the only best-of-the-year film poll you'll need

Well, that might be an exaggeration. But the indieWIRE poll of 107 alt-weekly and alt-leaning critics is a good place to start. My only complaint: I wasn't asked to submit.

who loves the shins?

I do. You should too. And with their new single, "Phantom Limb," there's more to love.

Elsewhere in Consumables, I gush about Sonic Youth, Sparklehorse, and the best hip-hop album of the year: The Coup's Pick a Bigger Weapon.

will smith goes for his oscar

The Pursuit of Happyness is a pretty standard based-on-a-true-story "inspirational" tale. But Will Smith's seemingly indestructible charm keeps the movie from collapsing into Hallmark dreck.

ucla 13, usc 9: the fans have their say

Sometimes you don't need a sportswriter to summarize your feelings about a game's outcome; sometimes the fans can express it just as well.

Today's collection of letters in the Los Angeles Times sports section are all from Trojan and Bruin fans reacting to UCLA's stunning upset of USC last Saturday. The win destroyed the Trojans' chances for going to the national championship, ended their seven-game dominance of their crosstown rival, and (perhaps most importantly) shattered USC's air of superiority, of presumed dominance.

Nothing I have read sums up the experience of that game better than the elated, angry, mocking, pithy, clever responses from these fans.

too many movie reviews to keep track of

My reviews of ...

... Casino Royale

... For Your Consideration

... The Departed

... Babel

... Happy Feet

... Candy

... Flags of Our Fathers

... Iraq in Fragments

... The Last King of Scotland

... Sweet Land

... are all in this week's Consumables.

i don't make my jukebox selections for the recognition

One of the best places for consistently good music commentary is The Onion, that beacon of cultural satire. I must admit that I had taken The Onion for granted of late -- I don't check the site as frequently as I did, say, five years ago. But I came across this article and remembered how dead-on the fictional newspaper's writers can be. "I Don't Make My Jukebox Selections For The Recognition" is an "opinion piece" written by a very self-satisfied music fan who "considers jukeboxing an art, and not a cheap plea for notoriety." The piece nicely mocks all us music "experts" who love to find any opportunity -- any at all -- to show off the breadth of our, ahem, knowledge.

david thomson on will ferrell

David Thomson's Biographical Dictionary of Film is a reference book I check as frequently as I do my dictionary -- it's a constant companion. Unfortunately, we have to wait years between editions of his book. Thankfully, he's starting to update it an actor or director at a time over at The Guardian. His most recent entry is on Will Ferrell, and it's easily the smartest look at the comedic actor I've read. (I tried myself a few years back.)

penelope cruz vs. borat

I'm sure it's a fight some twisted individuals would love to see. My reviews of Volver and Borat are part of my latest Consumables column.

joanna newsom's new album.

Five songs.

Fifty-six minutes.

Say hello to Ys.

Ugh.

whatever happened to moby?

After 1999's Play, he seemed like he was on his way to becoming a superstar. Didn't quite happen, huh? Still, with the release of his new best-of, Go, it's time to reassess.

cocaine cowboys

It may seem like a sleazy documentary about the drug wars that overtook Miami in the 1970s and '80s, but Cocaine Cowboys is also a darkly funny, smart perspective on a tumultuous time, told by the good guys and bad guys who saw it firsthand.

the queen

The Stephen Frears movie is great, even if you don't care at all about the royal family. Also in Consumables, the Hold Steady and the Pogues make beautiful music (but not together).

the man who used to be in guided by voices

Robert Pollard writes too many songs and releases too many albums. But that's why his fans love him. Even though Guided by Voices has disbanded, Pollard keeps rolling right along. Normal Happiness is his latest and, his admirers will be happy to know, it's more of the same.

saw iii

The third installment in the horror franchise is more of the same, except less so.

badly drawn boy

It's been six long years since The Hour of Bewilderbeast. Badly Drawn Boy's latest record, Born in the U.K., is as cozy and lush as you would expect. But he seems to have lost his ability to wow us.

little children

Todd Field's second movie is pretty terrific, although it could have been ever better. Also in Consumables, reviews of Deliver Us from Evil, the Pernice Brothers, Irving, 30 Rock, and that new John Mellencamp song you've undoubtedly heard if you've watched any of the ads during the baseball playoffs.

the decemberists

Colin Meloy's indie-rock group has never done much for me. Then I heard their new record, The Crane Wife. This is the warmest, most moving collection of stories he's assembled, backed up by hooks that recall the timeless pull of ancient ballads.

writing pad, lesson two: reviewing as storytelling

Greil Marcus is brilliant at taking an album and turning its songs, lyrics, and themes into a narrative -- he reviews the work by presenting it as a story. The tricky thing about this process is that to fully appreciate his review, you may need to be familiar with the album already.

Of all his pieces, this may be my favorite: his glowing review of Bob Dylan's magnificent Love and Theft. He writes the piece as the story of an old man (Dylan) who lives in town who no one really knows. Along the way, Marcus references the songs as clues to the old man's secret passions and sorrows. Anyone who loves the album will find that Marcus has recreated the experience of hearing it for the first time, unraveling its many pleasures.

writing pad, lesson one: the review as social observation

I mentioned before that I'll be teaching a class this weekend at the Writing Pad on the art of criticism, so I've been looking for good samples for a few weeks in preparation. This review by Ann Powers of the Britney Spears compilation, My Prerogative, does a great job of both dissecting the pop star's fame as well as examining how her celebrity seems perfectly timed for an era when young women are being sexualized more and more. And all the while, Powers smartly reviews the actual songs, too.

zerophilia

Good news: My review of Zerophilia is my first in The Village Voice.

Bad news: I had to watch Zerophilia.

marmaduke explained

Is this commentary? Should it be in this blog? I dunno -- but it makes me laugh. A lot.

jesus camp

Jesus Camp, the new documentary about the religious right's desire to indoctrinate its children into the cause, is both disturbing and heavy-handed. Elsewhere, in Consumables, reviews of The U.S. vs. John Lennon, Fergie, and the terrific Todd Snider.

j dilla, r.i.p.

Dilla, the talented hip-hop producer, died at the age of 32 earlier this year. The Shining was the album he was working on near the end, and now it's out. It's no landmark record, but it's a fine swan song.

crumb

Crumb, Terry Zwigoff's great documentary about his friend Robert Crumb, will be playing at the Aero on Sunday, October 1 as part of a retrospective of the director's work. I pay homage here.

And for a great, in-depth interview with Zwigoff about the making of Crumb, I highly recommend this site, which includes these bits:

There was certainly times when I was following him around with a camera where he would get to the point where he was running out of patience for it. He would turn to me and say, “If you were not my best friend, I would be so out of here.”

Robert always thought [Crumb] would just be shown on my living room wall. And when it wasn’t and when it sort of caught on and started being released to theaters theatrically and getting all these favorable reviews in all the magazines and newspapers, it really had an alarming effect on his life where he would start to get recognized on the street and journalists were showing up on his doorstep to interview him. And his life as he knew it was changing.

studio 60 on the sunset strip

Aaron Sorkin's new NBC drama, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, is the sort of sophisticated, flashy character piece you'd expect from the West Wing auteur. That's a good and a bad thing.

how have we changed since 9/11? don't ask us.

John Powers has a fine essay in the LA Weekly about the incessant desire in the media and within both political parties to use the anniversary of 9/11 for their own purposes. The GOP gets whacked around, but so do newspapers and artists in general:

[I]t's worth remembering that, in the rush to pontificate about that awful September morning, five years is no time at all. Events may be fast, but meaning is slow.

lambchop

The Kurt Wagner-led Nashville alt-country band return with a new album, Damaged. I think it's one of their best.

zach braff gets serious

The Last Kiss plays like a somber version of Zach Braff's Garden State, but despite this new film's ambitions to be significant and meaningful, it's loads less profound about twenty-somethings than Braff's quirky, heartfelt offering from two years ago.

keep your 9/11 away from my 9/11

The anniversary of 9/11 always depresses me, but it goes beyond the memory of what happened five years ago. Nowadays, it's the way certain people -- and certain people in power -- try to use 9/11 for their own benefits, trying to bully the rest of us into thinking that they care more about what happened or that they are the only ones who haven't forgotten. That attitude makes me so angry I just wanted to hide in a ball on Monday, and I pretty much did.

Tuesday morning brought some happiness, though, thanks to Keith Olbermann. His 9/11 commentary speaks eloquently to the anger that many of us feel. The Bush administration keeps reminding us that we can't forget what happened five years ago. Olbermann suggests that not only haven't we forgotten, we've also remembered all the foolish decisions and cynical manipulation that have transpired since then:

History teaches us that nearly unanimous support of a government cannot be taken away from that government by its critics. It can only be squandered by those who use it not to heal a nation's wounds, but to take political advantage.

bob dylan

Modern Times isn't up to the level of Dylan's other recent albums. Sorry, it's true. Elsewhere in Consumables, I go nuts for Neko Case's latest record and have nice things to say about Ben Affleck's performance in Hollywoodland.

the album leaf

Jimmy LaValle, the electronica musician who is the Album Leaf, is an unassuming nice guy. I know because I interviewed him about two years ago. Well, he's back with a new record, Into the Blue Again. He makes good records -- I just wish he would resist the urge to sing.

jody rosen on robert christgau

Slate's Jody Rosen has a noteworthy appreciation on Robert Christgau's legacy. While I disagree with some of Rosen's nitpicks about the Dean's style, passages like this more than make up for it:

Christgau's craft is all about compression. He has published hundreds of terrific, expansive essays over the years, but his signature column is the Consumer Guide, a monthly compendium of capsule record reviews that he's been writing since 1969. To date, Christgau has produced more than 13,000 mini-reviews, a testament to his legendarily voracious listening habits. (On the few occasions I've seen Christgau in the flesh, he's either been wearing headphones or had them at the ready around his neck.) With Pauline Kael, Christgau is arguably one of the two most important American mass-culture critics of the second half of the 20th century -- yet he's devoted the majority of his working life to fashioning 100-word blurbs with letter grades. He's a public intellectual who unwittingly invented the reviews section of
Entertainment Weekly.

talking to patricia foulkrod

Patricia Foulkrod is the director of The Ground Truth, a new documentary about the horrors that befall our troops once they return home from combat. Anybody who has been following B.D.'s ordeal on Doonesbury since he lost part of a leg in Iraq knows that the mental scars can be as harrowing as the physical ones, and The Ground Truth brings these realities similarly to life without political grandstanding.

I spoke with Foulkrod recently for the LA Weekly:

"The biggest mythology in American culture about war is that if you sign up for the military, you'll be taken care of. And I think many soldiers believe that. Even as they're watching someone they know -- a brother or a father who was in Vietnam who came back messed up and never spoke about it and never got help -- they think that somehow they will be different."

The rest of the interview appears here.

robert christgau and "breakfast with the beatles": say it ain't so

As we slide into Labor Day weekend, there are two sad stories on my radar. First, is that Robert Christgau has been let go from the Village Voice. The second is that this Sunday will be the final Breakfast with the Beatles radio show on L.A.'s 97.1 FM. Times change, the fates shift ... I'm not feeling much comfort in those platitudes. It reminds me of Mike Royko's comment: "I learned a long time ago that life isn't always fair. But it shouldn't cheat that much."

The most we can hope for is that both Christgau and Breakfast will find more supportive home bases soon. In the meantime, here's a great piece Christgau wrote right after the death of John Lennon. Seemed appropriate.

the st. louis rams as a microcosm of the nfl

Yes, a rare sports piece from yours truly. For Deadspin, I wrote an NFL season preview for the St. Louis Rams. Kinda. I mostly used the team as a springboard to talk about what I love (and don't love) about the National Football League. The Deadspin readers were not pleased.

hearting justin timberlake

It's no secret that I'm quite fond of the solo career of Mr. Justin Timberlake. I continue with the kind words in my latest Consumables column. I also ponder Paris Hilton and Spike Lee. (Now there's a combo.)

hendrik hertzberg nails bush again

The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg has so continually criticized the Bush administration's failures in Iraq and elsewhere that it's easy to take his always-fine commentary for granted. But this week's piece on the growing American consensus against the war is one of his very best, as he coldly dissects the litany of recent disappointments ...

The war's sole real gain -- the overthrow of the murderous Saddam Hussein regime -- is mocked by the chaos and suffering that have overwhelmed millions of Iraqis, whose country is again a republic of fear. The concrete losses are horrific: nearly three thousand American and "coalition" troops killed; thousands more maimed; scores of thousands of Iraqi civilians dead; a third of a trillion dollars burned through. So are the less tangible ones: the unprecedented levels of anti-Americanism throughout the Muslim world and Europe; the self-inflicted loss of America's moral prestige; the neglect of real nuclear dangers, in Iran and North Korea, while chimeras were chased in Iraq. The neoconservative project of a friendly, democratic Middle East, with Israel and Palestine living side by side in peace, is worse than a charred ruin -- it is a flaming inferno.

Just about covers it, huh? Of all the insightful points Hertzberg makes, "the self-inflicted loss of America's moral prestige" probably angers me the most -- the idea that we now live in a country that has (in the eyes of the rest of the world) forfeited its reputation for honorable, virtuous behavior is going to be a bitter pill we'll be swallowing for a long time to come, I fear.

snakes on a plane

The wait is over: Snakes on a Plane is finally here. It's no work of art, but for a late-summer B-movie, it has a whole lot of charm.

seeing barry lyndon on the big screen

The Academy is hosting a screening of Stanley Kubrick's underrated Barry Lyndon on Monday, August 21. If you've never seen it -- or only seen it at home -- now's your chance. Even better: Ryan O'Neal might be there, too.

writing pad

I'll be teaching a one-day seminar in Los Angeles on Saturday, October 14 as part of the Writing Pad. The topic? The art of reviewing. It'll be fun, I swear -- and the food should be quite tasty.

please see the house of sand

It's an amazing film. If that doesn't sway you, my latest Consumables column also covers Miami Vice, Scoop, and Band of Horses.

there are worse things than mel gibson...

... like our current president, for instance.

will ferrell

The former Saturday Night Live comedian is pretty funny in his new film, Talladega Nights. If that's not enough to entice you, Sacha Baron Cohen is also in it.

the motel

Writer-director Michael Kang's debut feature, about a young boy stuck working in his mom's dingy motel, might sound dull, but it's a quietly moving coming-of-age story. On the other side of the quality spectrum, there's Another Gay Movie.

little miss sunshine

Steve Carell is quite good in this comedy-drama. Also in Consumables, I discuss A Scanner Darkly, Thom Yorke's The Eraser, and that song about booties that's all over the radio.

the endless misery in the middle east

Remember how those who opposed the Iraq War said we shouldn't overextend our military on the off-chance that, who knows, we might need our troops for a more pressing problem somewhere else? The difficulties with North Korea and Iran have only strengthened those arguments, and, as Rosa Brooks points out in a sharply worded piece in the Los Angeles Times, the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah is simply the latest evidence of the error in the Bush Administration's thinking.

metallica: "enter sandman"

Although my article profiling the making of Metallica's "Enter Sandman" ran in Blender a year ago, the piece is just now becoming available online. Lots of fond memories rush through my head as I re-read this piece; thanks again to Lars Ulrich, who was a terrific interview. Enjoy.

people like johnny depp as a pirate

The Pirates of the Caribbean sequel is making a ton of dough, but isn't so good. Elsewhere in my Consumables column, I tackle Superman Returns, the Dixie Chicks, the Arctic Monkeys and other fun entertainment items.

you, me and dupree

I thought Wedding Crashers was a pretty smart "new dude" comedy, but You, Me and Dupree demonstrates that the genre is far from foolproof.

baffled by the searchers

In honor of its 50th anniversary, John Ford's The Searchers has been re-released on DVD. Here in Los Angeles, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences screened a new print to commemorate the occasion, which I attended. I'd seen the film several years ago, but hadn't quite understood some critics and filmmakers' adoration for this square and disjointed Western. Despite the gorgeous new print, I remained very much in the dark.

I was, therefore, very relieved to find Stephen Metcalf's recent piece which does a great job dissecting both the flaws of The Searchers and the tangled rationale for its fans' enthusiasm. It can be difficult to trash a consensus masterwork without sounding foolish or petty, but Metcalf smartly sidesteps such pitfalls. His opener says it all…

The Searchers, John Ford's epic 1956 Western, is a film geek's paradise: It is preposterous in its plotting, spasmodic in its pacing, unfunny in its hijinks, bipolar in its politics, alternately sodden and convulsive in its acting, not to mention boring.

wishing roger ebert well

It's easy to make potshots at Roger Ebert because of his popularity and visibility as a film critic, but there can be no question that for a lot of young filmgoers he was the person who first introduced us to the great movies that got us hooked for life.

Considering his recent health problems, I thought back to this revealing portrait of Ebert's home life from The New York Times. You get a sense of a fully lived life awash in the art and the people who matter most to him. Frankly, it sounds as close to Heaven as someone in our business can hope to achieve.

if only gay sex caused global warming

That's the provocative headline to Daniel Gilbert's great op-ed about people's willingness to ignore a problem that doesn't seem to be affecting them directly and immediately. In other words, global warming might be real but nobody cares, while flag-burning drives everyone into a tizzy despite its rather low danger factor.

no comment

Attention, all bloggers: If you're sad that no one's responding to your heartfelt, eloquent postings, Pearls Before Swine feels your pain. Kinda.

the road to guantanamo

The controversial film, along with Cars, A Prairie Home Companion, and Ghostface Killah's Fishscale, is reviewed in my latest Consumables column.

the fast and the furious: tokyo drift

The new installment in the Fast and the Furious series isn't necessarily terrific, but its up-and-coming star, Lucas Black, may be someone worth keeping an eye on.

the lake house

The new romantic drama starring Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock, which opens Friday, will be a hit among the female set. Men are another matter entirely.

bruce springsteen: protest folkie

While I respect Springsteen's post-9/11 work, it's been hard for me to love it as much as Tunnel of Love or Born in the U.S.A. His fans, of course, won't have the same difficulty.

the need for iraqi civil war

While the Bush administration strains with all its might to insist that Iraq is not tumbling into civil war, Edward N. Luttwak of the Center for Strategic and International Studies argues that, frankly, maybe that's just what Iraq needs:

Civil wars can be especially atrocious as neighbors kill each other at close range, but they also have a purpose. They can bring lasting peace by destroying the will to fight and by removing the motives and opportunities for further violence.

The logic is very sound. Of course, the White House will have a hard time accepting this rationale -- it will be a bitter pill for the Republicans to swallow if they acknowledge that they have to step aside and let the country implode so that the Iraqi people can eventually move forward.

camera obscura

This sextet from Glasgow write pretty songs about being sad. Let's Get Out of This Country is their latest. I quite like it.

Playwright Edward Albee argues that what separates us from animals isn't our ability to use tools or possess a soul -- it's our desire to create art:

I hold that we are the only animal that makes art, and I'm convinced that this is part of the evolutionary process. We all used to have a tail, you know. Not a collective one, you understand, but we still have a jut of bone at the base of our spine called the coccyx, and that is the vestigial remnant of our tails. You still have this jut of bone; don't look now, but take it as we must so much on faith. To simplify just a little bit, what happened is this: Somewhere along the line in the evolutionary process, our tails fell off and we grew art.

For most writers, this would be a strong enough point, but Albee goes further, chiding us to understand the repercussions in a society where art is no longer valued:

[B]roadly speaking, the [artists] we rightly put up on pedestals have less influence on the mind and morality of this country than their intellectual and creative inferiors. We know it is commerce that determines this, which equates popularity with excellence. But I warn you, if the finest minds and talents cease to matter in the larger cultural picture, we are in serious trouble, and our culture is in serious decline.

the best weapon against terrorism? scorn

Professor J. Michael Waller has an interesting suggestion on how to win the War on Terrorism. When engaging an enemy whose main weapon is fear, he writes, you must remove Al Qaeda's ability to inspire terror. In other words, you need to mock them, which the U.S. military did to great effect by releasing those humiliating outtakes from Abu Musab Zarqawi's latest video.

To most Americans, ridiculing terrorists might seem trivial, even sophomoric, as a weapon of war. But dictators and terrorists, being unable to function in the free market of ideas, need propagandists to control (not merely spin) their public images. They require obedience or acquiescence -- a fear factor that cannot long coexist with put-downs and snickering.

Intellectually, the argument makes a certain amount of sense. Of course, it also calls to mind this exchange from Woody Allen's Manhattan:

Isaac Davis: Has anybody read that Nazis are gonna march in New Jersey? Y'know, I read this in the newspaper. We should go down there, get some guys together, y'know, get some bricks and baseball bats and really explain things to them.

Party Guest: There is this devastating satirical piece on that on the Op Ed page of the Times, it is devastating.

Isaac Davis: Well, a satirical piece in the Times is one thing, but bricks and baseball bats really gets right to the point.