As if Daniel Day-Lewis didn’t already deserve countless plaudits for his transformative performance as the sixteenth President of the United States in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, it seems his reluctance to take on the role–noting that reluctance to take on a … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2012 — Number Ten
I’ve been thinking back on the film year just passed, looking for some sort of unifying theme or idea. As I’ve noted before, I don’t really believe in the sort of cinematic groupthink that other critics are stumbling upon all the time when they survey the wide array of multiplex and art house offerings (much as I like and admire the film writers for The New York Times, they seem to stumble upon a wholly imagined trend about every other week). But I do think the films that speak to any given individual can be somewhat revelatory, offering a glimpse … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2012 — An Introduction
Remarkably, it’s taken Kathryn Bigelow all of two films to transform from an also-ran action director to the most revered and dependable cinematic chronicler of American’s early 21st century of global militaristic angst. Unless there are people out there who … Continue reading It was a girl with her face in the shadows so dark
In a recent Director Roundtable discussion organized by The Hollywood Reporter, David O. Russell discussed how he came to work on the the 2010 film The Fighter. Russell acknowledged that it was exactly the sort of conventional projected he would … Continue reading Hey, babe, what’s in your eyes? I saw them flashing like airplane lights.
10. “Never Let Me Down Again” by Depeche Mode The second single from Depeche Mode’s Music for the Masses, “Never Let Me Down Again,” was the a fairly weak performer, by some measures anyway, compared to the other tracks released in the first wave of the album’s promotion. Of the first three singles, for example, it was the lowest charter on the U.K. charts and the only one that didn’t manage a Top 5 showing on the U.S. Dance charts (lead single “Strangelove” even managed to top that particular chart for two weeks). Nonetheless, it was one of those songs … Continue reading College Countdown: KROQ-FM’s Top 40 Songs of 1987, 10 and 9
It was a fairly light week for me at Spectrum Culture. I have a stockpile of music reviews that will be coming due any minute, but or now I just had one full length piece, a terrible drama that I somehow managed to squeeze out a couple hundred words on even though I just wanted to write “Israeli-Palestinian relations as an ABC After School Special” and be done with it. I also pitched in on our Best Comedic Performances of the 1970s, writing about one Oscar winning turn and another that got a well-deserved nomination. Continue reading Spectrum Check
There are things in my iTunes that I don’t entirely recall how they got there. I mean, I have some vague idea that it involved some internet prowling of dubious copyright legality, but I couldn’t begin to track down where or when I first found the material in question. That’s compounded when even attempting to search for the artist in question proves to be a fairly fruitless endeavor, as in, say, when looking for more information about an obscure nineteen-seventies rock band that went by the name Fat. You can go pretty deep into a Google search of that word … Continue reading One for Friday: Fat, “The Shape I’m In”
I no longer offer up predictions of the Oscar nominees, but I can tell you with some assurance that I definitely wouldn’t have seen that Best Director list coming. While there are all sorts of interesting details up and down the list of nominees for the 85th Academy Awards, it’s the five guys cited for directing that stand as the most interesting story from the morning’s announcement. And “guys” is a word that I use very deliberately. After becoming only the fourth woman to be nominated in that category and the first to win, Kathryn Bigelow failed to make the … Continue reading Lincoln, Lincoln, I’ve been thinkin’
#50 — Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (Russ Meyer, 1965) According to Russ Meyer, the conception of the film was simplicity itself: “I had men kicking the shit out of women, so I thought, ‘Why don’t we do one where the … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 60s — Number Fifty
And here we are again, nary a breath drawn after the completion of one foolhardy countdown and its time to readjust the settings of the Wayback Machine and start over. In introducing the equivalent countdown for the nineteen-seventies, I noted that it was the first venture into films that I largely saw detached from their context, or rather in the context of retrospective adoration (or scorn) heaped upon them. I was forced to meet the films’ respective reputations at the same time I encountered the actual work for the first time. Take that sentiment and multiply it, and that brings … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 60s — An Introduction
Coffee for Two 