I believe fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer think of the show in terms of seasons. That’s in large part because show creator and chief creative force Joss Whedon did the same. The show began with a little bit of … Continue reading That Championship Season: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season Five
The band Thirteen-One-Eleven, the brief side project of R.E.M. drummer Bill Berry in the early nineteen-nineties, released exactly one 12-inch single. The a-side of that record was a song entitled, “My Bible is the Latest TV Guide.” That’s a fairly … Continue reading That Championship Season: An Introduction
#21 — The Verdict (Sidney Lumet, 1982) Sidney Lumet directed his first feature film in 1957 and his last one in 2007. Both those efforts were sensationally good, and Lumet had enough similarly marvelous efforts during the half-century between the … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 80s — Number Twenty-One
10. The Pogues, Peace and Love There’s a picture of the Pogues on the back cover of the soundtrack to the 1987 Alex Cox movie Straight to Hell. In the photo, the members of the band are dressed in bandito garb and lead singer Shane MacGowan sits right in the middle, with a pistol pressed against his temple as if he’s about to pull the trigger and kill himself. My friend Colin, an aficionado of all things Pogue, once remarked that the picture would be far more accurate if MacGowan were holding a whiskey bottle to his skull, since that … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1989, 10
This week, I did my duty on the film side of the site, reviewing a new French thriller, which largely served as a reminder that same curve of quality applies across all facets of film. There are just as many drab, by-the-numbers movies available for the art houses as there are in the multiplexes. I also wrote about the latest Lykke Li album for a feature on the best music of the year so far. If pressed, I’d probably still designate the latest PJ Harvey record as the best of the year, but I’ve already written about that one for … Continue reading Spectrum Check
I have an instinctive aversion to band reunions, a trait that has manifested in all sorts of snippy little comments in this space. I have no good reason to feel this way, although I suspect it comes from essentially being part of the second generation to grow up with rock ‘n’ roll and therefore associated most bands from the distant past as relics who did little more than play the burgeoning casino circuit, often with a line-up of session musicians recruited to fill in for deceased or disinterested band members. I remember reading a Rolling Stone cover story about George … Continue reading One for Friday: The Velvet Underground, “I Heard Her Call My Name” (live)
Nim was the name given to a chimpanzee who was born in an Oklahoma research facility in late 1973. At the behest of a Columbia University professor named Herb Terrace, Nim was removed from his mother’s care at the earliest … Continue reading Standing in the concrete cave, swaying sad and insane
#22 — Say Anything… (Cameron Crowe, 1989) As I acknowledged at the beginning of this particular countdown project, the peculiarly personal tug I have for some of the films from this ten-year span had a significant impact when I sat … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 80s — Number Twenty-Two
So good. There more where that came from. Continue reading Gone Madonna of the swans, she waves a magic wand and then she settles on me
Two for the Road (Stanley Donen, 1967). This comic drama about the evolution of a marriage, with particular focus on the sharp degradation it experiences, is playful with its chronology in a way that must have been completely novel at the time of the film’s release. Now, it’s a more familiar cinematic approach, which doesn’t make Two for the Road terribly ineffective, though it does undercut some of the sillier moments that were presumably inserted to make the film easier to grasp a hold of for perplexed audiences. Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney are both terrific as they play the … Continue reading Bernhardt, Bicquet, Donen, Huston, Pakula
