Earlier this year, New York magazine came up with something they called “The Showrunner Transcripts.” They sought out the driving creative forces behind over a dozen critically-adored current series and interviewed them about their influences, favorites and approaches to creating … Continue reading That Championship Season: Cheers, Season Five
#6 — Broadcast News (James L. Brooks, 1987) By the time I was in a college film class in the early nineties, the textbook was already citing the James L. Brooks screenplay for Broadcast News as a ideal example of how writing for film should work. Specifically, the author spent several pages marveling over the efficiency of Brooks’s dialogue in developing character. That’s for good reason: scene after scene, the conversations that happen between characters are natural, funny and engaging, but always have a deeper purpose. Brooks doesn’t build foreshadowing puzzles into the dialogue nor rigidly constructed plot point delivery. … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 80s — Number Six
6. Holly and the Italians, The Right to Be Italian Trouser Press wrote: “More polished than the Go-Go’s, but just as breezy and tuneful. (Subscribers: Play flexi-disc for details.)” The album The Right to Be Italian opens with lead singer … Continue reading College Countdown: The Trouser Press, Top Ten Albums of 1981, 6
With my countdown of nineteen-eighties films approaching the end, I’ve been trying to both watch and rewatch important movies from the prior decade in preparation for the next naturally step backwards in my tops of the decade project. As for the latter endeavor, there are simply some movies that I haven’t seen in approaching thirty years (and perhaps never saw properly, given that my exposure to them was dictated by the way I watched the material on cable, not always the most ideal manner to take them in) and in order to figure out their placement on the pending list, … Continue reading Spectrum Check
While the deep denizens of the Internet have been shockingly good about documenting pop culture topics like movies and music with great thoroughness, there’s still all sorts of things that they miss. One of the fascinating things to me about our current information age is the way that absolutely everything that’s happening now will leave a digital footprint, but there were be more than a few phantoms from the days before the nineteen-nineties. As far as I can tell, there’s no entry at the impressively exhaustive allmusic website for the band The Spliffs, and there’s certainly no Wikipedia page for … Continue reading One for Friday: The Spliffs, “You Know What They’ll Say”
#7 — The Big Chill (Lawrence Kasdan, 1983) All through this process, I’ve deliberately avoided treating the countdown too much like a countdown. What I mean by that is that I didn’t want to go too hung up on where … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 80s — Number Seven
Can anyone doubt that the early nineteen-seventies was truly the Mighty Age of Marvel Comics? The publisher surely didn’t, taking every opening as an opportunity to feed the faithful with profound praise for the titanic tales and colorful clashes wonderfully … Continue reading Mighty Marvel Checklist HyperboleCheck: Fantastic Four #132
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. By the time “Come See” was release in 1965, Major Lance had already notched five prior Top 40 songs, the biggest of which was probably “Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um,” which had climbed all the way to #5 (and topped the R&B charts) the previous year. He was considered one of the major figures of Chicago soul and was one of the … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “Come See”
Carnal Knowledge (Mike Nichols, 1971). Working from a script by by the great cartoonist Jules Feiffer, Mike Nichols explores the fraught, shifting dynamics of sexual relationship by following a few characters over the course of several years, putting special focus on a randy, rambunctious, sharp-edged man played by Jack Nicholson. The movie may have been most noted for it’s frankness about sexual matters, still remarkable for the time, but it remains engaging because of an even bolder willingness to plumb the emotional rigors of the various characters. Nicholson is especially strong, shrewdly carrying his character from an impetuous, greedy youth … Continue reading Epstein, Greno and Howard, Nichols, Penn, Rush
7. The Pretenders, II Trouser Press wrote: “Derivative? Sure! But Chrissie Hynde can still charm your pants off (sic) when she wants.” Let me start by noting that I don’t get that review. It’s not that I substantively disagree with … Continue reading College Countdown: The Trouser Press Top 10 Albums of 1981, 7
Coffee for Two 