Adolphe is an odd one: it’s a story of a romance with virtually no context. Sure, we get some idea of what Europe was like for a son of a wealthy family in the early 19th century. And, in one of the later chapters, Constant describes the physical geography of an area of Poland. But, …
Month: January 2016
Big Game (2014, Jalmari Helander)
One day, I really will live tweet or live blog a movie, instead of posting my comments after the fact. I’m sorry to say that my comments below don’t have time stamps. SPOILERS! (As if that matters…)
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1962) edited by Donald Kagan
This particular Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is an old sampler of theories about the decline of the Roman Empire that I think was part of a class my father took in university. It was assembled in 1962, but the first issue with it is that many of the books and articles it …
Payola (2015) by Desaparecidos
I was really surprised how much I liked their original album. Noticing my old rating for it I feel like I have bump it up a bit, as I like it more than the rating suggests. But this one…
Vincebus Eruptum (1968) by Blue Cheer
For years and years I have been telling everyone who would listen that Jeff Beck’s Truth is the First Heavy Metal album of All Time. If people mentioned Blue Cheer, I dismissed them outright – despite only ever hearing their cover of “Summertime Blues” once or twice – or assumed that The Jeff Beck Group …
Lord Jim (1900) by Joseph Conrad
Conrad is perhaps my favourite (English language) writer from the turn of the last century. I find “The Secret Sharer” to be one of the greatest English language short stories ever written. And Nostromo is a favourite of mine. And yet it took me forever to get into this, considered by some to be among …
Everclear (1991) by American Music Club
These guys are the Kings of Slowcore, so I’ve been told. Not being the biggest devotee of the genre, I have no idea if that’s true. And if I get obsessed about influence and such, I’ll ignore the music here and focus on the fact that slowcore already existed when this came out. (Because, of …
Bastards (2013, Claire Denis)
Denis takes your typical revenge thriller plot – solitary man’s loved one(s) is wronged and he seeks revenge – and flips it on itself. The solitary man is solitary because he works on tankers. His family is hurt by a suicide – not, on its face, a wrong inflicted upon them. And the world he …
RIP David Bowie Playlist
I am going to try to put together some of my favourite songs Bowie wrote and performed over the years, but I apologize if this list is not thorough enough. Nothing will really be good enough to capture what he meant to me or millions of others.
RIP David Bowie
Much like when Lou Reed, another of my favourite songwriters, died, I find myself in complete shock. Shock that someone I have spent over half my life listening to, discussing/debating and feeling like I had some kind of connection with, has died…could die. Shock that death comes for us all, no matter how great.
The Purge (2013, James DeMonaco)
The opening text this movie displays, explaining what ‘the purge’ is, is basically the pitch meeting for this movie. The filmmaker likely walked into an office, said those exact words, mentioned some actors for the key roles, and got this green-lit. This film is a perfect symbol of what is wrong with “high concept” films …
Making a Murderer (2015, Moira Demos, Laura Ricciardi)
This is a documentary in the grand tradition of The Thin Blue Line, Paradise Lost and Brother’s Keeper, but with the time-span of something like Hoop Dreams or American Promise. And, as a 10-episode TV show, it adds nearly unprecedented depth to its subject, comparable only to a Ken Burns documentary series, or Shoah. SPOILER …