There is a creative exuberance to Valérie Donzelli’s Declaration of War that stands in beautifully paradoxical contrast to the smothering sorrow of its subject matter. Donzelli and Jérémie Elkaïm play a French couple with classically familiar names, Juliette and Roméo. … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2012 — Number Seven
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. The band 10cc started in 1972. At least that’s when the group of British musicians who’d been writing and recording together for a while decided to formally become a band under that name. Before that, they’d operated in several different iterations, including a stint as a band called Hotlegs, as which they had a minor hit in 1970 with the song “Neanderthal Man.” … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “People in Love”
6. “Need You Tonight” by INXS The Australian band INXS could reasonable claim that they’d already broken through on the U.S. charts when they released Kick, their sixth studio album, in October of 1987. Their prior effort, 1985’s Listen Like Thieves, just missed the Top 10 of the Billboard album charts and yielded a Top 5 hit in the lead single, “What You Need,” which MTV seemed to play about as much as their top of the hour astronaut bumper. That taste of success was a grain of salt compared to the deluge of flavor that came with Kick, an … Continue reading College Countdown: KROQ-FM’s Top 40 Songs of 1987, 6 and 5
There were plenty of my upstart opinions flung around digitally this week at Spectrum Culture. Among the film reviews, there was my take on a new indie thriller, the sort of neo-noir that had a momentary spell of prominence in the mid-nineties. That’s not to imply that this new effort was outdated. Instead, it’s major sin was its unrelenting dullness. I’ve been sitting on a fair number of albums from late 2012 while still picking up new releases to review, and that stockpiling led to a pair of pieces this past week. I reviewed the second full-length from the Joy … Continue reading Spectrum Check
The first time I knowingly heard of Chekhov’s gun, it was in a song. The monumentally important Russian playwright used the gun as a mean to articulate the importance of efficiency in dramatic storytelling, writing, “One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.” The way Peter Case put it in his 1989 song “Put Down the Gun” was as follows: “I don’t want to swear it/ But it’s something that I’ve heard/ A gun in the first act/ Always goes off in the third.” So I came to my knowledge … Continue reading One for Friday: Peter Case, “Put Down the Gun”
I hedged a bit when I first wrote about Magic Mike, noting that the final act had problems. I stand by that, but as time has passed, I find I care less and less about where the movie sags and more about its thrilling thrust. Inspired in part by star Channing Tatum’s own experience as a male stripper, the film makes this hedonistic world appear both unbearably sleazy and wickedly intoxicating, often in the same gasped breath. In that way, it races along the same track as Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights, but Anderson’s vivid sprawl is replaced by director … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2012 — Number Eight
#49 — Don’t Look Back (D.A. Pennebaker, 1967) When Bob Dylan toured England in 1965, he had five officially released albums to his credit, including the just-issued Bringing It All Back Home. He was a star, but not yet an … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 60s — Number Forty-Nine
21 Jump Street (Phil Lord and Chris Miller, 2012). This adaptation of the ludicrous nineteen-eighties television series about cops undercover in high school (one of the first hits for the Fox network) was met with surprising appreciation by the critical community when it was released last spring. I can certainly understand why its metafictional comedy may have been a welcome surprise, but it’s still more ragged and predictable than it is shrewd and effective. Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum have nice interplay as the requisite mismatched cops working together, and there’s something refreshing about the inversion of stereotypes, with the … Continue reading Carax, Davies, Godard, Huston, Lord and Miller
With Your Sister’s Sister, writer-director Lynn Shelton positions herself as an auteur of particularly tricky terrain. She structures her scripts as if they’re challenges to herself, writing the story into tight corners and seeing if she can plausibly extricate the … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2012 — Number Nine
8. “True Faith” by New Order New Order’s 1986 album, Brotherhood, may have still had an impact in 1987 (see #39 below), but it was the two-record set released during the year proper that represented a major turning point for the band. Called Substance or Substance 1987, depending on how deeply one feels the need to accede primacy to the Joy Division collection of the same name released the following year, the album compiled all of New Order’s singles and b-sides up to that point, although some of them in rerecorded or otherwise modified form. To help fill out the … Continue reading College Countdown: KROQ-FM’s Top 40 Songs of 1987, 8 and 7
