David + David’s album Boomtown turned 30 this summer. They’re making the follow-up now. I was 15 when I bought Boomtown on vinyl in the weeks following its July 7, 1986 release. My family had just informed me that, by November, we would be moving 50 miles away from the only home I’d known. By that summer, Boomtown had already been […]
Like most auteurs, director Ben Wheatley can’t be pigeonholed. Calling him a horror director is like saying Werner Herzog makes biopics. Same would go for science fiction, which classifies Wheatley about as easily as it does David Cronenberg. Cronenberg may be Wheatley’s best antecedent; a director talented beyond genre whose work touches genre and reinvents it sometimes (The Fly) yet never […]
Truth is only sometimes stranger than fiction, but truth is almost always more horrifying, unless you’re lobotomized, or attend too many raves. One element separating fictional horror and horrifying nonfiction is guiltless entertainment; you can enjoy Stephen King or Jo Nesbo, or even Gone Girl, but you can’t necessarily say you enjoyed Truman Capote‘s In Cold Blood (although don’t underestimate Capote’s […]
With physical album sales tanking and streaming royalties frozen by corporate war, you can bet your BitTorrent that major label artists are scrambling to release visual albums. Whether these visual albums will be exclusives for web-based companies remains to be seen: major labels are already circling their contractual wagons, and no less than Spotify has […]
1. Avoid complaining. It’s a waste of time. When your wife returns from work, the kids will ignore you completely and dominate her every minute. Unless she’s a riveter, your wife has spent her day with the freedom to surf the internet for 20 minutes whenever she felt like it. See those people outside office buildings taking […]
I’m tired of horse movies. Which makes sense, because I’m not 8. But my younger daughter is 8. We are excepting The Black Stallion. That’s a real movie. The majority of horse movies available to stream follow the standard “Horse Reform” formula: Troubled/spoiled girl conveniently moves to a relative’s home. A male relative/father figure, with a […]
Allow me to harvest for you. On Netflix now: The Tribe – Not only an unusually excellent movie available to stream, but the best movie I’ve seen in years. The Tribe follows a new student’s jarring experiences upon entering an Ukranian boarding school for hearing-impaired students that doubles as a criminal enterprise. There’s no translating Ukranian […]
Why actresses? I’m raising two of them (haha, sexist dad humor. Please kill me). Listicles step from the brain-mist when a writer hears a certain song, sees a certain film scene, reads a book etc, and asks, “how many other songs/films/book do that? Am I lazy enough to feed the internet with an answer? Shall […]
Don’t get me wrong: I enjoyed all eight episodes of Stranger Things, and look forward to season two. Heaps done right: Matthew Modine & Winona Ryder as characters their 80s characters conceivably would have become, as adults. Banana seat bikes. D&D. Dimensional travel. Clairvoyance. Budding adolescence. David Harbour, formerly known as the only good thing in The Equalizer, is mostly […]
While Ed Sheeran gets fleeced for ripping off Marvin Gaye, Deerhoof has a case against Desiigner’s hit “Panda.” Of course, in most cases, launching a lawsuit requires a certain level of established affluence on the plaintiff’s part, and I doubt Deerhoof has the type of deserved cash for this. But who knows – they’re not so obscure […]
Stop Loving Everything 