This story originally ran on May 21, 2025. We're rerunning it because "Hometown Summer" will be at the Michigan Theater again on Saturday, July 12, with screenings at 7:30 pm and 9:30 pm.

Comedies come in cycles. There was a time in the late 1990s and continuing through the early 2010s when movie theaters regularly welcomed rated-R-for-raunchy flicks with over-the-top humor. 

But as social mores changed, and movie theaters struggled to get people into their buildings, many of those movies went straight to streaming.

Wolverine Productions' Benjamin Vomastek misses when salty comedies with no-holds-barred japes populated the cineplex, and the University of Michigan grad is doing his part to bring them back.

Vomastek's film debut, 2024's Rosetta Stoned, filmed in Ann Arbor on a $30,000 budget, features a pothead who convinces a socially awkward classmate to exchange homework answers for weed. 

The new Hometown Summer, also filmed in Tree Town, premieres at the Michigan Theater on Thursday, May 22, at 7:30 pm. The cast and crew will appear after for a Q&A session.

In Hometown Summer, three young pals spend the warm months in Ann Arbor, and all kinds of mayhem happen when they get mixed up in a crazy business plan and indulge in all sorts of vices.

Vomastek makes no secret that his films are indebted to outrageous comedies of the past, such as Superbad and There's Something About Mary, so I asked him to discuss some movies that were direct influences on Hometown Summer.

"Each of these films carries a theme of human authenticity and realism that has inspired me as a filmmaker," Vomastek said.

In Nothing Special, Callie has been surrounded by magical artifacts and creatures her entire life, but there's nothing special about that. She knows she's not human—after all, she can see and commune with the spirits of vegetables—but beyond being part daemon on her dad's side, she hasn't a clue what else might be in her lineage. That begins to change when Callie and her boyfriend Declan embark upon a rescue mission past the town gate she had been forbidden to cross, joined by enigmatic companions including the demon prince Lasser and a dead radish named Radish.

Created by Ann Arbor artist Katie Cook and originally serialized online on the Webtoon platform, the third volume of Nothing Special is now available in a chonky print graphic novel. Cook's artwork is fresh and bright, complementing her surprising, laugh-out-loud humor. Yet some of the conflicts these characters encounter speak to heavier, darker themes. 

I spoke with Cook about Nothing Special, its inspirations, and how it compares to her work on Star Wars and My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.

On Sunday, July 6, two doctoral candidates and one newly minted Ph.D. from U-M’s School of Information (SI) will appear at hear.say brewing + theater, a westside Ann Arbor venue that's become a haven for improv.  

When Hana Chung, Hibby Thach, and Dr. Sylvia Darling take the stage, they won't be creating the improv—a trained troupe will be on hand, and the School of Information folks will appear as subject experts. That’s because college professors and grad students provide prompts for the improv players in a new kind of show they've dubbed Extra Credit.

On the first Sunday of each month, experts give 10-minute lectures, which are often humorous takes on serious subjects. These become the springboards for improvised sketches, and Q&As follow. While the improvs are funny, the Q&As deal with the substance of the research.

Gabriela Marcu, an SI professor, discovered an improv show at the Philadelphia Science Festival that began with talks by researchers. “I had always dreamed of making my own version,” she says.

Now and then, authors have banner years.

Nicholas Delbanco is in the midst of one after having had two books published in the last year: a memoir titled Still Life at Eighty and a hefty volume of collected short stories, Reprise: The Collected Stories of Nicholas Delbanco, containing two previously published collections and a new one. Still Life at Eighty debuted last fall, and Reprise came out this spring.

Delbanco is the Robert Frost Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan, where he directed the MFA program in creative writing and the Hopwood Awards. He lived in Ann Arbor and taught at U-M for 30 years, after which he returned to the East Coast, where he began his career.  

In Still Life at Eighty: A Memoir, Delbanco writes with the clarity of distance, realities of age, and optimism of a well-lived life. The book, as he writes, is “not … a standard memoir or full-fledged autobiography.” In fact, the term “still life” serves as an accurate description with some liberties as the author looks around at the places, things, and people that form the tableau of his life. Delbanco expands on what the volume covers within it:  

Kyle Hunt's new exhibition is about looking inward to see what comes out.

"The past decade has been a period in which the inner work I need to do has become more apparent and imperative," Hunt said. "It’s difficult work to dig through one’s past and start fixing what got knocked over, broken, displaced, disfigured, etc."

The Ann Arbor artist's What What Happened Led To exhibit at Ypsi's 22 North gallery features abstract explorations and offbeat figurative works from the past four years, "mostly oil and acrylic paintings on canvas, as well as some gouache, acrylic, and ink paintings on paper," he said.

The exhibition runs from June 27 to July 25, with an opening reception on opening night, where Hunt will display another talent: poetry.

"The poems and the visual art all represent what it’s like for me to start rebuilding after a storm has blown through," Hunt said. "The journey of doing that difficult but necessary work."

But if poetry isn't your thing, don't fret.

"It will truly be a short reading. While I have written some poems since grad school, most of my time has been spent making paintings and drawings, so that’s the focus of the show," Hunt said. "I don’t want anyone tired from a long poetry reading, left with little energy for art on the walls."

The dynamic work in What What Happened Led To is infused with energy, but not directly or aggressively. The images can come across like scary dreams, but they are painted in pastel-oriented colors, giving the works a strange blend of subtle fear but no loathing. It's more like lucid dreaming, where you take charge of your sleeptime imagination and ride out the sensation—even if it's a nightmare—as if you're an omniscient narrator. 

I asked Hunt a few questions to understand his work, where the "bad dream has infiltrated a good dream."

Leigh Sugar’s debut poetry collection, FREELAND, expresses “an impossible love story" in which the poet is in love with an incarcerated man and grapples with the heartache of orbiting the prison while he remains inside. The poetic sequence “CORRECTIONS” considers that “Alone, we silent ask if love is leaving a part / of oneself with your love whenever you’re apart.

The separation within this relationship and the ways incarceration disrupts lives suffuse these poems. The collection captures a reality in which the poet yearns for things to be different. The poet writes, “I want your body to be only my body / and not state property to be held and taxed” in “CORRECTIONS.”

The poem “Fantasy” illustrates the depth to which prison sits in contrast to outside life with dreams, such as “Cells are only what keep bodies and plants alive.” Another desire is that “Solitary confinement is when / you choose to enter a room filled with sunlight. No one puts you there but you. / No one keeps you there.” The poet assimilates the circumstances of prison to the extent that, upon going to the subway and “remembering I am not going to prison / today,” the speaker realizes that “today I can carry anything” rather than worrying about security. FREELAND shows how far the walls of the prison reach.

Sugar is a writer, editor, and educator who lives in Ann Arbor. She will celebrate the release of FREELAND at Literati Bookstore with Tamar Ashdot on Wednesday, June 25, at 6:30 pm.

Before her event, I talked with Sugar about her journey with poetry, poetic and political structures, specific poems in FREELAND, and her work with a poetry podcast.

The Blox, a competitive web show for entrepreneurs, might be closer to Fear Factor than Keeping Up With the Kardashians as far as reality television goes.

The web show’s focus on public speaking, spur-of-the-moment pitching, and an intensive point system are enough to challenge anyone, especially Rick Coughlin.

Coughlin, co-founder and co-owner of Ypsilanti’s Grove Studios, a 24/7 rehearsal space and recording studio, said appearing on season 16 of The Blox was a well-needed “kick in the teeth.”

“You’re standing in front of all your peers, the guy that’s doing $5 million a year, and the woman who just started her dog business, and they’re all looking at you,” said Coughlin, a musician who co-started Grove Studios in 2017 and now runs it with business partner Breck Crandell.

“You have to deliver something that makes sense, and then a coach pokes holes in everything that you said. You get grilled for another half hour or so, and then you rinse and repeat for seven days. And there [are] cameras everywhere all the time.”

For more than a decade, Justin Lawnchair has been the sole member of progressive death metal band The Biscuit Merchant.

Across 10 albums, the Ann Arbor artist charts a cacophonous course through dark waters that touches on numerous extreme metal styles: Biscuit Merchant songs feature the technological precision of thrash, the blackened passions of death metal, and the Viking majesty of European power metal.

Lawnchair recently completed the latest chapter in a conceptual multiple-album project called ALPHA. Each title in the series begins with a different letter of the alphabet, eventually numbering 26 when complete. The new album, Tempora, is number 10, and like the others, opens with riffs and themes that connect it to its predecessor, 2024’s Visible Scars.

The difference with this record is that it has a more defined narrative than the other episodes. Tempora tells the tale of humankind’s reaction to the threat of domination by an alien intelligence—to build and deploy a weapon that might destroy the entire universe if it works, and will definitely destroy humanity if it doesn’t. Either way, mankind chooses to leave nothing for their enemies to conquer. Rings true, right?

“Victorious," the first single on Tempora, is a gargantuan slab of rolling riff, demonic verse, and heroic chorus that manages to be punishing and hooky in equal measure, and it depicts the turning point of the story.

“How is our consciousness changing?” is the question Maddy Ringo grapples with throughout her record People of the Earth and Sea, released March 28. The Toronto-born singer-songwriter has established herself as a beacon of Ann Arbor’s music scene, adding her voice to the cultural howl for another folk-music revival, but one that reflects the current reality.

“I think you also have a lot of people who can’t really relate to folk and country songs about plowing the fields or working on the railroad," Ringo said. "That’s not our lives, and I think a lot of people in my space are taking that folk tradition and those things that feel really grounded and familiar and then writing about our modern life.

“I think people are very hungry right now in the aftermath of the pandemic and also in the face of AI. People really want live music, and they’re responding to things that feel real.”

Jeff Dunn didn't mean to become a go-to photographer for the Southeast Michigan jazz scene. He was just a guy who started taking his camera to jam sessions around 2014 after being a fan of the "sound of surprise" since the early 1970s.

"The first time I went to [Detroit's] Baker's Keyboard Lounge in 1973, I was hooked," Dunn told Pulp in a 2018 interview. "I've been addicted to live jazz performances ever since."

Now he's the house photographer for the Detroit Jazz Festival Foundation, a regular presence at concerts from the Motor City to Tree Town, and the focus of a new exhibit at Argus Museum in Ann Arbor.

Jeff Dunn - Jazz Photography runs June 2-27, offering 38 shots by the St. Clair Shores resident and retired Wayne State computer programmer/web developer.

The exhibit is tucked into a narrow hallway with a slight zig-zag, but there's enough room to step back from each photo and imagine the 71-year-old Dunn's placement for each shot. The description plates for each image feature enthusiastic prose from the photographer about his subjects, revealing Dunn's fan-first appreciation of jazz.