There’s no doubt that Guillermo del Toro’s sympathies lie with the monsters. In that respect, The Shape of Water is no revelation. Instead it is — marvelously, beautifully — an expression of del Toro’s worldview so perfectly, precisely rendered that … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2017 — Number Four
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. I enjoy reading about … Continue reading Laughing Matters: The Simpsons, “We Are the Mediocre Presidents”
980. Iggy Pop, Party (1981) Arista Records executives held onto some bizarre ideas about which performers were likely to stride purposefully into sudden crossover commercial success. As I noted a couple weeks ago, the label badgered Lou Reed through the … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 1000, 1979 – 1989 — #980 to #977
Last week, I dug out the old review for Clint Eastwood’s The Flags of Our Fathers. It’s time for his follow-up. Since I initially took the occasion of revisiting these reviews of Eastwood films to call into question some of the more overt veneration of his skills as a director, I now feel obligated to add that this effort nabbed a reasonably secure place on my top ten list for the year it was released. Well it’s a damn sight better than Flags of Our Fathers, I’ll say that. The companion to director Clint Eastwood’s earlier film about the battle of Iwo Jima … Continue reading From the Archive — Letters from Iwo Jima
Although I was present and aware during the time when the Go-Go’s dominated radio, MTV, and good chunk of pop culture as a full-on sensation, I don’t recall if there was any particular pressure to identify a favorite band member. … Continue reading One for Friday — Jane Wiedlin, “Rush Hour”
I read a lot of comic books as a kid. This series of posts is about the comics I read, and, occasionally, the comics that I should have read. Well before there was a comic book industry press eager to … Continue reading My Misspent Youth — Black Panther by Jack Kirby
Mudbound, directed by Dee Rees, does heavy lifting. Set largely in nineteen-forties Mississippi, the adaptation from a Hillary Jordan novel (Rees and Virgil Williams are co-credited on the screenplay) depicts the hardships endured by two connected families on a sprawling, … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2017 — Number Five
Murder on the Orient Express (Kenneth Branagh, 2017). This adaptation of one of Agatha Christie’s most famed novels finds Kenneth Branagh in his happy showman role, both in the officiously constructed visuals and in his leading performance as detective Hercule … Continue reading Playing Catch-Up — Murder on the Orient Express; Roman J. Israel, Esq.; A Cure for Wellness
In the basic mechanics of its story, Baby Driver is familiar to the point of farce. There’s our hero, Baby (Ansel Elgort), referenced in the title, a young man of preternatural skill whose excursion in the seedier side of society … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2017 — Number Six
984. UB40, 1980-1983 (1983) The early nineteen-eighties was a good time to be dishing out gentle, reggae-influenced pop in the U.K. The band UB40 started germinating around 1978, when Ali Campbell took the compensatory award he received after enduring a … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 1000, 1979 – 1989 — #984 to #981
