The kismet of cinematic artistry is elusive, which unfortunately alleviates the unfair sense of disappointment when the most creative individuals struggle through dry spells. By now, it’s understood that Woody Allen is too prolific (and too unconcerned with anything other … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2013 — Number Nine
#50 — Lady and the Tramp (Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, and Hamilton Luske, 1955) Everything I know about romance I learned from Lady and the Tramp. I’m not sure when I first saw it. Maybe it was during its 1980 … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Fifty
And so our extended exercise in chronological backtracking through list-making and backward counting reaches the nineteen-fifties, which is the first decade of film covered that I didn’t come too with a clear vision of it. I had firsthand experience with the aughts, the nineties, and the eighties. As for the seventies and sixties, they loomed large in my understanding of cinema history, thanks to defining revolutions in American and French film. What’s more, the fifties don’t have quite the same automatic allure as the forties, which I associate with my beloved film noir, or the thirties, which virtually percolated with … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 50s — An Introduction
Director Paul Greengrass is great at the particulars of a film’s story. That’s what made United 93 comes across a model of titanic restraint when it arrived, its keen attention to the simplest details of people reacting to terrible turns of history providing an emotional poignancy that Hollywood script speechifying could never muster. Even his contributions to the Bourne series are at their best when tightly focused on the physical mechanics of the scenes. And that’s what gives Captain Phillips its bracing immediacy. Based on actual events that took place in 2009, the film follows the hijacking of a cargo … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2013 — Number Ten
2. Cake, Fashion Nugget Among college radio kids in the mid-nineties, there was a pretty healthy market for songs that took critical aim at their own music fandom. For example, Ben Folds Five first got noticed with “Underground.” In the … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1996, 2 and 1
The long farewell to my tenure as a Spectrum Culture writer turns this week to contributions made to the music section. As I noted last week, I was originally brought on as strictly a film writer, but I was given … Continue reading Spectrum Check
In the most recent installment of the College Countdown feature, I continued to let the writing be colored by personal disgruntlement over my alma mater station’s embrace of mediocre (to be kind) soundtracks in the mid-nineties. Realistically, though, those student programmers were properly, albeit somewhat painfully, reflecting the state of the music scene at the time. Just as blockbuster, mass appeal soundtrack albums were the norm about a decade earlier, round about 1996, filmmakers and labels were actively pursuing the alternative music fan with soundtrack efforts, maybe in part because the likes of Hole, while big in their own way, … Continue reading One for Friday: Boss Hog, “I’m Not Like Everybody Else”
One of the great disadvantages of plying an amateur film critic trade is that the bevy of opportunities to see the best cinematic offerings of any given year–the major film festivals, the pile-up of fourth quarter press screenings designed to dazzle just in time for various associations’ awards–are denied me, a situation further compounded by living in the hinterlands, well away from the qualifying runs of films in the big cities. So when the critical community is rising up to breathlessly proclaim a movie year to be especially good, the sentiment can seem a little off to me. Sure, I … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2013 — An Introduction
My strong impression of Bruce Springsteen’s general approach to crafting albums is that he agonizes over every bit of every song, and then he agonizes some more about the way those songs fit together. This leads to the perception (and … Continue reading The New Releases Shelf: High Hopes
Before he started directing feature films, Spike Jonze had a deserved reputation a master crafter of wildly entertaining and even innovative music videos. However, I think his best single piece of work away from the big screen is clear: the … Continue reading I wouldn’t be me if she wasn’t her
Coffee for Two 