Oakland’s Grand Lake Theatre is a 1926 Art Deco show palace that first hosted vaudeville shows and silent movie screenings accompanied by the bass-note oscillations of a Wurlitzer Hope Jones Unit-Orchestra Pipe Organ. The classic venue is symbolic of its city, which made it the ideal spot for the Bay Area premiere of a the debut feature by another Oakland icon: activist, musician and now writer-director Boots Riley, who came of age as a moviegoer at the venue. “I saw Star Wars here,” he told an audience that packed the house during the recent San Francisco International Film Festival, where the […]
by Steve Dollar on May 1, 2018Apparently frustrated by Interscope’s tardiness in continuing the production of a documentary on M.I.A. he was directing, Steve Loveridge staged a guerrilla action this weekend by uploading a five-minute teaser to YouTube, embedding it on his Tumblr. “Reblog the shit out of this and maybe they’ll wake up,” he wrote. The action did not go over well. Interscope pulled down the clip, and a Roc Nation exec sent Loveridge one of those entertainment industry “I’m really pissed off but, hey, bro, s’all cool” emails, noting that the upload “screws with” the label’s marketing and PR efforts while assuring Loveridge that […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 8, 2013As the conversation regarding M.I.A. shifts to a debate over who ordered the truffle fries, I thought I should post her latest video, “Born Free,” directed by Romain Gavras, in case you haven’t seen it. M.I.A, Born Free from ROMAIN-GAVRAS on Vimeo.
by Scott Macaulay on May 30, 2010