And what did the generator throw up for us this time?
#746: Housewife
#895: The Staircase 2
#554: The Danish Poet
#754: In the Realms of the Unreal: The Mystery of Henry Darger
#479: Romper Stomper
Getting into some controversial territory with this bunch, no? Anyway, off we go!
Read the rest of this entryThe random number generator tossed up…
#496: A Short Love Story in Stop Motion
#443: L.A. Confidential
#846: Undead
#844: Shoulder Arms
#919: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
And so on we go!
Read the rest of this entrySo I just now realized that the first part of this, which I finished two days ago, I never hit Publish on! Well, now it’s published, and we’re off to the races on the second batch of five:
#887: Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon
#627: Sherman’s March
#608: Suspect Zero
#567: Young Frankenstein
#513: Albino Alligator
Should be some more interesting bits to mull over than the kind-of-obvious first slate, so let’s go!
And here we go. The first five movies the random number generator popped out for me:
#497: The Station Agent
#882: The Booth
#490: Off the Charts: The Song-Poem Story
#403: 6ixtynin9
#654: Dead Presidents
Pretty formidable for a first lineup, no? And thus, off we go.
Wait… movie content? Perish the thought!
This is going to be a series, but not one nearly as organized and consistent as the Desert Island Disc series from 2013. The TL;DR version: I’m going to try and rearrange the (now over seven hundred) four-star movies on my Thousand Best list. (Warning: link requires a Letterboxd account)
Read more: The Rearrangements: An Introduction Read the rest of this entry
We’re halfway caught up! And it’s only… March [EDIT! Here we are in April]…
at this rate I’m not even going to start listening to new music until summer. Sheesh. But we continue apace, and I’ve finally distilled 2021 down to the most essential albums your collection is in dire need of. And so, as always, we begin with a quick rules recap:
Read more: Best I Heard, 2021 Edition Read the rest of this entryAnd here we are, finally getting into the missing back issues of the AotY lists. I didn’t start digging into 2022’s releases with quite as many as I did with any other year I’m doing make-up articles on, but it was still over two hundred. A number of fantastic albums in 2022, and we’re well-represented with both new-to-me bands and old friends. So, a quick recap of everyone’s favorite list rules:
Well, it’s been a bit.
I mean, I don’t have to tell you how friggin’ weird the last five years have been, right? And yet still, I’m pissed at myself for dropping the ball here because (a) as of March 2019, my working life is over for good (progressive arthritis will do that to ya), so it’s not like I don’t have the time to listen to albums and report back, and more importantly, (b) I dropped that ball on what would have been the fortieth anniversary of my ten-best lists. So I’ve been meaning to kick myself in the rear and get going again. And every time I decide to, something happens.. This year, though, I finally sat down, broke the last five years of my collection into Plex playlists by year, and starting doing seriously deep dives. I haven’t listened to a single piece of music recorded before 2019 that hasn’t been thrust upon me (I got Mariah’d on Thanksgiving day–I didn’t even get the chance to play the game this year!). About three months into this process, I realized there was no way I was going to get all five lists done by the end of 2023. I’m writing this first draft on December 11th while avoiding moving duties (we’re moving on the 15th and there’s still HUGE amounts to do, so I’m sitting here typing while waiting for painkillers to kick in so I can keep attacking the kitchen), and on my way home from a quick errand just now, I finally eliminated the bubble release, and I’m finally down to the lists.
Read the rest of this entry
Every year, during the first third of it or thereabouts, I hear a stunning piece of work that makes me say “this is the first real contender for Album of the Year.” Of course, with the plethora of albums released every year, what this means in practice is “here, wear this target on your back for the next nine to eleven months.” Most years, that’s how it plays out; I’ve been doing this for forty years now, and in all that time, three albums I started out saying that about actually ended up Album of the Year. The first appeared in February 1987; to this day, King Diamond’s Abigail remains, for me, the greatest concept album ever released. The second was Merzbow’s Ikebukuro Dada, which climbed atop the mountain in March of 2002 and was never topped. The third? Read on.
[originally published 12Oct2012]
Cthulhu (Dan Gildark, 2007)
Welcome to the end of the world. Image source: wikipedia
Cthulhu, Dan Gildark’s expressive, delicious supernatural drama, suffers from the same mismarketing that most supernatural dramas do. This is not entirely unexpected, considering the supernatural drama is, these days, almost exclusively a Southeast Asian genre, and when similarly exceptional Asian films find their way over here, they are usually mismarketed as horror as well. (Case in point: Soo-youn Lee’s The Uninvited, one of the greatest Korean films ever made, widely panned for “not being scary enough”.) I admit, Gildark probably brought some of it on himself by tapping into the Lovecraftian mythos, but really, kiddies, if you pick up anything even remotely Lovecraft-related and expect a Roger Corman (or, worse, a Brian Yuzna) movie, you’re going to be disappointed by, well, every good attempt at Lovecraft that’s ever been committed to screen–“and this one is very good indeed.
Popcorn for Breakfast 