PopSmart

Sunday offers us the first-ever Georgia Author Book Bash, presented by Atlanta magazine and the Literary Center of the Margaret Mitchell House. The event will take place from 4-7 p.m. at the Margaret Mitchell House. Tickets are $15 general admission, $10 members. Guests can schmooze with the LL (local literati) on the front lawn and wrestle them to the grass for an autograph. There’ll be hors d’oeuvres, live jazz (as opposed to dead jazz) and a cash bar.

One question: How the hell is anyone going to be able to meet and greet 50 authors, much less get their John Hancock on their books? Good luck trying.

The Big 50 in attendance is about as impressive a list of local authors as you’ll find this side of the AJC Decatur Book Festival, and even then. The names are so obvious and familiar, I’m almost embarrassed to mention them — although it does give me an excuse to provide cool hyperlinks to coverage of several of them. For example, there’s former CL Fiction Contest judges Joshilyn Jackson and David Fulmer, as well as Mike Luckovich, Bill Osinski, Ferrol Sams, Goldie Taylor and Tina McElroy Ansa. And of course there’s CL’s own Hollis Gillespie, whose new book, Trailer Trashed: My Dubious Efforts Toward Upward Mobility, is due out Aug. 1.

It’s also a chance to check out our sleeper pick, Gay and Lesbian Atlanta, by Wesley Chenault and Stacy Braukman of the Atlanta History Center for Arcadia Publishing’s “Images of America” series. It’s quite the trip down memory lane, broken down into four chapters/epochs: “Unconventional Lives and Ambiguous Identities: 1900-1940,” “Quiet Accommodation: 1940-1970,” “Parties, Politics, and Pride: 1970-1990″ and “Collective Power and Culture Wars: 1990-2000.” Nice way to get in some infotainment before next week’s Atlanta Pride.

(Image courtesy Arcadia Publishing)

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We all love Film Love, the ongoing cinematic series from Andy Ditzler’s Frequent Small Meals that looks into the nooks and crannies of more independently minded movie-making in a way that’s both entertaining and informative.

The Film Love blisses out on July 25 at Eyedrum with a twofer titled “The Trick of Disaster,” which looks at the domino effect of destruction. Showtime is 8 p.m.

First up is Buster Keaton’s 1920 short film “One Week,” in which his lead character tries to build a house (using a makeshift kit) for his new bride. Here’s a great clip from the short (and don’t be fooled by the racy bath shots; it was pre-Hays Code, after all).

Next up is the ingenious 30-minute short by artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss, “The Way Things Go,” which was a lab experiment of chain-reaction delights as objects constantly have a surprising impact on one another. “The entire structure slowly destroys itself before our eyes, and never once do we see a human onscreen,” Ditzler writes. “With its hilarious (and oddly suspenseful) encounters between objects, “The Way Things Go” has amazed and delighted audiences for twenty years, and has been compared to everyone from Rube Goldberg to Alfred Hitchcock.

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Remember waaay back in our June 4 issue, where we ran my review of the not-terribly-charming Hats Off, filmmaker Jyll Johnstone’s loving profile of 93-year-old bit-part actress Mimi Weddell? (Of course you do!) Well, as is often the case with independent movies, the release date kept getting pushed back (the first time, after we’d gone to press and printed the review) and back and back until, according to the publicist, it’s actually not going to show in Atlanta. Ever.

With all due respect to Mimi, you didn’t miss much, as I wrote in the review …

Despite her years, and her quaint biography, in Hats Off Weddell becomes little more than a character — someone who happened to be at the right place at the right time. As the movie grinds along, we start to suspect there’s not much else there. While Young@Heart made several performers of a certain age ripe with feeling and depth, Hats Off leaves the viewer wanting to know more.

Young@Heart. Now that’s a movie to watch. Check out Curt Holman’s review. And it’s still playing in Atlanta (at the Tara).

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In this week’s “View from the Couch” DVD column, Charlotte’s Creative Loafing film critic Matt Brunson spans the spectrum of new releases. He takes on new films Definitely, Maybe as well as The Spiderwick Chronicles, Be Kind Rewind and 10,000 B.C., but also has takes on releases of older films such as The Furies and Xanadu.

For me, the most intriguing of the releases is the Criterion Collection’s release of 1950’s The Furies, a darker take on the Western genre and featuring the legendary Walter Huston in his last role and Anthony Mann directing his first Western. It also features one of my all-time favorites, Barbara Stanwyck. Check out this awesome scene. No wonder Matt finds the relationship between the film and Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood.

(Image courtesy The Criterion Collection)

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I reviewed the Actor’s Express production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch in this week’s issue, and while I believe there’s room for improvement, it remains an impressive production. And as I stated in my review, one of the reasons why watching Hedwig is such a compelling experience is because John Cameron Mitchell’s collaboration with Stephen Trask is the most authentic stage rendering of rock music you’ll ever witness. (And before we continue, I don’t count Tommy in this mix; the Who’s rock opera started out as an album.)

There are a lot of reasons for this, some of which speak to how audiences — both gay and straight — related to both traditional musical theater and rock ’n’ roll. The best thing about Hedwig and the Angry Inch is how it can unite all theater-going (and some non-theater-going) audiences. (more…)

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The theme for this year’s AJC Decatur Book Festival could easily be “Bigger, Stronger, Faster.” Bigger, in that its programming has been expanded. Stronger, in that the authors lineup continues to improve in this, the festival’s third year. And Faster, in that, much to the staff’s relief, the lineup is all but set. (Compared to last year at this time, about half the lineup had been confirmed.)

So the organizers could be forgiven for their delighted grins at Monday morning’s press conference, held at the Old Courthouse in Decatur’s Downtown Square to announce the programming. The conference was hosted by co-founder Daren Wang; and the lineup went live on the website later in the morning.

I’ll dispense with the laundry list of big names, but Decatur native and humorist Roy Blount Jr. was on hand to give an idea of the local flavor at the festival. Blount, a regular on the NPR quiz show “Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me!” (carried by WABE on Saturdays at 11 a.m.) has become a fixture at the festival. Some other major names this year include former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins (2001-2003). (Check out his now-famous poem “The Names,” which he read to a joint session of Congress after Sept. 11, 2001.) Other heavyweights include John Dean (pictured) and his new book, Broken Government: How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive and Judicial Branches; Sara Shepard, author of the “Pretty Little Liars” series, who will help kick off the festival’s new “The Escape” programming for teens; and John Bemelmans Marciano, author of Madeline and the Cats of Rome, the first story from the famed “Madeline” series in 50 years. (Marciano is the grandson of the series’ creator, Ludwig Bemelmans.)

OK, so it’s a laundry list. Sue me. The festival runs Aug. 29-31 (Labor Day Weekend) in downtown Decatur.

(For images from the press conference, visit our new Sideshow photo blog.)

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As most of our readers know, our Creative Loafing empire spans the greater Southeast, and one of the many charms of this regional domination is CL Charlotte film critic Matt Brunson and his “View from the Couch” DVD column. In this week’s column, Brunson takes on the Dirty Harry collection, High Noon, Jumper and Under the Same Moon. Here’s his key point about Clint Eastwood’s greatest recurring bad-ass this side of spaghetti Westerns.

On one hand, it’s clear that Harry has little use for liberal laws that protect potential criminals (critic Pauline Kael famously called him a “fascist”), yet the character was championed by the other side for being so decidedly anti-Establishment. (And who among us doesn’t side with Harry when he tortures the guilty Scorpio in order to save a little girl’s life?)

(Image courtesy Amazon.com)

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I reviewed Jellyfish (pictured) and The Singing Revolution this week, but since there was no room for print we decided to publish them as online-only extras. And they’re both worth checking out.

Jellyfish is a quirky little excursion into magic realism by Israeli author-turned director Etgar Keret and his partner, Shira Geffen:

Winner of the 2007 Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, Jellyfish often stays afloat on a visual charm that floods its aquatic metaphors. In the opening shot, we see Batya (a subtly expressive Sarah Adler) standing with her departing boyfriend in front of what looks like an aquarium’s façade. But as he and his truck pull away, so does the background, revealing a Tel Aviv street scene. Reality bites, and much of Jellyfish is spent watching its women struggling to navigate life’s choppier waters.

Then there’s The Singing Revolution, a documentary by James Tusty and Maureen Castle Tusty about the impact of Estonia’s deeply entrenched musical culture on its struggle for independence from the Soviet Union:

That passion is laid out in a methodical but poetic fashion, as [actress Linda] Hunt’s narration explains the nation’s love of music as best heard at its annual Song Festival. The sights and sounds of witnessing 30,000 voices unified in one song – and in particular, the nation anthem born under occupation, “Land of My Fathers” – come off as a moving metaphor. The camera pans and scans the people, young and old, as they defiantly sing for their common identity: “For her a hundred times I shall give my life. You are still alive in my heart.”

Both open today (Friday) at Landmark Midtown Art Cinema.

Here’s the trailer for The Singing Revolution …

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In the world according to Jay Louis, there’s no such thing as too many douchebags. No, not the countless politicos that Jon Stewart likes to skewer on “The Daily Show,” but the tatted-up, hair-spiked, shiny-foreheaded, six-pack-packed, hand-symbol-thrusting, shades-sporting, wife-beater-wearing, tongue-thrusting, hand-gesturing and pec-bearing American men who somehow wind up with really attractive women in living color.

Louis, aka douchebag1, hosts the phenomenally popular website Hot Chicks with Douchebags, in which he and alert readers hip the rest of us “normal” folk to the cheesily over-packaged American men hanging out with women who would seem way out of their league. As popular as the site is, the next logical step would seem to be a book, Hot Chicks with Douchebags (Simon Spotlight Entertainment), which fell into our reluctant hands this week and will hit bookstores July 8. The book’s thesis seems simple enough:

In this book, we will identify every type of ’bag within the douche spectrum, from the youthful stage-1 Fratbags to the polluted, noxious stage-4 DJ Club Douche. We will tap directly into the core of not only how douchebaggery manifests, but also how it corrupts the hottie within its wily, greased-up charms. These unnatural cohabitations must be exposed to the disinfecting light of detailed scrutiny if we have any hope of societal redress.

(more…)

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Emmy-winning actor and favorite Atlantan Leslie Jordan is going to be all over Atlanta this weekend and beyond, all in honor of the recent release of his memoir, My Trip Down the Pink Carpet. The former “Will and Grace” guest performer is one of those guys who’s just funny once he opens his mouth; I firmly believe that he could read the mayor’s budget-cut proposals and get a laugh. (His 2006 interview with Curt Holman proves as much.)

Jordan will be plenty busy over the next few days, starting Saturday with a book-release appearance at Outwrite Books. The reading/signing starts at 7:30 p.m.; admission is free. He follows that up with a two-night stand at the 14th Street Playhouse with his one-man show of the same name, Sunday and Monday at 8 p.m.

Unfortunately, the status of the sitcom “12 Miles of Bad Road” (in which he co-stars) seems hopelessly up in the air, according to this article in the San Francisco Chronicle. Anyone know anything different? Perhaps Leslie will enlighten us, in a way only he can, as he shows in this clip taken during his recent Stonewall Columbus fundraiser.

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