#14 — Mean Streets (Martin Scorsese, 1973) I have a strong awareness that retroactively visiting certain films creates an entirely different impact than, say, connecting with them chronologically, especially as they’re released. For example, I’d seen a lot of films … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 70s — Number Fourteen
Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master has the look, feel and tone of a masterpiece. It has a distinct anti-narrative structure that allows even the moments that falter to feel organically right, refutations of the supposed need for everything in a … Continue reading I want your picture but not your words, you know they want it, but there’s no verse
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. Exile was a band that formed in Kentucky in the nineteen-sixties. They were a group of high schoolers that got together to play and, in true Wonders style, were picked up by the Dick Clark Caravan of Stars tour to barnstorm around their home state and then nationwide. Success didn’t immediately follow, however, and it was the endurance of the band, as much … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “You Thrill Me”
This week at Spectrum Culture, the significant mound of assignments I’ve picked up lately started to catch up with me (though not at the level of the next crazy few days). It was one of those rare weeks when I had two new film reviews up. As it turns out, both were documentaries and both were at least somewhat disappointing. First, I offered an assessment of the new film from Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg. I selected it because I figured its subject matter–baseball knuckleballers–made me a little more qualified to review it than many of my cohorts at the … Continue reading Spectrum Check
#15 — Badlands (Terrence Malick, 1973) Terrence Malick has so solidly secured his place in cinema as the agonizingly meticulous crafter of exquisitely poetic, emotionally abstracted films–with perhaps the decisive argument in favor of that judgment offered by the utterly brilliant Tree of Life–that it obscures the earthy urgency of his earliest efforts. Yes, Malick has a preternatural ability to realize beautiful imagery, just as Steven Spielberg had an uncanny knack for the mechanics of narrative storytelling from the very beginning, but there was also a deep ferocity to his storytelling in his first couple of films, an ability to … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 70s — Number Fifteen
It was a fairly straightforward week for me at Spectrum Culture. I reviewed a film called Breathing, which is the directorial debut of a fairly significant Austrian actor (although not one who’s significant enough for his film to stir much more than a blip of curiosity over on this side of the planet). On the music side, I reviewed the second full-length album from the Australian band Van She. This was one of my periodic attempts to select a release for review that’s somewhat outside of my typical realm, which actually stymied me just enough that I turned it in … Continue reading Spectrum Check
#16 — The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) One of the risks in indulging in this ongoing exercise in counting backwards is that all my various cineaste heresies will eventually be revealed. Certainly filmmakers will be underrepresented and specific titles that have earned consensus admiration among learned film viewers (or at least the cool kids among them) will be utterly absent. I think I ultimately have fairly conventional, time-tested tastes when it comes to my tallies, which makes the aberrations stand out all the more. Tracking through the seventies, for example, illustrates that I’m completely out of step with the … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 70s — Number Sixteen
Flow: For Love of Water (Irena Salina, 2008). Because there are few things we enjoy in our house than watching documentaries that offer an assessment, in painful detail, of how humanity is engaged in self-inflicted extinction through carelessly destructive exploitation of one of the most necessary substances for human existence. It make for a fun night of movie-watching. Real popcorn fare. Irene Salina’s film is compelling and suitably frightening, although it occasionally tangles itself up because there’s simply so much ground to cover. As admirably as it presents the scope of the problem, there are definitely times when it seems … Continue reading Donen and Kelly, Frankenheimer, Salina, Skolimowski, Téchiné
I had a busy week at Spectrum Culture, in large part because it was my turn to contribute to the Revisit series on the music side. While my previous efforts were focused on different releases that did require me to give them fresh spins to reacquaint myself with their pleasures (and think about them in a context that now included significantly more hindsight), this time I decided to write about an album that I know extremely well. I’m also quite happy that my observations about the overly self-assured dismissive attitudes about differing opinions among the fans of the band in … Continue reading Spectrum Check
#17 — The Last Detail (Hal Ashby, 1973) When I first watched The Last Detail, some fifteen years ago, it was the first time that the reverential opinion usually afforded nineteen-seventies American cinema really began to fully make sense to … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 70s — Number Seventeen
Coffee for Two 