I think the one thing that makes me love movies are the feelings that they can make you feel. Rarely in this day-and-age where blockbusters rule the theatres (don’t get me wrong, I love a great action sequence) do moviegoers find a film where they can really feel for the characters that are playing out life on screen. In a new summer tradition, I called up my friend for our weekly Tuesday “bucket night” date at the Bev and we decided to catch the new Keri Russell flick Waitress; and I have to say, I’m glad we did. Adrienne Shelly (Revolution #9) wrote, directed and acted in this, her final film before she was tragically murdered in November of last year. The film follows Jenna (Keri Russell - Felicity) who works in a restaurant creating and serving up pies (like the “I hate my husband” pie). She is in a marriage to a man named Earl (Jeremy Sisto - Six Feet Under) whom she does not love and controls her every move. Right away Jenna finds out she is pregnant and she is very adamant about how unhappy she is about this pregnancy. Jenna’s pregnancy leads her to Dr. Pomatter (Nathan Fillion - Drive, Firefly) who she begins to have an affair with. Through her affair with Dr. Pomatter, her friends (Adrienne Shelly and Cheryl Hines), the lovable grumpy old man Joe (Andy Griffith), and especially the birth of her baby, Jenna learns to appreciate herself and finds out who the true love of her life is. Before you go off thinking this is a sappy love story, I can safely say that it is; but not in the conventional way. Throughout the film, Jenna is upset about having a baby because she looks at it as a burden, as an attachment to the life and the husband that she wants to get away from. And without ruining the ending, the look that Jenna gives to her baby when the nurse puts her in her arms is one that just radiates love and emotion.

Now for you guys that are reading this thinking “Kendra, you are gonna make my girlfriend take me to another sappy movie” I can say yes it has it’s emotional points but it also has a whit and comedy to the writing and performance that makes the audience laugh out loud. The sarcasm that comes from the characters is something that many can appreciate and is also very real. While at times it can seem that some of the characters feelings are slightly exaggerated, there is such a real feel to the film and those “exaggerated emotions” that makes you appreciate each character, even the controlling Earl. Each character seems to have their own stories to tell that intertwine with each other throughout the film.

In memory of Adrienne Shelly; writer, director and actress; June 24, 1966 - November 1, 2006.

Yaaarrrrr!!!!!

All your favorite swashbuckling stars are back for another scurvy-ridden, barnacle-encrusted, rum-soaked adventure with Pirates of the Caribbean III : At World’s End. After the second installment, I was a little afraid that the third would be mired down in its own plot and way too over the top, but the fact that this was by far the most expensive movie endevour in years actually pays off for this historical fantasy spectacle.

In true pirate fashion, the film goes completely all out and makes no apologies for anything. Disney, Bruckheimer and Verbinski clearly have a lot of faith in their audience as they compound on one new character after the next along with interweaving plot points and a good dose of pirate lore and mythology as icing. But somehow rather than being confusing it all works well and delivers an absolutely indulgent and no holds barred experience for the willing. Even the visuals are completely sumptuous and decadent to match. Similar to the feeling you get from actually understanding what’s going in a Harry Potter book, new characters fit in with old ones that pop up here and there and it feels good to keep up. I’ve grown so tired of people complaining about this, so instead I’ll say thank you for not watering things down and for giving us something interesting to watch and digest. I like that they actually use some historical facts and characters while at the same time not taking themselves too seriously and expanding on old superstition and stories. The complication seems to even mock itself at times with characters struggling to explain their own plans and actions. There’s a point in the film where you honestly don’t know who to trust anymore and to me that’s the most piratey scenario.

Without giving anything away, I will just say that the ending is satisfying without being sappy. The film is over the top, but why would you want a Disney movie about pirates and magic to be any other way? Even though the sequel trend is reaching frightening proportions, Pirates III takes on some heady chances that’s quite refreshing in the long run. Even the score displays this as Zimmer stays true to Badelt’s original themes while playing around with modern influences and adding his own slew of variations. The performances are perfectly pirate-like (especially Geoffrey Rush who absolutely shines) and each character, even the minor ones, are given their due of attention in this last hurrah. The film has admittedly lost some of the light-hearted charm of the original chapter, but much like the Star Wars series, this deep, dark conclusion is the proper wrap up to the frenzied pirate spell the movies have cast on theater-goers. If you liked the others, you will love this and if you didn’t, give it a try anyway because it may just surprise you. Just don’t make my same mistake of leaving before the credits are over…

This Saturday, a lineup filled from start to finish with two-piece bands will rock Mike ‘n’ Molly’s beer garden. Clatter (drums/bass with vocals), Triple Whip (bass/drums), Water Between Continents (guitar/drums), reds (guitar/electronics) and The Rise and Fall of Tomax and Xamot (guitar/drums) will play the show. Jane Boxall, drummer for Triple Whip, conceived and booked the show. She and Holly Rushakoff, Triple Whip’s bassist, sat down with On The Town to discuss the upcoming show and the ins and outs of performing in a duo.

On The Town: Duo-Fest comes up this Saturday, are you excited for it?

Jane: Yeah, it’s the first time I’ve set up anything like this. I’m excited because we’ve got this band called Clatter coming up from Missouri. They’re bass and drums but the lady sings as well. They sent me a CD and it sounds really good.

Holly: Can we say our secret?

Jane: Oh, yeah.

Holly: I have a surprise. It’s been a long time coming, but we’re planning on collaborating with Water Between Continents, it’s a guitar/drum duo. They learned a couple of our songs, we’re learning one of their songs, and so we’re going to fuse bands. We’re going to transition, I think the order will be from them to us?

Jane: Yeah, we’ll play on their last song and they’ll play on our first two songs. They’re both fantastic.

Holly: Brian Reedy was my favorite drummer until Jane came to town. Since we’ve been a duo we have not collaborated with other musicians for a show, except for the great cover up, but for our own songs we haven’t collaborated with anybody. This will be really exciting to see what they have to add, and Nick Rudd is a great guitarist.

On The Town: When did you start working with them?

Jane: We’re going to start later this week (laughs), but the idea was hatched a while ago.

Holly: It was at a show at the Iron Post that Nick proposed the idea of collaborating … Since we’ve had each others’ music we’ve been rehearsing on our own. It’ll be kind of a fresh, new, organic experience.

On The Town:  How did you come up with the idea for Duo-Fest?

Jane: I’m pretty sure it was because I’d been searching, just looking online to see what other bass and drum duos there were, because I wanted to check out what other people were doing with the same configuration we have. I came across this band called Clatter from Missouri, and then we just started talking about show swaps and they wanted to come play here. I thought, ‘well how about we have all duos and make it a festival?’ It went through the usual thing of said bands were confirmed at different points and then it all changed, but I think the lineup we’ve got is pretty good, I’m happy with it. Hopefully it could become a regular thing in the future.

On The Town: Was it relatively quick to put together or did you have some trouble?

Jane: The booking is always … a lot of things are conditional, like finding out if the bands are available, finding out if the venue is available and then a lot of bands will become unavailable. It’s generally a lot of time and e-mailing, trying to get things in place.

Holly: And also considering what out of town bands we could bring, because there were bands that we wanted but if we had too many out of town bands, we probably wouldn’t be able to pay them all fairly.

Jane: When I bring in bands from out of state, I don’t want it to cost them anything to play. I like to give them plenty of gas money. Hopefully that should work out because we’ve just got the one out of town band.

On The Town: What is it like being in a two person band?

Holly: You hear everything, as far as the audience goes. There’s no overlapping, which is traditionally what you have is this beautiful mesh of melodies and goings on. With the drums and bass, I think what we’re able to do is showcase our talents and we have a lot to show.

Jane: There are good points and bad points to being a two-piece. Obviously both of us have to carry our weight, there’s nothing to hide behind. If I mess up on the drums when we’re playing, it’s really obvious. Whereas, I’ve played in a lot of really big bands where there’s a lot more cushioning. The upside of that is … I feel that as a drummer I have a lot more freedom. I can play – I don’t want say overplay – but you know play some pretty involved, in your face kind of stuff that if I was just playing as a session drummer, I would get fired. That’s the kind of creative freedom that for me comes with it.
…Some people will say, we don’t really have songs as such. There’s no singing, you’re stripping away a lot of the things that people usually latch onto and feel comfortable with – typical song structures, verse-chorus, guitar and singing –  and we don’t have any of that. We’re kind of asking people to make a little bit of a leap of faith when they listen to us.

On The Town: Are you guys usually the only duo on the bill?

Jane: I would say, typically. We play with Water Between Continents quite a lot. I think (Duo-Fest) will be cool because it’ll be like our own little club, and we won’t be the freaks of the show for once.

Holly: I don’t really think of ourselves as ‘just a duo’ … I think that there’s enough going on between the two of us that sometimes we get the comment, ‘I can’t believe that two people can make that much sound.’ … I always like observing other musicians and seeing what they can do given only two members. I’m looking forward to celebrating that.

Jane: I think we’ve got enough variation … because even the other bass/drums duo, their stuff is so different to ours. They have vocals and it’s more of what you’d expect as a song. I think each act is going to be pretty different to the last one.

Duo-Fest begins at 8 p.m. this Saturday at Mike ‘n’ Molly’s, 105 N. Market St. This is a 21+ show, and cover is (appropriately) $2.

Saturday night local/Chicago-based industrial quartet I:Scintilla played their CD release show at Cowboy Monkey. The group played several tracks from their new full-length, “Optics”, for the first time in some cases.

The sizable bar crowd danced and head banged along to the band’s heavy, electronic-laden beats and infectious vocal hooks. Old favorites as well as brand new tunes garnered an energetic response from the audience.

“That was probably the best part, being able to play the new songs and people actually being excited about them,” said Brittany Bindrim, lead singer of I:Scintilla.

“Optics” features 12 songs, some of which appeared on their debut “The Approach”, and last summer’s “Havestar” EP. The band signed with Belgian label Alfa Matrix in February 2006, and released the “Havestar” EP the following August.

“A lot of the songs we felt that on ‘The Approach’ weren’t portrayed the way we actually wanted them to be recorded and portrayed,” Bindrim said. “When Alfa Matrix picked us up, they actually wanted to re-release a lot of stuff, but we wanted to write a lot more new stuff as well.

Bindrim said they chose a few songs they liked and felt had more potential to re-record for the new releases. “The Bells,” “Havestar,” “Translate” and “Scin” made the transition to “Optics.”

“We knew it would be a lot better, and the way that we wanted them to be the whole time,” she said.

The album is also available in a limited edition double disc package. The second disc features remixes from the likes of Combichrist, Angelspit and Clan of Xymox, among others.

“With our label, they always put out the limited edition two CD, and you can really kind of put whatever you want on the second CD,” said Jim Cookas, guitarist and programmer of I:Scintilla. “Sometimes they put unreleased stuff or they put filler music or live … but I think the best things to put on there are remixes. I think it’s better than unreleased crap that you obviously don’t think is good enough to put out.”

Bindrim said the title of the album came after many of the songs were written.

“With all the lyrics that I wrote, there were a lot of different perceptions and a lot of different topics; dealing with religion, the war in Iraq and politics; and more introspective things like addictions and self-destruction … it felt very fitting because we had a lot of different viewpoints,” Bindrim said.

On May 28, I:Scintilla will play the Wave Gotik Treffen festival in Leipzig, Germany. The four day industrial festival has 162 acts confirmed to play.

“The crowd is going to be at least three thousand which is the biggest crowd we’ve ever played to,” Bindrim said.

We’re in the heart of finals season, and local band JigGsaw are hard at work - but not in the library. The group just opened for The Tossers at Cowboy Monkey last Friday, and they will open for The Matches and This Is Me Smiling Friday May 11 at the Independent Media Center. JigGsaw will release their new self-titled EP June 5 through iTunes and Yahoo! Music. Lead singer and guitarist Mark JigGsaw talked with On The Town about the new EP, local shows and jelly/mustard bands.

OTT: How was the vibe opening for The Tossers?

MJ: Playing with the Tossers was very cool.  It was great seeing how their fans reacted to us because we’re a lot different than the Traditional Irish punk bands.  But we got a lot of compliments from people who haven’t heard us before and there were a lot of people that came to see us too.

OTT: “Zero Generation” has been out for more than  a year now. Do you get many singers in the crowd?

MJ: Yeah, that’s the best thing about playing in Champaign and Chicago, people really know the songs.  The first time people sang along was really bizarre for me because up until that point I had always just wrote these little songs and sung the thoughts that were in my head.  But now I’ve kind of got this “bigger picture” with writing songs other people can relate to.  Sometimes I’ll call my friends and ask them what I should write a song about.  And it’s really cool to listen to other people’s views and put my own twist on them.  Hayden’s been helping me a lot with lyric inspiration lately too.

OTT: Is the sound of your new self-titled EP much different than that of your debut?

MJ: Yeah, it’s completely different.  Everyone is saying it’s more technical but I think we’ve all just become better song writers since “Zero Generation.”  When we started all I knew how to play were power chords.  And we fell victim to the “verse-chorus-verse” formula at first.  But we’ve definitely grown into a new sound since we’ve been touring and writing so much.

OTT: Did you make any changes in the writing and recording process for the new EP?

MJ: No, all the songs still start with me sitting in my bedroom with an acoustic guitar.  The only difference is I don’t finish anything without the input of the rest of the band.  I usually have the essence of the song in my head, but the arrangement and the structure of the song isn’t set in stone until I run everything past Hayden and Mikey.  I think it’s given more life to the songs since it’s basically three or four people working together instead of one.

OTT: Have you tested any of the new songs out in the live setting?

MJ: Yeah, we’ve got five new songs that we’ve started playing live.  And Hayden and I have about three other ones that our new drummer Craig still hasn’t heard.  So those won’t be finished until Craig writes drum parts for them.  But we are planning on doing a new full-length next year and we like to tour and play the songs live as much as possible before we put them on tape.  We’ll always be a live band and we want to make sure the songs come through well in our live show before we go into the studio.  It seems like some bands write a record in the studio and have a hard time matching the sound live.  I don’t think we’ll ever approach making music that way.  I think it’s much better to gage a crowd’s reaction to songs before we put out a record.

OTT: Next Friday you’ll be opening for The Matches and This Is Me Smiling. What do you anticipate for that show?

MJ: That should be a great show.  I saw The Matches play at CMJ in New York and they were really great live.  We’re all fans of that band.  And we’re all really excited to play with This Is Me Smiling as well.  Plus, it’s an all ages show and we love playing in front of the all ages crowd.

OTT: If there were a local band sandwich, what ingredient would JigGsaw be?

MJ: Well, I think we’d be the bread.  Some of us don’t eat meat and I see us as more of an essential part of the sandwich than just jelly or mustard.  There are plenty of jelly or mustard bands out there, don’t you think?

Check out JigGsaw with The Matches, This Is Me Smiling and Frank Must Go this Friday at the Independent Media Center, 202 S. Broadway Ave. in Urbana. Tickets are $10 in advance or $12 on the day of the show.  All ages, no alcohol, the show starts at 6 p.m.

So Ebertfest is over, but I’m still telling stories about it. Especially my Herzog experience, which of course, I’m about to share with you.

I was sitting in the same row as Werner Herzog, famed director of Stroszek, Fitzcarraldo and Grizzly Man among many others, but across the aisle from him at the Virginia Theater. We were waiting for the next film to start showing and a few of my friends told me to go chat with him. I didn’t want to bother him, so instead I popped one of his films I had on DVD called Even Dwarves Started Small into my laptop. I was messing around trying to get his attention with the screen, and my friends told me to go sit next to him and see what he does. I couldn’t be more thankful for their peer pressure because when I finally decided to do it, he looked at me, surprised, and laughed.

The next thing I know, he invited me to a special screening of his latest film that he shot in Antarctica. So I found myself spending my Saturday morning in the English Building watching clips from Herzog’s newest picture. After that we watched director Paul Cox’s newest feature as well. It was such an amazing experience. For those of you unfamiliar with Cox, you have to check out his films Innocence and Man of Flowers. He’s a director who knows how to make very moving films.

It was awesome to meet both directors and they had many encouraging words for a young filmmaker like myself. As I get ready to graduate in two weeks, and begin to try and carve out my own niche in the filmmaking world, it was great to talk to these seasoned artists and gain a new perspective on the craft.

I guess that’s just another bonus of Ebertfest. I think it does a lot for our community in general, providing exposure to some really neat movies and getting to hear from the people involved with them. What’s cool about the festival is that it’s not just movies for moviegoers. I think there is enough to appeal to many different types of audiences—people who go to the cinema all the time, people who go once a year, people who’ve seen all the films before, and people who’ve never heard of them or the guests that are invited to chat about them afterwards.

My own experiences at Ebertfest have been very warm and it was fun to get to see the movies on the big screen. Blake and I had a blast covering the festival and encourage you to check out the movies if you haven’t seen them. Well, that’s a wrap for the Silver Screen Madmen on Ebertfest, but don’t forget to look for us over the summer!

Well, I can’t believe it’s over. Practically living at the Virginia Theatre the past five days has brought me nothing but loads of new knowledge to pack away in my trivia bank of a mind. Oh, and did I mention one of the best experiences of my life?! :-p Meeting the guests over the course of the festival was also a treat (as if the films weren’t enough!). Specifically Rudi Dolezal (part of DoRo Productions), whose name I had not recognized but whose work is something that all of us have seen. The man has worked with more big names in the music industry, it’s no wonder he’s one of the originators of the “Rockumentary” style of filmmaking.

Seeing Roger again was also great. I had a chance to interview him last year and it is to this day something I hold near and dear as an aspiring critic. His wife, Chaz, also gets an extra round of applause from me because I have never seen someone with such class. The audience loved her, and she loved them right back.

Overall, I have to say I’m waiting with anticipation for next year’s festival, now officially dubbed “Ebertfest.” I hope next year our coverage is even bigger and better!

If you wish to seek more coverage, feel free to check out the following blogs:

David Bordwell - Film Scholar
Lisa Rosman - Festival Blogger
Jim Emerson - Editor of RogerEbert.com

For now, all the best. And be sure to keep reading for entertainment based coverage right here at DI On the Town.