The worst thing to emerge from the success of the 2009 movie The Hangover is the misconception that Todd Phillips makes good movies. Before that, the matter seemed to be fully settled, the opposite conclusion largely agreed upon across the … Continue reading The Unwatchables: Due Date
#15 — Melvin and Howard (Jonathan Demme, 1980) Part of the appeal of subscribing to auteur theory is the sense of extra connectedness to the directors with the strongest cinematic presence. It’s easy to feel like watching a film is akin to getting concerted insight into worldviews, spiritual philosophies and political preferences. The collected work becomes a backward version of a Rorschach test, with very specific material being transformed by the viewer into something nebulous enough to project suppositions onto. While I realize the inherent fallibility of such a view, I also can’t help but fall for it when it … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 80s — Number Fifteen
4. Lou Reed, New York Lou Reed’s New York has the following instructive message amongst the liner notes: “This album was recorded and mixed at Media Sound, Studio B, N.Y.C., in essentially the order you have here. It’s meant to … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1989, 4
Ah, here’s Spectrum Check, back at it’s regularly scheduled time. So the first piece I had go up this week happened as a direct result of the intervention of my friend, a fabulous babe who a generation of Madison music fans know as Casino Queen. Somewhere around the midpoint of my ongoing countdown of the best films of the nineteen-eighties, she emailed me with the gentle but firm assertion that our friendship might be in jeopardy if the 1981 cinematic extravaganza The Great Muppet Caper wasn’t included somewhere on the list. I sheepishly informed her that it indeed would not … Continue reading Spectrum Check
I have a somewhat idiosyncratic opinion about the peak of Liz Phair’s music career. I’m fairly certain the consensus remains locked into amber that Phair’s very best album is her attention-getting debut, Exile in Guyville, which famously topped the influential Village Voice year-end music poll when it was originally released. I like that record fine, but I felt it got a disproportionate amount of attention just because of the raw language Phair used freely across the songs, a facet of the record she later admitted was a blatant tactic to to stir up attention. I knew plenty of women who … Continue reading One for Friday: Liz Phair, “What Makes You Happy”
Sheesh. I just realized that this didn’t post on Saturday as I intended. I’m inclined to pile this into this weekend’s Spectrum post, but I’ve actually got a lot of background to add to the things I wrote this week. On top of that all, I don’t think I’m going to have time to finish my intended post for today, so…that’s that. Here a bonus, delayed midweek Spectrum Check. There was a stretch in the early-nineties when it felt like crossover foreign cinema–to the degree that foreign cinema ever truly crossed over to broader audiences–was defined by crusty old-timers bonding … Continue reading Spectrum Check
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 line-up of the terrifically successful band the Archies was as follows: Archie Andrews on lead vocals and guitar, Reggie Mantle on rhythm guitar, Jughead Jones on drums, Betty Cooper on tambourine and Veronica Lodge on keyboards. Except, of course, it wasn’t. Transferring the popular comic book teenagers that debuted in the pages of a standard superhero anthology series a quarter-century earlier to … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “Who’s Your Baby?”
#16 — The Last Emperor (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1987) The Last Emperor almost certainly won the Best Picture Oscar because of its bigness. Its impressive scope, in terms of individual scenes bustling with extras and spectacular feats of art direction as … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 80s — Number Sixteen
One of the things I find most entertaining about Steven Soderbergh’s directorial career is the way so many of his films seem like they had their genesis as some sort of bar bet. “Bet you can’t make a big, glossy, … Continue reading A different disease in another translation, though you don’t understand the familiar sensation
5. XTC, Oranges & Lemons Perhaps befitting a band that had a colossally strong affection for the era of the Beatles built on densely layered psychedlia, XTC played their last tour date in the spring of 1982. While the Fab … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1989, 5
