You can't exactly blurb a film: "Lacks zeitgeist!" But as Ron Howard directs the back story of noble rogue Han Solo in the stand-alone Solo: A Star Wars Story, it has two principle disappointments. It's neither as full of revolutionary ardor as Rogue One, nor as touching as the last two installments, where seemingly immortal childhood heroes bit the dust. Co-scripted by Lawrence Kasdan, who co-wrote The Empire Strikes Back, this is certainly one of the most romantic of the 10 films so far. But it's also spotted with doughy patches, heavy info dumps and battle scenes that aren't quite coherent... even though the different sides helpfully use different colored lasers so you can always tell who is shooting whom. » Read More

As if it were Honest Movie Trailers: The Movie, the second installment in the Deadpool franchise leavens the hit-making Marvel mix of fight scenes, flashbacks and explosions with dick jokes. Our protagonist, Wade (the ultra-bro, Ryan Reynolds), was a mercenary. He was left with a complexion like a Costco cheese pizza after a forcible gene-scrambling experiment intended to cure his stage 4 cancer. Now he's the killer Deadpool: hooded, cross-sworded, armed and ludicrous. His superpower is bouncing back after extreme dismemberment and preposterous mayhem--Deadpool is the most cartoony of cartoon heroes, the one who owes the most to Chuck Jones and Tex Avery. He clowns before a long-gone fourth wall. At one point he describes a clue as "a huge » Read More

A few years back, choreographer Val Caniparoli was doing something he often does when looking for inspiration: turning to YouTube. Always in search of the unusual, he ended up coming across the perfectly bizarre jumping-off point for his next ballet. It was an album, which vividly imagined the emotionally rich, underlying back stories behind the millions of seemingly mundane videos uploaded to YouTube every year. Titled Confessions, the 2016 album is a collaboration between American composer Nico Muhly and Faroese singer-songwriter Tietur, and includes support from the Holland Baroque Ensemble. Confessions also serves as the central influence and narrative backbone for Caniparoli's latest endeavor with the Smuin Contemporary American » Read More

One is considered boring, abstract, steeped in intellectual arcana and of interest only to a tiny subset of academics. The other is very much none of those things. But the study of rhetoric and Donald Trump are almost perfectly suited to each other. So claims Ryan Skinnell in a new book called Faking the News: What Rhetoric Can Teach Us About Donald J. Trump. Skinnell, who teaches rhetoric at San Jose State University, has gathered together 11 essays from experts in the field of rhetoric to take on Trump. If Trump is the Jedi master of commanding the loyalties of his fans and inflaming the animosity of his detractors through language and symbolism, then, says Skinnell, Faking the News is the guidebook on just how the president practices » Read More

The latest exhibition at the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles begins at the box office. Upon purchase of a ticket, guests are not only offered a copy of their receipt, but prior to entering, they are also asked to pick out an empty bullet casing from a glass dish brimming with spent shells. The weight of a bullet casing seemed insignificant at first, but by the end of viewing "Guns: Loaded Conversations," I found myself turning the shell over and over in my hand as if it were carrying the weight of the nearly 35,000 gun deaths that happen annually in the United States. And that's exactly the point. While the gun debate takes center stage in the national arena, "Guns: Loaded Conversations" brings the discussion to the local level by » Read More

Kelly Luker needed to learn how to smoke crystal meth. As a criminal defense private investigator in Santa Cruz in the mid-2000s, she had been asked to learn—and be able to demonstrate to a jury--the technique of smoking crystal meth and scraping down particles formed along the inside of a glass pipe. The client was definitely a drug addict, but she had to help prove he wasn't a drug dealer, too--and that meant proving that he wouldn't have been able to profit off the amount of "substandard" drug residue inside his pipe--which he was accused of selling. Luker had never smoked meth, and didn't intend to start now. She needed a teacher, a propane torch, vitamins and liquid air freshener—not all of which were particularly easy to find. » Read More

Helena Byrne, an Irish singer and storyteller from across the Atlantic, is entertaining a group of 40 people with stories about the footprint of St. Patrick. She sings familiar songs and then conjures up a few pagan stories about Samhain. I'm in the back row, with all of us comfortably jammed into the parlor of Pamela McMahon's house in Santa Clara. Byrne is on tour, her first time ever on the West Coast, and this performance is a fundraiser for the San Jose-Dublin Sister City Committee's educational programs, which include a trans-Atlantic academic exchange between San Jose State University and the prestigious Dublin institutions of Trinity College and Dublin City University. Sister Cities International includes 500 member communities » Read More

Sadly, the CDC has been remiss in informing men of the exceptional protection against sexually transmitted diseases that open-toe shoes can provide. Men's shoes speak to women. They are a form of what anthropologists and zoologists call "signaling"--communication between organisms. In the mating realm, signals advertise quality in a potential partner--or sound the alarm when it's lacking. Wearing bad shoes (like your stanky, hobo-ready sneakers) suggests you lack the social intelligence to dress like a grown-up and/or the interest in taking care of more than your own needs--like for the five basic bachelor-dude food groups: beer, Hot Pockets, pizza, Doritos and pot edibles. » Read More

The Aries poet Anna Kamienska described the process of writing as akin to "the backbreaking work of hacking a footpath, as in a coal mine; in total darkness, beneath the earth." Whether or not you're a writer, I'm guessing that your life might have felt like that recently. Your progress has been slow and the mood has been dense and the light has been dim. That's the tough news. The good news is that I suspect you will soon be blessed with flashes of illumination and a semi-divine intervention or two. After that, your work will proceed with more ease. The mood will be softer and brighter. » Read More