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. For a small stretch of time–not when I was an actual … Continue reading My Misspent Youth: Marvel Two-in-One #7 by Steve Gerber and Sal Buscema
And The Sopranos is on right now. Six years after the show went off the air, it remains a staple on the various HBO side channels, enduring in perpetual rotation in a way that other acclaimed series from the network haven’t quite. Not that there’s any shortage of treasures within the show, led by the inspiration of creator David Chase and a multitude of great performances. But watch any given episode and it’s clear that a major part of its greatness–the reason it truly lasts–is the incredible central performance by James Gandolfini. It’s absolutely one of the pinnacles in the … Continue reading James Gandolfini, 1961 – 2013
#29 — Cool Hand Luke (Stuart Rosenberg, 1967) What Cool Hand Luke is going for is made clear as can be right there on the movie poster: “The man…and the motion picture that simply do not conform.” Released at the … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 60s — Number Twenty-Nine
“So you suffer through the night with the perfect-on-paper man–the stutter of jokes misunderstood, the witty remarks lobbed and missed. Or maybe he understands that you’ve made a witty remark but, unsure of what to do with it, he holds it in his hand like some bit of conversational phlegm he will wipe away later. You spend another hour trying to find each other, to recognize each other, and you drink a little too much and try and little too hard. And you go home to a cold bed and think, That was fine. And your life is a long … Continue reading Great Moments in Literature
64. Jane Jensen, Comic Book Whore I haven’t double-checked up and down the entire list, but I’m somewhat confident that Jane Jensen is the only performer on the chart who played a title role in a Troma Films release. In … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1996, 64 and 63
It’s been a couple weeks since I provided an update on my doings at Spectrum Culture, which would usually mean a pile-up of links to share. For a variety of reasons, that’s not the case. Instead, I have only the … Continue reading Spectrum Check
When I started the “Top 40 Smash Taps” series of posts, it was largely to push myself to write about music that was unfamiliar to me. Without the prompts delivered by decades of Billboard data, I can’t imagine myself having cause to write about Donna Summer. And now here I am, writing about her a second time in the space of three days. Part of the pleasure of writing the “Smash Taps” posts comes in discovering odd little details about the modern history of music that were previously outside my ken. For example, I was pretty fervently devoted to all … Continue reading One for Friday: Donna Summer, “Protection”
#30 — Alphaville (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965) “Once we know the number one, we believe that we know the number two, because one plus one equals two. We forget that first we must know the meaning of plus.” These are the words … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 60s — Number Thirty
These posts are about the songs that can accurately claim to crossed the key line of chart success, becoming Top 40 hits on Billboard, but just barely. Every song featured in this series peaked at number 40. If there’s any doubt whatsoever that Donna Summer was the queen of the disco era, consider the following: in 1978 and 1979, Summer had three consecutive double albums top the Billboard chart, the first artist to accomplish that feat, and placed four separate singles atop the Hot 100, including a duet with Barbra Streisand (amazingly, “Last Dance,” practically the official anthem of disco … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “Who Do You Think You’re Foolin’”
Sabotage (Alfred Hitchcock, 1936). My instinct is to refer to this as an early Alfred Hitchcock film, but he was a decade and almost two dozen films into his career by this point. What’s more, this was released the year after The 39 Steps, so while Hitchcock may not have been The Master yet, he was a seasoned, skilled and respected filmmaker already. This was toward the end of the run of his British-made films, and there’s a certain added restraint–even somewhat pedestrian quality–to the narrative about a terrorist group staging bombings around London. It notably adheres to all of … Continue reading Cianfrance, Hitchcock, Levine, Sonnenfeld, Zinnemann
Coffee for Two 