CLICKING & STREAMING: ‘DEATH METAL ANGOLA’ (Baltimore citypaper)
"Death Metal Angola" opens with intimate, handheld shots of an Angolan man, Wilker Flores, playing a six-string and breathily snarling into a mic in front of dim-lit stucco wall. This image, which both confirms the typical heavy-metal image and complicates it, is followed by a description of Angola's tragic and tumultuous post-colonial history and recurring violence.
‘THE LOBSTER’ REVIEW (DEADSHIRT)
Director Yorgos Lanthimos is an auteur of stringent, calculated discomfort. He satirizes and fetishizes the banal. He leaves you feeling repulsed, and yet somehow so much richer for having walked away with the experience of seeing his grotesque perspective. That’s at least what most people felt about Dogtooth, Lanthimos’ breakout film that earned him a lot of notoriety at Cannes in 2009.
HARI KONDABOLU INTERVIEW (BALTIMORE SUN)
A modest provocateur, stand-up comedian Hari Kondabolu has performed on a variety of late-night talk shows, had his own half-hour Comedy Central Presents stand-up special, hosts a podcast with his brother Ashok ("Untitled Kondabolu Brothers Project"), formerly of the laughing-but-very-serious rap group Das Racist, and was a staff writer for the short-lived FX stand-up comedy television series, "Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell," a show that, given the current conversations surrounding race in the United States of America, is much needed, 2/4 making its cancellation all the more frustrating.