Nov 13-19, 2013

Nov 13-19, 2013 / Vol. 27 / No. 38

Cover Story

Hidden Valley tries to start anew

In the past five years, a short drive down Sugar Creek Road near the I-85 exchange has become a morbid television tour of sorts. On one side of the street you’ll see the Cook-Out featured on a 2010 episode of A&E’s The First 48, in which a woman killed a man because she didn’t like…

Ryan Pitkin

The Visitor: Ominous activities in Atlanta

Think of Ovidio G. Assonitis as the filmic equivalent of a poor cover band. Toiling under the belief that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery — or the most lucrative, at any rate — this Greek producer would often mastermind cut-rate Italian rip-offs of Hollywood smashes. Thus, 1973’s The Exorcist led to 1974’s Beyond…

Matt Brunson

Parody on the prowl in Forbidden Broadway

After an on-and-off run spanning 31 years in 19 editions and more than 9,000 performances, Gerard Alessandrini’s Forbidden Broadway is one off-Broadway fixture that doesn’t need to prove it has legs. Yet here those long, long legs are, on the road, 600 miles from home through Sunday at Booth Playhouse, the one and only Forbidden…

Perry Tannenbaum

Cucalorus Report: Wrap

With Wilmington’s 19th Annual Cucalorus Film Festival a done deal, we look back at all the movies covered for Creative Loafing. Films are listed in alphabetical order. Click on the title to be taken directly to the review. The Bounceback Hank and Asha How to Lose Your Virginity Short Term 12 Stranger By the Lake…

Matt Brunson

Cucalorus Report: Part 3

A Sunday departure meant I wasn’t able to enjoy any of the offerings on the final day of the 19th Annual Cucalorus Film Festival, but I caught two last films before bidding adieu at Saturday night’s fest-sponsored Midnite Brunch. TERMS AND CONDITIONS MAY APPLY — As one of the talking heads notes in this informative…

Matt Brunson

Cucalorus Report: Part 2

The siege of the 19th Annual Cucalorus Film Festival continues, with two more reviews from the front lines in Wilmington. SHORT TERM 12 — Short Term 12 offers the most concrete proof yet that Brie Larson will be with us long-term. A former child actress who’s lately been filling out small but memorable parts in…

Matt Brunson

Bizarre crimes from Charlotte police files (Nov. 14)

Pedicab Confessions: With all of the rickshaws and party peddlers trolling around Charlotte these days, it’s surprising that it took this long for someone to get injured by one. Last week, a 48-year-old woman was “dumped onto the ground” from the pedicab she was riding in when the vehicle experienced an “equipment malfunction.” Get Booted:…

Ryan Pitkin

Theater review: The Dining Room

In case you didn’t get the memo, family conversation is extinct and manners were flushed down the toilet decades ago. With an intriguing mix of ceremony and casualness, playwright A.R. Gurney convened his audience in 1982 at the site where both fossils once thrived, The Dining Room. The corpses were fresher in the ground back…

Perry Tannenbaum

Cucalorus Report: Part 1

The 19th Annual Cucalorus Film Festival is now underway in lovely Wilmington, and with more than 200 films on the schedule, there’s certainly no lack of product. Here are reviews of the opening salvo I caught. THE BOUNCEBACK — Dealing with onscreen horrors is nothing new to three of the stars of The Bounceback: Ashley…

Matt Brunson

Book review: Daniel Coston’s North Carolina Musicians

About halfway through North Carolina Musicians, the new book by Charlotte photographer Daniel Coston, the author describes a night at the Comet Grill in late 2011. It’s just after Christmas, and patrons “shuffle out of the cold” to see local blues guitarist Lenny Federal. The scene — with eager concertgoers cramming two floors — is…

Jordan Lawrence

CD review: The Man from Ravcon’s Skyscraper

Since his 2010 debut LP, Zombie Pimp Cowboys From Outer Space, former Ravelers vocalist and guitarist Mike Brown (aka The Man from RavCon) has been a musician cum mason, building sonic “movies of the mind” from the mortar of cult movies — a twang-inflected treasure trove of imagined spaghetti, spy, blacksploitation and Italo-horror soundtrack cues.…

Pat Moran

Wrestling with a decision

A fair amount of my childhood was spent sitting in front of a television set watching professional wrestling. In a pair of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe Underoos and a plastic chain draped over my shoulders, I would pretend to be Junkyard Dog or “Rowdy” Roddy Piper, dropping elbows and body splashes on…

Adam Frazier

All I ever needed from Dick

When I was three months pregnant, my best friend Lonnie called to tell me that she was going to get married in a few months — at my ex-boyfriend Dick’s house in Los Angeles. Dick isn’t just any old ex-boyfriend. He’s the kind of guy who locks you in a room with your favorite European…

Sarah Hays Coomer

Where to find: Sweet potatoes and yams

The Fresh Market in the Strawberry Hill Shopping Center has a confusing tuber section. One bin offers “garnet yams,” another “organic yams,” while a third bin contains “North Carolina grown sweet potatoes.” But in truth, all three bins contain sweet potatoes. And November is the time for sweet potatoes. Whether starring as an overcooked mash…

Tricia Childress

Gingham style

Airline hostess Pam Ann just made me promise to wear a gingham shirt when she flies into Charlotte for the first time. She insists all people in the South wear this pattern, even though she’s never been here before. I’m not about to correct this raucous pretend flight attendant, whose real-life persona is Australian comedian…

Joanne Spataro

Golden girl

The other day, after shopping at my neighborhood Food Lion on Beatties Ford Road, I ended up checking out in a line where an elderly woman was having a bit of trouble. The senior patron was emptying her basket and arranging things onto the conveyer belt in some ritual that made sense to her. When…

Charles Easley

Luna’s Living Kitchen’s growth spurt

It was first planted in a tiny corner space of the Atherton Mill and Market in 2009 — a haven for those in search of living food, a small restaurant with the worthy mission of “bringing health, beauty and art to the plate.” Since then, the sustainably-minded staff at Luna’s Living Kitchen has captured the…

Keia Mastrianni

Lenny Boy enters the kombucha beer business

Townes Mozer, owner of Lenny Boy Kombucha, is hell bent on firsts. The 26-year-old ‘booch expert was the first to open a kombucha brewing business in Charlotte, selling the fermented tea touted by many for its digestive and probiotic benefits, thanks to a special bacterial culture used to make the beverage. Mozer also owns the…

Keia Mastrianni

Trombone Shorty brings the funk

By the time he was 4, Trombone Shorty had already earned his nickname for toting a chunk of brass bigger than he was through the Treme neighborhood streets in New Orleans. As the years passed, that ‘bone became only one weapon in his formidable arsenal. Today, the 27-year-old known by the government name Troy Andrews…

Grant Britt

Weekly horoscope (Nov. 14-20)

For All Signs: We have a full moon in Taurus on Sunday at 10:16 a.m. EST. This one occurs at a particularly potent degree of the zodiac, 25 degrees, which is the position of the fixed star Algol. Ancient astrologers gave much attention to the star positions. Algol is named for the Medusa, whose gaze…

Vivian Carol

Masochists at work in Venus in Furs

Not too far into David Ives’ Venus in Fur, there’s a key moment when Vanda Jordan is no longer pleading with playwright/director Thomas Novichek for an audition — after arriving hours late for her appointment, if she actually had one. She has worked on Thomas’s sympathies, cataloguing her mishaps on the way to the audition,…

Perry Tannenbaum

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