I’ve never really had any interest in John Grisham’s work, but for some reason we’ve been watching the film adaptations the last few Sundays, and this one might be my favorite so far! Sometimes a stacked cast giving its all to a twisty potboiler premise lands just right. Its supersaturated assembly feels very of its time, and while early-aughts pop culture isn’t a source of much nostalgia for me, I’m not entirely immune to the… See more →

I hadn’t heard of this one before its recent Blu-ray upgrade, and what a gem! It goes for broke pretty much from start to finish, with James Brolin rampaging through upper Manhattan and the Bronx as he hunts his daughter’s kidnapper, pounding his way through street gangs and crooked cops, leveling half the city in the process. In the 1970s-NYC-as-hellhole pantheon, I’d say it triangulates somewhere between Serpico, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three… See more →

In these early days of a post-BrooklynVegan world, who knows how long it would have taken for me to catch wind of Temptation to Exist, today’s surprise release from your best friend and mine, Andrew W.K., but thankfully my buddy Smo informed me via text early this afternoon, and I was spinning said release forthwith. Ever since Andrew cancelled all tour dates and deleted his website and social media almost immediately after releasing his last… See more →

The interviews get pretty repetitive in this rock doc about the post-“Smells Like Teen Spirit” feeding frenzy in Seattle, but they’re well worth sitting through for the film’s treasure trove of live footage of a ton of great bands from the scene who never hit the big time. Oddly enough, for as much as Hype! is about the Pacific Northwest, its most memorable moment for me is a bunch of Japanese rockabilly dudes with comically… See more →

I find that a terrible movie that broadcasts its amateur maker’s steep learning curve is usually more interesting than a terrible movie made by a professional for whom it was just another day at the office. And the more ambitious the amateur’s vision, the more compelling their failure. In the case of Almost Invisible, apparently the first and last writing/producing/directing effort of a 50-something MD (currently serving a 13-year federal prison sentence for running a… See more →

Look, I’m not a conspiracy-minded guy, but a carefully coordinated effort by the international punk intelligentsia to keep me in the dark is the only explanation I see for why it took 37 years for this incredible album to find its way to me. Nomeansno has been on my radar since the early ’90s, when they appeared on Alternative Tentacles’ Virus 100 compilation, and their committed a cappella cover of Dead Kennedys’ “Forward to Death”… See more →

This thing is so overloaded with ridiculous ’80s signifiers, and its picture is so pristine, I initially thought it was a nostalgic throwback made sometime in the last 10 years (à la the dreadful Kung Fury). But the hair, the clothes, the cars, and the music are simply too perfect, and that pristine picture comes courtesy of Vinegar Syndrome, patron saints of pulling out all the stops on film restorations no one else would have… See more →

I’m not really into Christopher Nolan or epic movies, but my knowledge of Greek mythology is shamefully cursory, so I hoped seeing Nolan’s Odyssey would give me the nudge I needed to finally do some proper reading. I enjoyed the film more than I expected to; it’s very effective in many ways (Polyphemus! Circe!) and clunky in others (loud plot forecasting and a clumsy big finish), but I don’t think I looked at my watch… See more →