“The ‘Real’ ‘Housewives’ of ‘Atlanta’”
Wednesday, October 8th, 2008
“Image is everything in Atlanta.”
“In Atlanta, money and class give you power.”
“Everybody wants to be in Atlanta. It’s hot!”
These are just a few of the tips I picked up watching the premier of Bravo’s “The Real Housewives of Atlanta” last night. It was all news to me, and I’ve lived in Atlanta my whole life. (Marietta, technically, but if these women — in their 15,000-square-foot mansions in the gated communities of north Georgia — live in Atlanta, then so do I.) I’ve never had money or class or a cake in the shape of a Louis Vuitton bag, but I’ve still managed to scrape by. And it’s definitely true that Atlanta is hot. Sometimes very hot. (more…)





Yesterday marked the release of Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*! by Art Spiegelman, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the Holocaust memoir Maus. Printed in large, 10-inch-by-14-inch format, Breakdowns is, for the most part, a re-release of a collection of strips printed in 1978 with an original run of 5,000. It’s a book within a book, with a facsimile of the original Breakdowns sandwiched between new material. It begins with an illustrated biographical introduction and ending with an afterword by Spiegelman himself — a kind of reflective essay about Breakdowns and how it came about.
Here are some of the titles that come out on DVD today. For more, see Matt Brunson’s View from the Couch column tomorrow.

This week CL Charlotte’s Matt Brunson discusses the DVD releases of Ewan McGregor-Hugh Jackman movie Deception, Iron Man, the special Coppola Restoration of all three Godfather movies and more.

Kerry Howard, or “Big Daddy,” of Cumming, Ga.’s 

This week CL Charlotte film critic Matt Brunson takes a look at 88 Minutes, An American in Paris and more, including that 
Buying car insurance is easy. Happiness is difficult.
This week, CL Charlotte film critic Matt Brunson reviews the Tina Fey comedy (mom-edy, perhaps?) Baby Mama, director Vadim Perelman’s The Life Before Her Eyes, Snow Angels and Young@Heart — all on DVD for the first time — as well as the second collection of the Fox Horror Classics.

This week, CL Charlotte film critic Matt Brunson reviews the special edition release of the Coen brothers’ 1998 The Big Lebowski, as well as the French film Brotherhood of the Wolf, the two-disc edition of Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas and more.