Music
James Armstrong
The Muddy Waters
Friday, January 23, 9 p.m.
James Armstrong, who plays the Muddy Waters on January 23, is an electric guitarist and singer/songwriter whose venerated talents have earned him the nickname "The Ambassador of the Blues." But with Armstrong boasting, according to JazzTimes magazine, "the kind of flexibility that allows him to easily and convincingly shift gears," and celebrated blues historian Tony Russell calling him a master of "the flexible language of feeling allusion," I'd like to propose a new moniker for the famously flexible artist: Stretch Armstrong.
And just now, I received a cease-and-desist from Hasbro. Man, I really thought I was the only one who remembered that toy ... .
FOXCATCHER
Friday, January 16, 10:05 a.m.-ish: My first and final quadruple feature of 2015 (yeah, right) begins with the Michael Mann thriller Blackhat, which opens with the camera racing within a computer module and deeper and deeper into the internal workings of binary code, like a burrowing reverse of Robert Zemeckis' introductory shot in Contact. At its climax, we discover that we've been watching the process by which a faraway cyber-terrorist sets off an explosion at a Chinese nuclear facility, and it's a juicy, unsettling prelude - so good, and so promising, that it probably takes longer than it should to realize the movie is goofy as hell.
It was awfully early in the morning, 5:30 a.m. Pacific, when the nominations for this year's Academy Awards were read by actor Chris Pine, directors J.J. Abrams and Alfonso Cuarón, and Academy president Cheryl Boone Isaacs. (Also, for the first time ever, the nominees in all 24 categories were read live, meaning we prognosticators didn't have to wait an extra six minutes to find out just how badly we screwed up Best Sound Mixing.) It might even have been a little too early for Ms. Isaacs, who, when announcing their names, approached true Travolta-ness by calling Julianne Moore "Julianne Moren" and Mr. Turner cinematographer Dick Pope "Dick Poop."
SELMA
If you're reading this hot off the (electronic) presses, members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences only have an hour or so to submit their online or - less frequently these days - paper ballots for this year's Oscar race. (Voting officially ends today at 5 p.m. PST.) So this seems like an appropriate time to make my own final guesses for January 15's nominees, even if a better time would be January 15 itself - preferably just after the Academy's official announcement of contenders.
There are quite a few promising titles I've yet to see, including wintertime Oscar hopefuls such as Selma, American Sniper, Mr. Turner, Still Alice, A Most Violent Year, and Inherent Vice, and most everything bound to be nominated for Best Foreign-Language Film and Best Documentary Feature. The Quad Cities area is a relatively small movie market in the Midwest, and I don't get to Chicago (or New York or Los Angeles) very often. C'est comme ça.
Music
THE WOMAN IN BLACK 2: ANGEL OF DEATH
