It’s be hard to find another film as awash in enthusiasm for its subject as The Muppets. Written by Jason Segel and Nicholas Stoller, who directed Segel’s previously produced screenplay Forgetting Sarah Marshall, the movie is really just Segel’s extended … Continue reading Footloose and fancy-free, getting there is half the fun, come share it with me
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. According to most accounts of Motown Records, Mary Wells was the label’s first big star, the one who set the benchmark for “The Sound of Young America.” A talent contest regular from the tender age of ten in her hometown of Detroit, Wells approached Berry Gordy, then the head of Tamla Records, a label that had a string of major successes. Wells wanted … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “Your Old Standby”
Though I’ve had plenty of time to get used to it, I still find it very odd to think of the director Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas and The Departed presiding over a movie largely targeted at children, or at … Continue reading Hugo’s not afraid to cry, Hugo is an okay guy
5. Squeeze, East Side Story Trouser Press wrote: “Craftsmanship needn’t be dull. Someday their songs will get the recognition they deserve; don’t wait.” Well, Trouser Press was sure correct about that “someday” part of the review. Though the album was … Continue reading College Countdown: The Trouser Press Top Ten Albums of 1981, 5
Due to the Thanksgiving holiday, Spectrum Culture followed a shorter publishing week. While I’ve got a couple fairly significant things looming for the week ahead, my only contribution to the site last week was a couple essays for our PLAYLIST feature on R.E.M. The premise is fairly simple: the various music writers go through all of a band’s albums and select the best single track from each release, duking it out electronically until we come to a reasonable consensus. Logically, the songs I was assigned to write about were among those those for which my first pick represented the song … Continue reading Spectrum Check
As long as I went ahead and gave a shout-out to Thanksgiving in yesterday’s post, I may as well concede my digital space to the sorry fact that today is the busiest shopping day of the year. I’m certainly not going to participate by doing something a hellishly masochistic as going to the mall. Toni Basil was a choreographer with credits that included Head and American Graffiti and an actress who, among others things, was sitting across the booth from Jack Nicholson when he delivered one of his most famous lines. She released her debut album, Word of Mouth, in … Continue reading One for Friday: Toni Basil, “Shoppin’ From A to Z”
As Ron Swanson would surely tell you, don’t be afraid to wrap your turkey legs in bacon today. Happy Thanksgiving! Continue reading I owe my soul to each fork in the road, each misleading sign
Night Moves (Arthur Penn, 1975). Gene Hackman plays a seedy private detective named Harry Moseby who gets drawn into a case that involves tracking down a missing teenage girl, played by Melanie Griffith in one of her first real film roles. The film is entirely of its era, in good and bad ways. It’s nicely gritty and dark, but it also gets completely mired in a sense of existential dread until it become subsumed by its own fatalism. Nothing good can even come of this world, which the film labors to proves across its overly calculated third act. The film … Continue reading Ficarra and Requa, Friedkin, Gillespie, Penn, Rafelson
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
