Every year around this time, Richmond slips a little. It starts small and you catch it out of the corner of your eye. Someone in armor pumping gas. A Jedi standing at the crosswalk on Broad, waiting for the light like everyone else. A guy in full wizard robes standing...
These blurbs originally appeared in the Mass Appeal section of RVA #33 Summer 2018. You can check out the issue here, or pick it up around Richmond now. University of Richmond Grad Launches Gender Fluid Brand University of Richmond isn’t exactly known for its fashion program, at least not in comparison to VCU, but Kadeem Fyffe made it work....
I walked into Franco’s Fine Clothier earlier this week to a bright-eyed, smiling Franco Ambrogi greeting me at the door. At 78 years old, the owner of the Richmond fashion institution has a surprising reserve of energy for a rainy Monday morning. His heavy accent courtesy of his native Tuscany was nothing short of welcoming and warm, as he showed...
Welcome to Virginia, motherland of presidents, a craft beer mecca, and in recent years, a burgeoning home for major motion pictures and television series. Virginia has always been a low key place for the film industry to come knocking when it needed a location. Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln" was shot right here in the River City, along with the...
Imagine Shark Tank, but instead of a better toothbrush, white contestants pitch solutions for racism to a panel of black judges. In the first few episodes, they've proposed everything everything from reparations to white slavery and the Rachel Dolezal-linked concept of “transracialism.” The show is Dark Tank, and it’s just been released by Yedoye...
Jeff Goldblum is life; the air we breathe, the water we drink. His genre-defining performance in "Jurassic Park" as mathematician-turned-American hero Ian Malcolm, introduced a generation of teenagers in the 1990s to concepts like chaos theory, and the art of lounging casually with your shirt open; bringing sexy back when Justin Timberlake was...
It’s easy to forget that safety is a luxury, but Richmond filmmaker Jen Lawhorne is prepared to compel us to remember. Her new documentary, “Fata Morgana,” made in partnership with two African refugees, is meant to reveal and examine the hardships and transition process of the African refugee, the global refugee crisis, and what Lawhorne...
"Stand-up is survival. For me that's jazz, that's what I have to do." It is hard to overstate the impact that Robin Williams had on just about every aspect of comedy since he broke the scene in the mid-1970s. His sheer energy, razor-sharp wit, ability to morph his persona into characters both known and unknown, and genre-defining stand-up shaped...
Anger, frustration, sadness, heartbreak. The air in the theater felt heavy. It was as if you could feel the emotions of the audience dance around you from one side of the room to the other. These were the powerful reactions from the crowd following the Institute for Contemporary Art's recent screening of Say Her Name: The Life and Death of Sandra...
In search of something more rough and real, Pilipino director Lino Brocka’s 1975 docudrama, “Manila in the Claws of Light,” is steeped in social realism in its depiction of the lower-class struggle of a young twenty-something named Julio (Bembol Roco). The film follows Julio into the seedy underbelly of Manila on a search for his lost love,...
