Screen
Television Human Giant Up-and-comers Rob Huebel, Aziz Ansari, Paul Scheer (shown), and Jason Woliner have parlayed their popular series of goofy and uneven online shorts into an equally goofy and uneven half-hour sketch-comedy series on MTV. 
— Nancy Miller
Theaters The Hoax Billionaires ain't what they used to be (see Bill Gates on The Daily Show), which explains why yet another film about Howard Hughes intrigues. This tale of a desperate writer (Richard Gere) and his bogus autobiography of the eccentric recluse is a groovy history lesson. 
— Monica Corcoran
Theaters American Cannibal Reality TV will eat itself. That's the message behind this unappetizing documentary that follows the ill-fated production of a Survivor copycat. Despite the filmmakers' best efforts, Cannibal is a toothless critique of mass media's most tasteless fare. 
— Scott Thill
Games
Xbox 360 Boom Boom Rocket Bizarre Creations, maker of the frenetic cult fave Geometry Wars, gets musical with its latest game, which is downloadable via Xbox Live Arcade. Players trigger rockets in time with the tunes — the closer to the beat, the cooler the explosions. The psychedelic Fourth of July effects and 3-D cityscapes are engaging, but the songs grew tiresome. Whose idea was it to use a ska version of the "Hungarian Waltz" and a techno remix of "Ride of the Valkyries"? 
— James Lee
PC Play With Fire The first exclusive release from Greg Costikyan's boutique online distributor Manifesto Games is a puzzler. A ball of fire is trapped in a maze of artfully arranged flammable blocks that are floating in some weird dimension. Accompanied by trippy kraut rock, your only way out is through an escape block, which you can usually find by jumping around and torching a path through each level. It's a clever concept for a low-budget indie game, but the addiction factor is missing. Faster pacing and fancier pyrotechnics might set that fire alight. — Jared Newman
Why Beauty Is Truth Ian Stewart It's easy to envision mathematics as its own hermetically sealed world. But University of Warwick math prof Ian Stewart mounts an impressive two-pronged attack on this mindset. He shows how the concept of symmetry informs reality, right down to the basic composition of matter. And, by offering glimpses into the lives of the men who helped develop the concept — from Babylonian scribes to gambling Renaissance dandy Girolamo Cardano — he proves that the social and the theoretical have always been inextricably entwined. — Elizabeth Svoboda
Bill & Dave Michael S. Malone This tale of Hewlett-Packard's rise and fall recalls the time when, incredibly, HP was cool. Starting with Stanford football tryouts (Dave Packard made it; Bill Hewlett didn't), Malone chronicles how the two quickly outgrew what Packard called "that damn garage" and developed the HP Way, the cultural operating system standard for high tech companies. Bill and Dave created a powerhouse that engineers loved to work for — a company that, before its recent troubles, sounds very much like the geek-friendly juggernaut built by Larry and Sergey. — Josh McHugh
Music
Blonde Redhead 23 New York based trio Blonde Redhead liquefies its dissonant guitars and jagged melodies into a lush sound that bubbles and flows like a slo-mo volcano. From the My Bloody Radiohead meltdown of the title track to singer Kazu Makino's breathy rendezvous with '60s pop on "Silently," 23 is like the soundtrack to a film you can't wait to see. — Jon J. Eilenberg
El-P I'll Sleep When You're Dead Indie hop's sharpest tongue is back — with a star-studded lineup. Cat Power, Trent Reznor, and the Mars Volta ride shotgun in the Definitive Jux founder's joyride to hell. "Habeas Corpses" rockets the war in Iraq into THX 1138 territory, while "Smithereens" blares like Star Trek's red-alert Klaxon in a total dystopia. 
— Scott Thill
Andrew Bird Armchair Apocrypha Orchestral folk-pop is a lot like a turducken: Sounds like a little much to be any good — until you try it. On his 10th album, the classically trained violinist fiddles and plucks his way through punchy guitars, rousing beats, and quirky lyrics. Somehow, Bird manages to make the whole thing fly. — Steven Leckart
PLAY
| Hobbit Producer's Hare-Raising Tale
| Always Expect the Unexpected
| Rotterdam's Succulent Skyscraper
Reviews
