February 1, 2018
Tell me if this sounds familiar: you get home from work, have dinner, and settle in for the evening. You think about picking up that book (you know, the one on your bedside table that’s been serving as a coaster for your phone since just after Christmas), but you decide against it, even though reading…
December 14, 2017
In most cases, people do their best to avoid the sensation of inescapable, all-encompassing dread. This makes sense, of course, since there are few thing worse than being entirely unsure what is going to happen, but being certain that, whatever it is, it’s going to be horrible. I remember exactly when I was first made…
December 7, 2017
By the time I was wiping my tears away at the end of Coco, Pixar’s latest gift to the world of animated films, I was already considering where it might land in my personal Pixar movie rankings. For now, the list goes: Finding Nemo Inside Out Wall-E Toy Story 3 Ratatouille I’m not sure if…
November 30, 2017
The Grammys don’t matter. It’s important that we all agree to that, here at the beginning. It’s important because, historically speaking, Grammy wins have been used as ammunition in arguments about musical artists’ accomplishments, especially in comparison to other artists. Perhaps this made sense in the past, perhaps it didn’t. I mean, Roger Miller won…
November 16, 2017
A good courtroom drama is hard to beat. The ingredients for a compelling narrative are there: the law, justice, guilt, innocence. In a courtroom drama, the stakes are organically high, the conflict clear, and the characters intensely motivated. All of this adds up to a kind of obvious appeal, and any number of directors have…
November 9, 2017
As the final notes of The Police’s “Every Breath You Take” played over shots of Stranger Things’ endearing young characters shuffling (and smooching) their way around Hawkins Middle School Gym, my mind had already turned to thoughts of where these characters and their stories might go during the already-confirmed third season. This is perhaps unfair.…
November 2, 2017
I saw an ad this week for Denzel Washington’s new movie Roman J. Israel, Esq. It got me thinking. In the last couple of years, I’ve read a lot of books about the way the human brain works. For one thing, I hope that understanding the brain will help me assess my own biases and…
October 26, 2017
In his excellent book Killing Yourself to Live, the writer Chuck Klosterman argues that “every straight man born after the year 1958 has at least one transitory period in his life when he believes Led Zeppelin is the only good band that ever existed.” I’m not sure how well this generalization holds up in the wider sense,…
October 19, 2017
Fox News commentator Katherine Tempf caused sad white weirdos everywhere to stub out their morning’s fifth cigarette in exasperation when word got out that, on something called The Greg Gutfeld Show, she had claimed that Radiohead would get into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame even though their music was “elaborate moaning and whining…
October 12, 2017
Not long ago, a Star Wars fan asked Rian Johnson, director of the franchise’s next entry, if he thought that avoiding the movie’s forthcoming promotional barrage would enhance the experience of seeing the movie when it finally releases on December 14. Johnson was predictably ambivalent, but he said that if fans really wanted to go…