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Finders Keepers ***1/2
It might sound like damning with faint praise—or maybe just plain weird—but this documentary by Bryan Carberry and Clay Tweel is about as richly human an experience as one could hope for in a movie about a custody battle over a mummified, amputated human leg. The real-life tabloid story began with a plane crash in 2004 that cost North Carolina resident John Wood his left leg—which he chose to keep—and blows up into a national story when the contents of the unpaid storage unit in which Wood was keeping it went up for auction, and Shannon Whisnant ended up with the leg when he bought the smoker grill in which it was resting.
New R-W dancer Melissa Younker on this weekend's performances
While the conventions and festivals are ruling over downtown this weekend, there's still many performances happening around the area for those not attending or just aren't interested in what they have to offer. For the people who enjoy dance, Ririe-Woodbury will be bringing back their highly successful showcase Flabbergast, starting tonight at the Capitol Theatre.
The Stanford Prison Experiment ***
A laser focus on the titular, infamous 1971 incident—in which psychologist Dr. Philip Zimbardo (Billy Crudup) recruited students to serve as guards and inmates in a simulated prison in the basement of the Stanford University psychology department—keeps this dark drama intriguing even when it gets too obvious in its nudges at 21st-century events. Director Kyle Patrick Alvarez doesn’t waste time establishing who these 18 young men were before they were randomly assigned one or the other of the two roles, an appropriate choice given the experiment’s entire suggestion that their behavior had little to do with background.
New music from Lamar Holley, Big Sky, Johanna Johanna and more
For those of you who have absolutely no interest in Start SLC or FanX this weekend and are looking for something of a more musical nature, we've got a slew of local albums to talk about this week, along with a release show this weekend for you to check out. We'll start with online releases and the first up is Lamar Holley, a Bountiful singer/songwriter who has been releasing material since 2009.
The Forbidden Room ****
There's a palpable love for the physical medium of film in Guy Maddin's latest, that extends throughout its multiple, dream-like layers of narrative to a celebration of bodies and all their splendor. But it's film itself, and the moving pictures captured on it, that is the star here: the ways in which age and weather distress it, and the wholly new qualities that distress conveys; the ways in which light and tint combine to make beauty; the way images can be manipulated with effects; the things film does to human faces, and the glory of faces on film.
This coming weekend is going to be featuring two different conventions with their own built-in audiences, sitting no less than three blocks from each other. To say that driving downtown between Thursday and Saturday will be a commuter's nightmare is an epic understatement.
Brooklyn ***1/2
Director John Crowley and screenwriter Nick Hornby take the story from Colm Tóibín's brilliant novel in a much more conventionally satisfying direction—but boy do they ever succeed at conventional satisfaction. In 1951 Ireland, young Eilis Lacey (Saoirse Ronan) gets a chance to move to New York and get a job to help her widowed mother.
