Review

I once knew a guy who, while gazing up at a clear night sky with a young lady companion, pointed at the brightest star and softly declared, “That’s your star.” This album is thirty-seven saccharine minutes of that same eye-roll-inducing sentiment. Kip Berman has never been a particularly artful lyricist, but at least the band’s early recordings were able to musically express an understanding of romantic love more complicated than that of your average… See more →

In its assessment of how a small town in Alabama came to be a recording destination for discerning musicians and a hotbed of hit singles, Muscle Shoals spends a little too much time indulging New Age mysticism and Native American fables about the region’s supernatural gifts. Thankfully, it spends considerably more time peeling back the layers of Fame Studios founder Rick Hall, whose vision and prodigious talent as a producer is the unquestionable nucleus of… See more →

Slint was a short-lived indie rock band from Louisville, KY whose second and final album, Spiderland, is one of underground music’s most revered recordings. The album’s cryptic, distinctively uneasy aura, coupled with the group’s decision to disband without promoting it or touring, has granted Slint a rare mythic quality. Breadcrumb Trail, a documentary named after Spiderland’s opening track, somehow manages to be an informative and compelling account of the band’s story without really demystifying… See more →

Comic strips were what made me want to be an artist. There’s no straight line to be drawn between them and my graphic design career, but few people have influenced me creatively as much as Bill Watterson (Calvin & Hobbes) and Gary Larson (The Far Side) did in my formative years. So I had hoped that Stripped, a documentary about comic strips and the people who make them, would give me a new angle from… See more →

As a fan of the sort of slapstick gore found in movies like Dead Alive and Re-Animator, I had long looked forward to seeing Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky. It delivers several gems of cartoon violence, and the over-the-top acting and inept dialogue are frequently funny, but the almost total lack of an actual story makes the scenes between the action too much of a slog.

The Mexican drug war has claimed over 100,000 lives since 2006, and much of the violence has taken place in the city of Juarez, just across the US/Mexico border from El Paso, TX. Narco Cultura examines the conflict chiefly through two sets of eyes: those of Richi Soto, a crime scene investigator who works an endless procession of homicides in Juarez, and those of Edgar Quintero, a Mexican-American in LA who is making a burgeoning… See more →

House of Cards, Season 2: A smart ode to the long con, a functional indictment of a broken democracy, but still too lumpy as entertainment.

House of Cards, S02E13: Finale as microcosm of season: the pulp isn’t pulpy enough, and all else (even Frank’s biggest moment yet) is bland.

Ellis is a 14-year-old boy living on a river in rural Arkansas who desperately needs to believe love can succeed. The dissolution of his parents’ marriage and his floundering attempts at teen romance don’t give him much hope, but a chance encounter with a mysterious man who seems to be the very embodiment of “love conquers all” offers Ellis a glimmer of validation. Known only as Mud, the man also happens to be a fugitive,… See more →

House of Cards, S02E12: The season opener was farcical, but Frank’s endgame is looking pretty dry. Fingers crossed for a cartoon finale.

House of Cards, S02E11: Meechum’s… self-actualization is an anachronistic grab for water cooler talk in a post-broadcast-schedule world.

House of Cards, S02E10: All the elements of the impending boiling point are pretty boring, so I predict a seriously wacko twist just ahead.

House of Cards, S02E09: So they developed all these innocent characters just to be collateral damage in a presidential brove triangle?

Energetic, catchy, fuzzy lo-fi with solid songwriting. On paper, I might not find that description enticing, but I think the monster rhythm section is what sells it for me. Great stuff.

Whether they’re grappling with the side effects of success or (more likely) licking the wounds of failure, I don’t have much sympathy for people trying to be superstars. And as much as 20 Feet from Stardom is primarily an affectionate profile of some of pop’s most noteworthy backup singers, it spends a little too much time entertaining assertions that these (mostly) women’s status as historical footnotes is some kind of gross injustice.

Granted, it’s not… See more →

House of Cards, S02E08: Do all lobbyists have mad P.I. skills like Remy? Also, I want to make a fanfic lifestyle magazine called Plutocrat.

After having their records in steady rotation for several months, tonight I heard Whores the right way. Best live band I’ve seen in ages.

Last night’s Nothing show was way more of a punk thing than I expected; it isn’t the dominant vibe I get from the record. Not a bad thing.

House of Cards, S02E07: Claire’s marital destabilization tactics are at the pioneering intersection of US foreign policy and Heathers.

House of Cards, S02E06: Tusk is playing hardball, eh? Clever, if a bit on-the-nose. I’m kinda bummed Doug is finally cracking. He’s my rock.

Veronica Mars has a lot of work to do. For the cult following of the TV series that spawned it, it needs to be a reunion, and for the potential fans who never saw that series, it needs to be an introduction. The series’ third season attempted a similar balancing act, eschewing the first two seasons’ year-long, serialized story arcs in favor of standalone episodes that wouldn’t put off new viewers unfamiliar with the backstory.… See more →

House of Cards, S02E05: So many Civil War LARPers, and they’re not even the ones chewing the scenery. Feng, Gavin, and FBI guy are hackwork.

House of Cards, S02E04: Claire’s big interview is straight-up pornography for real-life CNN execs. Frank’s pseudo bottle episode is filler.

House of Cards, S02E03: Hieronymus Bot! Lucas’s wacky deep web adventures are fun for now, but the minute I see a Guy Fawkes mask, I’m out.

I don’t begrudge Thelma & Louise its iconic feminism – and it’s sad that a major motion picture asserting that women deserve to be treated like human beings is still revolutionary more than twenty years later – but the on-the-nose catharsis that defines the film also holds it back. As a pair of friends whose weekend vacation goes awry when one of them guns down a would-be rapist, Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon are an… See more →

No matter how many times I see The Silence of the Lambs, it is engrossing from start to finish. Anthony Hopkins’s Hannibal Lecter is unforgettable, but only as a foil for Jodie Foster’s much more sober Clarice Starling, without whom Lecter would be little more than a cartoon. Countless imitators tried and failed to replicate that magic, including Lambs’ two sequels. The leads anchor the film, and everything else falls into place around them.

House of Cards, S02E02: Will Frank also undermine Major Dad’s sway over Walker’s Netflix queue? “I suggest ‘Usual Suspects,’ Mr. President.”

House of Cards, S02E01: The WTF plot sucker punch actually made me grin without irony. Maybe I warmed up to the show between seasons.

It always seemed to me that Tonya Harding was not sufficiently contrite in public regarding her husband’s involvement in the attack on her rival Nancy Kerrigan. Harding was quick to assert her innocence, but she never seemed all that mortified that someone was assaulted on her behalf, and in this documentary twenty years after the infamous event, she still doesn’t. But she is plenty bitter, and while that’s no surprise coming from someone whose life… See more →

When the credits roll at the end of The Act of Killing, roughly a third of the crew is listed as “Anonymous.” These are presumably Indonesians who have gone nameless for fear of retribution by a government, new to democracy, which perceives their participation in the film as an act of defiance. For the same reason, virtually no one who is not closely aligned with the government is interviewed in the film. The voice of… See more →

It’s hard to pin down the horror/sci-fi alchemy that makes Alien work so well, but probably more than anything else, its landmark production design is indispensable, drawing the viewer helplessly into its lived-in world, making the film’s claustrophobic dread palpable.

Carrie is one of the better Stephen King adaptations, thanks largely to Sissy Spacek’s fragile performance and its memorably masterful climax. Still, I always feel like the first hour is mostly just something to sit through while waiting for the big moment.

It’s hard not to be inspired by Wayne White’s restless creative spirit and whimsical, hand-crafted artworks across an array of media, and his cheerfully acerbic raconteur skills make the story of his journey as an artist that much more entertaining.

The Lego Movie is probably the best unabashed, 100-minute toy commercial anyone is ever likely to see. It certainly helps that the toy on offer has a long history of superior quality, and that the imagination- and creativity-focused brand values the film is designed to bolster are essentially unassailable. But it still could have been a disaster in the wrong hands, especially given the cloying, self-acknowledged cliché at the center of it: You are special.… See more →

Elena is a character study of an aging housewife who is frustrated by her wealthy husband’s refusal to offer financial assistance to her struggling son (from a previous marriage) and his family. It’s hard to tell how much one’s appreciation of the film is contingent upon their understanding of the class divide in post-Soviet Russia (mine is admittedly limited). Every plodding, beautifully shot moment of its excessive runtime is an overt examination of one or… See more →

A pompous high school literature teacher, Germain, encourages the troubling voyeurism of a promising (and manipulative) student, Claude, intending to help Claude improve his writing. But as Claude’s story becomes increasingly invasive into the real lives of his characters, Germain’s motives as an instructor come into question. Within that premise, In the House is an exploration of the audience’s role as a participant in art, and in particular the audience’s complicity in the sins of… See more →

An inventive and well-constructed mystery thriller that consistently intrigues without ever veering too far into pulp. A few too many answers pile up at the end for the resolution to be completely satisfying, but overall, I really enjoyed the ride.

If you’ve seen Johnny Knoxville’s hilarious Irving Zisman schtick in the Jackass movies, you know what to expect from Bad Grandpa, and it delivers. But trying to use an actual story to string together its collection of pranks and gags disrupts the pace and dilutes the comedy. The absence of character development was never a problem for the Jackass series before, so I’m not sure why they decided to try it here. The closing credits… See more →

There’s a strange narrative conflict at the heart of 12 O’Clock Boys. On one hand, the broader story of Baltimore’s brand of impoverished urban escapism through reckless dirt bike riding probably could have been told well enough in a short film. The local news clips and interviews with riders get pretty repetitive after awhile. On the other hand, following its charismatic protagonist, Pug, through three of his formative years (ages 12–15) offers a valuable glimpse… See more →

Parts of this song remind me of Menthol’s “USA Capable” (which isn’t currently available on Rdio). http://youtu.be/KrVxf-nO2QI

A wonderfully atmospheric, somewhat Lynchian portrait of emotional deterioration, with no small amount of affection for giallo films and the analog audio era. Excellent score by James Cargill and the late Trish Keenan of Broadcast.

I was 22 before I finally saw The Godfather. I previously had no interest in mob movies, mainly because of what I knew about Tommy DeVito, Joe Pesci’s character in Goodfellas, whose maniacal extortionist with an intolerable sense of entitlement I took to be the genre’s dominant archetype. While it turned out that wasn’t entirely off-base, I was pleased to find many Mafia stories richer than I expected.

Fifteen years later, The Wolf of Wall… See more →

In Her, the central romance between Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) and his artificially intelligent operating system Samantha (Scarlett Johansson) is developed almost entirely through conversation, since Samantha doesn’t have a physical presence. As a result, virtually everything either character thinks or feels is plainly stated aloud, giving viewers little to assess for themselves. The film is its own CliffsNotes. And while it touches on various difficulties inevitable to a relationship between a metaphysically boundless AI and… See more →

Computer Chess is a paradox. It appears to be a (successful) attempt to be as dry and impenetrably arcane as its subject can be, even for people who might be interested in that subject. In theory, it’s a compelling experiment, but its very definition requires that it offer no rewards, and for the most part, it meets that requirement.

Any film that sets out to play a bunch of Big Star music and talk to people in the know about how it was made and why it’s great can’t really go wrong, and this one doesn’t. But while the early acts offer engaging coverage of the birth of Memphis’s legendary Ardent Studios, Big Star’s formation, and the great records that followed, what comes after is a bit murky. There is much hypothesizing about why… See more →

This was good for a few chuckles, but I expected more from the collective comedic pedigree involved. There are plenty of gags reminiscent of other John Landis classics like The Blues Brothers and Three Amigos, but Trading Places just doesn’t have the same heart. That said, as a Philadelphia area native, I did appreciate the many location shots as a great snapshot of the city in 1983.

McConaughey is excellent, but the redemption story is pretty by-the-numbers, and is ultimately overpowered by a rather shrill anti-FDA polemic.

Somehow I never noticed the US foreign policy allegory happening here.

Joe Elliott can’t hit the high notes quite as forcefully as he used to, but otherwise, Def Leppard sounds pretty fantastic here. It’s impressive to hear an album as quintessentially overproduced as Hysteria pulled off live this faithfully, and 25 years later at that. (Of course, the band has had plenty of recent practice aping its younger self by recording verbatim recreations of its classic hits to spite its domineering record label.)

For my money,… See more →

Well, at least we’ll always have that first album.