Results tagged “lies”

What's new and/or interesting on TV this week.

There was very little else for Londonist to be concerned with when the threat of a Tube strike became a very unpleasant reality. The inconvenience was extreme: there aren't many alternatives to the Tube in London despite the best efforts of the Londonist team to get everyone from A to B. Brighter news came in the form of the first ever female Yeoman Warder, or Beefeater as the position is more commonly known, and several smiles as well as lots of cash were raised by some plucky urban ironing. London is apparently full of lies and whales: one of these things is true. We leave that up to you to figure out.

Finished within the last year, this newly-landscaped part of Fairmount Park lies between the Waterworks Restaurant and the Spring Garden Street Bridge, from which the photo was taken.

We told you that we dug Arcade Fire in our preview but we didn't realize how much until we left Arcade Fire's concert on Saturday night. Arcade Fire's show was one of the best shows we have ever been to, hands down. Their mission was, "to uplift fans, combat 'spiritual death' and bring back the hurdy-gurdy." They completed all three of these missions with incredible music, awesome stage presence and an overall kick-ass show....

Filled with sentimental and emotional ballads, Mindy Smith's recent Philly show never seemed to get off the ground. Kicking her show off with "Out Loud," her new single off her second album, Long Island Shores, she seemed to be excited and energized. But with each subsequent song, the energy lessened, an awkwardness grew between Smith and the audience and her songs fell flat. After hearing the final song, "Come to Jesus," we finally realized...

Tom Knox is the frontrunner in the 2007 Democratic primary and, according to the most recent Keystone poll, the one with the momentum behind him. But like so many other things about him, Knox’s accomplishment is less impressive than it first appears. Relying on nothing more than a wealth of contacts in city and state government, a nationally known campaign team (his media guru was profiled in The New Republic, under the headline “Joe Trippi Reinvents Campaigning”), and more money than God and his opponents put together, his campaign managed to overcome a name recognition deficit by flooding the local airwaves with ads. No doubt this was a risky strategy—how could they be sure that Philadelphians would spend time watching television?

Films: Dead Daughters, Trigger Man, Severance, The Burglar, Ten Canoes

Dear Shoe Makers:

This is not a book recommendation, it is a call to arms.

Year: 1895

Before I begin my review of to make sure to visit the restroom on their way into the theater. The film clocks in at just under 150 minutes, without previews. Now that that's out of the way...

...Spokesfailures: We will never get tired of hearing about what a failure at life K-Fed is. (Via What Would Tyler Durden Do?)

“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.” From the first sentence, Beckett’s youngest and funniest novel, Murphy, proves to be so quintessentially Beckett that, as a friend aptly analogized over coffee one day this week: “It’s as if that sentence were Beckett’s body diced, dipped in bourbon, cured and later left to brew in hot water until some old expert could declare it, a perfect cup of something Beckett.”

Remember how you used to have to come up with your own lies and excuses for your friends/parents/significant others/employers when you weren't where you were supposed to be, when you were supposed to be there? Pain in the ass, wasn't it?

The best of the internet, chopped into tiny bits and grilled for your enjoyment.

What do you think of when you hear the word "Genesis?" A book of the Bible? A planet forbidden? Or a cheesy '80s and '90s pop group fronted by Phil Collins? If so, there's a whole other Genesis just waiting for you to discover. In the early '70s, the band Genesis was fronted by Peter Gabriel, and was writing and performing incredible, epic, complex, theatrical, beautifully orchestrated, metal-style progressive rock story-songs. Genesis in that form sadly no longer exists (although Tony Banks, Michael Rutherford, and Phil Collins are announcing officially at a press conference on November 7th that they're getting back together and going on tour next year; here's hoping there are some Philly dates - and that they play some of their '70s stuff), but we do have their old albums to listen to (classics like Nursery Cryme, Foxtrot, and The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway), and for the live experience, we have The Musical Box.

Right on the heels of last Thursday's PECO-related, underground explosion, another underground explosion left many residents without power...this time in Northeast Philadelphia. Flying manhole covers may well become a new thing to watch out for when you're ambling about town.

The best of the internet, squirted out in flavorful neon globules, just for you.

It's been an incredibly busy couple of weeks, and now that that's all over, Phillyist is entertaining out-of-town guests. So we thought we'd cut a few corners and keep things as concise as possible today.

- Always feel like somebody's watching you? Come this May your paranoid delusions might be based in truth; it's then that voters will have a chance to vote on whether or not police surveillance cameras should be posted around the city.

It's not that we don't like watching Allen Iverson play. The guy is an absolute warrior - wants to play hurt, wants to play when the Sixers are up, wants to play when the game's close, wants to play when they're getting hammered. Time and time again, he gets knocked to the court, and you just wait for him not to get up, because he's not the burliest guard in the league, after all, but then, there he is, scraping himself off the floor and hobbling to the free throw line.

“This is Shakespeare, not the Sopranos.” So says Diana (Glenn Close), at the beginning of Heights, critiquing a pair of Macbeth-modernizing acting students for replacing the traditional dagger with a revolver. The Scottish Play provides a leitmotif for the film, filled as it is with secret plots and pacts entered into by New Yorkers seeking power, opportunity, or pleasure. And while the story that follows features neither stabbing nor shooting, it is amply stocked with the emotional bloodlettings of three couples practicing or contemplating infidelity. Broadway diva Diana and her husband seethe under the restraints of their own “open relationship,” he seducing a new understudy while she appraises everyone who crosses her path with a predatory leer. Isabel (Elizabeth Banks) is approached by ex-boyfriends and new career opportunities while her jealous fiancée (James Marsden) worries that a new photography exhibition will dredge up his own past. The photographer (unseen, but looming spectrally over all the proceedings) has meanwhile sadistically deployed his current and choleric journalist boyfriend (John Light) to write a Vanity Fair profile about him by interviewing all his ex-boyfriends.

As each pursues one thread of the story, their paths jaggedly converge on the night of Diana’s birthday party. And while some of the secrets and lies are predictable, they are delivered with an excruciating malice that lends resonance to the film’s sour take on relationships. Others pass through their lives, mostly the collateral damage of the principals’ failed romances. While the primary mood is grim and elegiac, director Chris Terrio and writer Amy Fox have leavened the script with a sly wit, particularly from George Segal as the Rabbi counseling the interfaith couple of Isabel and Jonathan. Aside from a few trite observations about the passionate artistic temperament, embodied by a Welsh conceptual artist (Andrew Howard), Heights is a movie of many virtues. It is cleanly constructed, well acted and subtly evokes themes of voyeurism and violence of all kinds: emotional, physical and political. It also features the most elegant tribute to the post-9/11 New York skyline I have yet seen on film, during a quiet conversation on a lower Manhattan rooftop. Directed by Chris Terrio and produced by the late Ismail Merchant (of Merchant-Ivory fame), Heights is a thoughtful and occasionally wrenching essay on modern relationships. No, it isn’t The Sopranos and it isn’t Shakespeare either, but it’s well worth seeing for anyone who enjoys their summer movie violence delivered verbally, as well as by Batarang and Martian disintegrator ray. Heights is playing at the Ritz at the Bourse (400 Ranstead Street). This week's showtimes: 12:45 pm, 3:00 pm, 5:30 pm, 7:40 pm, 9:55 pm.