Despite the many things wrong with Brian De Palma’s Redacted, the acting was superbly on-point. De Palma’s little-known cast got class differences right, even while the film’s rhetorical concept was slanting them into the typical Blue State condescension about working-class grunts. This bias infects the latest Iraq War movie, The Messenger, by writer-director Oren Moverman, who lacks De Palma’s instincts for actorly (human) truth. This story about two veterans (Ben Foster, Woody Harrelson) assigned MOS duty to deliver death notices to the deceased’s NOK (next-of-kin), is so bungled up with fashionable ambivalence about the Iraq War that every single behavioral detail is not just prejudicial but wrong. Read more

In a town full of skyscrapers, it’s often what’s happening beneath the sidewalk that ends up being the most exciting. Hidden spaces—think SubMercer, the basement of La Esquina or the late, lamented Undochine—are black gold in New York's over-saturated nightlife scene. A hard-to-find, little-known location with the right music and crowd can become an overnight sensation, and if a group of people just above 14th Street play their cards right, they might have New York’s next one on their hands. Read more

Simon Abrams’ piece about Halloween film offerings, “Bumps (and Chumps) in the Night (Oct. 28) caused on reader to respond: “F*ck Film Forum. Their programmers have always had contempt for genre films, yet they threw together this mismatched pair of (admittedly great) horror/thriller titles, late in the game, just to have something available for Halloween. Rent Theater Of Blood and Scream Of Fear on DVD, and spend your hardearned dollars at a cinema that stoops so low as to care about genre films throughout the other 364 days of the year, like BAM or Anthology.” Read more Read it in print

SHAME ON TYLER PERRY and Oprah Winfrey for signing on as air-quote executive producers of Precious. After this post-hip-hop freak show wowed Sundance last January, it now slouches toward Oscar ratification thanks to its powerful friends.Winfrey and Perry had no hand in the actual production of Precious, yet the movie must have touched some sore spot in their demagogue psyches. They’ve piggybacked their reps as black success stories hoping to camouflage Precious’ con job—even though it’s more scandalous than their own upliftment trade. Read more Read it in print

GEORGE CLOONEY MEET Dusan Makavejev: Hollywood clown to Yugoslavian art-movie satirist. Clooney’s dismal new comedy The Men Who Stare at Goats makes it essential to re-learn what good political satire means.There’s no richer example than Makavejev’s films, and three of them are now packaged in Criterion’s DVD box set, Dusan Makavejev: Free Radical. Read more Read it in print

Add Robert Zemeckis to the list of filmmakers exposed by Michael Jackson's This is It. The empathetic star-power in that beautiful concert film should have inspired a brilliant remake of A Christmas Carol. Instead, Zemeckis made his pact with technology. Every shot is a gimmick in Zemeckis' A Christmas Carol. Strange that Charles Dickens' great, imperishable tale about change-of-heart should be adapted by a filmmaker who has renounced brilliant satire (I Wanna Hold Your Hand, Used Cars, Back to the Future) in order to sentimentalize and distort human beings (starting with Who Framed Roger Rabbit? then famously with Forest Gump). Read more

Scorpio (Oct. 23-Nov. 21) I love Scorpios. I even spent 12 months trying to walk in your shoes (I told everyone my birthday was November 11th that year), just to see what it was like. Read more Read it in print

A week before Girls, the much-talked-about band from San Francisco, kicked off its tour with a show at Maxwell’s, the band was still putting together its live act. “We haven’t had a full rehearsal, we’re still teaching [new band members] songs—we have a week to teach 15 to 20 songs,” explained JR White who writes music and plays bass for the band. “The last tour we were playing new songs and not playing some songs from the album. We haven’t been playing ‘Lauren Marie’ because it hasn’t been working live.” Read more

Cornflakes With John Lennon: And Other Tales From a Rock N’ Roll Life By Robert Hilburn, Out now This book of essays by the former L.A. Times rock critic looks over his career at the musicians and music that shaped rock ‘n’ roll. Read more Read it in print

Paper Garden Records hosts a sort of P.S. 1-type event at 3rd Ward featuring not only Brooklyn intellirap duo Das Racist, but Boy Crisis, art by Art Battles and, if that doesn’t make you at least interested enough to go, free Colt 45, which is the new free Red Stripe. See how now you are interested in art and music? Predictable. Read more Read it in print