Music

G. Love & Special Sauce

The Redstone Room

Thursday, July 3, 9 p.m.

On July 3, Davenport's Redstone Room hosts a special evening with the alternative hip-hop and blues artists of G. Love & Special Sauce, performing in support of their recent album Sugar. On that recording, you'll find the song "Too Much Month," the band's ode to being desperately short on funds. And among its lyrics, you'll find the following: "I got too much month for the end of my money / And not enough money for the end of the month."

This is ordinarily when I'd make some crack, such as "And boy, do we Reader employees know what that's like!" But I'm angling for a raise, so the timing doesn't seem right.

JERSEY BOYS

Jersey Boys, Clint Eastwood's film version of 2005's still-running Broadway smash, is a big, bizarre, cornball, clever, terrible, wonderful movie. It's hard to fathom what, beyond its inherent appeal, made Eastwood want to take on the project; this bio-musical about 1960s pop sensations the Four Seasons seems so clearly designed for Scorsese that's it's almost some kind of joke that it instead wound up in the hands of a man who, stylistically and temperamentally, is Scorsese's polar opposite. Yet somehow, astonishingly, the damned thing works. Its parts may be stronger than the whole - at least if you're allowed to cherry-pick the parts - but the film is affecting and entertaining and alive, and exudes more sheer joy than any other title on Eastwood's 43-year directing résumé.

Music

The Sena Ehrhardt Band *

Rascals Live

Friday, June 13, 7:30 p.m.

This year, Father's Day lands on Sunday, June 15. And two days prior, when Minnesota-based singer/songwriter Sena Ehrhardt performs her concert at Rascals Live, she'll actually share the stage with her own dad Ed Ehrhardt, who's the guitarist for his daughter's blues ensemble the Sena Ehrhardt Band. In other words, this Father's Day, Sena will be able to give her pop the one gift all parents most want from their children: a paycheck.

THE FAULT IN OUR STARS

The first words heard in the romantic tearjerker The Fault in Our Stars come from Shailene Woodley's cancer-stricken teen Hazel, who tells us, in voice-over narration, that Hollywood movies are never honest in their depiction of sad stories, and promises that when it comes to the sad story she's about to relate, "This is the truth." And in retrospect, the film lost me with those four little words, because almost nothing that happened over the next two-plus hours felt even close to true.