John Ford’s late career was dotted with heavily revisionist takes on the western cinematic mythology he helped to define, whether attacks on the genre’s racism or even its legacy as a romanticized outpost of uncivilized abandon. Ford’s final film, 7 Women, gave these critiques their purest expression by radically altering…
Pretty much all songs on all of Elliott Smith’s released recordings are immaculate on both the structural and engineering fronts, which doesn’t make them any less occasionally uncomfortable to listen to. At the moment of its release and after, XO was presumably forcing fans to choose an arbitrary binary preference. Option…
Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg opened with Greta Gerwig’s character, a young woman working as a wealthy man’s personal assistant, trying to merge into traffic, saying “Are you gonna let me in?” Baumbach’s latest, While We’re Young, begins with a quote from Ibsen’s The Master Builder in which a young woman suggests to a dying architect…
Beginning with its titular event and ending with a funeral, Prince’s Parade is obsessed with love, sex and death. If that weren’t enough baggage, Parade also serves as the soundtrack to the 1986 film Under the Cherry Moon. Prince’s Paris-set follow-up to Purple Rain tells the life and death story of Prince’s gigolo character, Christopher Tracy,…
Curtis Harrington’s Night Tide screened in 1963 as the second half of an Edgar Allan Poe inspired double bill alongside Roger Corman’s The Raven. It is almost unfathomable that a film as guileless and pure and innocent (but not naive) as this could ever be made today. Harrington’s landlady warned him that…
“Let’s approach this like it’s our last album,” Billy Corgan claims to have said to his bandmates, in so many words, before work began on their supersized third record, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. It wasn’t the last gasp of the Smashing Pumpkins, or even of the original, pre-breakup iteration…
Recorded at the height of her powers, Mack the Knife — Ella in Berlin is the definitive answer to the question “Who is Ella Fitzgerald?” It’s an education spread across nine tracks, highlighting everything that made Fitzgerald the greatest American singer of her time. By 1960, Fitzgerald had recorded standards from the songbooks…
Kinsman: The Secret Service is ostensibly both a rebuke to the increasingly self-serious spy genre and a tongue-in-cheek nod to the good old days of 007 in a tuxedo and megalomaniacs in super-fortresses. But is amping up the violence and suspect gender politics the most effective way to parody…
“The cat record” is how I identified Tapestry at the age of five — initial fascination with my mother’s scruffy vinyl copy stemming less from its warm musicality and clear-amber songcraft than from its famously candid cover shot, with Carole King’s own tabby, Telemachus, a smoky blur in the foreground. I wasn’t, at…
The life-changing instance of reason defeating desire has been at the center of such great melodramatic moments as the airport climax of Casablancaand the railway station farewell of Brief Encounter, but for this viewer its most powerful incarnation comes towards the end of The Bridges of Madison County, Clint Eastwood’s 1995 tear-jerking…
Pinastri, a scientific term given to a specific moth family, is the safe word for S&M lovers Cynthia (Sidse Babett Knudsen) and Evelyn (Chiara D’Anna), but it’s no mistake that it also sounds like “Be Nasty” when whispered in the women’s thick British accents. That’s a strategic aural…
Damning rock n’ roll for its racist and imperialist legacy while having the gall to simultaneously rock like hell, “Amnesia” stands at the thematic center of The Mekons most thematically compelling record. The ninth of the fourteen songs on The Mekons Rock N’ Roll (on the UK release, anyway; the band’s…
Some of Eric Rohmer’s sharpest skewerings of male psychology take as their focus guys defined by disjunctions between appearance and intention — take, for instance, the exceedingly suave manipulator in Claire’s Knee, or the willfully standoffish oaf from La Collectionneuse who nonetheless craves affection. In this regard, Melvil Poupaud’s Gaspard, from A Summer’s Tale, is…
The daughter of Minos and wife of Theseus has long fascinated many a romantic soul — Euripides, Racine, Swinburne, and Lee Hazlewood all wove the name of Phaedra into their offerings (Hazlewood via the 1967 Nancy Sinatra-aided schlock classic “Some Velvet Morning”). Edgar Froese’s reasons for naming West Berlin synth…
One is tempted to think of Heat as a culmination, a kind of halfway point in the career of its director, Michael Mann. This isn’t entirely accurate, since the crime genre has been a vested interest of Mann’s both before and after Heat; one could just as easily place a demarcation point in…
If The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan proved that Bob Dylan could do anything and everything, The Times They Are a-Changin’ proved that he could hone in on doing one thing very well. It’s less about breadth than depth, in other words, with Dylan removing most of the humor, romance, absurdity, and goofy fun and doubling…
Though it’s a truth that’s now largely forgotten, at least among the young and the terminally hip, Rod Stewart was once a pretty righteous cat — foremost among interpretive singers and endowed with gangbuster rock and roll bonafides primarily, perhaps, from his role as frontman for the Faces, as gloriously disheveled, shambolic,…
There were times during this especially tumultuous year when it seemed as if the world at large was on the verge of collapsing. A whole commercial jetliner seemingly disappeared without a trace, leading some ostensibly serious news outlets to put forth honest-to-god inquires about the possibility of supernatural…
With the recent Twilight series, the vampire myth had gotten caught in a rut, burying what had been an endlessly, richly expanding legend in a cesspool of teenage angst and not terribly inspiring romance. One couldn’t be blamed for looking at vampires with a sense of weariness as…
After two Hunger Games films setting the stage for revolution in the future dystopia of PanEm, audiences are apparently finally ready for a third film setting up a feature-length climax evidently to be offered next year. In the fine tradition of modern studio-franchise moviemaking, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part…
With The Homesman, Tommy Lee Jones’s torch-carrying efforts on behalf of the tried-and-tested beauty of the American West continue to be moving. Taking into account his feature appearance as a practical spokesperson for old western values in the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men, his reverent direction…