My 2008 album begins in Utah and ends in (or near) hell. Whether you think the distance between the starting point and the destination is a lot of territory or not much, we do get to travel pretty far afield. There’s sunny California with the Botticellis, lovely inner-city Baltimore with DoMaJe, Iraq with the estimable Danny Elfman, and someplace sublimely absurd with Flight of the Conchords.
Pretty self-explanatory: Martin Sexton’s one-hour set at River Roots Live in Davenport, Iowa, on Friday, September 22, 2006.
Jordan Peele’s Us didn’t really scare me, and that’s not a complaint. I didn’t find it particularly suspenseful, which is also not a criticism. Those two sentences reflect not the craft of Us as a horror movie but the writer/director’s use of metaphor and symbolism – an area where he overplays his hand and gets into serious trouble.
My favorite movies, starting with Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, Errol Morris’ Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control, Atom Egoyan’s Calendar, Christopher Nolan’s Memento, and Marleen Gorris’ Antonia’s Line.
My favorite albums starting with Fiona Apple’s When the Pawn …, Neko Case’s Blacklisted, The Clash’s London Calling, Coil’s Horse Rotorvator, and Jimi Hendrix’s Band of Gypsies.
The blog “Notes from Classy’s Kitchen” recently cited my essay on Stone Reader.
To mark the fifth birthday of Culture Snob (and the second day of the Self-Involvement Blog-a-thon), some raw data and some calculations: In five years, Culture Snob has produced 514 entries, 36 polls, and 17 commentary tracks – nine full-movie commentaries and eight of the five-minute variety. I have written roughly 450,000 words for the site – an average of about 250 a day, or enough to fill 1,800 double-spaced typed pages over the site’s life.
If two young women characters in a movie decide to take a vacation to an exotic locale before going to their respective colleges, the viewer can be certain one of two things will happen: They’ll have passionate sexual awakenings at the hands of a handsome stranger, or they’ll be unjustly imprisoned in a fucked-up judicial system with seemingly no hope of ever getting out. In the case of Brokedown Palace, we get both.
Aussie crime thriller ‘The Square’ is poised to explore guilt in a handful of characters but instead becomes a ridiculous, contrived tragedy
Like most of his movies, David Cronenberg’s Camera is a sly piece of work. On the surface, it’s an illustration of the effects of lighting, camera movement, recording format, performance, and even costumes. Camera appears to be Cronenberg’s most warm and human work. But it packs a lot into its running time, and, on closer inspection, it’s a downer about submission to addiction.
