Leisure

Reviews and think pieces on music, movies, art, and theater.

Leisure

Critical Voices: Avenged Sevenfold, Hail to the King

Despite lead guitarist Synyster Gates’ insistence that Avenged Sevenfold’s sixth studio album “blasts your fucking head off,” it just doesn’t. The listener may contemplate the varied heavy riff selections or nod along politely to the more intense solos, but your dome remains largely intact between your headphones. Hail to the King stops short of decapitation as an unfortunate result of its derivative nature. The LP is simply too familiar and comforting to live up to any epic expectations.

By August 26, 2013

Leisure

Critical Voices: Black Sabbath, 13

All hail Black Sabbath, the progenitors and titans of heavy metal! With original frontman Ozzy Osbourne leading the band, the legends of rock just put out their most potent and malevolent work in decades.

By August 26, 2013

Leisure

Art majors make a promising Pit Stop in Spagnuolo Gallery

In a department whose graduating seniors are few enough to count on two hands, there’s bound to be a level of camaraderie and collaboration that’s difficult to find in more popular disciplines.

By April 25, 2013

Leisure

GU Hispanic Theater students take the quixotic route

Mischief and trickery may be the staples of any Cervantes play, but the amusing antics involved are always grounded by heavier social commentary. Organized by director and novelist Professor Barbara Mujica’s Hispanic Theater class, two of the Spanish playwright’s lesser known one-act plays, El retablo de las maravillas and La cueva de Salamanca, explore this dichotomy between comedy and something a little darker.

By April 25, 2013

Leisure

Critical Voices: Snoop Lion, Reincarnated

Artists at times choose to reinvent themselves—a procedure that pleases some fans and alienates others. Occasionally, however, the journey off the beaten path leads straight into a brick wall. Reincarnated after a cross-species evolution from Snoop Dogg, Snoop Lion makes a clearly marked wrong turn into reggae. “Love is the cure and courage is the weapon / You can use to overcome,” Snoop Lion moans on “Rebel Way,” the opening track. The same advice can be applied to attempting to successfully listen to the entire album in one sitting.

By April 25, 2013

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Critical Voices: Phoenix, Bankrupt!

In its first album since emerging into the forefront of the music scene with hit-filled Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix in 2009, Phoenix takes a slight gamble with Bankrupt! as the band attempts to achieve the delicate balance between pushing artistic boundaries and embracing its relatively recent surge into mainstream music. Despite the stark similarities in sound and structure, Bankrupt! diverges from its predecessor in that it exhibits less cohesion and more confusion, particularly in its lyrics. However, the musical veterans do not disappoint in this amalgamation of recognizable vocals and excedingly synthesized sounds.

By April 25, 2013

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Under the Covers: A chat with Josip Novakovich

Josip Novakovich is a writer of short stories, essays, and novels, with many published to popular acclaim. He was recently shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize for “literary excellence… in a writer’s entire body of work.” Born in Yugoslavia in 1956, Novakovich grew up in Daruvar, in what is now central Croatia.

By April 25, 2013

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Georgetown student filmmakers search for their Muse

Spending a Saturday afternoon in the bioethics library isn’t atypical for Georgetown students, except if you have a camera and a crew of 10 people trying to turn it into a film set. Whispering directions to his two actors, Alex Waldon (COL ’15) and Taylor Mansmann (COL ’15), Andres Figueredo (COL ’13) is in the middle of shooting a scene for his Film & Media Studies thesis project, Muse, and attempting to avoid the wrath of the librarian in the process.

By April 17, 2013

Leisure

Company You Keep: Not what it seems

Terrorists aren’t oceans away; they are in our midst. The radical freedom fighters that were born out of ‘60s rebellion are on full display in The Company You Keep, an enthralling though not quite fully satisfying reminder that this term, which was still used only once in the film, is but a name for ideological fierceness and misguided passions that have a role in this country’s history as much as that of any foreign land.

By April 17, 2013

Leisure

Restless in Washington

The millennial generation has much more to offer artistically than a 22-year-old writing songs about never ever getting back together. With this mentality, theINcrowd founder and creative director Seun Oyewole (SFS ’14) launched The Young and the Restless hip-hop showcase in 2010 to promote “people our age who are trying to take their music to the next level,” a goal that resonates with the event name.

By April 17, 2013

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Newseum fondly remembers John F. Kennedy’s humanity

There are certain events in history we return to again and again, the controversy and the spectacle surrounding them driving our fascination and drawing us back to look for more. The assassination of John F. Kennedy is one of them, a catalyst of unrest and one of the omens that predicated what would be one of the most tumultuous decades in American history.

By April 17, 2013

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Critical Voices: Fall Out Boy, Save Rock and Roll

Bands returning from a long hiatus have a difficult choice to make. They can pay their oldest fans a service and return to their musical roots, or they can pursue a new sound. After ending a five-year break with the unexpected release of Save Rock and Roll, Fall Out Boy has proven that they’ve still got the creative spark needed to produce compelling, fresh material unlike anything they’ve done before.

By April 17, 2013

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Critical Voices: Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Mosquito

Though their usual musical nuance is missing throughout most of their fourth album, Mosquito is the kind of eccentric experimentation that could only come from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. While it lacks the clear highlights of prior albums, such as “Maps” from the now decade-old Fever to Tell, Mosquito is not without its moments—but listeners will have to scratch beyond the surface to discover these glimmers of artistic success.

By April 17, 2013

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Under the Covers: A book as bland as matzah

Mystery, a love triangle, cross-cultural conflict, and a foreign setting—what more could you want in a summer read? And for us internationally aware Georgetown students, Second Person Singular’s author, Sayed Kashua, is yet another of its attractions.

By April 17, 2013

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Reel Talk: Risqué, violent movies ‘R’ us

Most movie fans remember the first R-rated movie they watched. If you have trouble recalling this formative experience, you probably had awesome parents who let you watch Commando when you were three. But that’s beside the point. A couple hundred R-rated movies later, we cannot help but miss the visceral reactions our younger selves felt as we saw explicit images on the screen, images that opened the door to terror, sexuality, and humor which our virgin eyes and ears had never been exposed to.

By April 17, 2013

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Astounding Trojan Barbie takes on a life of its own

Walking into Gonda Theater and seeing a Barbie doll’s limbs tied on cords is a bit of a shocking sight. At first, you think it’s just a child’s room gone horribly wrong, when in reality, it means so much more. As grotesque as it appears, it conceals profound conflict beneath the surface.

By April 11, 2013

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D.C. Film Fest kicks off

Now in its 27th year, the D.C. Film Fest continues to showcase a comprehensive selection of foreign films and documentaries. This city-spanning event brings in some of the more enigmatic filmmakers and public figures of the age, but to categorize these guests as provocateurs would be a bit of stretch.

By April 11, 2013

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Trance will hold you in its sway

A psychological thriller can only go one of two ways—astounding success or abject failure. Every piece of the puzzle must come together in the end, the build-up to the ultimate reveal being propelled by unmistakable momentum. Director Danny Boyle masterfully achieves this feat with Trance, his fascination with both visual and metaphorical fragmentation showing through in every scene and suspense pervading every line.

By April 11, 2013

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Examining intimacy with “Let’s Not Ever Be Strangers Again”

I have never witnessed a performance art show, since it’s a relatively nascent artistic phenomenon to gain attention from the general population. The closest I ever got was visiting the Curator’s Office, a gallery near Logan Circle, to examine the extraordinary documentation of D.C. native and performance artist Kathryn Cornelius’s edgy experiment, performed in summer 2012. “Let’s Not Ever Be Strangers Again” details 34-year-old Cornelius’s experience of getting married to seven different people in seven hours, and promptly divorcing each one merely an hour after the wedding vows. All in a day’s work.

By April 11, 2013

Leisure

Critical Voices: James Blake, Overgrown

A sensitive dubstep artist who’s been known to collaborate with Bon Iver isn’t exactly the kind of musician you find in droves these days. So, James Blake is somewhat of an anomaly in this sense, though the tremendous appeal of his idiosyncratic, folksy electronica is impossible to deny. With his sophomore effort, Overgrown, the London-based singer-songwriter proves that he’s in no way contained within the boundaries of genre.

By April 11, 2013