Articles by Justin Strout
226 stories found. Showing page 1 of 12.
DVDs Nuts!: Lesser-seen OW-approved titles
10/21/2010 | By Justin Strout
The Electric Chair Here’s a change for this column: I’m recommending a film I haven’t seen. Recently “unearthed” by Wild Eye Releasing, 1985’s The Electric Chair stars Victor Argo (Taxi Driver) as a...[MORE]
Happytown
Happytown | 10/21/2010 | By Billy Manes, Justin Strout
Dear Kendrick Meek, this isn’t easy for us, but we have something we have to tell you: We think you should take one for the team and get out of the goddamned Senate race. Yes, we’re well aware that ...[MORE]
DVDs Nuts!: Lesser-seen OW-approved titles
10/14/2010 | By Justin Strout, William Goss
All My Friends are Funeral Singers At some point in any relatively successful indie band’s career, someone inevitably says, “Let’s make a movie to tie in with the album!” They might shoot some footag...[MORE]
DVDs Nuts!: Lesser-seen OW-approved titles
10/7/2010 | By Justin Strout
Ally McBeal The Complete Fourth Season: Whenever we rant about the need for Glee to finally become a “real show,” this brilliant season of another often irritating, yet more often uplifting, TV phen...[MORE]
Oh my goddess: ELLA Fest organizer Robert Johnson leans on the city’s female artists for strength
9/30/2010 | By Justin Strout
ELLA Fest with Christina Wagner, Amy Steinberg, Raffa & Rainer, Sunny, Lauren Carder & the Multiple Me, the Actomatics and more 5-11 p.m. Friday, Oct. 1-Sunday, Oct. 3 Orlando Brewing, 407-...[MORE]
DVDs Nuts!: Lesser-seen OW-approved titles
9/30/2010 | By Justin Strout
Calvin Marshall Expectation is the theme at bat in this tender coming-of-age film about a less-than-stellar Juco baseball player (the charming Alex Frost) who compensates for his lack of athletic sk...[MORE]
Outside the margins: A stellar South Asian Film Festival lineup just when it’s needed most
9/30/2010 | By Justin Strout
Beyond Bollywood: 16th Annual South Asian Film Festival Saturday, Oct. 2-Monday, Oct. 4 Enzian Theater, 407-629-0054 www.enzian.org $10-$35 It’s an election year, so it should be no surpr...[MORE]
Happytown
Happytown | 9/30/2010 | By Billy Manes, Justin Strout
It was a showdown at the OC Corral last week when the Orange County commission blustered into a dustbowl at its Sept. 21 meeting of the rather large heads. Normally, county commission meetings carry w...[MORE]
Concrete proof: Local rapper Prote-J drops a stellar mixtape debut
9/23/2010 | By Justin Strout
Prote-J Good Hip Hop Meets Radio (self-released) In any performance art, the most important and elusive quality is self-identity; the ability to create with not just any point of view, but one th...[MORE]
What the world needs now: The 8th annual Global Peace Film Festival is here to clear your summer-movie palette
9/23/2010 | By Justin Strout
Global Peace Film Festival Through Sunday, Sept. 26 407-224-6625 www.peacefilmfest.org $8 per screening Main Screening Venues Gallery at Avalon Island 39 S. Magnolia Ave. Plaza Cinema C...[MORE]
Fall Guide: Shell shocked
9/23/2010 | By Justin Strout
Besides “Orlando” or maybe “Tiger Woods, skanks,” few Google search terms conjure local love more than “death, gun range.” Poppin’ a cap in a piece of paper has long been a Florida pastime, but a rece...[MORE]
Fall Guide 2010 - Music
9/23/2010 | By Justin Strout, Caitlin McGill
Sorry, arts. Too bad, sports. Suck it, film. Fall in Orlando belongs to music, and that’s never been more accurate than this year – a jam-packed season of historical proportions that promises to lea...[MORE]
Fall Guide 2010 - Film
9/23/2010 | By Justin Strout
Fall is prestige season at the theaters, the time of year every movie studio has waited for to unleash the potential Oscar nominees they’ve held in their pockets all year. But while it might be te...[MORE]
DVDs Nuts!: Lesser-seen OW-approved titles
9/16/2010 | By Justin Strout
Afterschool A brilliant take on modern young detachment, then-college-age director Antonio Campos (the film made the festival circuit a couple years back) brings to sobering, fascinating life the tal...[MORE]
Back to black: 20 years after Public Enemy's masterpiece, frontman Chuck D looks back in everlasting anger
9/16/2010 | By Justin Strout
1989 was the number. That summer, the national conversation on race had reached a boiling point. Spike Lee’s film Do the Right Thing threw a garbage can through the country’s safe-distance window, dem...[MORE]
DVDs Nuts!: Lesser-seen OW-approved titles
9/9/2010 | By Justin Strout
My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done A ton of talented people (Michael Shannon, Chloë Sevigny, Willem Dafoe, David Lynch) hop aboard Werner Herzog’s latest crazed passion project and pay for it dearly,...[MORE]
Happytown
Happytown | 9/9/2010 | By Billy Manes, Justin Strout
We’re off to see the Wizard! Well, we were, anyway. In our ongoing attempt to keep you apprised of all of the comings and goings of the still somewhat theoretical Dr. Phillips Center for the Performin...[MORE]
DVDs Nuts!: Lesser-seen OW-approved titles
9/2/2010 | By Justin Strout
Cinevardaphoto Three short films completed about 20 years apart between 1963-2004, and gathered together in this beautiful, complex collection, are separately fascinating but tedious when strung toge...[MORE]
Happytown
Happytown | 9/2/2010 | By Billy Manes, Justin Strout
With everybody’s post- primary-night hangovers firmly in check, U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson – who now gleefully faces stodgy old (alleged) woman-hater Daniel Webster in the November general election – mad...[MORE]
All smiles: Regional pop act Rabbit! records the anti-album
8/26/2010 | By Justin Strout
Rabbit! Connect the Dots (Rock Salt) “Jellybean, jellybean/You’re my automatic sunshine machine.” “Who’s got the magic? I do!” “I’ve got a brand-new chap stick that you think tastes like grape....[MORE]
226 stories found. Showing page 1 of 12.
173 reviews found. Showing page 1 of 9.
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
Film review: by Justin Strout | 8/11/2010
When he first screened 2006’s defining cinematic culture shocker Borat, comedy writer George Meyer turned to Judd Apatow and said, “I feel like someone just played me Sgt. Pepper’s for the first time....[MORE]
I’m Still Here
Film review: by Justin Strout | 10/21/2010
Joaquin Phoenix and Casey Affleck are two young actors who I thoroughly enjoy watching onscreen, especially Affleck. His recent work (Gone Baby Gone, The Killer Inside Me) suggests a thespian with a...[MORE]
Stone
Film review: by Justin Strout | 10/21/2010
It makes a sad kind of sense that stars Edward Norton (Pride and Glory) and Robert DeNiro (City by the Sea) agreed to make Stone, a wholly der-ivative and inconsequential mid-level character drama fea...[MORE]
You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger
Film review: by Justin Strout | 10/14/2010
Like a visit to a beloved senior at a resting home, Woody Allen’s new comedy amounts to a mostly pleasant, sometimes trying afternoon. Now in his mid-70s, Allen is still a good storyteller with brie...[MORE]
Never Let Me Go
Film review: by Justin Strout | 10/7/2010
Never Let Me Go, director Mark Romanek’s adaptation of the highly acclaimed Kazuo Ishiguro novel of the same name, isn’t so much a narrative feature as it is a visual essay: a glossy fashion picto...[MORE]
It’s Kind of a Funny Story
Film review: by Justin Strout | 10/7/2010
In their feature-film debut, 2006’s Half Nelson, writer-director team Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck observed addiction with a high-minded yet thoroughly relatable eye. With Sugar two years later, they a...[MORE]
Catfish
Film review: by Justin Strout | 9/30/2010
This review contains minor spoilers. Graciously appearing from out of nowhere (Rogue Pictures announced its opening only this week and at one theater in Orlando: Regal Waterford Lakes) on the same...[MORE]
Let me in
Film review: by Justin Strout | 9/30/2010
Poor Matt Reeves. When he announced, almost exactly two years ago, that he would be writing and directing an American version of the Swedish vampire film Let the Right One In, he effectively cornere...[MORE]
Jack Goes Boating
Film review: by Justin Strout | 9/30/2010
It would be so easy to dismiss Jack Goes Boating, an adaptation of the Robert Glaudini play in which Philip Seymour Hoffman originally starred in New York, as standard quirky-for-the-sake-of-quirkin...[MORE]
Exit Through The Gift Shop
Film review: by Justin Strout | 9/30/2010
The first half of notorious art prankster Banksy’s documentary, Exit Through the Gift Shop, is a thrilling tour of the evolution of a revolution: street art. Through the untiring camera lens of the ...[MORE]
The Social Network
Film review: by Justin Strout | 9/30/2010
The epic, two-minute trailer for The Social Network, director David Fincher’s take on Facebook’s origin story, begins with snapshots of the website’s various uses – a girl showing off her new tattoo...[MORE]
Bran Nue Dae
Film review: by Justin Strout | 9/23/2010
Reportedly a popular musical in Australia, though it’s difficult to imagine why, Bran Nue Dae is a film adaptation that barely qualifies as either a film or a musical. Written for the screen and d...[MORE]
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
Film review: by Justin Strout | 9/23/2010
There is a moment in director Oliver Stone’s 1987 yuppie manifesto Wall Street, where the film comes to a painful stop. It’s somewhere in between stars Michael Douglas and Charlie Sheen’s exhilarati...[MORE]
Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky
Film review: by Justin Strout | 9/16/2010
From the plainly exclusive title to the lushly designed, lifeless frames, Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky is everything that turns people off of “art-house films.” Not to play fly-over’s advocate, b...[MORE]
The Town
Film review: by Justin Strout | 9/16/2010
Ben Affleck’s second directorial effort, The Town, builds upon the multi-hyphenate’s behind-the-camera debut, 2007’s Gone Baby Gone, and its crack at Bostonian character authenticity. This time it’s...[MORE]
Legendary
Film review: by Justin Strout | 9/9/2010
Earlier this decade, WWE pro wrestling got wise to the fact that their homegrown lugs were using the exposure they got from WWE as a platform to Hollywood action-star success. So CEO Vince McMahon for...[MORE]
Machete
Film review: by Justin Strout | 9/2/2010
Of all the “Look at me!” bids for attention that director Robert Rodriguez hurls at his audience like a hyperactive middle schooler in Machete, the latest in a series of increasingly cheap, film-schoo...[MORE]
The American
Film review: by Justin Strout | 9/2/2010
Dropping mere days after the surprisingly strong opening weekend for Takers, a crime flick called “junk food cinema” by fellow local critic Brian Orndorf – not to mention its bigger, louder brother,...[MORE]
Mao’s Last Dancer
Film review: by Justin Strout | 8/26/2010
Veteran director Bruce Beresford has carved out a three-decade career crafting sturdy, slightly above-average films with just enough pulse and winsomeness to shuffle his audiences out of theaters with...[MORE]
Get Low
Film review: by Justin Strout | 8/19/2010
I care about the people of this town as much as they care about me,” says Felix Bush of the denizens of Roane County, Tenn., in this fictionalization of the true story of a Depression-era hermit who t...[MORE]