Rigid Expectations
Against Me! has been selling out for the better part of a decade, so complaints about the polish of the band’s forthcoming record are already tired to songwriter/vocalist/guitarist Tom Gabel. Because Gabel is a punk icon and an anarchist, it was little surprise that there were negative reactions when the band jumped to a major label. But as it prepares to release White Crosses next week, Gabel talked about the challenge of being an ever-changing person in a world of rigid expectations.
Tagged: Against Me!, Interviews, Tom Gabel
In Calendar, writer/director Atom Egoyan offers a film version of 
The unfathomably fashionable torture film has spun off a welcome girl-power subgenre, in which determined, attractive young females facilitate the agonizing dispatches of men who have committed atrocities against youth. But two early entries – Hard Candy and Lady Vengeance – are misguided.
The conventional wisdom says that among the early entrants in the summer 2009 sweepstakes, Star Trek is a hit (and a winner in its first three weekends in our Box Office Power Rankings), Wolverine is a disappointment, and nobody cares about Angels and Demons. Yet X-Men Origins: Wolverine had the biggest North American opening of the three: $85 million. These evaluations are muddied by so many variables that it’s difficult to cut through the crap. But one simple measure is second-weekend drop-off, generally considered a reliable indicator of a movie’s staying power. So: Wolverine dropped 69.0 percent from $85 million; Star Trek dropped 42.8 percent from $75 million; and Angels and Demons dropped 53.0 percent (not counting the Monday holiday) from $46 million.
I won’t be coy. The genesis for this piece was the hypothesis that The Last Jedi was not “divisive,” despite that word being 
A throw-away bit of connective tissue struck me in 
