Music Review: North Mississippi Hill Country Picnic, Volume II

Chapel Hill-based Devil Down Records has thrown down the gauntlet again, challenging audiences to take a bite out of North Mississippi blues and daring them to see if that blues won’t bite back. MAY 18

Label puts new ear to old sounds

One day last September, junior Southern Studies major Reed Turchi was sitting on the porch of Kenny Brown’s house in Potts Camp, Mississippi, recording one of the most eminent blues guitarists in America. APR 21

Spring break bulletin

Dive’s got some tips on how to maximize your break, be it the best traveling records or easy day-trip or weekend destinations. So don’t be blue if there are no exotic beaches in your future. Even Chapel Hill can feel tropical when there aren’t midterms clouding your outlook. MAR 16

Music Review: Drive-By Truckers

For the Drive-By Truckers, the southern thing is both an identity and an industry. By mixing deep-fried rock ‘n’ roll with masterful storytelling and redneck apocrypha, the Athens, Ga.-based musicians keep turning out one awesome album after another. MAR 3

Movie review: The King's Speech

In one scene near the beginning of “The King’s Speech,” the Duchess of York (Helena Bonham Carter) sits next to a poor stuttering boy in the waiting room of a London speech therapist. The Duchess is there under alias, uncomfortably mingling with the commoners while her husband, Prince Albert (Colin Firth), secretly works on his stammer. JAN 31

Movie Review: True Grit

First spun by Charles Portis in the original novel from 1968, and then again in its first filmed version starring John Wayne a year later, “True Grit” was already a twice-told tale. JAN 13

Movie Review: Fair Game

It’s seven years late, but Hollywood’s dramatic take on the “Plame affair” is finally here. Maybe you’ll remember this shameful story from 2003, when Scooter Libby, chief of staff to Dick Cheney, illegally divulged the name of undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame to the media. DEC 2

Movie Review: Inside Job

A week ago, the UNC Global Research Institute hosted an interview with Larry Summers, the director of President Barack Obama’s National Economic Council. NOV 18

Old Crow Medicine Show to sing with 'heels tarred'

DTH: Can you explain the distinct sound of the music you play? *
Ketch Secor:* It’s kind of like a Brunswick stew. NOV 12

Movie Review: The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest

The final segment of the menacing “Millennium” trilogy is here, and it couldn’t have found a more inappropriate venue than the gray-haired Chelsea Theater. If you haven’t read the bestselling novels by deceased Swedish communist Stieg Larsson or seen the first two films, that doesn’t really matter. A quick online summary is all one needs for the back story on Lisbeth Salander, Larsson’s defiant hacker-punk heroine who is determined to kick lots of ass and let every one else take their sweet time figuring out why. NOV 11

Battle of the Taco Trucks

In this week’s Dive, we take a look at one of the finest dining traditions in the area — taco trucks. While these providers of meals on four wheels aren’t typically revered with the same respect as restaurants, we thought it was high time these paragons of cheap and tasty tortilla- wrapped fare received their due. NOV 11

Judging the man and his movies

As part of the Roman Polanski film series being hosted by the Varsity, “The Pianist” will begin screening this Friday. Polanski, an acclaimed filmmaker, was convicted of statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl in 1977. He then fled abroad, and because of his fugitive status, debate has erupted regarding whether he should receive critical praise as a filmmaker. This column serves as a response to last week’s piece by Rocco Giamatteo, which defended Polanski’s films. NOV 11

Movie Review: Soul Kitchen

“Soul Kitchen” kicks off with funk and grace — it ends with credits that rise beyond the colorful glory of funk poster art. OCT 7

World Beer Festival returns to Durham

In the fourteen years of its existence, the World Beer Festival in Durham has grown exponentially. “All About Beer,” which acts as “host,” also holds the festival in Raleigh, Columbia, S.C., and Richmond, Va., each year. But Bradford says Durham’s is the best. OCT 7

Movie Review: 'Machete'

After watching “Machete” I wonder what’s wrong with Robert Rodriguez, but I don’t wonder long. The all-terrain movie man has run laps around any idea we have of Hollywood decency. He cashes in as director of the Spy Kids franchise on odd-numbered years and collaborates with bloody Quentin Tarantino on the even ones. So what’s he getting at? What’s his game? SEP 9

Movie Review: Get Low

Tennessee hermits are strange creatures, especially when they hide in the hills and shroud themselves in rumor and legend. SEP 2

Movie Review: The Expendables

A movie should be judged by what it is, right? AUG 26

Movie review: Crazy Heart

Dive Verdict: 2.5 of 5 Stars

Movie review: ‘The Messenger’ brings a decade of war home

Dive verdict: 4 of 5 stars

2009 will be remembered, at least in part, as the year American cinema finally turned its gaze on a near decade of warfare in the Middle East. “Brothers” and “The Hurt Locker” were both good, but the last to get to Chapel Hill, Oren Moverman’s “The Messenger,” is the most unique, most important and, if you ask me, best of them all. FEB 3

Movie review: Extraordinary Measures

Dive verdict: 1.5 of 5 stars

Brew Ha Ha: 1/15/11

Welcome to a new year and a new semester at the Brew Ha Ha. Hopefully everyone had a blessedly intoxicated winter break. We’ll kick off our first few weeks with themed beer investigations, starting with “angry” ales this Friday, and turning to India Pale Ales next week. After that, who knows what’s to come?

Our first “angry” ale this week isn’t so much angry as it is sour. In fact, it’s just that: a sour ale from Fullsteam Brewery in Durham. At the moment Fullsteam has on tap something they’re quite creatively (and deceptively) calling their “Sour Mashed Sweet Potato Ale.” The story behind this limited-release beer has nothing to do with sour mash whiskey, sadly, but derives its name rather from Fullsteam’s regular “Carver” sweet potato lager. From what I apocryphally gather, the grains normally used for the Carver were recently infected by a strain of bacteria known as lactobacillus under mysterious circumstances, and this soured the wort. When that wort was then reused, it turned into a sour beer, and thus a star was born. FEB 23

(Belated) Brew Ha Ha: November 24, 2010

I offer my profoundest and most humble apologies for the lack of brew news last week, and will make up for it this week with a Brewhaha smorgasbord. So let’s get started.

First up is a heads up to all those deal-hounds looking for good-to-decent beer at awesome-to-awesomer prices. Last week I scored a 12 pack of Redhook’s Longhammer IPAs at the Harris Teeter (a.k.a. the Hairy Teat) in Carrboro for roughly $8. I was so stoked about that price that I forgot to be skeptical about, well, that price, and bought the pack without a second thought. Longhammer, though much maligned by my friends as a sub-standard IPA, is not a bad beer. I admit, it’s not particularly strong or adventurous, but it’s easily drinkable and has more than enough hoppiness to justify a $ 0.66 dollar/beer price. The catch with that, and the beer generally, though I didn’t realize this until I got home, was that the IPAs were roughly three months expired. Whoops. It turned out that didn’t really matter, as they were still plenty drinkable and not stale at all. So word to the wise: the Teat might not be sold out. If you can stomach a mediocre IPA for rock bottom prices, hit ‘em up and tell ‘em the Brew Ha Ha sent you.

Diversions' Jonathan Pattishall chats (even more) with Ketch Secor of Old Crow Medicine Show

Old Crow Medicine Show is bring banjos and fiddles to Memorial Hall tonight. But before rocking out, banjoist and fiddle man Ketch Secor sat down with Diversions staff writer Jonathan Pattishall to talk about Brunswick Stew, Led Zeppelin and barbeque.

Brew Ha Ha: November 5, 2010

After last week’s beer mixing and this week’s essay writing, the Brewhaha is going to take a week off from beating readers over the head with advice on what beers to drink, and will just be telling you where and when to drink them instead.

As my Dive colleague Rachel Arnett reported in yesterday’s paper, the annual Home Brew Festival will be taking place at the Nightlight tomorrow, beginning at 4 pm. It should be a great chance for laid back sampling of the crazy things that Chapel Hill/Carrboro brewers cook up. From what I gather, entrance is free, but people will probably think you’re an asshole if you come and drink their beer without donating to Nourish International and The Multiple Sclerosis Society like they want you to. So don’t be an ass, and come out tomorrow for the beer and a couple of good causes. I hope to see you there!

Homebrew equipment photo courtesy of gadgets.boingboing.ne

Brew Ha Ha: October 29, 2010

We mix wines. We mix spirits. We mix foods and medications and hip hop tapes. We even mix races nowadays. So why don’t we mix beers?

This is the question that stumped me over fall break as I sat on the bank of the James River, overlooking the beautiful downtown skyline of Richmond by night. I was at the Legend Brewing Company pub, following up on a random tip from a comrade-in-beer. As often happens, one tip leads to another, and when I asked my waiter at Legend what his favorite house beer was, he surprised me with some advice that you don’t often hear among craft-brew purists these days. “My favorite is to mix the golden ale and the brown ale,” he said.

Fall Shakori Flashback: Marshall Tucker Band

Hot, nasty, rhythm-heavy white boys with a little flute thrown in for good measure. That’s southern rock in a nutshell. It’s also the easiest way to describe the Marshall Tucker Band. A staple act during the hey-day of southern rock, sharing stages with the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd, the boys from Spartanburg, SC are entering their fourth decade of redneck jams. And while most of the faces have changed (RIP Toy and Tommy Caldwell), the tunes were still fresh and anthemic when the legendary band rolled through Shakori on its opening Thursday night.

Brew Ha Ha, 10/15

I was really hoping to make it out to Raleigh last night for the annual Big Food Truck Harvest at Big Boss, complete with cask ales and pumpkin carving, but threats of inclement weather and bad traffic on I-40 kept me at home. The shit-show must go on, however, so I hit the bottle shop in lieu of the party and rummaged up something for this week’s Brew Ha Ha. This time I gravitated away from the local beers that I’ve been harping on recently, exchanging them for challenging stuff from stranger American

World Beer Fest — Costumes, Brews and Conviviality

Click the photo above to see Dive’s entire Flickr set of the World Beer Fest

“You go to a beer event and everyone’s having a hell of a lot of fun.”

That’s how Daniel Bradford, producer of the World Beer Festival, described things to me last weekend when I interviewed him for Dive’s cover story. He wasn’t talking specifically about his festival at the time, but he might as well have been. As I found out when I attended the event at the Durham Bull Athletic Park on Saturday, the World Beer Festival is nothing short of one huge hell of a lot of fun.

Brew Ha Ha, 10/8

The Brew Ha Ha will be heading down the road to Durham Saturday for an afternoon of food, fun and, of course, beer, at the 14th annual World Beer Festival in the Durham Bull’s Athletic Park. In honor of that occasion, and in keeping with Thursday’s Dive story on the same, I went out this week in search of a growler of the coveted “Sweet Josie” American brown ale from Lone Rider Brewery in Raleigh. “Sweet Josie” recently won the gold medal in the American brown ale category at the Great American Beer Festival in Denver, Colo., and Sumit Vohra, the company’s CEO, went on the record in our story, speaking about what a blast the World Beer Festival in Durham is. Unfortunately, the coveted “Sweet Josie” is a little too sweet and a little too coveted, and by the time I made it to Weaver Street Market they were all gone. Not too worry, though, because I scored a six pack of their “Peacemaker” pale ale instead, trusting that a brewery that can kick ass in Denver must certainly be able to brew more than one stellar style of beer.

Brew Ha Ha, 10/1

With the autumnal equinox come and gone, and foul weather haunting Chapel Hill for half a week, we can officially say that summer is through. That means that fall is kind of here (or maybe not yet, or maybe sort of, or maybe he’s thinking about it) and it’s the time of the year that we pagan souls love most: harvest time. The harvest is a very special time all throughout the beer world, but it means different things in different places. In honor of this year’s assuredly diverse harvest, the Brew Ha Ha will be all over the place as well, trying to fight its ADD and focus on a consistent beer theme, but probably failing miserably. At the very least we will (mostly) restrict ourselves to seasonal and limited beers, so get your hands on these babies while supplies last, or prepare for a long, hard, thirsty winter.

We begin with a simple musing, a thought that occurred to me earlier today. It was half past noon and I was unashamedly pouring my “before-class beer,” a can of Guinness draught, widget clinking blissfully away. Once the pouring was finished I undertook my usual ritual of holding the full glass up to light, admiring the internal beauty of a vessel hardly worthy of its contents. It was a sight I’ve seen a million times before—the tiny, mocha-colored nitrate bubbles of Ireland’s most famous export sinking
curiously downwards, forming a liminal region between the dark black depths of its hell and the impenetrably thick cloud of its heaven. Then, as sometimes happens, a new thought sprang fully formed out of this familiar image: I was staring at a gem, a Tiger’s Eye to be exact. The transition of colors, the mesmerizing beauty, it was all there. Then I took the thought a step further. They say it takes nearly two minutes to pour the perfect pint of Guinness out of a tap, far longer than most (probably any) other beers. In tap terms this is called a “double pour,” and it takes the bartending equivalent of an epoch in geologic time. Is Guinness even a beer at all then? Or is it something more durable, forged deep underground in a crucifix of heat and pressure and time like its metamorphic twin? I don’t rightly know, but when drinking at 12:30 on a Thursday, such speculations can be pretty convincing.

Enough with the poetry, on to the beer! I picked up three different bottled
brews at the Carrboro Beverage Company on Thursday with an eye to seasonal
offerings. Here’s what I came up with.

Duck-Rabbit Märzen:

Movie Review -- "Cairo Time"

Told in less than ninety minutes of loosely connected vignettes, the Chelsea Theater bills this little movie as “a love letter to a city intertwined with a love story about a woman.”

More accurate would be “a love letter to a city that’s barely present rudely suffocated by an abortive love story about an uninteresting woman that begins prematurely and ends unconvincingly.”

Brew Ha Ha -- 9/24

School is back in full swing, which can only mean one thing for college
students everywhere. That’s right! It’s time again to retreat into your
protective shell of alcohol consumption. Ignoring deadlines and skipping
classes aren’t exactly hard things to do, but they’re just that much easier
when you’ve got a little liquid courage (or liquid laziness) lending a
helping hand.

Just don’t forget that you don’t have to skip and slack without class. When
you get tired of frat-packs of Busch Light and empty handles of Aristocrat
littering your kitchen, be sure to tune in to Dive’s weekly post, the Brew
Ha Ha, for helpful pointers on craft brewed beer in Chapel Hill. Slaking
your thirst should be a joy to your palate as well as your liver, and
nothing kills those two birds with one stone like a serious beer.

We reinaugurate the Brew Ha Ha with a brief look at two North Carolina
selections both being served at Milltown at the moment.

The first is the Carolina Common by Fullsteam Brewery in Durham.

Screen Time for Feb. 12

It's either going to be really good or really bad, but whatever "The Wolfman" is, it'll be well worth watching. Rehasing beloved Victorian tales has become popular in recent years ("Sweeney Todd," "Sherlock Holmes"), but they have normally been rehashed by experimental, (dare I say ironic?) filmmakers who prize a good time over a faithful rendering of source material. "The Wolfman" looks like it might be truer to form for its classic story of the werewolf, which is a good thing considering the fact that the werewolf is probably the archetypal Victorian monster. And as director Joe Johnston can tell you, having worked as an art director on all three of the archetype-heavy original "Star Wars" films, straying from our collective unconscious is not normally a good idea (or a good way to make money). Johnston has had a spotty career as director -- he butchered "Jurassic Park III" in 2001, but then made up for it with the smart, culturally dynamic and entertaining "Hidalgo" three years later -- which just confirms the first sentence of the paragraph that you are currently reading. Benicio del Toro, Anthony Hopkins, Emily Blunt and Hugo Weaving star, but who are we kidding? This isn't going to be about acting. It's going to be about how impressively Johnston can turn a handsome, Academy Award winning actor into a werewolf in front of our very eyes. And how many chills he can send up our spine like a damp English fog. I don't personally find the previews to be chilling (the ultimate compliment for Victorian horror), but I do find them entertaining, and perhaps that's all it will take to get audiences howling at the moon.

FEB 16

Screen Time for Feb. 5

My movie recommendation for the week goes to “Dear John,” the new adaptation of a heart-warming literary masterpiece of true love by Nicholas Sparks… Syke!

My recommendation for the week actually goes to “From Paris With Love,” the witty… Yeah, I can’t even really make a joke about that one.

OK guys, no BSing this time. My recommendation for the week actually goes to “Crazy Heart,” a serious movie with serious acting by serious actors for serious people. With all that seriousness flying around you might think “Crazy Heart” must run the risk of being over-serious, and it would, if it weren’t about a washed up, drink-sodden country music singer struggling to make a living playing local dives and one-night acts. Country musicians keep their senses of charming humor through thick and through thin, and when your redneck troubadour is acted by Jeff Bridges its hard to be too dour. Bridges’ performance in this movie is supposed to be phenomenal, and by some accounts actually transcendent. (But not transcendental. That’s hippy shit!) With Maggie Gyllenhaal, Colin Farrell and Robert Duvall in backing roles, and a score by T-Bone Burnett, this one should feel as authentic as a glass of Jack on ice.

FEB 6

Screen Time for Jan. 29

It was a close call this week between Mel Gibson's psychologically tough new Boston crime drama, "Edge of Darkness," opening wide, and last year's critically acclaimed "The Messenger," finally opening at the Chelsea. But the ponderous weight of the critics won out in the end: my recommendation for the week goes to "The Messenger." Directed by the Israeli-American Oren Moverman, who also co-wrote the screenplay, "The Messenger" takes an uncompromising look at the jobs of soldiers in the Army's Casualty Notification Service. These men and women are responsible for going door to door and informing the families of fallen soldiers that their loved ones have been killed in action. Granted, any job is a good job in our current economy, and there's little risk of being killed yourself when serving in the CNS, but that's one job that I would never want to have.

Moverman was a co-writer for "I'm Not There," the 2007 anti-bio-pic of Bob Dylan, but "The Messenger" is his directing debut, so look for fresh,innovative approaches to the personal story of these soldiers and his take on the Iraq War. Woody Harrelson stars alongside Ben Foster as the two main CNS officers, and Harrelson has garnered much critical buzz for his performance (even earning a Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actor). Steve Buscemi also has a minor role, to throw something odd in the mix. On the tail end of our seven year involvement in Iraq, "The Messenger" should be a brutally honest movie, and therefore a very necessary movie, about what war means on the home front.

JAN 29

Rocky Horror Playhouse

"The Rocky Horror Picture Show" is the epitome of cult cinema. Some people get it, some people don't. I've seen it once or twice, and I admit that I was at least mildly amused, but I'm not what one would call a "Rocky Horror" enthusiast. All the same, I respect the Show's unique place in film history and culture, and I deeply appreciate the texture that it brought to the movies. In honor of that texture, and also in honor of Stuart Hoyle, the Varsity projectionist who is featured in this week's cover story for Diversions, I've dug up a little Youtube clip of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" at the 8th Street Playhouse in New York City. The Playhouse was one of the two most important venues for launching "Rocky Horror" into its cult status, along with the Waverly Theater, also in NYC. Hoyle worked at the Playhouse for four months sometime in the mid 1980's, before coming to Chapel Hill to work at the Varsity. So enjoy this little slice of movie-house fun, and remember, if you ever go see "Rocky Horror" live, never, ever tell them that you're a "virgin."

JAN 28

Screen Time for Jan. 15

"Broken Embraces" (The Chelsea)

Though "The Book of Eli," opening today in multiplexes near you, looks like an interesting take on the currently worn out genre of post-apocalyptic tales, my movie recommendation for the week is "Broken Embraces," Pedro Almodovar's latest collaboration with Penelope Cruz. Almodovar is one of the most important living directors in the world, the cinematic author of masterpieces such as "Talk to Her" (2002) and "Live Flesh" (1997), and I have been anxiously awaiting the opening of this limited release film in Chapel Hill. He is widely considered to be a "woman's director" because his films' most intimate struggles typically center on his female protagonists and victims. He also uses bright, feminine color palates that compliment his female leads. "Broken Embraces" promises to be both in this vein and totally outside of it, a neo-noir love-thriller (yet with colorful flair) about dangerous romance. It's brief and enigmatic trailer has a mysterious quality reminiscent of the confusions of identity and murder in 2004's "Bad Education," albeit heterosexual this time. It is even said to border on hard-boiled detective styles, which will be an interesting masculine change that no Almodovar fan should miss. Look for good performances from usual Almodovar collaborators Cruz and Lola Duenas.

JAN 15

Movie Review: Invictus

“Invictus” tells an incredible and entirely true story, that of the 1995 Rugby World Cup in South Africa. In that year Nelson Mandela (played in the movie by Morgan Freeman) used a white-dominated sport that had been a prominent symbol of apartheid to reconcile white and black South Africans. With the help of the Springbok’s captain Francois Pienaar (Matt Damon), he launched a PR campaign that brought the leftist agitators of the anti-apartheid African National Congress into the same sports tent as right-wing Afrikaners, most of whom were rugby fanatics. By championing the Springboks, Mandela convinced whites that he respected their culture, and in the process he helped unify a nation on the verge of race-based civil war.

It is essentially a story about the charm, magnanimity and political genius
of Nelson Mandela. So even if some of the historical details were allowed to slip by the wayside (and they were), the only chance this movie stood of being a success was in hitting Mandela’s chord in perfect harmony. If director Clint Eastwood couldn’t do that, he should have scrapped the project altogether.

Click above to read more

DEC 13

Screen Time for Dec. 4

What a Friday this is shaping up to be. What a baller, rip-roaring,ass-kicking Friday. First of all Dive has its semi-annual party at the Local 506 at 10 pm, for free. (Don't you love shameless self-promotion.) Then, two highly anticipated movies are opening in Chapel Hill. And don't worry, neither of them are "Armored."

"Brothers" (Wide): This remake of an award-winning 2004 Danish film, directed by Irish film-maker Jim Sheridan, and starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Tobey Maguire, has all the trappings of an emotionally powerful Oscar-contender. It follows the story of two brothers, a straight-laced Marine (Maguire) missing in action in Afghanistan and his ne'er-do-well sibling (Gyllenhaal) who looks after his brother's wife and kids, getting a little closer than a missing husband would like.

When the Marine is found alive and returns home, he begins to spiral out of control with the worst-case-scenarios of a traumatized veteran. Look for some heavy-duty war time drama from the two lead males, as well as Natalie Portman, who plays Maguire's grieving wife.

Movie Review: My One and Only

Never before have I wanted to walk out of the theater five minutes into a movie. Never before have I finished a movie and genuinely thought about how much better my life would have been had I spent the last two hours licking envelopes. Never before have I considered giving a movie zero stars.

But here I am, and now I face the difficult task of explaining to you just how bad “My One and Only” is. At first I thought that maybe I should do the Mr.-Pretentious-Pants, big-shot critic thing, and try to be very nuanced in my dissection. To take a jackhammer to its adamantine shell of s--ttiness, so to speak, and try and dig something redeeming out of the rubble.

But I can’t do it. Obviously somebody somewhere can, seeing as it has an 80 percent “fresh” rating among top (i.e., professional) critics on Rotten Tomatoes. But I’m not one of those people, and I cannot at all imagine what is running through their heads. Have they lost it?

Click above to read more.

DEC 7