Adrian Mack

Posts by Adrian Mack

• Documentary Review/Interview – Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage

  Tinseltown screens the Rush doc tonight in Vancouver…

• Interview – Spoon River’s Tavis Triance

  Adrian Mack interviews the former Montrealer about his band’s new album Kingdom of the Burned, working with a hungover Cate Blanchett, and the world’s most wasted man.

• Review – Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel

  Kids will love the slapstick antics, writes Adrian Mack, while parents are left to wonder, ‘Am I watching a kid’s movie or Vertigo on DMT?’

• Review – The Princess and the Frog

  Adrian Mack takes his kid to The Princess and the Frog and wonders, can Disney ever again replicate the artistic success of The Cat From Outer Space?

• Letter from Philip K Dick

  ‘Vancouver turns up in Dick’s two most important books, VALIS and The Divine Invasion…’

• Top Ten Things You Pretended Weren’t Happening In the Last Decade

  ‘We were swimming in Forteana this decade, from weird silver jellies performing inter-dimensional aerial contortions, to the Stephenville craft that made a beeline for the Bush ranch in Crawford, to the thing that punched a hole in the clouds above O’Hare Airport in Chicago…’

• Interview – Collapse Director Chris Smith

  ‘Whether he [Michael Ruppert] ends up being proven right or wrong, whether he’s ultimately vindicated or ends up a footnote in history as just another Chicken Little doomsayer, that’s irrelevant. But in terms of this moment right now, I think he feels his life’s work is being acknowledged and taken seriously…’

• Documentary Review – It Might Get Loud

  ‘It Might Get Loud is porn for rock fetishists and guitar-lovers…’

• Movie Review – Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs

  ‘Incredibly, the funniest character in the film – a South American camerman-doctor-pilot who might have been a death squad “electrician” for all we know – is voiced by Benjamin Bratt…’

• Concert Review – Manic Street Preachers at the Commodore Sept. 22 09

  ‘it’s been tough times and partly diminishing artistic returns for the Manics since the end of the last century, when This Is My Truth Tell Us Yours made them megastars in the UK and also-rans over here…’

• Concert Review – Summer Sessions at Ambleside Park, Sept 12 2009

  ‘This is where I found myself on a scorching hot Saturday with the single-minded goal of seeing Neil Young. Who opened for Sarah McLachlan. Which one might say is a little fucking topsy-turvy…’

• Concert Review – Os Mutantes at the Rio Theatre, Sept 3 2009

  ‘This year’s version of Os Mutantes radiated an instant and all-consuming warmth, with toothsome co-founder Sérgio Dias projecting intoxicant levels of goodwill and joy from beneath a floor-length wizard robe…’

• DVD Review – Neil Diamond’s Hot August Night NYC

  ‘I would point to “Solitary Man” as a supreme masterpiece of popcraft, on a par with Jimmy Webb or Elton at his mid-’70s best. And then I would point to about another 50 or so classics…’

• Social Commentary – The Rifleman

  The Rifleman…

• List – 10 Most Annoying Wankers in Rock

  ‘… [Dave Navarro], the only man on earth to have a life-size tattoo of his own face, right on his face…’

• MilkULTRA pt. 5

  ‘… in a nutshell, he was convinced he’d cracked the code on an enormous Alternate Reality Game…’

• Movie Review – Up

  ‘It’s bravura cinema, and outrageously moving…’

• Concert Review – TV On the Radio at Malkin Bowl, Vancouver, May 25 2009

  ‘… the genius is in its seamlessness…’

• Movie Review – Angels & Demons

  ‘… Angels & Demons is flat, obvious, and looks like shit…’

• Movie Review – Bat Pussy

  ‘… the Turkish Bat Pussy is even worse…’

• Review – Monsters vs. Aliens

  ‘… could be retitled “Them vs. Us”, or “Freedom vs. Islamofascism”, or “Hollywood vs. Me”…’

• Review – Bruce Springsteen, Working On a Dream

  ‘… Working On a Dream (fuck I hate that title)…’

• Review – JFK and the Unspeakable

  ‘… the Unspeakable is all around us…’

• Barack Obama & Fables of the Reconstruction

  Adrian Mack looks at the intersection between pop and politics in the age of Obama, and doesn’t like what he sees.