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Divine Deep-dish
For those who have never made it to Chicago, home of the famous deep-dish pizza, the Bay Area has been adorned with a few pizza joints that would make any Chicagoan think twice. We surveyed the inch-thick pies at SF newcomers Little Star and Patxi's, then stopped by the East Bay's old standby, Zachary's. There are some things you can make at home; others, like super-thick deep-dish pizza stuffed with ingredients and smothered with tomato sauce, are best left to the professionals.
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The Office Rock Star Returns to SF
Tapes 'n Tapes rocks shows all over the country (including opening night of Noise Pop 2007), but singer/guitarist Josh Grier still keeps it real with a data-analyst day job when he's not on the road. The Minnesota-based quartet returns to San Francisco on May 2nd at the Great American Music Hall with its first new material -- songs that will be featured on an upcoming album -- since the 2005 release of The Loon. Grier spoke with SF Station during a recent phone interview.
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SF Station Blows It Up
Last Saturday the triple threat comedian, actor and singer Jamie Foxx was in the house at San Jose's HP Pavilion to entertain. Performing a shot comedy routine to relax the crowd was an up and coming comedian called Speedy as well as Jamie himself. Once the show was off Jamie performed songs from his current album.
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Released on Virgin Records, 4/3/2007
It was with no small amount of irony that Fountains of Wayne received a "Best New Artist" Grammy in 2003 for Welcome Interstate Managers. The aforementioned album was in fact Fountains of Wayne's third album. Buoyed by the ode to horny, pubescent MILF lusting, "Stacy's Mom" put Fountains of Wayne on the map. Four years later, we've got Traffic and Weather, a decidedly boring album title, but the Fountains have not lost their gift for taking the mundane and turning it into something hilarious.
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Released on Astralwerk Records, 3/20/07
Musical heroine, Tracey Thorn, the svelte, emotive vocal wife-half of electronic-pop dynamic duo, Everything But The Girl, dangles her second solo release without Ben Watt, Out Of The Woods. She pulls this musical caper so in-character of her that Tracey Thorn fans will not find anything less than what they'd expect, for this album is neither haughty nor experimental and her trademark vocals make it unquestionably worthwhile.
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Released on Red Ink, 5/1/07
Black Rebel Motorcycle Club has been compared to Jesus and Mary Chain, Love and Rockets, The White Stripes, and a myriad of artists in between. By and large, BRMC's previous albums have received favorable reviews despite the somewhat open question of whether or not there is anything unique or distinctive about BRMC's sound. BRMC's latest album, Baby 81 may not necessarily answer this question, but there's no question that it's a fairly consistent effort and doesn't fail to entertain.
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Never Fear, the Supercop is Here
Meet Sergeant Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg), policeman extraordinaire. He graduated top of his class, he's an expert marksman, and he can can engage in a highspeed chase with the best of 'em. Along with a stacked resume, he also has an arrest rate 400% higher than anyone else in his department. In any other normal action movie, this would only be an asset to the hero but, then again, Hot Fuzz is no ordinary film.
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A Misfire of Minor Proportions
Mike White's (Nacho Libre, School of Rock, Chuck and Buck) directorial debut, Year of the Dog, is a character study of a lonely woman who loses her dog, friend, confidante, and companion rolled into one, and the life-changing events and circumstances that irrevocably change her personality. Year of the Dog is also a tragicomedy, farther away from White's broader efforts aimed at general audiences (School of Rock, Orange County) and closer to White's darker character studies of desperate, eccentric loners (The Good Girl, Chuck and Buck).
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Please Be Kind, Rewind
Written and directed by Jake Kasdan (Orange County, The Zero Effect), The TV Set satirizes network television and the inevitable compromises that follow when network executives openly interfere with the creative vision of a writer/producer. Occasionally hilarious but often too obvious in whom it satirizes, The TV Set feels like it should have been made twenty or twenty-five years ago.
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Panahi Scores with Lighthearted Populist Allegory
Director Jafar Panahi has never been afraid to test the patience of censors in his native Iran, a rigid theocracy in which even the slightest offenses may carry weighty punishments. His latest documentary-style feature, Offside, is hardly as sobering as 2000's The Circle, in which he chronicled the plight of women struggling to thrive in a society dominated by institutionalized sexism. Yet it is no less daring, as Panahi focuses on six young women desperate to attend the Iranian national soccer team's 2005 World Cup qualifier against Bahrain.
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No Exit
Directed by Nimród Antal (Kontroll) and written by Mark L. Smith (Séance), Vacancy is a slickly accomplished, gripping horror/suspense/thriller about stranded motorists fighting for their lives against killers who get their kicks by re-watching the murders on videotape.
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Matters of the Heart, Unevenly Expressed
Jon Kasdan, son of The Big Chill's Lawrence, makes a competent directorial debut with In the Land of Women, though his script wallows too often in trite, greeting-card sentiment. Despite that significant handicap, he commands strong performances from his stars. Meg Ryan and "The OC's" Adam Brody succeed in breathing life into material that is, at times, transparently thin, though Ryan's stiff countenance is a trifle unsettling.
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Nothing Can Put This Film Back Together
If it's Friday, it must be time for another psychological/suspense thriller. Like clockwork, Fracture, a psychological thriller/courtroom drama directed by Gregory Hoblit (Hart's War, Frequency, Primal Fear) and written by Daniel Pyne (The Sum of All Fears, Any Given Sunday) and Glenn Gers (My Brother's Keeper), arrives at your local multiplex, with ads and posters that pits the lead actors, Anthony Hopkins, representing the Old Guard, and Ryan Gosling, representing the New Guard, against each other in the proverbial battle of wits.
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Exotic Indulgences
Novella Spa and Imports is one of those places -- you know the kind. As soon as you step in, you're immediately smacked with an urge to buy the entire store, particularly if your tastes tend toward the exotic and rare. It's also one of the prime spots in San Francisco for decadent beauty rites to make you feel like a sultana of yore.
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Frolicking in the Fertile Fountain of Fabulousness
So what are you wearing right now? Wait, let me guess: jeans, t- shirt, hoody, sneakers, mostly in dark shades. I know I'm right. That's what we all wear in this country, the only difference in San Francisco is that everything's usually in shades of gray or black. For a city that the rest of the country thinks is hip and cool (well, they used to think that at least) our collective fashion sense now seems to be located somewhere between Nihilistic Schlump and Generic Gap. What happened to our flamboyance, joie de vivre, and iconoclastic freedom? Vivienne Westwood wants to help.
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