What’s the difference between music and noise? Besides general semantics, the two terms are perceived to create something of a dichotomy in relation to one another; often when trying to pass critical judgment on the sonic qualities of a recorded piece, there’s a tendency…
Red Beard — despite its three-hour-plus runtime, massive 2.35:1 widescreen aspect ratio, and a production history lasting approximately two years — is a rather humble motion picture. It’s certainly one of the most modest statements Akira Kurosawa ever made in his career, only realized…
In the age of mass production, art is nothing unique. And in the 1960s, the work of Andy Warhol became one of the foremost indicators of this new shift in cultural understanding. Reflected in his work is an increasing disassociation from modernist ideals and…
The first image of Agnes Varda’s 1965 film Le Bonheur (meaning “happiness” in English) is that of a yellow sunflower beaming in the radiant light of a perfect summer day. As the opening credits appear on-screen, we cut to another similarly-situated sunflower, and then to…
OK, so things don’t really vanish anymore: even the most limited film release will (most likely, eventually) find its way onto some streaming service or into some DVD bargain bin assuming that those still exist by the time this sentence finishes. In other words, while the title of In Review…
The boozy, bloozy, cacophonous conclusion to Bob Dylan’s mid-60s “electric” trilogy, Blonde on Blonde feels every bit the culmination of…something. A wild fever dream of an album, owing as much to Fellini and T.S. Eliot as to Woody and Leadbelly, it’s the sound of Dylan’s imagination pushed…
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…
#5: The Tree of Death: Rooting Around in the Killer Tree Subgenre Download episode here. Episode Description: This month, Simon & Steve tackle a fundamentally ridiculous topic when they decide to go rooting around in the very small killer-tree subgenre. (Tree? Rooting? You see what I…
