Daily Loaf

Valentine’s Day is once again upon us, bringing with it a spike in both florist-related expenses and the bitterness of the lost and the lonely. V-Day also usually comes gift-wrapped with an influx of romance-fueled media, a style exemplified by the star-studded romantic extravaganza creatively titled, you guessed it, Valentine’s Day, directed by Garry Marshall (Pretty Woman).

The holiday itself is rife with stories ranging from passionate love to vile, ugly heartbreak. The film Valentine’s Day does its best to hit those key points and few in between by casting a who’s-who of A-to-D list Hollywood elite in a terrific ensemble. The characters’ tales weave in and out of each other, producing a tapestry of love and lust, of sadness and redemption. But is Valentine’s Day just an example of cramming every recognizable actor onto one screen, or does the movie work as a fun and lighthearted 120 minutes?

Read the rest of this entry »

When you strip away all the pomp and circumstance from rock ’n’ roll — the fashion and politics and drugs and groupies and stardom and burnout — what’s usually left is a few simple chords and a tune you can hum. In the 50-plus years since Chuck Berry, Little Richard, etc. created an art form, rock ’n’ roll music has morphed from a powerful expression of freedom and rebellion into a multi-billion-dollar commodity to be packaged and sold by record company soul-suckers that view artists as cattle and the audience as ignorant rabble worthy only of being led around by the nose or dragged to court. It didn’t used to be this way.

The new film Pirate Radio remembers a time when the music was king. Well, OK, the music and a small handful of outlaw DJs floating just off the coast of Britain, pumping their pirate signal to millions of the Queen’s subjects while royally pissing off the authorities in the process. Pirate Radio isn’t a true story, per se, but elements of it are inspired by real events in 1960s Britain, when a legal loophole allowed unlicensed broadcasters to drop anchor within spitting distance of the mainland and thrill the masses with records by The Kinks, The Rolling Stones and The Who.

Read the rest of this entry »