From the Archive: A River Runs Through It
This review comes from The Pointer, the student newspaper at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. While hardly an epic, I’m a little surprised at the length of this piece. Certainly I was trying to make the case for a film I though was excellent and all too likely to be ignored by my fellow twentysomethings, but it still looks to me like it would have wound up being an awful lot of column inches devoted to my opinions. I remember endlessly championing cinematographer Philippe Rousselot by name when Oscar season came around, but I clearly hadn’t gotten his French moniker … Continue reading From the Archive: A River Runs Through It
One for Friday: Aretha Franklin, “A Rose is Still a Rose”
I suppose by now Lauryn Hill’s status in the exalted realm of pop stardom has been reduced to the almost entirely negligible, at kindest a cautionary tale and at meanest a punchline. Back in the mid- to late-nineteen-nineties, though, she was widely considered to be the next great music artist, the one destined to crank out classic after classic following her beloved solo debut, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. She was treated as some sort of creative revolutionary, reclaiming the nearly lost sounds of old school soul and delivering a finished product with a powerful replacement engine, assembled from the … Continue reading One for Friday: Aretha Franklin, “A Rose is Still a Rose”
Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Thirty-Seven
#37 — Wild Strawberries (Ingmar Bergman, 1957) Ingmar Bergman wasn’t yet forty years old when he directed Wild Strawberries. He’d be toiling at the hard art of making movies for about twenty years at this point, but surely that professional … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Thirty-Seven
Black, Buck and Lee, Emmerich, Frankel, Wells
Frozen (Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee, 2013). The most successful animated feature in the traditional Disney mold (fairy tale structure, a bevy of Broadway-esque songs) since the studio’s nineteen-nineties heyday, Frozen is charming enough if a little flat. Like a lot of modern Disney fables, it’s more interesting for the ways it compulsively upends the legacy tropes–the “true love” with a man, the oversimplified villainy–than for the actual merits of what winds up onscreen freed from meta examinations. The songbook provided by Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez may have launched a thousand (or more) YouTube videos on the strength of … Continue reading Black, Buck and Lee, Emmerich, Frankel, Wells
Use your mentality, wake up to reality
My first instinct upon seeing Under the Skin, the latest from director Jonathan Glazer, was that I’d never seen another movie like it, not really. But then my mind filled up with comparisons, in part, no doubt, in a probably … Continue reading Use your mentality, wake up to reality
Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Thirty-Eight
#38 — Pat and Mike (George Cukor, 1952) Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. That, of course, is the pairing, the classic onscreen team that effectively defined the wonder of ever elusive cinematic chemistry, even for those who’ve not seen one of … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Thirty-Eight
College Countdown, The First CMJ Album Chart, 16
16. Styx, Pieces of Eight It’s the nineteen-seventies, and Styx’s Pieces of Eight is a concept album, so it’s absolutely got to have some weighty philosophical concerns pressed into its grooves. In this instance, the album was preoccupied by the … Continue reading College Countdown, The First CMJ Album Chart, 16
From the Archive: Last Action Hero
Besides the weekly radio show, my cohort and I occasionally experimented with slightly different ways to deliver reviews over the air, especially after I graduated and holding down a hourlong block that would be better devoted to students seemed wrong to me. Hence the creation of “Reel Thing Reports,” a prerecorded segment lasting only a few minutes that was dropped in a couple times per day. It kept our reviews on the air, but the lack of interplay between the two of us made for a less satisfying chunk of programming. It also keyed me to in to how much … Continue reading From the Archive: Last Action Hero
One for Friday: Material Issue, “What If I Killed Your Boyfriend?”
I spent this past weekend being continually reminded of my age, in ways that were both good and knee-weakening. Among many other indicators, there was the presence of songs that were once as contemporary as can be to me (and still maintain that freshness, at least in my head, heart, and soul) that have been transformed by the relentless shedding of calendar pages into bonafide oldies. Then there were the moments when a certain song could stir other thoughts that, when they reached their logical endpoints, were a little devastating. For example, the appearance of a Material Issue song certainly … Continue reading One for Friday: Material Issue, “What If I Killed Your Boyfriend?”
Time, time, time, see what’s become of me
Face front, True Believers. Who can doubt that this is indeed the Marvel Age of Movies? The comic book publisher that effectively launched their long climb to multi-media dominance over fifty years ago with the release of Fantastic Four #1 … Continue reading Time, time, time, see what’s become of me
