There’s a scene in In The Loop in which the “crossest man in Scotland” is introduced. Up until then you can be forgiven for thinking that you have been spending most of the film with that very man, Malcolm Tucker, a fixer with a penchant for four letter words that would make Deadwood’s Al Swearingen [...]
At the end of the seventies music was perched on the edge of the great fragmentation that would take hold in the eighties and especially the nineties – punk, funk, disco, pop all rubbed shoulders along with the first stirrings of hip-hop. It’s also the year Sony‘s Walkman would hit the market, revolutionizing the way [...]
It’s hard to write anything called an “appreciation” for Allen Klein, as he was more a creature to be feared, reckoned with, and noted for historical significance than appreciated. Klein, who died of complications from Alzheimer’s over the July 4th weekend, is one of the great characters (some might say villains) of music history. He [...]
The fact that a younger generation has no idea who Karl Malden was brought home today by the many blank stares from co-workers and at least one name pronunciation that suggested the attemptee thought Malden was a star of the German cinema. What Malden was, was an Oscar and Emmy winning actor whose blunt face [...]
It’s hard for me to remember a film with as divergent a critical response as Synecdoche, New York which made many reviewers best and worst films of 2008 lists at the end of the year. I can sympathize with those who didn’t enjoy the film – to its credit it never even tries to meet [...]
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