Editor’s Note: Welcome to V3 Weekend, a new Vanyaland series where we help you sort out your weekend entertainment with curated selections and recommendations across our three pillars of Music, Comedy, and Film/TV. It’s what you should know about, where you need to be, and where you’ll be going, with us riding shotgun along the way.
Music: Yard Act at The Sinclair
There’s been a whole new wave of English and Irish post-punk crashing our shores lately, and joining the likes of Wet Leg, Fontaines D.C., Shame and others is Yard Act, a Leeds outfit who hit Cambridge tonight (March 25) for a twirl and a pearl at The Sinclair. We first hyped these dudes back in January 2021, when fans gobbled up their entire run of “Dark Days” 7-inches in about two hours. The rise has been swift ever since, and the band unleashed debut album The Overload in January.
Yard Act just hit SXSW, and they play Coachella next month; but not before stirring up Harvard Square tonight, giving us that Friday Night Feeling we once had in the Before Times. Check out their recent live performance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon for a taste of the live action.
Comedy: Tone Bell at Laugh Boston
As Comedy Editor Jason Greenough noted on Monday in this week’s Mic’d Up, there are a veritable fuckton of live comedy options around the commonwealth this weekend, from Bert Kreischer in Wormtown to Trevor Wallace at The Wilbur to Randy Feltface at Roar way out in Springfield. But our hunt for laughter pure and simple leans towards Georgia native Tone Bell, who sets up shop at Laugh Boston for the second and third of three nights in the Seaport tonight and Saturday (March 25 and 26).
Writes Greenough: “No topic is off-limits for the American Soul actor, as he delves into politics, social justice, and of course, a bit lighter topics that can be found embedded in his own life. There are stories and jokes, but then there are stories and jokes as told by Tone Bell, and that’s a joy in and of itself.”
Film/TV: Enter the Void at Coolidge Corner Theatre
If the past two years have been an absolute trip, then it’s probably OK to (try and) sit still in a chair in a public movie theater and (attempt to) experience Gaspar Noé’s 2010 experimental drama art-film mindfuck Enter The Void. A film about life, drugs, and death, with a menacing 2:41 runtime, it screens at Brookline’s Coolidge Corner Theatre on Saturday night (March 26) for its After Midnight series, meaning this 11:30 p.m. show is a damn-near overnighter. The much-discussed death scene (not a spoiler) arrives fairly early in the film, and from there it’s a strobe of flashbacks and freak-outs strewn across Tokyo in what’s not always an easy watch.
Here’s a synopsis from the Coolidge: “A grimy and psychedelic out-of-body experience with a flair for extremity and technical wizardry.This psychedelic tour of life after death is seen entirely from the point of view of Oscar (Nathaniel Brown), a young American drug dealer and addict living in Tokyo with his prostitute sister, Linda (Paz de la Huerta). When Oscar is killed by police during a bust gone bad, his spirit journeys from the past — where he sees his parents before their deaths — to the present — where he witnesses his own autopsy — and then to the future, where he looks out for his sister from beyond the grave.”
Pack a lunch.