You can't call yourself a true Celine Dion fan (or stalker) unless you have copies of her childhood report cards, personal correspondence and ultrasounds. Now, thanks to Jenna Glatzer, you can. These and other ephemera, along with a gushing biography, make up Celine Dion: For Keeps. Weighing in at 3 pounds, 5.9 ounces, it's nearly as heavy as the diva herself.
Celine Dion: For Keeps
By Jennna Glatzer
$39.95
Snake Eyes for Seven |
With plans proceeding for the Strip's City Center project, Club Seven President Zohar Robin has announced Seven will be shutting its doors so the company behind the after-hours spot can focus its efforts on Stage, a new nightclub slated to open Downtown in the first quarter of 2006. Seven's last night will be October 29, 11 p.m. to 7 a.m., and Robin promises plenty of surprises.
"I would like to give a huge thanks to all present and past employees of Seven," wrote Robin, and passed on his gratitude to Seven's fans over the last five years.
LOCAL CD |
Northtown Bandits
Gutter to Glitter (2.5 stars)
Gutter to Glitter recalls the hood-centric rhymes of the early 1990s, when some North Las Vegans and West Las Vegans treated their jurisdictional rivalry with Hatfield-McCoy-ish enmity. Bookended by pedestrian songs on Northtown pride, hard times and pimp skills, tracks 7 through 11 stand out, deftly melding Vegas-y subject matter with gangsta funk and flows reminiscent of Scarface and Spice 1.
DVDs |
Festival! (NR) (4 stars)
$14.98
If there was anything missing from Martin Scorsese's No Direction Home, it was evidence of the magnitude of the folk-music community outside New York and London in the years Bob Dylan went electric. Murray Lerner's camera captured dozens of choice performances at the Newport Folk Festivals of 1963, '64 and '65, interviews with musicians and fans, and coverage of workshops. At the height of its popularity, the annual event attracted up to 45,000 lovers of traditional music and progressive politics. It also was a period when college students especially were about to turn on, tune in and drop out of mainstream society. Dylan's electroshock treatment helped facilitate the transition. Festival! succeeds both as a cultural essay and terrific reminder of the musicians who were just as influential then as Dylan became after. They include blues giants Son House and Mississippi John Hurt; soon-to-breakthrough stars Judy Collins, Joan Baez, Donovan and Johnny Cash; and such traditional acts as the Georgia Sea Island Singers and the Ed Young Fife and Drum Corps. The sound and visual quality are remarkably good, too.
The Big Lebowski: Achiever's Edition (R) (4 stars)
$49.98
Despite a lukewarm reception from critics and audiences, The Big Lebowski has emerged as the slackers' Citizen Kane, with Jeffrey Lebowski as a role model for at least one generation of American men whose idea of a productive day includes getting stoned, bowling and never having to wear anything more formal than a robe or aloha shirt. The Coen brothers used Raymond Chandler's classic detective novel, The Big Sleep, as a template for the mystery at the film's center and Elliot Gould's rumpled portrayal of Philip Marlowe in The Long Goodbye as the model for Jeff Bridges' Dude. Like Chandler's novels, The Big Lebowski presents Los Angeles as a vast melting pot for dreamers, schemers, grifters, drifters, tycoons, tyrants and toadies. It also is a hilarious send-up of Hollywood genre pictures. In short, it's a hoot and the Achiever's Edition comes with a bowling shammy, collectible coasters and photo cards from Bridges' collection.