Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Ten
#10 — Ball of Fire (Howard Hawks, 1941) Back when I was writing and editing for Spectrum Culture, I had a few little victories that I treasured whenever I was a participant in building one of our semi-regular lists. None of these was more satisfying than leading the campaign to anoint Barbara Stanwyck’s turn as Sugarpuss O’Shea as the Best Comedic Performance of 1941. Despite my booming pride, I don’t think it was all that tough of a fight. Arguably, Stanwyck’s stiffest competition came from her other justly loved comedic acting turns from the same year: as Ann Mitchell in Meet … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Ten
Top 40 Smash Taps: “The Resurrection Shuffle”
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. Tony Ashton and Ron Dyke have the distinction of playing on the first solo album by a Beatle. Before the seminal band had officially broken up — or even finished releasing new music — George Harrison released the album Wonderwall Music, which was also notable as the first product from the Apple record label. The same year that record came out, the twosome … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “The Resurrection Shuffle”
My Misspent Youth: Fray by Joss Whedon and Karl Moline
I read a lot of comic books as a kid. This series of posts is about the comics I read, and, occasionally, the comics that I should have read. I’ll begin with the occasionally necessary caveat that I can sometimes abuse the term “youth” in this space. I was hardly a kid when Joss Whedon made his first venture into writing comic books, a form for which he clearly had plenty of affection. Indeed, it was my relative decrepitude that originally steered me clear of Whedon’s superlative television series Buffy the Vampire, believing that surely I, a distinguished fellow in … Continue reading My Misspent Youth: Fray by Joss Whedon and Karl Moline
College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1995, 3
3. Foo Fighters, Foo Fighters At the time, it seemed highly improbable that Foo Fighters was the thumping drumbeat announcement of one of the more enduring rock bands to emerge in the nineteen-nineties. In the aftermath of Kurt Cobain’s suicide, … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1995, 3
From the Archive: Shine a Light
I’m still unpacking from a move that added a lot of miles to my odometer, so I’m going to once again pilfer a review from my former online home for our weekly look backwards. When this review was first posted, … Continue reading From the Archive: Shine a Light
One for Friday: Todd Rundgren, “The Want of a Nail”
When I got to my college radio station, in the late nineteen-eighties, I was anxious to start discovering artists who were entirely new to me. But I also appreciated the safety of those artists I’d heard repeated on the radio over and over again, even if it was with only one or two songs. Even more than that, I was somewhat proud that college radio could serve as a safe landing space for gifted performers who’d taken a spin with commercial success but were ultimately deemed too iconoclastic to become recurring residents on those parts of the dials. It matched … Continue reading One for Friday: Todd Rundgren, “The Want of a Nail”
Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Eleven
#11 — Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica, 1948) So much of the cinema of the nineteen-forties needs to be approached with the contextualizing recollection that the active engagements of World War II consumed around half of the decade-long span. It’s useful when considering the very different weight that war films must have carried — especially given how reticent filmmakers have been to build fictions that run in chronological proximity to contemporary wars in more recent decades — but it adds shading to so many films outside of that genre, even — or especially — tough-minded dramas that emerged in the aftermath of … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Eleven
We don’t know the meaning of fear, we play every minute by ear
Amazingly for a director who used to routinely face a barrage of critical darts for a supposed inability to progress past the childish stuff of frothy fantasy, Steven Spielberg has become one of the most dependable cinematic chroniclers of the planet’s tumultuous history. Across the last decade, with the odd exceptions of a misguided Indiana Jones sequel and a diversion into computer animation, Spielberg has been filming in the past. That’s not an entirely newfound preoccupation, of course. Even before Munich, which I’m using as the dividing line ahead of this era of Spileberg’s filmmaking, Spielberg kept cycling back to historical … Continue reading We don’t know the meaning of fear, we play every minute by ear
Oh, now I don’t hardly know her
Guillermo del Toro takes a clear, unbridled pleasure in sharing the wildest worlds of his imagination. Like Wes Anderson — and this is probably the sole cinematic instinct the two directors have in common — del Toro loves to spread his favorite playthings all over the screen. While Anderson presents them meticulously arranged, under glass, and with an implicit instruction that they must not be touched or moved even a millimeter, del Toro upends the toy box and romps delightedly as the colorful contraptions come raining down. It’s not that he has no control. The film that remains his finest proves decisively … Continue reading Oh, now I don’t hardly know her
Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Twelve
#12 — The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942) Orson Welles was happy to cultivate legend. The towering wunderkind brought an overwhelming panache to absolutely everything he did, but he was rarely more at comfortable home than when engaging in something that burnished his own monumental reputation, either as genius, a showman, or, increasingly as his career progressed, a semi-tragic figure discarded by the very entertainment establishment that could have most benefited from his distinctive brilliance. Just one look at Welles facing the press in the aftermath of the infamous “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast, playing every variant of chastened … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Twelve
Coffee for Two 