Our new monthly music feature, Rooted & Restless, finds country music aficionados Josh Hurst and Jonathan Keefe wading into all things Americana, expanding the definition of ‘country’ to incorporate all the permutations that the genre has opened itself up to, especially in recent years. And our first issue, focused on February releases, already…
For those who still associate Rivers Cuomo with the confessional and unabashed awkwardness of Pinkerton, an album of estimable emotions that seems to have been released an eternity ago, Weezer’s Weezer (Black Album) could come as a special kind of shock; for everyone who’s been following the band for the last 20 years, though, it might seem like…
In Alex Lehmann’s Paddleton, Mark Duplass and Ray Romano play Michael and Andy, a couple of sadsack, socially awkward, loser neighbors who have struck up a friendship based seemingly on proximity and mutual apathy. When Michael is diagnosed with terminal cancer, he enlists Andy to go on a brief road trip with him to acquire…
Jean Luc-Godard’s career came to an end in 1967, with Weekend — only for it to rise again out of the ashes, and for the filmmaker to summarily dismiss everything he’d made before. The violent and vehement events of May 1968 marked a return to zero for Godard, the requisite thrust towards a revolutionary form that asserted cinema’s capabilities beyond mere representation. Rejecting the ‘bourgeois’ image which Godard saw as necessarily resulting from an attempt to “reflect reality,” the director sought…
A Perfect World‘s title is contradictory, born from a phrase that implies that life will never really amount to what we want it to — but abbreviated, so as to suggest that the central relationship in Clint Eastwood’s film is a utopian alternative to the injustices of reality. And yet, the world that is shared and created by the film’s surrogate father and surrogate son is never quite that, because for all of its ability to warp time and space and…