I owe my soul to each fork in the road, each misleading sign
As Ron Swanson would surely tell you, don’t be afraid to wrap your turkey legs in bacon today. Happy Thanksgiving! Continue reading I owe my soul to each fork in the road, each misleading sign
Ficarra and Requa, Friedkin, Gillespie, Penn, Rafelson
Night Moves (Arthur Penn, 1975). Gene Hackman plays a seedy private detective named Harry Moseby who gets drawn into a case that involves tracking down a missing teenage girl, played by Melanie Griffith in one of her first real film roles. The film is entirely of its era, in good and bad ways. It’s nicely gritty and dark, but it also gets completely mired in a sense of existential dread until it become subsumed by its own fatalism. Nothing good can even come of this world, which the film labors to proves across its overly calculated third act. The film … Continue reading Ficarra and Requa, Friedkin, Gillespie, Penn, Rafelson
That Championship Season: Cheers, Season Five
Earlier this year, New York magazine came up with something they called “The Showrunner Transcripts.” They sought out the driving creative forces behind over a dozen critically-adored current series and interviewed them about their influences, favorites and approaches to creating … Continue reading That Championship Season: Cheers, Season Five
Top Fifty Films of the 80s — Number Six
#6 — Broadcast News (James L. Brooks, 1987) By the time I was in a college film class in the early nineties, the textbook was already citing the James L. Brooks screenplay for Broadcast News as a ideal example of how writing for film should work. Specifically, the author spent several pages marveling over the efficiency of Brooks’s dialogue in developing character. That’s for good reason: scene after scene, the conversations that happen between characters are natural, funny and engaging, but always have a deeper purpose. Brooks doesn’t build foreshadowing puzzles into the dialogue nor rigidly constructed plot point delivery. … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 80s — Number Six
College Countdown: The Trouser Press, Top Ten Albums of 1981, 6
6. Holly and the Italians, The Right to Be Italian Trouser Press wrote: “More polished than the Go-Go’s, but just as breezy and tuneful. (Subscribers: Play flexi-disc for details.)” The album The Right to Be Italian opens with lead singer … Continue reading College Countdown: The Trouser Press, Top Ten Albums of 1981, 6
Spectrum Check
With my countdown of nineteen-eighties films approaching the end, I’ve been trying to both watch and rewatch important movies from the prior decade in preparation for the next naturally step backwards in my tops of the decade project. As for the latter endeavor, there are simply some movies that I haven’t seen in approaching thirty years (and perhaps never saw properly, given that my exposure to them was dictated by the way I watched the material on cable, not always the most ideal manner to take them in) and in order to figure out their placement on the pending list, … Continue reading Spectrum Check
One for Friday: The Spliffs, “You Know What They’ll Say”
While the deep denizens of the Internet have been shockingly good about documenting pop culture topics like movies and music with great thoroughness, there’s still all sorts of things that they miss. One of the fascinating things to me about our current information age is the way that absolutely everything that’s happening now will leave a digital footprint, but there were be more than a few phantoms from the days before the nineteen-nineties. As far as I can tell, there’s no entry at the impressively exhaustive allmusic website for the band The Spliffs, and there’s certainly no Wikipedia page for … Continue reading One for Friday: The Spliffs, “You Know What They’ll Say”
Top Fifty Films of the 80s — Number Seven
#7 — The Big Chill (Lawrence Kasdan, 1983) All through this process, I’ve deliberately avoided treating the countdown too much like a countdown. What I mean by that is that I didn’t want to go too hung up on where … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 80s — Number Seven
Mighty Marvel Checklist HyperboleCheck: Fantastic Four #132
Can anyone doubt that the early nineteen-seventies was truly the Mighty Age of Marvel Comics? The publisher surely didn’t, taking every opening as an opportunity to feed the faithful with profound praise for the titanic tales and colorful clashes wonderfully … Continue reading Mighty Marvel Checklist HyperboleCheck: Fantastic Four #132
Top 40 Smash Taps: “Come See”
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. By the time “Come See” was release in 1965, Major Lance had already notched five prior Top 40 songs, the biggest of which was probably “Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um,” which had climbed all the way to #5 (and topped the R&B charts) the previous year. He was considered one of the major figures of Chicago soul and was one of the … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “Come See”
