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Philadelphia

City archive / 430 posts

Our RoboCop Remake film poster

Our RoboCop Remake

One of the best random laughs I’ve had in the last few years was at a “Remember when RoboCop shot that dude in the dick” t-shirt, and this fever dream of a comedy collaboration is a kind of spiritual sibling of that shirt, especially since it really goes for broke in reimagining that particular moment. All of RoboCop’s 60 scenes are remade by different people, often sketch comedy troupes, and while they don’t all… See more →

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Spinal Tap II: The End Continues film poster

Spinal Tap II: The End Continues

I remember getting MGM’s This Is Spinal Tap DVD when it was released in 2000 and being giddy at all the special features. The deleted scenes were longer than the movie, revealing that a ton of great stuff was sacrificed in the service of making the final cut an essentially perfect comedy. But alas, while watching Spinal Tap II, I shuddered to think what was on the cutting room floor, because the vast majority of… See more →

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Unwound

Unwound

A quick reminder to myself that in the future I really should swap out my 15dB earplug filters for the 25dB ones (or maybe even the solid ones) if I’m going to be right next to the speakers. My left ear was not the same after this show, and I hope it’s not permanent. That said, of all the dozens of shows I’ve attended in this room over the years, I don’t remember any of… See more →

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Crypta

Crypta

First time in a long time I’ve come home from a show covered in fake blood! I knew Ghoul’s schtick borrowed liberally from Gwar’s, but I didn’t realize just how far they took it until one of their elaborately costumed characters came out with hoses attached to himself. Sure enough, his face was soon ripped off to get the fluids flowing. Not nearly as messy as a Gwar show (which these days suits me just… See more →

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Nine Inch Nails

Even if I’ve never been all that interested in the records that came after The Downward Spiral, a Nine Inch Nails show is always an event, so I had been keeping an eye on tickets for this one. By the day of the show, even the available cheap seats were not quite cheap enough for this cheapskate, but at the eleventh hour, a friend materialized with an extra ticket, and I came to my senses.… See more →

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Weapons film poster

Weapons

Weapons has a good summer mystery/thriller premise—an entire class of third graders disappears individually from their homes one night—and thankfully the grating little-kid voiceover filling in the backstory gets out of the way soon enough. What follows is a master class in Magnolia-style nonlinear plotting, with a variety of character POVs across the same timeline unfolding one by one, each new angle making the mystery weirder, scarier, and—crucially—funnier.

As this is not some Lynchian… See more →

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Tower

Tower

Not a packed show, but well-attended by scene afficionados, as I noticed members of Baroness, Pentagram, Pharaoh, and Sonya in the audience. Also cool to spot Ben Brower (formerly of The Stuntmen) in Breakker! Tower crushed. Definitely the best way I could have spent this particular Sunday evening in Philadelphia.

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Faraquet

Faraquet! (I’m not sure why Devin sounds off-key in the video, because he sounded great in person.)

The late, great Faraquet scheduled a handful of reunion gigs across a weekend (presumably so no one in the band would have to take time off work) to celebrate the 25th anniversary of their lone full-length album, The View From This Tower, which has long been high on the list of my favorite underground records. I felt a rare bit of hometown pride when the Philly show sold out fast enough for them to add… See more →

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Bob Log III

A solid bill of oddities tonight.

Ecology: Homestones is a purveyor of harsh noise that probably wouldn’t hold my attention if it weren’t performed by a towering ghoul with a shrunken head, accompanied by a limbless torso writhing along to the cacophony on a hook behind a velvet rope. Apparently there’s a whole mythology that goes with this, and incredibly, it’s attracted more than a half million social media followers in just a few short… See more →

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Godspeed You! Black Emperor

It’s not uncommon for me to lament an old band’s preference for new material at a live show, and while tonight’s set list was dominated by songs from NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD, and I do find that album to be something of a rote exercise, that wasn’t the only reason I left early. Even in this grim geopolitical moment, Godspeed’s brand of all-consuming pessimism somehow feels to me more naive… See more →

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The Match-Stick Flame 2: Lunada Bay film poster

The Match-Stick Flame 2: Lunada Bay

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Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning film poster

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning

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Flexing with Monty film poster

Flexing with Monty

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Black Bag film poster

Black Bag

Kinda wild to take in this tasty morsel of espionage competence porn on the same day it’s revealed that a cabal of U.S. cabinet secretaries accidentally invited the editor of a major magazine along for the ride when they planned a bombing using something they downloaded from the App Store.

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Fanatico… When the Godess Calls film poster

Fanatico… When the Goddess Calls

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Lisztomania film poster

Lisztomania

Gonna tell my kids this is A Complete Unknown

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Steak film poster

Steak

Steak is Quentin Dupieux’s first feature film, which I enjoyed more than I expected considering that I don’t remember much liking Rubber, the film he made after it, when I saw it some 15 years ago. Steak’s comic beats, bizarro world of Clockwork Orange-tinged perpetual high school, and bumping electronic soundtrack all cohere into a satisfyingly absurdist satire of conformity, reminiscent at times of Yorgos Lanthimos’s more accessible moments. And it’s perfectly paced:… See more →

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That Was 2024

My year in review

I was hopeful, if not naive enough to be confident, that enough people were sufficiently fed up with That Fucking Guy to keep him from returning to the White House. But he will, of course, be returning, and while this time his victory isn’t the shock to the system it was in 2016, his popular vote win, a hair shy of a mandate, still stings plenty. The Democratic Party’s subsequent soul-searching might be morbidly comical… See more →

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It’s All Right, My Friend film poster

It’s All Right, My Friend

How Peter Fonda is not best known for this starring role as a tomato-averse alien with explosive ejaculate is something I will never understand

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Slowdive

I joked with some other folks in line about the event staff carding people at the door: Would anyone attending a Slowdive show in 2024 be under 40? I had momentarily forgotten that the kids on TikTok have in recent years made shoegaze far bigger than it’s ever been, and not only had the kids come out to pack this show, but they’d arrived early. I got there shortly after the start of Quannic’s opening… See more →

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Memoir of a Snail film poster

Memoir of a Snail

I adored Adam Elliot’s early shorts, up to and including his Oscar-winning Harvie Krumpet, but Memoir of a Snail, overloaded with schmaltz and details recycled from his previous films, seems to be methodically constructed to confirm any suspicion that he’s content to make a career of repeating himself and tugging shamelessly at shallow heartstrings.

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Iron Maiden

The name of this tour, The Future Past, led me to believe it was one of those tours where Maiden would be sticking to the classic albums, which is all I really want to hear. If I had done any research at all, I would have learned that “Days of Future Past” is the name of a song on their 2021 album Senjutsu, and indeed, that album accounted for a full third of the setlist.… See more →

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Greet Death

My fourth Greet Death show, and my first since singer/guitarist Harper transitioned, and it was nice to see her come out of her shell, playing more expressively in a way that maybe she felt she couldn’t before.

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Holy Flame of the Martial World film poster

Holy Flame of the Martial World

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The Substance film poster

The Substance

Like Fargeat’s debut, this is more successful as pulp than polemic, and its inevitably bombastic finale is a dud, but I can’t deny I enjoyed the ride, especially with an audience.

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Zombie Ass: Toilet of the Dead film poster

Zombie Ass: Toilet of the Dead

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Longlegs film poster

Longlegs

Marc Bolan doesn’t deserve this.

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Center Jenny film poster

Center Jenny

When it’s not succumbing to self-consciously unhinged improv exercise, this is something like a feature-length maximalist update of Bruce Nauman’s Clown Torture for the reality TV age. The editor is unquestionably the MVP.

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Mannequin Pussy

Soul Glo isn’t really my thing, but I’m not gonna tell you they didn’t burn the place down. Mannequin Pussy, not so much.

Frontwoman Marisa Dabice isn’t an especially clever lyricist, and it’s easy enough to get past when listening to the band’s records, whose sonics are more about feeling than thinking. But while the records are mercifully absent overt speechifying, this show sadly was not, and Mannequin Pussy’s emotion-to-intellect ratio is a poor fit… See more →

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