Review: 'Pee-wee's Big Holiday' (loved it)

from BoingBoing:

Last night my eight-year-old daughter and I enjoyed Pee-wee's Big Holiday. This is a fantastic return for Pee-wee Herman, and Paul Reubens has done a masterful job. Pee-wee's charm, innocence, and awesome moral compass are still keeping him out of trouble, despite a cast of delightfully troublesome characters that pop up along the way.

This is another Pee-wee Herman road movie. Pee-wee is loving his life in Fairville, and hasn't left since the events of his last feature film. When phenomenally cool stranger and well-known actor Joe Manganiello (portrayed by himself) comes to town, the two become instant friends. Manganiello invites everyone's favorite adorable man-child to his birthday party, which happens to be in just five days and in glamorous New York City. The invitation rekindles Pee-wee's sense of adventure, and he takes to the open road. Raucous hilarity ensues.

My daughter told me she really likes Pee-wee. He is cute, very nice, and oh so funny. I have to agree. This film is was great fun for us both! Pee-wee's playful innocence and charming smirk are in perfect tune. Interesting and sometimes slightly creepy characters appear with every scene change. Rube Goldberg machines, silly disguises, crazy locations, and improbable events abound.

Big Holiday is a reprise of Pee-wee's Big Adventure, one of the most hilarious films of all time. The new Netflix feature is not the same adventure you remember from the 1985 cult classic, but close enough to press all your happy nostalgia buttons. Paul Reubens exudes 100% of the boyish charm and delight we expect in Pee-wee. His high-pitched scream still pierces even after 30 years. His smile and giggle are still infectious. Director John Lee manages to get the rest of the cast to play along with Reubens perfectly, while dropping easter egg after easter egg for longtime fans. Mark Mothersbaugh did an amazing job with the soundtrack--absolutely reminiscent of Danny Elfman's work for Big Adventure, but stand-alone wonderful.

Pee-wee's Big Holiday, via Netflix

I also have an eight year old, he and I enjoyed it as well!

Chain and The Gang - Minimum Rock N Roll

record review from
Washington City Paper By Leor Galil:

Ian Svenonius has spent decades in bands that present themselves as anything but ordinary—the Nation of Ulysses, the agitprop post-hardcore group he fronted till its demise in 1992, even seceded from the union. Svenonius is an immeasurably sharp and sophisticated pop auteur who could make challenging, provocative work in a variety of mediums. He’s dabbled elsewhere: He’s hosted his own talk show (Soft Focus) and he’s written a couple of books (most recently 2012’s Supernatural Strategies for Making a Rock ’n’ Roll Group), but rock music is still the vehicle Svenonius uses to propel his heady sociopolitical manifestos.

He’s also got a knack for condensing a lot of ideas into lean, catchy rock, which is central to Chain and the Gang’s fourth album, Minimum Rock N Roll, released on Svenonius’s new label, Radical Elite (and distributed by Dischord Direct). It’s rock music stripped to its barest essentials—sometimes the spaces between notes can leave an impression as powerful as the group’s blunt guitar stabs—and played in a fashion reminiscent of the unvarnished, animalistic garage of decades long-since passed. Minimum Rock N Roll is revival rock, but that has less to do with the fact that the album sounds like it popped out of a time capsule from the ’60s and more to do with the way Svenonius, vocalist Katie Alice Greer (of Priests), and the rest of the band deliver the stark tunes with a fervor that borders on religious.

The music gets pretty intense, but its simplicity and near-minimalism tend to foreground any elements that change from song to song, elevating Svenonius’s words, and, more importantly, their content. The music’s the grand pulpit Svenonius uses for his declamations, and on Minimum Rock N Roll, he’s speaking (or singing, or sing-speaking) from one with a strong amplification system. His polemics are multipronged and layered—“Devitalize” is as much a takedown of gentrification as it is of society as a whole, no stretch for a guy who once released an album about destroying America and who calls his current band’s sound “crime rock.”

Indeed, there’s a sense of lawlessness that pervades Minimum Rock N Roll, which spills over from Svenonius’s lyrics into the band’s music and back again. The album’s a pointed attack on indie rock’s middling status quo, and it feels a little dangerous in a way that’s also entirely charming and approachable. Chain and the Gang even make outlaw life sound stylishly romantic on “I’m a Choice (Not a Child),” an old-school ballad that hints at some hidden nuance that’ll take months to unpack. It’s clever, a bit deceptively so, but that’s what you can expect from Svenonius and company—something that sounds innate and familiar, yet twisted in unexpected ways.