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At Eternity’s Gate

In Film, The Menu, Visual Arts by Jamie ValentinoLeave a Comment

The success of painter-turned-filmmaker Julian Schnabel’s biopic At Eternity’s Gate depends on who you are asking. Someone expecting exciting revelations or fresh insight on Vincent Van Gogh would most likely be disappointed, however, Schnabel never made such claims. Though the film has been criticized for merely continuing to stir the already existing pot of mysteries haunting the memory of the artist, its approach …

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Boy Erased

In Film, The Menu, Visual Arts by Max FergusonLeave a Comment

“What makes a man a man?” Sykes yells with a cadence that switches the ‘h’ and ‘w’ in ‘what.’ He yells this at a row of boys and girls, all homosexual, all wrong in the eyes of the program they are currently forced to attend. The program is attempting to change them, and if you’ve paid attention to the news …

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Private Life

In Film, Visual Arts by Eben ParkerLeave a Comment

When people talk about waning movie theater attendance, in my mind I attribute the phenomenon to a decline in the quality of the movies we’re being shown. To compensate for lazy storytelling, producers rely on showy effects and preexisting properties. Ironic then that Private Life, which so beautifully breaks this mold, was not released in Theaters, but on Netflix. Private …

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Brampton’s Own

In Film, The Menu, Visual Arts by Max FergusonLeave a Comment

BIG LEAGUE ROMANCE for the WORLD SERIES Audiences love having room to explore an array of different meanings in movies. Because outside of the filmmaker’s point of view, there is no “most accurate” permutation. The possibility for messages and personal attachments creates a specific accessibility for a movie viewer, and Brampton’s Own tackles this game of connotation in a much …

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The Last Suit

In Film, The Menu, Visual Arts by Max FergusonLeave a Comment

    I often allow a movie to marinate for a couple days before I say anything about it. If a friend asks how it was or wants my opinion I say I do not know. However, my experience with The Last Suit was different. I knew exactly how the film impacted me the second the screen faded to black, …

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So Much to Do!

In Film, The Menu, Visual Arts by Jennifer ParkerLeave a Comment

Things you can do this weekend in NYC: Run to the East Village and hear Private Siren at Coney Island Baby tonight at 730, grab a pizza and be home in time to catch Wyeth on PBS by 10:00. With me so far? Then tomorrow night, go to IFC and see a double feature of the Hal Ashby doc and …

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Susanne Bartsch: On Top

In Film, Visual Arts by Jennifer ParkerLeave a Comment

Whether Susanne Bartsch was anointed or appointed “Queen of the Night” and patron saint of LGBTQ advocacy and inclusion is no less important than her ability to throw a rockus party where the only criteria for entry is making the effort to be fabulous. Face it, we all want to feel special and no one wants to be turned away …

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Graves – A Web Series to Die For

In Crumbs, Film, The Menu by Jennifer ParkerLeave a Comment

The web series that I’m into at the moment is Graves which is about a group of friends who are about to say goodbye to their twenties (yeah, my first thought was grow a pair, try saying goodbye to your forties, fuckers, but I’m trying to remain empathetic in the latter half of 2018) and are living in a small …

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Ideal Home

In Film, The Menu, Visual Arts by Jennifer ParkerLeave a Comment

Yo, it is 20-freaking-18 and I know one thing for sure. The Ideal Home if you believe in fairies, leprechauns and unicorns may indeed exist but no one is sure what that magical construct looks like. What kind of parents make an ideal home? No clue. What I do believe is that no one starts off thinking that they are …

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You Can Go Shave Your Back Now: Page Six Has the Gall to Tell The Olsen Twins They Should Smile More in Photos

In Fashion, Film by Genna Rivieccio1 Comment

While we’re all well aware that anything the New York Post does is going to be completely tone deaf a result of its natural conservatism as mandated by Rupert Murdoch, there were some articles we never could have imagined being published in 2018, chief among them one about Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen–in “honor” of their birthday on June 13 no …

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Summer 1993-The Timelessness of Loss

In Film, The Menu, Visual Arts by Jennifer ParkerLeave a Comment

Memory is unreliable, facts are not. Summer 1993 takes us back to a time when AIDS was a death sentence and children whose parent died of AIDS-related illnesses were orphans and bore the stigmata of a disease that was sexually transmitted. Feelings like memories are not visible yet both palpable and ephemeral. We think we remember how we felt, how …

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Won’t You Be My Neighbor– I’m sorry, I just can’t but you should

In Film, The Menu by Jennifer ParkerLeave a Comment

I can’t do it. I just can’t bring myself to see Won’t You Be My Neighbor. the documentary about Fred Rogers and his children’s show, “Mister Rogers’, Neighborhood.” The film is totally legit. It has Academy Award®-winning filmmaker Morgan Neville (20 Feet from Stardom) directing a documentary about a subject audiences think they know everything about but evidently, do not. The …

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To A More Perfect Union: U.S. V. Windsor – Another Year, Another Decision

In Film, The Menu by Jennifer ParkerLeave a Comment

From the moment you decide to have a wedding and not elope it can be a shit show of details. The wedding industrial complex includes shelves devoted to magazines at newsstands, television shows like, Say Yes to the Dress, themed weddings, destination weddings, religious, civil and skydiving ceremonies, and an entire jewelry racket to navigate.  Weddings rank right up there …

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Master of None’s Eric Wareheim is a Master of Wine

In Film, Pie Hole, The Menu by Danny BrodyLeave a Comment

Eric Wareheim is a funny fucking guy. His gangly, goofy looks have propelled his comic adventures into SpaceX territory on groundbreaking shows like “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!”, while his endearing kookiness has helped make season two of “Master of None”, Aziz Ansari’s Netflix hit, an absurdist journey of deranged sanity and brolicious indulgence. Wareheim is truly silly, …

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HBO’s Fahrenheit 451 is All Smoke With No Fire

In Crumbs, Film, Literature by Alcy LeyvaLeave a Comment

There was a moment during the HBO film adaptation of the Ray Bradbury classic Fahrenheit 451 that I audibly groaned. Up until that point, I had been enjoying seeing the establishment of this dystopia and the struggle of it’s characters come to grips with its oppressiveness. There was subtle social commentary sprinkled here and there, and I enjoyed connecting the …

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Sex and the City Isn’t As Irrelevant As Its Current Detractors (Sarah Jessica Parker Included) Are Making It Out to Be

In Film, The Menu by Genna RivieccioLeave a Comment

As even Sarah Jessica Parker cowers to the juggernaut of gender fluidity and racial inclusivity that has rendered all pop culture offerings of the past utterly obsolete, one can’t deny that there are still many beacons of truth contained within the show that made daft white girls everywhere want to move to New York. And yes, Carrie Bradshaw (Parker) was the …

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Sara Driver: For Real

In Film, The Menu, Visual Arts by Jennifer ParkerLeave a Comment

Sara Driver is one of the most relevant and underappreciated filmmakers of a generation. Take Boom For Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat, her documentary piecing together the life of an artist and friend before he became famous. Driver who has witnessed decay and regrowth in New York City since being a grad student at NYU circa Jim …

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Tribeca: It Wasn’t only a Film Festival

In Film, The Menu, Visual Arts by Jennifer ParkerLeave a Comment

Driver Ed (the first three episodes now streaming on Vimeo – less than a ten-minute commitment) is a woke variation on witty web programming in the age of content overload. Ed is an all but agoraphobic introvert borderline recluse who has been in an online relationship for two years with the girl of his dreams who he’s about to meet …

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5 Things We Learned From the Westworld Season 2 Premiere (And 3 Things We Didn’t)

In Film, Marry + Screw + Kill by Alcy LeyvaLeave a Comment

Sunday night was the premiere of “Journey Into the Night”- the first episode of the HBO hit show Westworld’s second season. The show’s writers (Jonathan Nolan, Lisa Joy, and Halley Wegryn Gross) spent the better part of 2016 crafting an extremely tight story throughout the span of the first season. Weaving its characters through the vicious and violent world of …

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Tribeca Film Festival: Docs to Watch

In Film by Jennifer ParkerLeave a Comment

Tribeca is probably one of the most curated film festivals in the best of ways for everyone but cinephiles who have to make a decision about how to be two places at once. For documentary junkies, you might as well put a blindfold on, spin around three times and pin a tail on the schedule. There are too many stand-outs …

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Don’t Pass Over Pass Over

In Film by Jennifer ParkerLeave a Comment

What do you get when you combine Waiting for Godot, current American race issues, and Biblical lore into a narrative that’s at times hilarious, suspenseful and quirky? You get Antoinette Nwandu’s Pass Over, produced in 2017 by Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre and directed by Spike Lee. The direction delivers the intensity of Nwandu’s play—given life by actors Julian Parker and Jon …

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Negotiating with Nature. (Film Review)

In Crumbs, Film, The Actual Factual by Genna RivieccioLeave a Comment

Negotiating with Nature fully captures today’s main issue: mankind’s current Weltanschauung clashes with the way nature works. Filmmaker Stefan van Norden has the lyrical objectivity and open-minded poetry to lead audiences through a narrative of awakening. This suave documentary is an ode to nature and a call to action for the natural environment’s renewal and survival of all living beings. …

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Ready Player One: The Modern Day Coin-Op

In Crumbs, Film by Alcy LeyvaLeave a Comment

As you can tell from my reviews for Pacific Rim: Uprising and A Wrinkle In Time, films which use nostalgia or adaptations of popular kid’s books can be a double-edged sword. On one hand, you have the happy thoughts and all of the warmth that comes along with a trip down memory lane. On the other, you have the realization that …

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Top SXSW Docs: The Cook, a Music Icon, his DJ and Six Documentaries

In Film by Jennifer ParkerLeave a Comment

Some SXSW Highlights The 2018 Tribeca Film Festival is a few weeks away from beginning on April 18 with a slate of over 550 films and talks to navigate and expected attendance over 150K people.  It follows a hiccup after South by Southwest. SXSW or as actor/comedian Nick Offerman calls it, sexswa is a conference, exhibition and interactive, film, music and …

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Where Homage Meets Understanding: What Pacific Rim: Uprising Gets Wrong

In Film, Marry + Screw + Kill by Alcy LeyvaLeave a Comment

There’s a moment in the third act of Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018, dir. Stevens DeKnight), right in the middle of its thunderous final battle, where a character runs by a giant mecha statue right in the heart of a Tokyo. This moment single-handedly ruined the whole movie for me. Yes, I had already been engaged by its metal munching, monster-crunching …

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The Case for The Neurotic Quest for Serenity

In Film by Jennifer ParkerLeave a Comment

Imagine you’re a “medium-pretty” actress who is always worried about losing her role to another actress, not hard, right? Turn that worry into a full-blown, post-apocalyptic, Mad Max- like reoccurring nightmare complete with costumes and stunt people and you begin to understand the depth of Kika’s anxiety. In her non-dream life, she is being stalked by a super-fan, Filipão. She’s …

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Just A Wrinkle: Why Disney’s Newest Adaptation Shows the Flaws of Bringing Classics to Theaters

In Film, Marry + Screw + Kill, The Actual Factual by Alcy LeyvaLeave a Comment

When it was announced that Disney was finally bringing a film adaptation of bring the beloved classic “A Wrinkle in Time” to the big screen, fans rejoiced. Adding Ava DuVernay (director of the 2015 film Selma) to the fold as the director seemed liked icing on the cake. With DuVernay’s eye and a Disney budget, it was safe to bank …

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Leaning into the Wind

In Film by Jennifer ParkerLeave a Comment

There are more than a few ways to go about making a documentary about an artist. There’s the dead artist documentary, the living artist documentary and what he (and maybe every once in a while, she) has done thus far with his life—either pre-success or post and then there’s the slice-of-life look. The beauty of the latter is that context …

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Vieno James | Artist of the Black Sun

In Film by Jennifer ParkerLeave a Comment

New York-based artist Vieno James exudes a raw sensuality that mirrors the art he makes and the materials he utilizes in his work. Juxtaposing stucco framing against the silks and other fabrics Vieno procured from his travels to Italy, Kuwait, and Egypt, he blurs the line between painting and sculpture. There’s a calmness, physicality, and hint of theater to James’ …

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The Beauty of Culture and Conflict in Marvel’s Black Panther

In Film, Marry + Screw + Kill by Alcy LeyvaLeave a Comment

There were a few moments while watching Black Panther (2018, dir. Ryan Coogler) in which I found myself laughing out loud in the theater, and it wasn’t because there was anything particularly humorous happening on screen. I mostly laughed because I wondered how director Ryan Coogler was able to accomplish something so simple and yet still unheard of during my …

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The Party, Not So Black and White | Film Review

In Film by Jennifer ParkerLeave a Comment

Unpack this: You do look slightly ministerial in that pinny—in a 21st century, post-modern, post, post, feminist sort of way. Says Patricia Clarkson’s character, April to her BFF, Janet, albeit the woman who is about to prove that you can still get your ephemeral feelings in a world of hurt when you find out that your husband has been keeping secrets …

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Film Poetics: Spotlight on Guillermo del Toro

In Film, Marry + Screw + Kill by Alcy LeyvaLeave a Comment

“Film poetics” is a term which runs parallel to the David Bordwell theory of the “historical poetics of cinema” in that it looks at the specifics of film production. Film poetics takes this a step further in stating that everything that goes into a film (set design, writing, lighting, wardrobe) harmonizes with the vision of its director to create one …

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The Big Picture | Faces Places (Review)

In Film, Visual Arts by Jennifer ParkerLeave a Comment

Faces Places is the little documentary that could. Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, the filmmakers transform the quotidian into objects of fascination. There’s an inherent narcissism about making a film about the process of making art yet the subjects are so lacking in ego yet charming that it’s a delight to watch. JR and Agnès Varda …