May 13, 2019 - In Review Online

by Sam C. Mac Feature Articles Film Retrospective

Retrospective | Lou Ye: Every Face Is a Mask

May 13, 2019

After a first encounter, Chinese filmmaker Lou Ye seemed ripe for being written off as a Wong Kar-wai copycat — at best an adept craftsman of soft-focus, woozily shot images of beautiful men and women, bathed in shadow, moving kinetically through rain-streaked city streets. The film that suggested this was 2003’s Purple Butterfly, a quixotic, genre-inflected drama that immediately stood-out from the work of Lou’s Sixth Generation contemporaries by virtue of being a period piece. Set in Japanese-occupied Shanghai, in…

by Jonathan Keefe by Josh Hurst Feature Articles Music Rooted & Restless

Rooted & Restless | Issue 3

Our new monthly music feature, Rooted & Restless, finds country music aficionados Josh Hurst and Jonathan Keefe wading into all things Americana, expanding the definition of ‘country’ to incorporate all the permutations that the genre has opened itself up to, especially in recent years.…

May 13, 2019

#KickingtheCanon by Josh Hurst Music

Tom Waits | Mule Variations

There are a couple of ways to apprehend Mule Variations, the twelfth studio album from Tom Waits and the second to be co-written almost entirely by Waits and his wife, Kathleen Brennan. Skeptics might say it’s Waits-by-the-numbers, the closest he’s ever come to formula or…

May 13, 2019