Music

High on Fire

Rock Island Brewing Company

Thursday, May 29, 8 p.m.

On May 29, the Rock Island Brewing Company hosts an evening with musicians who, according to the UK's The Guardian, "have been blowing amps and minds for more than a decade." AllMusic.com declared that their music "rolls like sinister thunder across the landscape." And SputnikMusic.com called their most recent album "a ferocious and captivating listen that twists and turns through the deepest, darkest depths while pushing forward into new sonic territory."

Ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together for ... the Osmonds!

Whoops. I mean High on Fire. I keep getting those groups confused.

BLENDED

Without a gun pressed to my head, I'm not sure I could narrow down my list of "Things I Detest About Happy Madison Productions" to fewer than 20 elements, but I'm reasonably sure that the embarrassingly inept slapstick, humiliation of frequently enjoyable co-stars, distractingly rampant product placement, and presence of Adam Sandler would all make the cut.

The very first scene in the latest Happy Madison production, director Frank Coraci's Blended, finds Drew Barrymore shrieking while attempting to wash down ultra-spicy buffalo shrimp with French onion soup, consequently getting most of it on her blouse, and the chain-restaurant Hooters name-dropped a half-dozen times while Sandler sits opposite Barrymore wearing a Dick's Sporting Goods polo shirt.

Sweet Jesus, I thought. It's like a big-screen nightmare made just for me.

"It was third grade," says actor Marc Ciemiewicz, recalling his stage debut. "I went to Catholic school, and it was the Christmas pageant, and I was given the solo for my class - 'I'm Gettin' Nuttin' for Christmas.' And my mom, to this day, still tells the story of the gentleman in the audience who tried to give me a standing ovation ... but his wife pulled him back down."

NEIGHBORS

Director Nicholas Stoller's Neighbors is being marketed as a slapstick sausage fest in which that eternal frat guy Seth Rogen, playing a beleaguered suburbanite, wages war against a houseful of more age-appropriate frat guys led by Zac Efron. That's why it's both unexpected and kind of awesome to find that this meandering, intermittently hilarious movie is actually stolen by a female - or two, if you count the voiceless, ridiculously adorable Elise Vargas as a grinning newborn who would melt the heart of W.C. Fields himself. Really, though, the film belongs to no one so much as Rose Byrne as Rogen's former-party-girl wife, and considering how riotous the performer was in Bridesmaids and Stoller's Get Him to the Greek, this probably isn't the surprise I'm making it out to be.