It’s easy to forget now, but shortly before the release of No Country for Old Men, it appeared that Joel and Ethan Coen might have reached the end of their run as vital filmmakers. They’d delivered two critical and commercial … Continue reading From the Archive — No Country for Old Men
Thirty years ago, in the autumn of 1988, They Might Be Giants released their second full-length album, Lincoln. Promoted in a print advertisement as an extension of a storied naming history that included the car, the tunnel, the man, and … Continue reading One for Friday — They Might Be Giants, “The World’s Address”
Sometimes comedy illuminates hard truths with a pointed urgency that other means can’t quite achieve. Sometimes comedy is just funny. This series of posts is mostly about the former instances, but the latter is valuable, too. Earlier this week, I … Continue reading Laughing Matters — Rita Rudner on The Tonight Show
When the moment called for an evaluation comparing and contrasting the respective testimonies of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford and Judge Brett Kavanaugh before the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary, The New York Times couldn’t have tapped a better … Continue reading My Writers — Rebecca Traister
These posts are about great acting performances sustained across the full run of a television series. Amy Poehler as Leslie Knope in Parks and Recreation (2009 – 2015) Sometimes I feel like Parks and Recreation was single-handedly saved by the … Continue reading The Long Haul — Amy Poehler in Parks and Recreation
“Fiona had written poetry when she was Adam Henry’s age, though she had never presumed to read it aloud, not even to herself. She remembered quatrains daringly unrhymed. There was even one about death by drowning, of sinking deliciously backward … Continue reading Great Moments in Literature
832. Ry Cooder, Borderline (1980) As the nineteen-seventies were giving way to the eighties, Ry Cooder was the musician’s musician. His solidly prolific solo career was bolstered by appearances on other performer’s records, many of which were likely far more … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 1000, 1979 – 1989 — #832 to #829
Officially, director Bryan Singer has a new movie out this weekend. The reality is a little more complicated, but it’s a reasonable enough prompt to dig out this old review, especially since it’s looking like there might be a sizable … Continue reading From the Archive — Superman Returns
Thirty years ago, in the autumn of 1988, A&M Records released the compilation Stay Awake. Adorned with the description “Various Interpretations of Music from Vintage Disney Films,” the album was perfectly calibrated to endear to the brash sentimentalists around the … Continue reading One for Friday — The Replacements, “Cruella De Ville”
These posts celebrate the movie trailers, movie posters, commercials, print ads, and other promotional material that stand as their own works of art. The U.S. movie industry has a long history of cruelly casting off figures who were once titans, … Continue reading The Art of the Sell — Dark Tower commercial
Coffee for Two 