#9 — The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich, 1971) There’s a beautiful desolation at the heart of Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show, a echoing ache that’s given physical form by the scorched, dusty streets of the dying nineteen-fifties Texas town … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 70s — Number Nine
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. Sonny Charles was the lead singer of the band Checkmates, Ltd., a group out of Fort Wayne, Indiana that had a sizable hit in the late nineteen-sixties with “Black Pearl,” a track that undoubtedly garnered at least some of its attention because of the wall it was draped in trademark Wall of Sound regalia by producer Phil Spector. That taste of success wasn’t … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “Put It in a Magazine”
I have no way to string together words that won’t be compromised by extreme distraction today. A return to content tomorrow. Continue reading Lump sat alone in a boggy marsh
It has been twelve long years since Robert Zemeckis directed a film that had real live actors in it. He would undoubtedly take umbrage with that characterization, noting that the stop-motion animation efforts he’s toiled on during those dozen years … Continue reading Turn this crazy bird around, I shouldn’t have got on this flight tonight
30. “Alex Chilton” by the Replacements I rarely pass up an opportunity to expound on my immense appreciation for Pleased to Meet Me, the fifth full-length album from the Replacements and their second for major label Sire Records. The first, Tim from two years earlier, had a false start that must have especially pained the band’s frontman, Paul Westerberg. The glum genius songwriter felt a clear, special kinship with Alex Chilton, whose own self-defeating legend was assured by his time as one of the key creative forces behind the early nineteen-seventies rock ‘n’ roll cult heroes Big Star. Chilton was … Continue reading College Countdown: KROQ-FM’s Top 40 Songs of 1987, 30 and 29
Since I was gone for a week, I intentionally withdrew from selecting new items to review for Spectrum Culture, and my editor was kind enough to refrain from assigning due date for the one or two things I had that were, frankly, a little overdue. I’ll pay for that mercy a bit in the week ahead as I’ve got a lot of writing to do. For this past week, however, the only thing I had go up on the site was my contribution to the next installment in our year-by-year survey of great comedic performances. I’m especially glad the filmography … Continue reading Spectrum Check
Of course I need to begin by thanking Holly, Phil, Phantom Third Channel, Rachel and Rhienna for their exemplary efforts last week in my absence. I’ve been trying to think of a song for this week that somehow encompasses all of them, but I’ve been unable to find a super-sad song by the Fall that’s totally bonkers in a surprisingly blissful dance remix that’s only available on vinyl. I suspect that the track I’ve described actually exists, but it’s beyond my capabilities to find it. So instead I’ll just get right back to Friday business, digging into my ancient past … Continue reading One for Friday: Mary’s Danish, “Don’t Crash the Car Tonight”
#10 — Network (Sidney Lumet, 1976) I don’t think it’s quite right to say that all great films are timeless. I do think there are broadly translatable qualities to the very best works–things such as wit, grace, intellectual heft and … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 70s — Number Ten
I nearly forgot that I have a Halloween tradition. For the third year in a row, these are things that I find (or at least have found) scary… Ridley Scott’s Alien was released in theaters six days before me ninth … Continue reading Two steps forward, don’t say I didn’t warn you
Harry and Walter Go to New York (Mark Rydell, 1976). A colleague of mine at Spectrum Culture wrote about this nostalgic caper comedy a while back, calling it “a delightful farce of a film.” Not really, but it’s surely an oddball relic of the era when nineteen-seventies adventurism gave way to self-defeating excess. Clearly inspired by (and given its greenlight due to) the smashing success of George Roy Hill’s The Sting a few years earlier, the film casts Elliott Gould and James Caan as a pair of hackneyed vaudevillians in the late nineteenth century who get caught up in a … Continue reading Kubrick, Kurosawa, Robbins and Wise, Rydell, Wilder
Coffee for Two 