Category Archives: Pop Culture

Afterwards

I’m back from Sicily as of yesterday afternoon. I didn’t have internet access while I was away, or I would have written several posts about how amazing Italy is; I’m going to try and round up whatever thoughts I can recoup after ten days of sleeping in late, eating decadently tasty food and drinking lots of red wine, and write something here soon.

In the meantime, I’m feeling a little fuzzy-brained and jetlagged and a little deflated after returning to the reality of a non-vacation life. Mostly though, I’m feeling incredibly sad about Christopher Reeve’s death yesterday. There’s not an actor’s performance in any film that means more to me than Reeve’s in “Superman: The Movie.” It had a profound impact on the way I saw the world as a child, and it still chokes me up to watch it as an adult. It was acutely painful to see Reeve suffer that horrible accident in 1995, and now to see him go at the relatively young age of 52… I can’t possibly articulate the meaning of this loss in a way that would do it any kind of justice.

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Elephant in the Room

ElephantI’ve been an erratic fan of Gus Van Sant’s work for years, mostly because the work itself has been somewhat erratic — witness “Psycho” and “Good Will Hunting,” two movies I’d just as soon never watch again. But I was really, really floored by “Elephant,” which I skipped in theaters due to the somewhat uneven critical response it garnered. After two jaw-dropping hours, it baffles me that this film, which is meticulously directed and gorgeously shot, failed to become a sensation in its original run. Then again I think of the deliberate, almost Kubrick-like coldness with which it forgoes any kind of judgment over the characters caught in its Columbine High School-like construction, and it makes a certain kind of sense to me that the public would shun it. We like tragedies written bold in history and reductively in drama, and this movie fits neither of those criteria. It’s subtle and familiar and also deeply frightening.

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Live Leo

Ted Leo/PharmacistsIt was a year and a week ago that I wrote about Ted Leo/Pharmacists to little notice, but I’m still listening to these records, “The Tyranny of Distance” and “Hearts of Oak,” at least once a week. If anything, I think that what I once saw as Leo’s self-imposed and short-sighted limitations — his obsessive desire to re-create a sound and an energy often deemed lost to the 20th century — now seem more like a very selectively chosen milieu, a platform for an oeuvre. It was always that, of course, but I was reluctant to see it. Now, having watched the rise of a horde of bands who have worked out the science behind a way-back machine down to a decimal point, it’s more apparent to me than ever that Leo’s work is, first, classier and more thrilling than anything else in thrift store clothes, and second, actually forward-looking.

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Hollywood Killer

CollateralUnfortunately, I don’t make it out to the movies on opening night as much as I used to, so by the time I get around to seeing a new movie — in the theaters or, if I’m really behind the times, on DVD — and then actually to writing about it here, the point seems lost. My movie reviews have never been the most popular posts anyway, but I do get a kick out of writing them because I still get a kick out of cinema. Anyway, all of this is by way of excusing this glaringly untimely review of “Collateral,” which I just saw last week.

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Face the Press

Someone over at the Gray Lady just discovered typography, if David Dunlap’s piece on the 9/11 memorial cornerstone is any indication. Unexpectedly, the article devotes 1,000 words to discussing the use of Gotham — a beautiful typeface designed by Tobias Frere-Jones and distributed by The Hoefler Type Foundry — as the principle face for the cornerstone. The photo caption is unintentionally hilarious: “Gotham… is distinguished by the uniformity in the width of its strokes and the absence of embellishments like serifs.” Really!

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Late to School

School of RockIt always makes me feel a little silly to be writing here about movies that I’ve just seen on video or DVD, well after they’ve left the theaters and long after any initial excitement they may have stirred up has been dissipated. Unfortunately, with the way my life has worked over the past two years, I see far more films on my DVD player than at the cineplex. So more often than not, I’ll just choose not to write about them at all, but in the case of “School or Rock,” how can I resist?

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Stop Trek

EnterpriseI’ll admit a fondness for “Star Trek,” having enjoyed the original show in reruns as a generally geeky youth and its many successors as an only moderately less geeky adult. But after having caught five minutes of an episode this season wherein the crew of the latest show, “Star Trek: Enterprise” were shooting it out with aliens on a world that resembled America’s old West (crazy!), even I will admit that the whole franchise is just begging for a bit of television euthanasia.

For about five minutes at the launch of the series, “Enterprise” seemed to promise a new, fresher take on the tried and true Trek formula, in which a cadre of futuristic office co-workers spreads free market principles around the galaxy. But it too has succumbed to retreading the same old territory as its predecessors, and just a glimpse of the show reveals it to be hackneyed to distraction. Now word comes that, apparently, UPN has acquiesced to fan pressure and renewed “Enterprise” for another season. Please, someone make it stop.

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Old Musical Express

NMEOver the weekend, I picked up a copy of the 01 May 2004 issue of the New Musical Express, a long-running, weekly British music tabloid that I once read at least twice a month but that I now rarely ever glance at. Though the roster of bands that the NME covers has changed over the past decade, the tenor of the journalism is remarkably the same: patently snarky, often hilarious, willfully dismissive and still composed primarily of hot air.

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Couch Report

Having recently gotten through a huge project at Behavior, I’m finally getting some evenings and weekends back. Some of that time is spent hanging out and some of it watching movies; I’ve definitely missed being able to watch movies with frequency, and in the past two weeks I’ve finally been able to squeeze in a good number of them. Here are some quick thoughts on some of them.

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