Month: October 2013
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The Scariest Scenes from Non-Horror Movies
Halloween is upon us once more, and I’ve written or talked about the ‘Best Scary Movie for Halloween’ about 1700 times in my life. Blah blah blah, The Exorcist, blah blah blah, The Shining. Someone in my office came up with a great idea — the scariest scenes from non-horror movies! Here are the ground…
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Goodnight, Lou Reed
So my cranky uncle Lou (fuck it, that’s the way I felt about him) passed a few days ago. I don’t know what to say, really. He influenced me more than anyone else, ever. His records were weird, cantankerous creations you loved or hated, much like I would imagine the man himself to have been.…
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Escape from Tomorrow
I read about Escape from Tomorrow awhile back after it screened at Sundance and was instantly enthralled by the story of how it was filmed, which was nothing short of astounding. The plot centres on a man on the last day of his family vacation at Disneyworld, whose cheese starts to slip off his cracker,…
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Marc Maron – Thinky Pain
Marc Maron doesn’t care about what you think of him. As demonstrated in his new special Thinky Pain (Netflix), he’s going to do his stand-up comedy in his own way, a method cultivated through decades of struggle and hard work and drugs and marriages and failures and even some successes. He will probably spend most…
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William Onyeabor – Who is William Onyeabor?
There’s nothing quite as enticing for the obsessive music appreciator as the ‘unearthed’ album. Every so often, some buried relic will find an audience in the present in ways that, for a variety of reasons, it never could in the past. The stories of Rodriguez, Death, and to a lesser extent, Euphoria, have recently served…
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Down and Dirty Pictures
I first read Peter Biskind’s Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film, a look at the 80s and 90s Indie movie revolution, when it came out in 2004, ten years after I saw Pulp Fiction. I decided to read it again recently, now that some more time has passed, and…
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Moonface – Julia with Blue Jeans On
Spencer Krug is one prolific motherfucker. ‘Good’ prolific, like Ty Segall, who pumps out several highly listenable albums a year, as opposed to ‘bad’ prolific, like Ryan Adams, who had a high output of suspect material after his first couple of albums. You see, prolific only means something if your shit is good. Moonface is…
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To 3D? Or not to 3D?
While Gravity was one of the better films to have utilized 3D in the last few years, its use still didn’t really justify its inclusion to me. In the wake of Gravity and the announcement of the likelihood of sequels to Avatar shooting in fall of 2014, I wanted to write another rant about the…
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Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band – Take Me to the Land of Hell
If you’d told the seventeen-year-old version of me that one day I’d really dig a Yoko Ono album, I’d have yakked on the spot. Like any self-respecting Beatles fan, I’ve always eyed Ono with a degree of suspicion. Though there’s much more to the story, she was poking and prodding from the sidelines when the…
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Haim – Days Are Gone
LA sisters Este, Danielle, and Alana Haim (rhymes with ‘time’) have been playing music since they were kids, including being in a family band with the super terrible name, Rockinhaim. Two of the sisters were in the girl group The Valli Girls who had brushes with fame via Nickelodeon and the tween movie with the…