Vacation
Rusty Griswold (Ed Helms) is all grown up and eager to lead his own family on an epic road trip to Walley World, in what is jokingly played as a reset of the Vacation series. The writing and directing team of John Francis Daley and Jonathan M. Goldstein makes sure to remind us throughout that…
Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation
Tom Cruise continues to push that gigantic boulder up the hill. I’m not sure that he’s ever truly lost his grip and faltered — at least not so that he’s felt it roll back on him. Throughout his career, he’s occasionally had to lock himself into place to hold steady, but that’s the worst he’s…
A LEGO Brickumentary
Somehow a simple child’s toy became the building blocks for our global imaginations. Jason Bateman narrates A LEGO Brickumentary from Kief Davidson (Open Heart and Kassim the Dream) and Daniel Junge (Fight Church and Being Evel), which features (among others) Jamie Berard, one of the designers from Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s hit, The Lego…
Batkid Begins
Delving into a phenomenon, documentary filmmaker Dana Nachman (director of Love Hate Love and The Human Experiment, also sharing a co-writing credit with Kurt Kuenne), explores the startling flashpoint of the rise of a movement surrounding the granting of one 5-year-old cancer patient’s wish to be Batman for a day. What emerges is the portrait…
Morning News and Stuff
Hey Cincinnati! I'm Natalie, a new staff writer here at CityBeat covering news. You may have already seen a byline or two of mine. Expect to see more! I'm giving Nick a little break today and taking on my first morning round-up of headlines. Here's what's happening. The family of Samuel Dubose, the man who…
Leftovers: What We Ate This Weekend
Each week CityBeat staffers, dining writers and the occasional intern tell you what they ate this weekend. We're not always proud — or trendy — but we definitely spend at least some money on food. Casey Arnold: Yesterday, my boyfriend and I went to Findlay Market to see some live music and check out the barbecue competition…
Morning News and Stuff
Hey all! Hope your weekend was grand. Here’s the news today. Today is the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. There are a number of events going on downtown to commemorate the historic federal law, which works to guarantee equal rights for those with disabilities. A rally and presentations about the history and…
Review: Cincinnati Opera’s Turandot
Cincinnati Opera winds up its 95th season in truly grand operatic fashion with an opulent production of Puccini’s Turandot. The singing is (mostly) sublime, the spectacle is lavish and all the production elements are executed with stylish precision. The opera is a fantasy based on a play by the Venetian Carlo Gozzi. Turandot is a…
History Made Hysterical
If you need an evening of laughter, you want to be in a seat at Cincinnati Shakespeare Company for The Complete History of America (abridged). In fact, if you want to go, you apparently need to get your tickets right away. On opening night, CSC’s Producing Artistic Director Brian Phillips announced that in the company’s…
Weekenders: What We’re Doing This Weekend
Each week CityBeat staffers share their weekend plans: from dinner and drinks or special events to out-of-town concerts and stories we're working on. And some of us just watch TV. Maria Seda-Reeder: Friday night I will be checking out the work of Elise Thompson & Nathan Weikert at Boom Gallery in Evanston. I’ll head with the…
Morning News and Stuff
Hey all. Here’s what’s happening in Cincy today. University of Cincinnati officials yesterday released the police incident report and dispatch recordings related to the July 19 shooting of Samuel Dubose by officer Ray Tensing. Tensing shot Dubose after a traffic stop over the fact Dubose didn’t have a front license plate on his Honda Accord.…
Stage Door
Did you attend the Cincy Fringe back in 2011? If so, maybe you saw Abigail and Shaun Bengson perform a musical work in progress then called “Songs from the Proof.” They came back in 2012 to present a one-night concert of some of the songs. The work evolved into a show called Hundred Days, which had…
Your Weekend Playlist: July
Everyone gets hooked on a handful of songs they can’t seem to skip over during a period of time. Well, these are mine from the month of July. “Crystals” – Of Monsters and Men This song kicks complete butt. The heavy drum intro leads into the crashing of symbol waves throughout the entire track, while…
Protesters Demand Deters Release Dubose Shooting Video
A group of about 30 gathered outside Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters' office today to demand release of tapes showing events that led up to the death of Samuel Dubose, who was shot and killed by University of Cincinnati Police July 19 in Mount Auburn following a traffic stop for a missing front license plate.…
Morning News and Stuff
Hey y’all. I’ve had the past couple mornings off, so my morning news output has been slacking. But I’m back with a big bunch of stuff to tell you about. Here we go. Much of the news today is about the police shooting death of Samuel Dubose. CityBeat has been following this incident from the…
Media Musings From Cincinnati and Beyond
• Jack Cannon was a good man and a fine editor at the Enquirer. He was a copy editor, a member of a talented group of otherwise nameless journalists who spent their years trying to make us reporters seem accurate and error-free. Anyone with any sense was content if Jack were editing their work before…
I Just Can’t Get Enough
To some people, “bad tattoo” is redundant (“You’re just so beautiful as you are,” cry moms everywhere). But tats like poorly translated Chinese script, eerie portraits fumbled by an apprentice, or straight-up misspelled words are in a league of their own. Everyone’s personal Hollywood BFF Jennifer Lawrence is so normal and down-to-earth, she got herself…
Cincinnati-Filmed ‘Miles Ahead’ to Premiere at New York Film Festival
It continues to be a good year for movies shot in Cincinnati. First, Todd Haynes’ Carol premiered in competition at the Cannes Film Festival and was so well-received that its distributor, Weinstein Company, has scheduled a December release to showcase it for Oscar consideration. Today, Indiewire is reporting that Miles Ahead, the Don Cheadle-directed movie…
Southpaw
The sport of boxing, especially from the cinematic perspective, is all about redemption. In the fight game, everybody gets knocked down and counted out at least once, but that’s usually just the beginning of things. Jake Gyllenhaal finds himself caught up in one such narrative as Billy “The Great” Hope, a tenacious fighter who reaches…
Pixels
Chris Columbus, as a director, has bounced around the spectrum, although he tends to give audiences movies that are heavy on manufactured whimsy (Mrs. Doubtfire and Bicentennial Man) or seemingly sure-fire adaptations (the first two Harry Potter movies and Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief) that never quite take off as they should…
Paper Towns
Screenwriters/producers Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber have made a name for themselves in Hollywood as the teen-to-YA dramedy guys, having worked together on (500) Days of Summer, The Spectacular Now and The Fault in Our Stars. So it makes sense that they would be back in stride again with the latest John Green adaptation,…
Music: Glass Animals
Don’t let the patchouli-scented Jam band name fool you — Glass Animals have very little in common with that blissed-out branch of musical endeavor. Rather than unstructured guitar noodling punctuated by intermittent cosmic word-soup poetry, the Oxford (U.K., not Ohio) quartet carefully executes a sonic blueprint that mashes up elements of Trip Hop, Psychedelia, Electronica…
Music: Death from Above 1979
It’s easy to see why bands with lengthy histories and voluminous catalogs would consider getting back together, but those rationalizations don’t hold much water for Death from Above 1979. The Canadian duo featuring bassist/synthesizer-player/backing vocalist Jesse F. Keeler and drummer/vocalist Sebastien Grainger got together in 2001 and released a sole album of original material, You’re…
Music: Grace Potter
G race Potter’s rise in the music world has been steady. She has toughed it out with tour after tour for years, opening for and collaborating with artists like Derek Trucks, Warren Haynes and others. But now Potter is entering a new phase in her career; after years of being billed as “Grace Potter and…
Onstage: Seth MacFarlane
It seems today that all you see are sex-crazed talking teddy bears in movies and lewd cartoons on TV. But where are those good, old-fashioned crooners on which we used to rely? Luckily, there’s Seth MacFarlane. The creative mind responsible for the Ted movies, A Million Ways to Die in the West, American Dad and…
Music: Joan Jett
For all the grumbling about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the induction ceremonies can often be revelatory and moving, occasionally serving as a way to view an artist from a different perspective and remind everyone why an artist is receiving the honor in the first place. The 2015 Rock Hall inductions had its…
Music: Kelly Clarkson
Before she was chosen to sing at President Obama’s second inauguration alongside Beyoncé and Aretha Franklin, Kelly Clarkson was just a 21-year-old Texan who won the first season of American Idol when the show still had two hosts and Ryan Seacrest was yet to be a household name. Fast forward 13 years, and she’s still…
Sports: Florence Freedom vs. Southern Illinois Miners
Watching a Florence Freedom game is fun, but it’s even more fun on a theme night. Tonight’s theme is “Halo Night.” The Freedom’s home stadium becomes ground zero as Cincinnati Comic Expo hosts an evening of cosplay with the 405th Infantry Division of the Halo costuming group. If you don’t know what Halo is, it’s…
Classes: Fragrance Therapy
Those flowers in your garden are more than just aesthetically pleasing. Learn all about fragrance therapy and how to turn your blooms into potpourri during part of “6 Saturdays to Better Health” at Krohn Conservatory, in concert with their Healing Garden summer floral show. 11 a.m.- 2 p.m. Saturday. $4. 1501 Eden Park Drive, Mount…
Event: Big Weekend Clifton
Clifton’s Gaslight District is a veritable trove of ethnic cuisine and culture. And Big Weekend Clifton plans to celebrate the neighborhood’s quirk and international flavor with three days of food, music, dancing and cinema. Featuring an “Around the World in a Cocktail Hour” pub crawl-esque event that takes you up and down Ludlow to sample…
Music: Cincinnati Music Festival
Founded in 1962 as the all-Jazz Ohio Valley Jazz Festival, Cincinnati’s popular “Jazz Fest” has gone through a lot of changes in its half century-plus history. In more recent decades, the festival shifted focus to R&B and Soul acts and, even more recently, moved into the Bengals’ Paul Brown Stadium. This year, the fest also…
Onstage: Turandot
The Cincinnati Opera closes its season with Puccini’s Turandot, the tale of Princess Turandot, an enigmatic beauty in ancient China who reigns with an iron fist and cold heart. All of her wooers must answer her riddles to win her hand in marriage, or face certain death. When a mysterious man passes her impossible test,…
Event: Love Wins Cincy
Hot on the heels of SCOTUS’ landmark decision to legalize gay marriage nationwide (s/o to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg), cincygayweddings.com, a compendium of LGBTQ+-friendly wedding vendors in the area, decided to turn their launch party into an entire weekend of activities, featuring eight parties over three days with more than 40 different sponsors. Events include…
Event: Greater Anderson Days
Just because Independence Day is over doesn’t mean the fireworks are. The 17th-annual Greater Anderson Days, a July jamboree consisting of music, games, rides, food and an “Anderson’s Got Talent” competition, will culminate with Rozzi’s Famous Fireworks on Sunday night. The pyrotechnics are a perfect way for the family to celebrate the summer, but also…
Art: Amiable Strangers: Paintings by Elise Thompson and Nathan Weikert
Painters Elise Thompson and Nathan Weikert exhibit new work at Boom Gallery in Evanston, which demonstrates their move away from figurative painting toward something more abstracted, taking cues from the American AbEx tradition. Thompson’s paintings are done on unconventional materials — forgoing canvas for chiffon, for example — and the painter hangs her work on…
Comedy: Andy Sandford
“I’m done with Netflix,” comic Andy Sandford tells an audience. “I don’t mean I’m bored with it, I mean I’m almost done watching everything that has ever been made.” Lately he’s been viewing documentaries on serial killers. “I’m not a weirdo. I don’t admire what they do,” he says, “but I am impressed by how…
Growing Up with Bogart’s
Though it hasn’t always been a loving relationship, Bogart’s has been a part of my musical life since the ’80s. I’m slightly older than the venue. I was 5 when it opened. But in less than 10 years, as my music fanaticism truly took hold, Bogart’s would become a place of awe to me. It…
William H. Cosby Jr. vs. The Cos
Bill Cosby created The Cos — perhaps unofficially in the early 1970s, after breaking a color barrier by being cast in in I Spy in 1965 — as a means of convincing us he wasn’t at all like that lecherous curmudgeon Bill Cosby. Again. Bill Cosby created The Cos as a means of convincing us…
City Desk July 22-28
Marijuana Legalization Initiative Falls Short on Signatures ResponsibleOhio, the $20-million campaign to legalize marijuana, learned on July 20 that its petition fell nearly 30,000 signatures short of putting a proposed constitutional amendment on the ballot Nov. 3. The Ohio secretary of state’s office found only 276,082 out of 305,591 signatures to be valid on the…
Searching for Answers
On July 20, more than 100 mourners gathered in the small, isolated section of Mount Auburn where Samuel Dubose died the previous day. A memorial with drums, cards and balloons decorated the stop sign at the corner of Rice and Valencia streets. Some wept, while others shouted for answers as to why University of Cincinnati…
The Week’s Dining Events
This week's food and drink events. Reminder: Most classes, events and wine dinners require reservations. WEDNESDAY 22 Cincinnati Burger Week — It’s a rare opportunity — or should we say medium rare — that carnivores can delight in $5 gourmet and off-menu burgers throughout their city. Through Sunday, Cincinnati Burger Week pays homage to the American-cuisine staple by…
We’ll Always Have Short Vine…
F orty is an interesting age. If you’ve played your cards right, you’re in pretty good physical shape, you’re young enough to still dream and old enough to benefit from a little wisdom based on the calendars you’ve accumulated. This year, Bogart’s, the venerable Corryville nightclub, turns this interesting age. Some will say anniversaries are…
Add Outkast to Stone Mountain
HOT: Add Outkast to Stone Mountain With the successful efforts to have the Confederate flag removed from South Carolina’s State House grounds recently, some have been looking at the appropriateness of other Confederate landmarks in the South. For Stone Mountain near Atlanta, where a large etching of Confederate leaders Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and…
Fika Hus (Review)
T he U.S. is the most overworked developed country in the world, but in Sweden, employees and people in general take a daily “fika,” which roughly means “coffee break.” No matter what you’re doing, you stop, drink some coffee (or tea) paired with pastries and take a moment to contemplate the day. Sometimes these breaks…
Summer Cocktails in the City
Summertime and the drinkin’ is easy. All around town, bars and restaurants have lightened up their cocktail offerings to fit the season. And while it might not be the hottest summer on record in Cincinnati, we still prefer different drinks this time of year than in cooler months, according to many bartenders and restaurant owners.…
Behind the Heavy Metal Wheel of Sex
One of the longtime fixtures (and a weird and somewhat mysterious part of the club’s legend) in Bogart's backstage production office was and continues to be the Heavy Metal Wheel of Sex, a wall-mounted roulette wheel adorned with a handful (heh, heh) of fairly standard sexual acts along with a broader and slightly horrifying spectrum…
Present Voices
H uddled in the Sword Room of MOTR Pub, the voices of the poets reading at the monthly Word of Mouth Cincinnati event remain at the volume usually reserved for intimate conversations in domestic settings, barely carrying sound across the small cellar-esque basement of the Over-the-Rhine bar. At 7 p.m. on the final Tuesday of…
Know Is Ready to Rock with ‘Hundred Days’
Fasten your seat belt. Here comes the 2015-2016 theater season. Know Theatre gets bragging rights for being first out of the local theater gate with Hundred Days, a Rock-and-Roll show it played a significant part in developing. The Folk-Rock odyssey was created by and features the husband-and-wife duo of Shaun and Abigail Bengson. It was…
Pops Maestro Jazzed About Seth MacFarlane Show
It seems today that all you see are sex-crazed talking teddy bears in movies and lewd cartoons on TV. But where are those good, old-fashioned crooners on which we used to rely? Luckily, there’s Seth MacFarlane. The creative mind responsible for the Ted movies, A Million Ways to Die in the West, American Dad and…
Thunder-Sky Studies Art History, Passes the Test
“Don’t know much about history,” Sam Cooke sang. The good news is that you don’t have to know much about art history to tune into a wonderful world at Thunder-Sky, Inc.’s History Channel: New Art from Old Art. Well-known masters are represented among the more than 50 pieces, and several have been masterfully reimagined. The…
A View from the Record Shop
During my 15 years in three storefronts on Short Vine, Bogart’s was a terrific business ally and the local crossroads of “my people,” a perfect capacity house of worship where music nuts rubbed shoulders and dropped jaws, collecting a lifetime of “I saw them when…” moments. Public Enemy. Jane’s Addiction. Adrian Belew and The Bears.…
‘Infinitely Polar Bear’: Insight Beyond a Cute Title
The viewing experience sometimes needs to be shared, and I’m talking about films beyond the obvious genre exercises — the found-footage horrors where very little happens, seemingly made for midnight screenings, or the mythic displays of cartoonish world-beating violence that dominate the shared mythic realms of our comic book universes. No, I’m talking about the…
Party Like It’s 1984
One of the major coups for Bogart’s was the 1984 appearance of Prince, who had booked his new band for a short run of rehearsal gigs prior to the his extensive tour to promote the just-released Purple Rain film and soundtrack. After booking the date, which was billed as the Red Hot & Blue Tour,…
2015 Emmys: The Nominees
The 2015 Emmy Awards nominees were announced last Thursday, stacking some of the best television shows, specials and movies against one another. Andy Samberg will host the big show on Sept. 20, but here’s what we know so far. Big Winners OK, so no one’s a winner quite yet, but Game of Thrones leads the…
A Blazing Grace
G race Potter’s rise in the music world has been steady. She has toughed it out with tour after tour for years, opening for and collaborating with artists like Derek Trucks, Warren Haynes and others. But now Potter is entering a new phase in her career; after years of being billed as “Grace Potter and…
Ass Ponys Announce November Reunion Shows
After not performing together in more than a decade, one of Cincinnati’s greatest bands, Ass Ponys, have announced two reunion shows for this fall. The band developed a strong local and regional following in the early ’90s, releasing albums like Mr. Superlove and Grim on small independent labels. In the mid-’90s, when major labels went…
Sound Advice: Glass Animals with Gabriel Garzón-Montano
Don’t let the patchouli-scented Jam band name fool you — Glass Animals have very little in common with that blissed-out branch of musical endeavor. Rather than unstructured guitar noodling punctuated by intermittent cosmic word-soup poetry, the Oxford (U.K., not Ohio) quartet carefully executes a sonic blueprint that mashes up elements of Trip Hop, Psychedelia, Electronica…
Sound Advice: Death from Above 1979 with Deftones, Incubus and The Bots
It’s easy to see why bands with lengthy histories and voluminous catalogs would consider getting back together, but those rationalizations don’t hold much water for Death from Above 1979. The Canadian duo featuring bassist/synthesizer-player/backing vocalist Jesse F. Keeler and drummer/vocalist Sebastien Grainger got together in 2001 and released a sole album of original material, You’re…
Sound Advice: Joan Jett & The Blackhearts
For all the grumbling about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the induction ceremonies can often be revelatory and moving, occasionally serving as a way to view an artist from a different perspective and remind everyone why an artist is receiving the honor in the first place. The 2015 Rock Hall inductions had its…
Sound Advice: MisterWives with Handsome Ghost
It’s been an eventful three years since Mandy Lee went looking for an ’80s cover band to provide the soundtrack for her birthday party. Instead of entertainment, she found a career fronting the energetic and artful Pop quintet MisterWives, an NYC-based collective that combines the passionate vocal quirks of Sinéad O’Connor and Kate Bush and…
Onstage: Hairspray
Cincinnati Young People’s Theatre opens its 34th-annual summer show this week at the Covedale Center, where 80 local teens will twist and pony their way through the raucous musical Hairspray. Set in 1962 Baltimore, it’s about a Rock & Roll TV show that represents the dream of every kid to become a star, especially lovable…
Onstage: Hundred Days
Hundred Days, the first production of Know Theatre’s 18th season, defies categorization. Of course, it’s a play. But the performance is as much an Indie Rock concert as it is a dramatic work. Settling into Know’s 100-seat auditorium, you’ll see a multi-level stage ready for music: microphone set-ups, a drum kit, a snare drum, a…
