I would think that working on a film that grounds itself in the logic of fairy tales is very freeing. The parameters of plausibility widen quite a bit when the plot is inherently open to fairies, haunted forests and nasty … Continue reading Where’s my nurse, I need some healing. I’ve been paralyzed by a lack of feeling.
30. Rocket from the Crypt, Group Sounds Given that the main context I’ve brought to these College Countdown posts on CMJ‘s 2001 year-end has been one grounded in my own relationship with the individual artists–either of discovery, familiarity or pure puzzlement–there’s an interesting bit of symmetry to the two bands paired this week. Both were groups with a strong punk influence, and I had previously purchased and loved earlier efforts from both of them during the span of time between my commercial radio tenure and my return to college radio, when I was toiling (and somewhat floundering) in an effort … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 50 Albums of 2001, 30 and 29
I had a fairly busy week with Spectrum Culture. Because of the shifting vagaries of release schedules, I wound up with the rare instance of two new film reviews in one week. First off was my take on a gloomy extra-natural drama about a musician who starts hearing a low tone that no one else can, and the ways in which it drives him crazy (thanks in no small part to a conspiracy-minded brother-in-law). This is the sort of film I always feel a little bad beating up on. It’s so clearly a labor of love for the chief creators … Continue reading Spectrum Check
One thing I learned fairly early on in my college radio career is that there’s ultimately too much new music coming out to keep up with it all on your own. That was the case in the late eighties and early nineties, before the grunge-led boom in “alternative music” occurred in rough symmetry with greater affordability for more DIY-inclined bands to produce and distribute their own material. When I later started my second, slightly different life on the left end of the dial, the number of new CDs that flooded into the station each and every week, often from largely … Continue reading One for Friday: Figurine, “Let’s Make Our Love Song”
A few months ago, Ryan McGee wrote a piece for The A.V. Club positing that the Sopranos ultimately damaged the field of television by completely reconfiguring the relationship between individual episodes and the overall story of an entire season or … Continue reading That Championship Season: The Sopranos, Season One
Tron: Legacy (Joseph Kosinski, 2010). “You’re messing with my Zen thing, man!” Is there another actor working today besides Jeff Bridges who could deliver a line like that and make it sound plausible? In the never-ending quest to mine every cinematic artifact from the past three to four decades and turn it into a sparkling new franchise, Disney delivers the sequel, almost three decades in the making, that almost no one waited anxiously to see. What’s more, someone apparently decided that the best way to honor the zippy innocence of the original digital groundbreaker was to heap a whole bunch … Continue reading Kosinski, McQueen, Melville, Reichardt, Young
#31 — Grey Gardens (Ellen Hovde, Albert Maysles, David Maysles and Muffie Meyer, 1975) There are some things in this warped, wild, mixed-up world that outpace even the most fantastic and fanciful of imaginations. Upon discovering such a thing, perhaps … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 70s — Number Thirty-One
When the magnificent maestros of Marvel Comics were at the top of their game and still trying harder, the only thing they did better than spin scintillating stories was crow about their cornucopia of comics with crazy, colossal claims of … Continue reading Mighty Marvel Checklist HyperboleCheck: The Amazing Spider-Man #100
32. Death By Chocolate, Death By Chocolate Becoming reacquainted with the popular peaks of college radio in 2001 meant learning a lot of new terms. Sadcore? Yeah, that was a real thing. With some dismay, I came to terms with … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 50 Albums of 2001, 32 and 31
While I’m falling a little behind in my music reviews, I still had two new film pieces go up at Spectrum Culture this past week. First there was a review of a new documentary that uses one man’s personal experience, documented with a series of video cameras, to illuminate the ongoing challenges of the conflict between Israel and Palestine. While its homemade origins instill some humility into the film, it was also fairly complex and required a certain amount of deftness to detail its strengths and weaknesses. It was a nice challenge to write the review. I also wrote on … Continue reading Spectrum Check
Coffee for Two 