#50 — The In-Laws (Arthur Hiller, 1979) In half-watching a recent horror film the other night, I got into a discussion about the ways the story in question ticked off a multitude of basic, commonly shared fears. That’s what good … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 70s — Number Fifty
And thus our recurring exercise in nostalgic evaluation takes a turn into especially tricky territory. In tracking through my picks for the best films of the the first ten years of the 2000s, then the nineteen-nineties and the nineteen-eighties, I was always considering time frames with which I had at least some level of personal connection concurrent with their actual occurrence. Sure, I was awfully young when the eighties began, but those were hugely formative years as I matured with the movies, for good or ill, as one of my primary influences. If I’d conceived of a top fifty in … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 70s — An Introduction
It’s always a unique disappointment to see an excellent performance shellacked into the misery of a bad movie. In the new film My Week with Marilyn, Michelle Williams is consistently sensational as Marilyn Monroe. She’s charged with not only playing … Continue reading So far from the ordinary things I once knew while I wait for the chance to tell you what is true
One of the many household goals during the holiday season involved clearly material off of our heavily burdened DVR, a task with which, I must admit, we only had limited success (we seriously have about twenty hours of Boardwalk Empire … Continue reading Bad Movie Night — Predators/Season of the Witch
By the fall of 1988, the influence of college radio was at an early peak, which meant that the music that had stirred its rebellious, off-the-beaten-track spirit was in the process of being finally and fully co-opted. MTV’s Sunday night excursion into left of the dial fare, 120 Minutes, was popular enough to produce a nightly spin-off called PostModern MTV and major labels were scouring playlists of humble, student-run broadcasters in the hopes of discovering the next U2 or R.E.M., a band that had breakout potential. In September, the ultimate marker of the accepted institutionalization of the sound was printed … Continue reading College Countdown: First Billboard Top 20 Modern Rock Tracks, Fall 1988, An Introduction
While my predilection for movie-related lists is all over this corner of the Interweb, it’s been a long, long time since I’ve tried to craft a ranking of the best albums of any given year. Part of the reason is that I think those sorts of music preferences are a little more slippery, with opinions subject to change as albums age. Songs that sounded fresh and amazing become tired, even hackneyed and annoying as repeated plays mercilessly erode their charm. The reverse is equally true, as there have been plenty of albums that I initially dismissed, only to have them … Continue reading Top Ten Albums of 2011
I wish I could claim to be one of those kids who was wisely immersing myself in the jagged, angsty splendor of the likes of Joy Division and Jesus and Mary Chain. I wasn’t, though. Most of my record collection was taken up by the same touchstones of regrettable pop conformity that were on a lot of teenage bedroom shelves in the mid-eighties, or so the sales figures and MTV airplay assured me. These records were so resoundingly mediocre that I can’t even impose a retroactive, post-ironic coolness on them. I had the capacity for a more sophisticated musical palette, … Continue reading One for Friday: Stealin’ Horses, “Turnaround”
Throughout his lengthy career, Steven Spielberg has consistently been dogged by criticism that his films are overly manipulative, as if appealing to the audience’s emotions wasn’t a wholly relevant goal in making a movie. Considering he’s almost certainly the most … Continue reading Shiver and say the words of every lie you’ve heard
#1 — Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese, 1980) By his own account, Martin Scorsese thought Raging Bull could be his final film. His previous fiction feature, 1977’s New York, New York, was widely considered a disaster. A costly “film noir musical,” as … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 80s — Number One
Though I’m far less enamored with the bulk of his filmography than most, I completely understand the logic in choosing David Fincher to preside over the American studio film adaption of Stieg Larsson’s stunningly successful novel The Girl with the … Continue reading She has eyes that men adore so, and a torso, even more so
