The Savages experienced a surge to immediate music scene notoriety, the sort that can easily sink a band as happy surprise takes a smack of backlash and open-minded expectation curdles into defiant preemptive dismissal. The band officially formed in 2011, had … Continue reading The New Releases Shelf: Adore Life
The comparison to All the President’s Men is irresistible, only because it is so apt. With Spotlight, named after the investigative journalism unit at The Boston Globe, director Tom McCarthy traces the efforts of a team of dedicated reporters examining the pervasive sexual abuse of minors perpetrated by members of the Catholic clergy and the reprehensible cover-up of those crimes by the institutional powers within the Church. Like Alan J. Pakula’s sterling 1976 drama, Spotlight approaches its subject with a commitment to depicting the meticulous toil that goes into building a devastating, revelatory newspaper article of undeniable fact, essentially celebrating the … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2015 — Number Seven
Carnival of Souls (Herk Harvey, 1962). The film begins with a car crash, the vehicle careening off a cliff into the murky drink. Though the authorities are unable to find the vehicle’s female occupant (Candace Hilligoss), she eventually emerges, carrying no memory of how she survived. She proceeds with her plan, traveling to Utah for a job as a church organist. From there, writer-director Harvey, along with co-screenwriter John Clifford, comes up with downright ingenious ways to build scenes with unsettling layers with an obviously meager budget. The movie is ticklishly amusing given some of its more dated elements and amateurish … Continue reading Carey, Harvey, Hill, Maloof and Siskel, Shepard
244. The Suburbs, “Love is the Law” The inner sleeve of the full-length studio album issued by the Suburbs in 1984 states, “The title ‘Love Is The Law’ is the opinion of The Suburbs, stands alone and has no connection whatsoever with Aleister Crowley.” They may not have drawn direct inspiration from the foundational tenet of Thelema, as laid out by the upstart religion’s crackpot founder, but disavowing any relation whatsoever would require parsing the intent of an unidentified Minnesotan with access to spray paint and a blank horizontal surface. As Chan Poling, vocalist and keyboard player for The Suburbs, later explained, “I … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 250 Songs, 1979 – 1989, 244 – 242
As we continue to trek through the favored films I wrote about for the special year-end edition of The Reel Thing, I will now note that we also carved out a few minutes in the episode to discuss the worst films of 1992. Currently blessed with the selectivity of a part-time film critic, I’m decidedly ill-equipped to come up with such a list, but we had no shortage of contenders back then, especially with small-town screens serving as our main source of cinema. So, straight from the script, here’s my list of the worst films of 1992: Look, there’s a … Continue reading From the Archive: Unforgiven
“This City in Darkness” is one of those tracks in my digital collection that is so obscure I’m not even certain how I found my way to it. To the best of my knowledge, I never played anything from the band Sport of Kings during my radio days, although I suppose it is possible. It seems the band hailed from Chicago, and the entirety of their output was issues only a handful of years before I arrived at my happy bunker with a fully working transmitter. Perhaps I did slip one of their records out of the C Stacks some late … Continue reading One for Friday: Sport of Kings, “This City in Darkness”
Alex Ross Perry’s Queen of Earth is spectacularly discombobulating. The bare bones of the plot make it seem as plain and direct as can be: Catherine (Elizabeth Moss), reeling from the death of her father and a recent breakup, goes to spend a week at a lake house with her best friend, Virginia (Katherine Waterston). The broken neediness that Catherine carries with her parallels that of Virginia one year earlier, as does the lack of sympathy in others stirred by that vivid sorrow. The execution of the story, however, is anything but simple, with Perry taking the already strong emotions and … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2015 — Number Eight
I adore the way Leave Me Alone, the debut album from Hinds, shuffles to life with a distinct slacker ease, as if it’s trying to establish a code of ripe sonic lassitude. Album opener “Garden” recalls some of the hollowed out retro rock of the Best Coast brigade from a couple years back, but with an added distancing from the rigidity of popcraft. With its trudging backbeat, rickety anti-harmonies, and guitar lines that sound like they’re being played by arms collapsing out of exhaustion, “Garden” is a call to arms from a band choosing not to raise their voice too … Continue reading The New Releases Shelf: Leave Me Alone
#22 — Oliver Platt as Dennis Murphy in Bulworth (Warren Beatty, 1998) Once a film about politics swerves toward satire, there’s a hope and expectation that it will be simultaneously revelatory and prescient, especially if the cinematic endeavor in question comes from one of Hollywood’s more revered figures. The fourth film to formally credit Warren Beatty as director eagerly viewed as precisely that sort of astute, forward-thinking examination of the nation’s ruptured system for identifying worthy public servants. Even at the time of its release, Bulworth seemed to be missing its target, in part because Beatty couldn’t entirely split the … Continue reading Greatish Performances #22
Approaching ten years since the heartless, virulently irresponsible greed of countless Wall Street hooligans decimated the United States housing market, the one part of the nation’s economy thought to be practically bulletproof, and nearly took the entire global financial network down with it, and the repercussions against the perpetrators have been practically nonexistent. Damning journalism and ferocious editorials haven’t shifted the national narrative. Maybe comedy can help. In adapting Michael Lewis’s the non-fiction book The Big Short, which itself is infused with an apoplectic wryness, filmmaker Adam McKay brings his long history as a boisterously committed comic voice (mostly working … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2015 — Number Nine
Coffee for Two 