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New music from Dan Nobles and Graveljaw Keaton, CW Store shows
Dan Nobles: New album Loud Love out now
Loud Love is “a passion project 3 years in the making, detailing my musings about the world from my struggles with disability to the joy of finding the love of my life,” said singer/songwriter Dan Nobles on his new website for the album.
Haunted Mansion, The Beanie Bubble, Talk to Me, Sympathy for the Devil and more
The Beanie Bubble **
Anyone who has spent the past 15-plus years enjoying the wildly imaginative music videos for the band OK Go might reasonably be tingly with anticipation over the feature-filmmaking debut by the band's frontman/frequent video director Damian Kulash, Jr. And that makes it even more of a bummer that it continues this year’s weirdest cinematic trend—consumer product origin stories—with far too little unique spark. Kulash and his co-director/spouse/ex-SNL writer Kristin Gore tell the story behind the 1990s Beanie Baby phenomenon and company founder Ty Warner (Zach Galifianakis), told through the eyes of (fictionalized versions of) three key women in his life: initial business partner Robbie (Elizabeth Banks); intern-turned-website guru Maya (Geraldine Viswanathan); and Ty’s fiancée Sheila (Sarah Snook).
Barbie, Oppenheimer, Stephen Curry: Underrrated, They Cloned Tyrone
Barbie ***
On the one hand, all the credit in the world to Greta Gerwig for having the boundless imagination to come up with at least a dozen different ideas for how to make Mattel’s iconic gal-on-the-go doll into an actual movie; on the other hand, I wish she hadn’t tried to fit all of them into the same movie. It opens with one stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) abruptly losing her perpetual “best day ever” sunny disposition, necessitating a trip from Barbie Land to the Real World—with bleached-blond Ken (Ryan Gosling) along for the ride—to find out why a breach has developed between the two planes of existence.
Christopher Nolan delivers fascinating filmmaking for an enigmatic character study
“Nobody knows what you believe,” says physicist Edward Teller (Benny Safdie) to his Los Alamos supervisor, Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) late in writer/director Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer; “do you?” It plays a bit like a thesis statement for Nolan’s character study, which has to navigate a tricky path in peeling back the layers of the complicated man who shepherded the atomic bomb into existence, yet spent the later years of his life arguing for more cautious approaches to developing nuclear weapons.
Utah Is For Lovers Festival, City Weekly Store concert ticket offers
Utah is For Lovers Festival July 21 @ Granary Live
Granary Live is a brand-spankin- new venue, but boy does it have some good acts coming through this summer.
Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One, The Miracle Club, Bird Box Barcelona and more
Bird Box Barcelona ***
Contemporary “brand extensions” are generally content to offer more of the same; this “sidequel” set in the world of the 2018 Netflix hit Bird Box instead opts to take the premise in a genuinely audacious direction. In the wake of the mysterious global arrival of strange entities that causes spontaneous suicide in anyone who gazes upon them, Sebastián (Mario Casas) and his 11-year-old daughter Anna (Alejandra Howard) wander the streets of Barcelona, trying to find other bands of survivors.
Biosphere ***1/2
More than a decade after co-starring in the brilliant Humpday, co-writer/co-star Mark Duplass—with co-writer Mel Eslyn making her feature directing debut—returns to similar territory exploring masculinity and male friendships in this funky sci-fi comedy.
