Time to go deep into the last decade, as far as unsung movie scores, now that I’ve gone deep in the 80s and deep again in the 90s. When it came to compilations, the ’00s were flush with comebacks. Kevin Shields returned for Lost in Translation. Oh Brother Where Art Thou? completed Ralph Stanley’s long-overdue crossover from […]
Joe Strummer – Permanent Record (1988) and Walker (1987) Joe Strummer’s post-Clash songs for soundtracks and benefit comps often blow away the pretty damn good songs found on his solo albums. They deserve their own compilation. Following the final breaths of the Clash around 1986, Strummer jumped right into soundtrack work with two excellent songs for Sid & Nancy. With the soundtrack […]
Pitchfork recently spat out their “50 Best Ambient Records of All Time” list, essentially a holistic (and deserved) tribute to Terry Riley, Brian Eno, Oneotrix Point Never, and Tim Hecker. I assume it’s also a native advert for Spotify. For example, omissions include Ash Ra Tempel’s landmark ambient work “Inventions for Electric Guitar,” while the sole […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Listicles are: legion. We’ve reached the post-listicle age. Listicles about listicles are all that’s left for writers feeding the internet beast at 10 cents a word. As far as the “authors appearing in films of their own works” listicle, the obvious suspects appear in almost every piece. Stephen King hams it up as a dingbat in […]
Two nights ago I finished watching Julie Taymor’s interminable Across the Universe, essentially Rent with Beatles songs. I can even hear her pitching it that way to the studios. It’s a noble and even interesting experiment, but done with a suspicious lack of care, considering the conspicuous electronic-pitch-witchery for many of the cast’s attempts at […]
Stop Loving Everything 