Month: November 2013
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Seduced and Abandoned
The movie business will seduce you and abandon you, over and over again. I’m not sure whether James Toback (Tyson) and Alec Baldwin are referencing the Italian movie that played at The Cannes Film Festival in 1964, but either way, Seduced and Abandoned is also the title of their new HBO documentary. It reminded me…
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Eminem – The Marshall Mathers LP 2
Eminem isn’t nearly as popular as he was a decade ago, which puts him in a real bind when he releases an album. If he takes his music in a new direction, he risks only further irrelevance. If he repeats what he’s done before, he risks becoming a nostalgia act at the relatively young age…
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King Khan & The Shrines – Idle No More
It’s been six years since the last true King Khan & The Shrines album (not counting compilations, etc), but let’s hope that they can make up for this lacklustre record with the live show. Because ‘Idle No More’ shows us a King Khan (a.k.a. Arish Ahmad Khan) that has had the wind sucked right the…
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Frances Ha
I first laid eyes on Greta Gerwig in 2008 in the excellent mumblecore film Baghead. She was a cute, though average looking blond that was bursting with presence. ‘She could be a big star,’ I said to myself. She had natural ease on camera and kooky charisma. Time marched on and she made more films…
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The Broken Circle Breakdown
Sometimes, the masochist in us compels us to watch movies filled with soul-crushing melancholy. Dramas like Snow Falling on Cedars, Haneke’s Amour, Bergman’s Winter Light, or even the animated depressfest Grave of the Fireflies. Is it that each one of us has moments in our lives that are so sad we can identify with characters…
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Interview: Swervedriver’s Adam Franklin
Of all the 90s alternative music that graced my various stereos, from populist band Nirvana to influential shoegaze act My Bloody Valentine, perhaps the one that resonated the most with me was a band from Oxford, England called Swervedriver. Their unique sound took elements of the shoegaze movement coming out of the UK at the…
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Muscle Shoals
The documentary Muscle Shoals joins the ranks of some of the terrific movies for music nerds that have been released in the last few years, in the vein of Standing in the Shadows of Motown, 20 Feet From Stardom, and the first ¾ of Sound City (the last ¼ was a bit of a wank).…
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Évocateur: The Morton Downey Jr. Story
For a couple of years in the late 80s, America — the ‘real’ America — had a voice. It was a smooth, sonorous, irritated, chain smoking, bellowing voice: Morton Downey Jr.’s voice. In a time before the term ‘reality television’ was even a synapse in the calloused brain of Mark Burnett or Simon Cowell, Downey…
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Arcade Fire: Reflektor
Despite an ever-fragmenting musical landscape, an Arcade Fire album release can still galvanize music fans of all stripes to unite and listen. Whether or not you like the band, you’re expected to be versed in their catalogue. In their latest release, ‘Reflektor,’ Arcade Fire have teamed up with producer James Murphy (yes, that James Murphy)…
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The Reason I Jump – Naoki Higashida
When you say ‘Autism,’ too many people conjure up a mental image of Dustin Hoffman in Rainman, but it’s a disorder that real people live with that goes way beyond stereotypes of behaviour and counting cards to win big in Vegas. There’s a new book called The Reason I Jump that helps change the face…