Andrew Barker-Senior: Last News

Andrew Barker Senior Features Writer On April 15, 2012, 2Pac made his debut appearance at the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival. At this point, it had been 16 years since Tupac Amaru Shakur had been murdered on the streets of Las Vegas at the age of 25. And yet there he was onstage, his holographic likeness projected with uncanny vividness alongside his onetime collaborators and labelmates Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre, whom he now appeared to be speaking to and trading bars with in front of an audience of 80,000. As the first performance of its kind, the 2Pac hologram became national news, and sparked worries that a wave of holo-tours, featuring ghostly apparitions of long dead stars, would soon be filling festival grounds and amphitheaters. Aside from a few one-offs, however, this did not come to pass. And yet the 2Pac hologram still felt significant for a different reason. After a decade and a half of vault-clearing posthumous releases, books, documentaries, statues, shout-outs in hundreds of hip-hop songs, and murals in virtually every American city from the Bay Area and back down, Shakur’s iconography had long seemed at risk of swallowing the brilliant, infuriating, inspiring, complicated man himself, leaving only a depthless shadow behind. 

Andrew Barker Senior Features Writer Streaming services are locked in a tightening battle to become go-to destinations for live sports coverage. Women’s sports increasingly rival men’s as a source for fiery debates and runaway ratings.

Andrew Barker Senior Features Writer Over the past few decades, the playing field for music recording has expanded exponentially. Hit pop singles can now be cut in bedrooms, entire orchestral film scores have been recorded one instrument at a time and remote collaboration is often the name of the game. But there’s still no substitute for a thoroughly equipped, expertly staffed recording studio.

Andrew Barker Senior Features Writer Though she perished in a plane crash in 2012, Jenni Rivera is still changing the face of Mexican music. As the first genuine female superstar to emerge out of Mexico’s century-old banda genre, Rivera cut an entirely unique figure throughout the early 2000s, imbuing one of North America’s most male-dominated, storied music genres with a spirit that was unabashedly feminist and entirely modern.

Andrew Barker Senior Features Writer In his classic 1994 essay “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart,” David Foster Wallace pondered why so many athlete memoirs — and tennis player memoirs in particular — fail to provide sports fans with what they really want to know. What does it feel like to fail in front of millions of people? How does a human being handle such intense pressure? What actually goes through one’s mind in those do-or-die moments where the difference between eternal glory and lifelong disappointment is one tiny miscalculation or half-second’s hesitation? Maybe, Wallace eventually concludes, the answer to that last question is “nothing much at all,” and “the real secret behind top athletes’ genius may be as esoteric and obvious and dull and profound as silence itself.” In his two previous sports documentaries, “Senna” and “Diego Maradona,” filmmaker Asif Kapadia has gone a great distance toward disproving Wallace’s thesis, using ingeniously edited archival footage to probe the psyches of Formula One champion Ayrton Senna and soccer god Maradona in all their noisy complexity.

Andrew Barker Senior Features Writer “A Chinese Canadian tween undergoes magical puberty and turns into a giant red panda.” As far as elevator pitches go, it’s not exactly “‘Jaws’ in space” or “snakes on a plane.” But that highly specific logline is the one that Domee Shi used to persuade Pixar to greenlight her feature directorial debut, some half a decade ago when the then-20-something was a budding storyboard artist on the studio’s Emeryville campus. Shi’s film, “Turning Red,” delivers on every bit of that premise, focusing on a confidently nerdy Toronto girl named Mei and her loving yet strict mother, Ming, whose perfectly ordered lives are thrust into chaos by Mei’s sudden transformation. The film was released last spring, and immediately notched a number of milestones for the studio: the first Pixar feature solely directed by a woman, the first Pixar feature with all-female creative leads, and only the second Pixar feature directed by a person of Asian descent. But the particulars of Shi’s identity aside, it also represented the emergence of a singular new voice within the celebrated studio, and everything from its cultural specificity, to its animation style — impressionistic, frantically paced, anime-influenced — to its openness in addressing the messiness of early adolescence (from menstruation and mother issues to the suggestion that a tween girl’s love of a particular boy band might have some extra-musical motivations) felt both of a piece with the Pixar tradition and something invigoratingly new.

Andrew Barker Senior Features Writer Ramsey Naito has been running Nickelodeon Animation since 2017, and in that time the network’s programming has exploded with a raft of both homegrown series and adaptations of external IP. “Star Trek,” “SpongeBob,” “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” “Blue’s Clues,” “Dora the Explorer,” “Rugrats”… if that seems like too much for one network to handle, well, it no longer has to. Last fall, Naito added running Paramount Animation to her docket, and since then, the scope of potential programming across the corporate-partnered Nickelodeon networks, Paramount+ and Paramount theatrical has given the network increased space to expand. “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem” — the Seth Rogen-produced feature spun off from Nick’s revamped “Turtles” animated series — is due out next summer. Nickelodeon feature films from “PAW Patrol,” “Blue’s Clues” and “Baby Shark” are also on the horizon, as well as new features from Paramount properties “Transformers” and “Smurfs.” For Naito, this glut of programming presents opportunities.

Andrew Barker Senior Features Writer In September 1963, the first ever New York Film Festival was held in Manhattan’s Lincoln Center, and it counted as something of an experiment, an early test case as to whether the sort of serious, artistically inclined fests that were quickly becoming established in Europe could find real purchase stateside. The inaugural lineup included Luis Buñuel’s “Exterminating Angel,” Roman Polanski’s debut, “Knife in the Water,” and Yasujirō Ozu’s swan song “An Autumn Afternoon.” According to a Film Comment report at the time, the inaugural fest sold more than 20,000 tickets before a single film had unspooled. Not bad for a first time out.

Andrew Barker Senior Features Writer There has been no shortage of hip-hop star-is-born narratives hitting screens in recent years, but much like hip-hop itself for most of its history, there hasn’t always been a whole lot of space for women. Sanaa Lathan’s “On the Come Up,” which tracks a teenage girl’s complicated rise through the battle rap circuit to the even more complicated heights of viral stardom, provides a welcome exception to this rule, but fortunately it has a lot more going for it than just that. As frank and tough-minded and as it is warm and sweet, “On the Come Up” is a hugely promising debut from the actor-turned-director. Sixteen-year-old Bri (Jamila C. Gray) is already a talented rapper when we first meet her in her fictitious neighborhood of Garden Heights, and she’s already been through a whole lifetime’s worth of upheaval. Her father was a legendary local MC named Lawless, who was murdered just as his career was beginning to take off. She spent part of her childhood away from her mother (Lathan) while she battled drug addiction, and though she’s now clean, their mother-daughter bond has yet to fully mend. And what’s more, as part of the small contingent of Black students at her school, she’s forced to deal with unsympathetic administrators and suspicious campus cops, one of whom body-slams her to the ground after he spots her selling Skittles to a classmate.

Andrew Barker Senior Features Writer The phrase “this one’s for the fans” is usually delivered from a defensive posture. But in the case of “Clerks III,” it’s practically a statement of purpose. Now nearly three decades removed from the microbudget indie that made him one of the most unlikely major auteurs of the 1990s, writer-director-podcaster Kevin Smith has once again returned to the New Jersey Quick Stop where he first staked his claim as a filmmaker, bringing his now-fiftysomething slacker heroes back to confront the listlessness of middle age. But the real focus of “Clerks III” is not really Randal and Dante at all, but rather the film “Clerks” itself, and Smith aims this third installment straight at his diminished but still rabid fanbase, for whom the film remains a touchstone.   

Andrew Barker Senior Features Writer At this point, complaining about Disney’s deathless drive to cannibalize its entire library of animated classics into live-action remakes can feel as futile as complaining about capitalism itself. The studio has immense IP resources to exploit, a hungry well of content to fill, and a commercial imperative to introduce new generations of kids to the characters they’ll soon be expected to recognize on merch and in theme parks. And in truth, the studio could be doing a lot worse with these trawls through the archives. Once in a while genuine inspiration strikes (as it did with the gothy, revisionist “Maleficent,” or Jon Favreau’s visually inventive “The Jungle Book”), and even the least-fortunate of these remakes have mostly just been forgettable.

Andrew Barker Senior Features WriterThe Palm Springs International ShortFest will mark an in-person return to the California desert oasis from June 21-27, showcasing 300 short films in 51 different curated programs. If that seems like a markedly high number of films considering all of the disruptions in both the film production and festival space over the past two years, interim festival director Sudeep Sharma has an explanation.“One thing I’ve been saying a lot is that the pandemic has seemingly affected everything except for the production of short films,” says Sharma, a ShortFest veteran currently manning the festival helm while director Lili Rodriguez is on maternity leave.

Andrew Barker Senior Features Writer“I’ve been going through something.”These are the first words that Kendrick Lamar speaks on “Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers,” and if the 19 songs that follow over the next 72 minutes are any indication, it’s quite an understatement. In the five years since he last released a proper album, 2017’s best-rapper-alive declaration “Damn,” Lamar became the first hip-hop artist to win the Pulitzer Prize, earned an Oscar nomination, launched a media company, performed at the Super Bowl, and announced his departure from TDE, the tight-knit label that has been his home and a key part of his identity since the very beginning.But “Mr.

Andrew Barker Senior Features WriterIconoclastic auteur Peter Greenaway’s first film since 2015 is scheduled to be unveiled later this year, and when it hits screens, the opening credits will feature a company that may not yet be familiar to festival-goers. But if all goes according to their plan, it will be very soon.APX Capital Group’s film fund was launched in October of 2021, with headquarters in New York.

Andrew Barker Senior Features WriterSean Sullivan was the general manager of Pasadena, California’s famed Ice House Comedy Club for 22 years, during which time he witnessed the rise of Gabriel Iglesias, alongside so many other comics who were regulars on the Ice House stage. Now the director of operations for the Improv, Sullivan recalls his long friendship with Iglesias, and what it meant to see him graduate to the biggest stages in the world.“I think it was through a mutual friend that I first met him. We had gone to a lunch together at the Santa Anita racetrack, probably around 2001.

Andrew Barker Senior Features WriterLos Angeles has no shortage of historic, culturally monolithic concert venues. But none have as oversized and as specific a place in local culture as Dodger Stadium, where Gabriel Iglesias will soon become the first stand-up comic to perform two sold-out shows.From its sheer size, to its panoramic views of the entire city, to its status as the third-oldest Major League Baseball park still in use, there’s something quintessentially Los Angeles about the venue.

Andrew Barker Senior Features WriterWhat else is left to say about “Illmatic”? Nas’ 1994 debut has been included at or near the top of every credible “greatest hip-hop albums” list for as long as people have been compiling them. It’s inspired two books, countless scholarly essays, a play, and one feature-length documentary.

Andrew Barker Senior Features Writer“Palomino” is Miranda Lambert’s fourth studio album of the past decade, but that number doesn’t quite capture the tear she’s been on. That period also saw her release three albums with her trio Pistol Annies, as well as last year’s stripped-down demo collection “The Marfa Tapes,” on which Lambert and fellow Texans Jack Ingram and Jon Randall traded tunes and banter over a campfire.

Andrew Barker Senior Features WriterCypress Hill has always been an easy group to pigeonhole. From the adenoidal whine of frontman B-Real’s voice to the group’s almost monomaniacal focus on weed-smoking, one can imagine younger listeners writing them off as a one-note act.

Andrew Barker Senior Features WriterCypress Hill has always been an easy group to pigeonhole. From the adenoidal whine of frontman B-Real’s voice to the group’s almost monomaniacal focus on weed-smoking, one can imagine younger listeners writing them off as a one-note act.

Andrew Barker Senior Features WriterOne of the most intriguing film actors of his generation, and a pioneering advocate for numerous social causes, Elliot Page has spent the majority of his life in front of cameras. A native of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Page notched his first role at the age of 10, earning a Young Artist Award nomination for a part in the Halifax-set Canadian TV movie “Pit Pony,” which eventually spun off into a two-season series.After a few other scattered television parts, his feature film debut came three years later, and was the first of several emotionally weighty roles that the thesp tackled at a very young age.