Before Sucker Punch, writer-director Zack Snyder was always tethered, at least somewhat, to someone else’s vision. This isn’t uncommon in modern Hollywood, where children’s games are the unlikely fodder for wannabe blockbusters, nor is it necessarily problematic. So I don’t … Continue reading The Unwatchables: Sucker Punch
4. “Breakfast in Bed” by UB40 I’m going to try and untangle just what was going on with UB40 on the Billboard charts in the fall of 1988. On the Hot 100 chart, the band was rapidly climbing with a new version of Neil Diamond’s “Red, Red Wine,” which would eventually reach #1 (preceded and followed at the top of the chart by absolute junk). It’s probably more accurate to describe the gently loping, Brit boy reggae of the UB40 take as a cover of Tony Tribe’s 1969 go-round with the song. Diamond reportedly didn’t especially care for the good … Continue reading College Countdown: First Billboard Top 20 Modern Rock Tracks, Fall 1988, 4 and 3
Luckily enough, I had a very light week at Spectrum Culture just when I needed a break. I’d like to say I orchestrated that, but that’s plainly not the case. The only thing I reviewed was the new film from the director of Maria Full of Grace, which was surprisingly left behind in the first go-around in our selection process. Were I smarter or at least less of a procrastinator, I would have take the comfortable schedule to actually work ahead on a couple of the pending record reviews I have. Of course I didn’t, so I suddenly have a … Continue reading Spectrum Check
It’s interesting the way that certain performers hold onto their fame forever, even after death, and how some completely fade away, even if their music survives. Dying young has made so many rock ‘n’ roll stars into permanent icons–Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain–and yet there are those who rarely get a mention, the untimely ends somehow escaping romanticized sadness. Michael Hutchence of INXS was only thirty-seven when he died, just a few years after becoming a full-fledged sex symbol when his band’s album Kick turned into a huge blockbuster. What’s more, his death was ruled a suicide, … Continue reading One for Friday: Max Q, “Way of the World”
#44 — Scarecrow (Jerry Schatzberg, 1973) I’m hardly the only person who tends to point to the cinema of the nineteen-seventies as a blessed peak of the art form (conveniently ignoring that for every wonderfully aspirational effort there were plenty … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 70s — Number Forty-Four
New York Stories (Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and Woody Allen, 1989). I remember reading Roger Ebert’s review of this anthology film and thinking he cheated by giving individual star ratings to each of its three segments. After all, no one going to movie theater had the option of just paying for a third of a ticket to see the one part of the film he recommended. Now that I’ve seen it, however, I completely get why he chose to take that approach: one part of the film is significantly better than the others. Woody Allen’s segment is amusing but … Continue reading Allen, Coppola, Cukor, Gunn, Mills, Scorsese, Winterbottom
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 Hollies were a band that formed in Manchester in the early nineteen-sixties. While they had success in their home country almost right away, scoring a Top 40 hit on the U.K. charts with their very first single in 1963, it took them a while to fully capitalize on the Beatles-led British Invasion in the United States. They had some modest chart attention … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “Jennifer Eccles”
“Nineteen seventy-three. In the public imagination it was as fraught a year as you could name: Watergate, Roe v. Wade, withdrawal from Vietnam. Gravity’s Rainbow. Was it also the year that Prufrockian paralysis went mainstream–the year it entered baseball? It made sense that a psychic condition sensed by the artists of one generation–the Modernists of the First World War–would take a while to reveal itself throughout the population. And if that psychic condition happened to be a profound failure of confidence in the significance of individual human action, then the condition became an epidemic when it entered the realm of … Continue reading Great Moments in Literature
6. “Intoxication” by Shriekback Dave Allen was the bassist for Gang of Four, a band that fully understood the value of a killer rhythm section. He left the band after the release of their sophomore effort, Solid Gold, and formed Shriekback with Barry Andrews, who was previously the fourth member of XTC. By the time 1988 rolled around, Allen had given up on the group and departed. In the absence of his former compatriot’s fierce, propulsive basslines, Andrews apparently decided to accelerate the band’s gradual evolution to a commercially polished, club-friendly outfit. Nothing like KC and the Sunshine Band cover, … Continue reading College Countdown: First Billboard Top 20 Modern Rock Tracks, Fall 1988, 6 and 5
This week at Spectrum Culture, I opted to review the new film from director Jill Sprecher, who previously created the very good comedy Clockwatchers and the sadly mediocre 13 Conversations About One Thing. It’s been a long time since that prior feature, so I had perhaps had reason to be leery. But then the movie poster calls attention to the fact that it takes place in Kenosha, Wisconsin. I couldn’t turn that down, right? It was good, but there’s some internet scuttlebutt that it may have been even better in the original cut that debuted at Sundance a year ago. … Continue reading Spectrum Check
