Jun 7-13, 2017
Junior Astronomers ‘Body Language’
Banks fuses artistry and style at Fillmore concert
Singer’s set mesmerizes Charlotte crowd.
The Mummy should be buried
THE MUMMY * (out of four) DIRECTED BY Alex Kurtzman STARS Tom Cruise, Russell Crowe A plastic product made by mercenaries, pimps and profiteers rather than filmmakers who give a damn, The Mummy is the first official entry in what Universal is billing as Dark Universe, the studio’s attempt to duplicate the interconnected worlds showcased…
My Cousin Rachel worth knowing
MY COUSIN RACHEL *** (out of four) DIRECTED BY Roger Michell STARS Rachel Weisz, Sam Claflin While several screen adaptations of Daphne du Maurier works remain highly revered by film fans and scholars — specifically, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca and The Birds and Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now — the 1952 drama My Cousin Rachel has…
Megan Leavey goes beyond the battlefield
MEGAN LEAVEY *** (out of four) DIRECTED BY Gabriela Cowperthwaite STARS Kate Mara, Common A documentary filmmaker best known for the absorbing SeaWorld expose Blackfish, Gabriela Cowperthwaite makes her dramatization debut with Megan Leavey, an occasionally harrowing and always touching look at the bond that developed between a Marine and her combat dog. Working from…
Chance the Rapper thrills packed PNC Music Pavilion
Crowd doesn’t mind the long wait.
The Blotter: Relationship Problems
Proxy War A 26-year-old man filed a police report last week after his ex-girlfriend stole from him through a third party. The man told officers that he and his girlfriend had broken up, but that she needed to get her stuff out of his home in the Belmont neighborhood. Not trusting her to come back…
Beauty and the Beast, Land of Mine, The Man in the Moon among new home entertainment titles
(View From The Couch is a weekly column that reviews what’s new on Blu-ray, DVD and Streaming. Ratings are on a four-star scale.) BAMBI (1942). Is it absolutely monstrous not to consider the beloved Bambi one of the very best of Disney’s 50-plus animated features? Arriving in the first wave of the studio’s cherished big-screen…
Uptown’s Best-Kept Secret Returns
On The week of April 1st, I received an email from someone who worked for a marketing company based in New York. It read: “I’m happy to share that The Dock returns this weekend! Starting Saturday night April 1 at 9 p.m., Uptown speakeasy, The Dock will once again throw open its doors. After renovations,…
New Plaza and NoDa Walking Beats Welcomed by Some, Jeered by Others
Blake Barnes walked out of Common Market, the beer shop and deli he owns in Plaza Midwood, on the morning of May 31 and saw a multitude of TV cameras aimed at a man in a police uniform preparing to address the press. The scene was reminiscent of what happens following a murder or other…
Arthur Brouthers Creates Multicolored Visions of Lives in Charlotte
It’s a little after 2 a.m. in the back of an abandoned church uptown, and Arthur Brouthers is about to collide a pair of hummingbirds with a fistful of exploding stars. In just a while, a carefully mapped-out combination of chemicals and colors will combine in a process, perfected after years of trial and error,…
Terrence Richard and His Space Cadets Pen a Love-Hate Letter to Charlotte
When Terrence Richard and his older sister Crystal were kids growing up behind what was then called Ericsson Stadium in Charlotte’s Third Ward, their dad would turn the family’s road trips into fun and educational music-trivia games. Billy Joe Richard, a radio disc jockey and son of the legendary Greensboro-based gospel jock Alfred G. Richard,…
Vance Cariaga Turns Decades of Real-Life Reporting into Dark Fiction
While poring over decades worth of Creative Loafing issues in research for our recent 30th anniversary issue, about five years into CL’s existence I started to notice a name popping up again and again. Beginning around 1992, I noticed that a journalist named Vance Cariaga was pumping out an impressive amount of stories in his…
Who Deserves to be Protected and Served?
This week I found myself pondering about policing, gentrification and how both play into this city’s power structure. In my news feature, found on page 10, I discuss the implementation of new “walking beats” by CMPD in Plaza Midwood and NoDa, in which three police officers in each neighborhood will make the rounds on foot…
Greg Schermbeck Is Not All Talk When it Comes to Educational Equality
Greg Schermbeck may head up a consulting firm, but don’t call him a consultant. The founder of Charlotte-based SchermCo Consulting is well aware that of the estimated $488 billion of estimated revenue to be brought in by the consulting industry this year, a miniscule percentage will go toward actually implementing solutions. The rest, Schermbeck says,…
Brooke ‘Cobra’ Homer Works Behind the Scenes So You Can Enjoy the Show
Oftentimes in these MusicMaker columns we highlight the folks who make the music, while ignoring the folks who make the music happen. That’s where Brooke “Cobra” Homer, comes in. Cobra grew up going to concerts with her mother from the time she was 8 years old and fell in love with live music. As she…
Weekly Horoscope (June 8-14)
For All Signs Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system, turns direct on June 9, 2017 after a four month period of retrogradation. He is known as Zeus to the ancients, father figure to the others, and his better side symbolizes human expansiveness and spiritual wisdom. His negative qualities are ostentation, pomposity and expansion…
Vapiano’s RJ Miller Is A Toss Up of an Artist
If you walk into Vapiano Charlotte and happen to see a huge pizza whirl by your head, don’t worry, that’s just RJ. Culinary pro and restaurant manager RJ Miller went from tossing towels around his apartment to tossing pizzas at one of Uptown’s trendiest eateries and is now enjoying a succesful career doing what he…
The Kinfolks Soul Food Festival Was a Good Time for Taste Buds
They had greens, beans, potatoes, chicken, fish — you name it. No, this wasn’t the Shirley Caesar challenge, but the 8th annual Kinfolks Soul Food Festival, which touched down in Concord at the Route 29 Pavilion June 3 to kick off Black Music Month in the greater Charlotte area. The Kinfolks Soul Food Festival was…
