The James Logan Courier

By Alonyia Godfrey, Courier Features Editor

For Colored Girls is a movie adapted from the play “For Colored Girls Who Considered Suicide When the Rainbow was Enuf”, created by Ntozake Shange. The play is composed of 20 poems that talk about some of the trials and hardships “being colored and being a woman”.

Anika Noni Rose plays Yasmine, who represents the “Lady in Yellow” from the play. Yasmine is a passionate, artistic spirit who loves the art of dance. However, her life is shattered when she is raped in her home by a man with whom she was on a date.

Kerry Washington plays Kelly (Lady in Blue), a loving social worker who has a hard time dealing with her inability to have children due to an untreated STD that she contracted from a cheating boyfriend when she was younger.

Celebrate Black History Month with The Courier.

By Julia Ortiz, Courier Staff Writer

This year's I Am Number Four shows John Smith, a teen on the run from an evil force out to kill him. He puts everything on the line to save planet Earth. With three of his kind already dead, and him being number four, danger lurks in every mysterious sound.

The opening scene is full of action and the inevitable need to know what in the world is going on. With iant space beasts, super powers, weapons glowing with a deadly glare, I Am Number Four is a definite hit.

Of course, there is more to the movie then action and adventure. John falls in love with the lovely and intelligent girl at his school. Stereotypical jocks try to scare him out of it and he saves the school ‘nerd’ from humiliation.

By Milto Ungashe, Courier Staff Writer

Last week, my family and I went to Yoshi’s Jazz Club and Japanese restaurant for dinner; both the highly acclaimed restaurant and the night’s music were both delightfully pleasant.

Up and coming singer-songwriter Tad Worku charmed guests with his swoon-worthy voice. His voice sounded like a refreshing mix between the style of Jazz singer Michael Bublé and the voice of American R&B singer John Legend. The event was also the release concert of Worku’s highly anticipated eponymous EP.

By Ann Powers
Los Angeles Times (MCT)

Thom Yorke jerks around in the video for "Lotus Flower," the first single from Radiohead's just-released eighth studio album, "The King of Limbs," like someone only just discovering that the body's job is to move. In the clip, choreographed by the British kinesics expert Wayne McGregor, Yorke shakes, wobbles and nearly drools to the song's needling dance beat, sometimes elegantly loosening up, only to shake back into awkwardness.

The singer's moves and bowler hat recall the comedians of the silent film era, when onscreen human motion still seemed artificial, almost surreal. It's a typical Radiohead moment, a visceral expression of the struggle to stay fully human in a world both enhanced and corrupted by technology.

By Fred Jedder, Courier Staff Writer


Prince came to Oakland on Monday and put on an display of his prodigious musical talents and his sense of showmanship.

It was impressive.

Ultimately, though, I wasn't moved or emotionally involved in the proceedings, just impressed.

It struck me as appropriate that I was seeing the show the day after the NBA Allstar extravaganza, in that the NBA and Prince seemed to me to have the same basic goal: display jaw-dropping talent wrapped in undeniably entertaining packaging that obscures the lack of real drama or emotion.

By Billy O'Keefe
McClatchy-Tribune (MCT)

Few games deserve a second chance as much as "Dead Space Extraction," which sold miserably on the Wii despite continuing one of the generation's best new fictions and outclassing just about every on-rails shooter that ever came before it.

Though it also works (and with surprisingly decent results) with a regular Playstation 3 controller, "Extraction's" chemistry with the Wii's remote makes it a perfect fit for the Playstation Move controller as well, and its flawless (and, on some levels, enhanced) migration immediately positions it as perhaps the best Move-enabled game out there until "Killzone 3" arrives later this month.

By Amy Kaufman and Ben Fritz, Los Angeles Times (MCT)

LOS ANGELES — On what is traditionally the first big box-office weekend of the year, Hollywood may still be playing in a minor key.

With most people off work or school Monday, Presidents Day weekend is usually prosperous for the film studios. This one will probably fall short, however, continuing a box-office slide: So far, 2011 receipts are down 24 percent from a year earlier.

The young adult action-adventure "I Am Number Four" should top the box office; people who have seen pre-release audience surveys said it would probably take in close to $25 million in ticket sales in its first four days. The Martin Lawrence comedy sequel "Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son" is expected to finish second with about $20 million. And the new Liam Neeson action tale "Unknown" should be close to "Big Mommas" with $15 million to $20 million.

By Rebecca Keegan, Los Angeles Times (MCT)

When Rooster Cogburn, Jeff Bridges' gravel-voiced federal marshal in Joel and Ethan Coen's "True Grit," defends his tendency to shoot first and ask questions later in a courtroom scene, he is a figure engulfed in shadows. Slowly, a shaft of light streams through the courtroom's giant windows, revealing Cogburn's craggy, bearded face to the film's protagonist, 14-year-old Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld), and the audience for the very first time.

The dramatic effect, announcing the movie's larger-than-life antihero through light and darkness, is the work of Academy Award-nominated cinematographer Roger Deakins.

By Kimmai Nguyen, Courier Staff Writer

January 15 was a night to remember: Chris Carrabba, singer from Dashboard Confessional, came to The Regency Ballroom in San Francisco to played the album Swiss Army Romance for its tenth anniversary.

With much anticipation on BART, arriving was the easy part; trying to push and maneuver to the front of the crowd was the hard part.

By Linh-Chi Nguyen, Courier Music Editor

The 1971 release of Go Ask Alice directs the reader into the life of an adolescent female who undergoes the melodrama of a drug-induced time period where the influence of drug usage reigns supreme and the plight of withdrawal deems control.

The diary's creditability is questionable as it was published anonymously, but it did reach a worldwide audience of readers and spread the actuality of such behavior.

An anonymous fifteen-year-old girl begins the diary as an attempt to deal with ordinary teenage issues such as weight loss, relationships, sexuality, relating to her parents and peer acceptance. She writes in her diary to express the difficulties of having no social companions, while dealing with moving to a different home. This then escalated to a life that even fate could not predict.

By Omar Alimi, Courier Correspondent

In the world of synthesizers, DJ’s, and house music, the OP-1 by Teenage Engineering has become the object of desire for many not only because of its sleek look or compactness, but because of the new capabilities it brings as a synthesizer.

The OP-1 was scheduled for an early 2011 date, priced at $800 in the United States. In just a few weeks, Teenage Engineering has already run out of stock for this wonderful synthesizer. The synthesizer started out ten years ago as a from a group of dedicated Swedish musicians and engineers who came together to make something that no one else has. The group has surely made something in a new completely new category.

By Billy O'Keefe
McClatchy-Tribune (MCT)

Everyone makes third-person shooters now. But nobody has made anything like 2008's "Dead Space," which took a suddenly oversaturated genre, doused it in ingredients normally reserved for horror games, and turned that combination into a brutally claustrophobic shooter with a fiction that puts most contemporary science fiction to shame.

"Dead Space 2" expands its playing field from a solitary spaceship under siege to an enclosed space city that's been left in ruin by the invading mutant Necromorphs (who, depending on your interpretations of the first game's events, are either evil incarnate or victims of fanaticism gone obscenely wrong). But while the environment is larger and more diverse — a point driven home by portions of the game that take place in wide-open, zero-gravity space — the storytelling is considerably more personal.

By Milto Ungashe, Courier Staff Writer

Audrey Niffenegger’s debut novel The Time Traveler’s Wife is a beautiful tale of the love shared by Henry DeTamble and Clare Abshire, and their struggle to be with one another despite the bounds of time.

Henry DeTamble is an ordinary librarian who suffers from a rare, out-of-the-ordinary genetic disorder known as Chrono-Displacement that causes him to travel involuntarily through time. Clare Abshire meets him when she's six as a result of his time traveling. She's an artist that unsuspectingly falls in love with him eventually.

By Julia Ortiz, Courier Staff Writer

Arthur and his queen, Guinevere, ruled over Camelot in peace when the idea of the Round Table emerged. Lancelot travels all the way from France to be a part of it. Some scandals later, this has the making for and interesting story.

Last night, Logan opened their showing of Camelot, pulling together the school's award-winning choir, drama and band programs to get it off the ground.

About 45 people attended, which can be considered good for a weeknight. Tension and expectations of excellence piled on the performers once the instructors finally left back stage.

By Beatrice Esteban, Courier Editor-in-Chief

New York City, ballet dancers, French accents and homoerotic fantasies are just a few distinctive features of 2010’s Black Swan.

Directed by Darren Aronofsky—of The Wrestler fame—this movie is definitely one that viewers don’t want to see with their parents or siblings. Rather than presenting the audience with a fluffy story of young women in tutus, Aronofsky’s film instead explores the dark transformation of a sweet girl into a mysterious, seductive woman.

By Farah Ali, Courier Staff Writer

Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden tells the tale of a young Japanese girl named Chiyo Sakamoto. Chiyo lives in a tipsy house on the cliffs of the Japanese sea in a small village in Yoroido. She always had big dreams of leaving Yoroido and becoming successful to make her parents happy, but tragedy had struck when her father found out that Chiyo's mother was diagnosed with a fatal bone disease. The family prayed as much as they could, until the doctor told Chiyo's father that time had run out. Chiyo and her older sister Satsu were told that they would transported to the bigger and wealthier city of Gion. This came as a shock to Chiyo and Satsu, who didn't want to leave their tipsy house and parents. But what Chiyo didn't know was that her future would become more and more bright as the days passed on.

By Billy O'Keefe
McClatchy-Tribune (MCT)

Ports don't arrive much later to the party than "Mass Effect 2," which makes its Playstation 3 debut a week shy of a year after it appeared on the Xbox 360.
But it's nowhere near too late to get acclimated with a game as good as "ME2," which deservedly won a museum's worth of year-end awards from critics and fans alike. And like any good party guest, it compensates for its tardiness by bearing gifts.

For starters, because the first "Mass Effect" remains non-existent on the Playstation platform, Bioware has given the uninitiated a significantly better means of catching up to the story than it did for players on other platforms. An in-game interactive comic book details the important events of that first game, and through a handful of "Choose Your Own Adventure"-style moments, readers can shape the comic's story in much the same way players charted their narrative course through the game. The Xbox/PC versions of "ME2" allowed players to use save files from the first game to affect how the second game's story began, and this comic has the same effect.