DUNCAN TRUSSELL Cat’s Cradle, Chapel Hill Friday, April 1, 8 p.m., $20 Duncan Trussell is an out-there kind of guy. Anyone who’s familiar with the Asheville-born, Los Angeles-based comedian, whether on his The Duncan Trussell Family Hour podcast or as the cohost of Syfy’s short-lived Joe Rogan Questions Everything, knows that he can go off […]
Craig D. Lindsey
Bio: Craig Lindsey writes about pop culture for INDY Week. He lives in Raleigh.Link: http://unclecrizzle.tumblr.comTwitter: http://twitter.com/unclecrizzle
Posted inArt
With The Best Show, Scharpling and Wurster Spin Bad Phone Etiquette Into Comedy Gold
SCHARPLING & WURSTER Motorco Music Hall, Durham Saturday, Feb. 27, 9 p.m., $20–$22 When you’re about to interview Tom Scharpling over the phone, you might feel a twinge of anxiety. After all, on The Best Show with Tom Scharpling, he’s made an art out of creatively hanging up on poor, unsuspecting callers. It happened to […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Movie Review: Holocaust Horrors Haunt the Margins of the Excruciating Son of Saul
SON OF SAUL Opening Friday Update: After press time, Son of Saul‘s local release was delayed until Friday, Feb. 26. The Hungarian drama Son of Saul, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes last year and is tipped for best foreign film at the Oscars, deliberately gives an unusually narrow view of the Holocaust. Virtually […]
Posted inArt
Lily Tomlin Reinvented the “One-Man Show” for Women like Margaret Cho
LILY TOMLIN Carolina Theatre, Durham Wednesday, Feb. 3, 8 p.m., $37–$155MARGARET CHOGoodnights Comedy Club, Raleigh Thursday, Feb. 4–Saturday, Feb. 6, $25–$38 Lily Tomlin is enjoying a nice career resurgence. Last year, the seventy-six-year-old comedy icon starred as a lesbian poet who takes her granddaughter on a road trip to get money for an abortion in […]
Posted inCulture
Movie review: Todd Haynes’ Carol is a harrowing, exquisite story of forbidden love in the 1950s
Carol★★★★ Now playing With Carol, filmmaker Todd Haynes continues to delve into forbidden love during a tense, conflicted era. In 2002, he had ’50s housewife Julianne Moore flirting with African-American gent Dennis Haysbert (while her husband, Dennis Quaid, was busy failing to suppress his homosexuality) in the period melodrama Far from Heaven. But while that […]
Posted inFilm & Television
A boom year in black cinema
The year started off poorly for black cinema. The critically lauded Martin Luther King Jr. biopic Selma, directed by African-American filmmaker Ava DuVernay, received Academy Award nominations for best song (which it won) and best picture. But it was shut out in all the other major categories. While that looked like a bad omen of […]
Posted inArt
Five things that mattered this year in comedy
Sometimes you have to remind people that, all over the Triangle, there are creative, ambitious comedians determined to make folks in and out of the state take notice. Numerous people and projects made the local scene shine this year. “Ladies Night” was every night. In a year when Amy Schumer became a breakout movie and […]
Posted inArt
Five things that mattered this year in viral media
Believe it or not, the Holderness family’s wacky-ass holiday videos aren’t the only trending topic going viral from around here. There were many times this year, ranging from very silly to very serious, when people from the Triangle got their 15 seconds of social-media fame. #R-E-S-P-E-C-T One of the most delightful viral videos of the […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Brooklyn is a classy, classical and not quite trustworthy immigrant’s tale
BROOKLYN Now playing So lyrical and lush you don’t quite trust what you see, Brooklyn is a classyand classicalpiece of filmmaking. Working from Colm Tóibín’s 2010 novel, Irish director John Crowley (Intermission) and screenwriter Nick Hornby (High Fidelity) capture the melancholy and nostalgia of the book while presenting the sort of elegiac old-school melodrama that […]
Posted inArt
After revolutionizing TV by co-creating The Daily Show, Lizz Winstead still serves up timely satire
LIZZ WINSTEAD Friday, Nov. 20, 8:30 p.m., $20 Cat’s Cradle 300 E. Main St., Carrboro 919-967-9053 www.catscradle.com One wonders if comedian Lizz Winstead ever feels like Ice Cube, who once rapped, “I started this gangsta shit / And this the motherfuckin’ thanks I get?” But in Winstead’s case, replace “gangsta” with “fake news.” Nearly 20 […]