If you’re in the New York City area in the next few days, do yourself a favor and get over to the IFC Center and see the documentary Strongman from New York filmmaker Zachary Levy. The film is playing there through this Tuesday night, and it’s sure to entertain! If you’re not in NYC, the film is also playing in Chicago at Facets Cinematheque this week and will make its way soon to The Charles Theater in Baltimore, The Pickford in Bellingham, Real Art Ways in Hartford, and several other places.

Strongman follows Stanley “Stanless Steel” Pleskun, who is the strongest man in the world when it comes to bending steel and metal. The doc captures the aging strongman over several years’ time in his normal life making a living wage at a scrap-metal yard in New Jersey, as well as the life he lives pursuing his passion as a heavy lifter and bender, as he performs amazing feats like bending pennies in half with his bare hands and holding back airplanes with his arms.

The NY Times gave Strongman a great review and the documentary even made the Times’ “Pulse” list this week.

The Rite
Directed by Mikael Hafstrom
Starring Anthony Hopkins, Colin O’Donoghue, Marta Gastini
Rated PG-13
Release date: January 28, 2011

An excessively verbose film, The Rite clumsily observes exorcism as being either a satanic occurrence or a descendant of a psychological one that can warrant scientific explanations. It is the credulous of one belief always trying to sway and convince the incredulous of the other belief. We’ve seen the skeptic and the believer clash numerous times before in cinema, and this film continues the redundancy of such an argument.
 
In a weird by yet mildly surprising way, The Rite, directed by 1408 director Mikael Hafstrom and adapted from a true story based on Matt Baglio’s book The Rite: The Making of a Modern Exorcist, relies heavily on such intense arguments rather than having a clinging dependence on the unpleasant and abhorrent images that tend to go along with films depicting exorcisms. Films such as the horror classic The Exorcist and even the fairly recent and slightly nerve-tingling The Exorcism of Emily Rose had an intensifying inclination, even perverse in some instances, to dwell emphatically on the tortured subjects of the devil. Scarcely would a scene present any relief for the audience.

The animated cartoon concept created by KISS drummer Eric Carr before his passing may now become a reality thanks to Rocksville Nation Comics, which will be publishing a comic book including Carr’s Rockheads characters in an April 2011 release. In the second issue of Dyna Meecho’s Rocksville Nation, The Rockheads will be making an appearance in the adventure titled Ticket to Rockheads.

According to a press release, the story sees two young rockers on their own Detroit Rock City-style adventure, desperately attempting to find tickets to the final sold out Rockheads concert. The tale essentially places Eric Carr’s Rockheads as the idols of the main characters, and sounds like a lot of fun.

In 1992, Vivian Campbell joined the mega-success rock group Def Leppard, stepping into the second lead guitarist slot left vacate by Steve Clark, who had died the year before. At the time, Campbell had gone a few years out of the spotlight after leaving David Coverdale’s rock supergroup Whitesnake before signed on with the Leps, a position he’s had for nearly 20 years that remains his most high-profile gig to date.

The Irish-born Campbell, who got big break back in 1983 as Ronnie James Dio’s hot-shot lead guitarist in the former Black Sabbath frontman’s newly created solo band, Dio, has always said that the guitar parts in Def Leppard weren’t really challenging to him and he was fine with that. Now, the guitarist is finally bitching about it, complaining that fellow Lep guitarist Phil Collen gets all the good guitar parts. Let’s just say, I told you so.

Mark Waters, director of Mean Girls, Freaky Friday, and The Spiderwick Chronicles, is currently in line to helm Get Back, a comedy about two diehard Beatles fans who discover a time machine and use it to travel back in time to change a major event in John Lennon‘s life.

What do they plan to do in Get Back, which is named for the popular Beatles tune that closes out their final album Let It Be? No, not to stop his murder, that would be too logical. Instead, it’s to prevent the musician from ever meeting his wife Yoko Ono, who they feel was the cause of the breakup of the Beatles.

As this is planned as a comedy, I can see where there would be plenty of opportunity for laughs, especially when you have die-hard music fans and time-travel involved. But, I’m seriously hating the premise of this movie, which was scripted by Chris McCoy and was named as one of the best unproduced screenplays on the 2007 Black List.