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Wednesday, August 12th, 2009

Blu-ray Review: “Watchmen Director’s Cut”

by Jeff Giles

61OQtfp2ndL._SCLZZZZZZZ_[1]Watchmen (2009, Warner Bros.)
purchase from Amazon: DVD | Blu-ray

Others may have summarized Watchmen more eloquently, but my friend and colleague David Medsker struck right at the essence of the year’s first would-be blockbuster with three simple words: “Floppy blue cock!”

This is not to say there’s anything wrong with cock in the movies — floppy, blue, or otherwise — but the genitalia proudly displayed by Doctor Manhattan, Watchmen’s emotionless, radiation-powered superbeing, are the perfect visual distillation of the film, for three reasons: One, it’s hard not to get distracted looking at it; two, it frequently looks silly; and three — given Manhattan’s propensity for supersizing himself — it’s painfully, unbearably long.

Seriously. Seriously, you guys. If you plunk down the $21.50 it’ll cost you at Amazon to get Zack Snyder’s painstaking recreation of the classic graphic novel on Blu-ray, you will get plenty of bang for your buck, starting with the 186-minute director’s cut, and including sooo much more — a stack of featurettes tracing the book’s impact as well as its journey to the screen, a “maximum movie mode” that will allow you to watch the movie while Snyder raps at you, and the ability to link up the disc’s BD-Live features with Facebook so you can share your Watchmen experience with your friends. The package even includes a digital copy! The merits of the movie aside, this is exactly the kind of stuff that will make or break Blu-ray as a format; instead of pumping cheapo transfers of catalog titles onto store shelves, if the studios put more effort into stuffing their titles with added content with this much interactive coolness, I have to believe that even reissues of dreck like Indecent Proposal would enjoy healthy sales. (more…)

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Wednesday, July 29th, 2009

Screw TV on the Radio — Who’s Ready for Popdose on the Radio?

by Jeff Giles

Up ’til now, you’ve been able to get Popdose in your browser, your RSS reader, your Twitter feed, and all over Facebook — but we all know that simply isn’t enough, so we’ve teamed up with radio host Jon Grayson to bring your favorite pop culture disseminators onto the radio dial.

Here’s the deal: Once a week, one of your faithful Popdose writers will be making an appearance on Overnight America with Jon Grayson, a weekly show broadcast out of KMOX in St. Louis, and syndicated in several cities. We’ll be chatting with Mr. Grayson about some of the most interesting stories to post at Popdose in the last week, and…well, our Overnight America debut — recorded with New Music Editor Ken Shane — is already on the books, and you can hear it in the show’s archives, so listen now!

Obviously, we’re all very excited about this new development for the site, and we hope you’ll be able to find us on your AM dial (see the list of Overnight America stations here) — or visit the show’s archives every Tuesday to hear our latest segment. And stay “tuned” (ugh) for more exciting news…we’ve got big plans!

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Friday, June 19th, 2009

The Bigger Picture: Film and the Age of Facebook

by Arend Anton

mm_twitter[1]We live in a self-absorbed culture. Everything we do is shared through blogs, status updates, and tweets. Now that people have the Internet on their phones, nobody is more than a second away from an update. Yet, in this age of instantaneous content, cinema is still going strong.

Hollywood has panicked a bit in the last few years. For a time, box office numbers took a dive, and they began to blame their troubles on piracy. First, let’s discuss that logic. The entertainment industry always labels pirated works as “lost sales.” That’s not quite true. It’s difficult to predict whether the people who watch pirated movies would have actually paid for that work in the first place. People who use cracked software generally do so out of necessity, and how can the software industry really justify the prices they charge?

None of what I say is the equivocal truth, but then again, neither is the industry’s complaint of “lost sales.” I don’t even know where to look for ripped movies. The people who do it, thought prevalent, still make up an incredibly small number. Would it be justified for the retail industry to blame poor sales on shoplifting, and to call those incidents “lost sales?” (more…)

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Thursday, June 4th, 2009

The Bigger Picture: The Animal, the Internet, and “Darkon”

by Arend Anton

darkon1I’ve often written in this column about the state of film criticism and the Internet. It might seem strange that I, an online film columnist, feel I have the authority to judge something I take part in. It’s sort of like those internal government memos that we all question the validity of. Nevertheless, I usurp that power like the demagogue of Popdose.

In our everyday lives, we commonly adhere to societal rules and standards. People mostly treat each other with politeness and courtesy. We hold the door for strangers and wave after another driver lets us change lanes. Do we do this out of our own inner kindness or because we fear retribution for doing the wrong thing?

The Internet is an entirely different world. For many, it has become a separate reality. Often the rules of politeness disintegrate in this world and our truly animalistic side overcomes us. It is the ability to retain anonymity that gives people the strength to ignore the fear of reprisal.

My neighbor Mary has a young dog, named Ash. He’s a mix between a Yellow Labrador and a German Shepherd, and one of the most handsome dogs you’ll ever meet. When Mary leaves town, I often take care of Ash, mostly because I like dogs and enjoy being a helpful guy. (more…)

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Friday, April 17th, 2009

Bootleg City: David Bowie in Baton Rouge, April ‘78 (Pt. 2)

by Robert Cass

Late last summer a DVD of the movie August, which features David Bowie in a cameo, showed up at the office where I used to work. If you haven’t heard of it, you’re not alone: it was released in one theater in New York City last July before making a quick exit to video the following month. If it hadn’t been for that promo DVD, I doubt I would’ve heard of it either.

Directed by Austin Chick, August isn’t a terribly compelling film, due in large part to Josh Hartnett’s emotionally distant yet gratuitously beefcakey lead performance, i.e. “Don’t look at me! I mean, check out the six-pack, of course, but don’t look look at me.” (Is it just me, or do you get the feeling Hartnett tortured small woodland creatures as a child? Somebody needs to cast this brooding hunk as a serial killer — or at least a young Tommy Lee Jones — ASAP.) Howard A. Rodman’s script has some clever touches, though, like how it never explains what dot-com guru wannabe Tom Sterling’s (Hartnett) company actually does. I worked for a start-up for just three months in 2000 before being laid off, and during that brief time I had trouble justifying the company’s existence to my friends and family.

The press release that came with the August DVD said that the film “follows Josh Hartnett as a young dot-com entrepreneur who fights to regain control of his company from Ogilvie (David Bowie).” Based on that description you’d think Ogilvie is a major character in the movie, but as I said, the part-time actor only has a cameo. His single scene — at the film’s climax — is an important one, but he’s in and out of August in less than six minutes.

(more…)

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Posted in Bootleg City, Film, Music | Comments

Friday, March 20th, 2009

No Concessions: Fallen Stars

by Bob Cashill

I got word that Natasha Richardson had died Wednesday evening. But the Internet had killed her off Tuesday afternoon. And that bothers me.

Word came via an erroneous report on the Time Out New York website, which was retracted, though not before an onslaught of hits had crashed its server. I don’t blame the site for pursuing a lead that turned out to be false; if Natasha Richardson was a star anywhere, it was on the New York stage. But there’s something ghoulish about needing to be first with the “scoop,” when the scoop is a life-or-death matter—and whatever clarifying intentions the site had in posting the news, it could not but look as if it were angling to be out in front. The resulting misinformation led to a wave of aggravatingly dubious reports and falsehoods, perpetuated on online forums and the likes of Perez Hilton’s site and OK! magazine (which the diminished UPI used as an “informed” source), providing an infuriating underscore to Richardson’s actual demise a day later.

In the horse-and-buggy era, you read about someone’s mishap in the newspaper, got an update from the TV or radio news, then followed the saga day by day. Minute by minute is how we roll now. The old-media gatekeepers best-qualified to judge the so-called “public’s right to know” are too busy keeping the lights on to take greater care of the editorial content, while the bloggers just poop out whatever anonymous tidbit is in the air. I was just fine knowing what I needed to know about Christopher Reeve’s riding accident and subsequent paralysis in 1995, at the dawn of web time; and I’m satisfied to know that Steve Jobs is ailing and on medical leave without needing to know his exact condition, latest test results, and whatever else members of the business press are demanding. I’m under no illusion that he will personally repair my MacBook Pro when it breaks down.

For all the wrong, tabloid reasons, Richardson is a star now. Her tragic end secured her the cover of People magazine. I can hear America asking, “Who was Nastasha Richardson?” It’s a fair question. To the general public, she was two things: the wife (actress, right?) of Liam Neeson, a middle-of-the-pack celebrity enjoying a surprise hit movie to call his own (Taken, a title with a grimmer connotation now), and Liam Neeson’s wife (actress, right?) who died unexpectedly as a consequence of a skiing accident. That she was part of a dynastic clan of actors, or laid claim to greatness on Broadway, was fuzzier at best. If you had trouble placing her when you heard the news, I’m not patronizing you, from my aisle seat as a New York theater writer who saw her incandescent Tony-winning performance in Cabaret, her fine work in Closer (she found the biting humor the film version lost), and a formidable Blanche opposite John C. Reilly’s miscast Stanley in A Streetcar Named Desire (pictured). Outside of the Lindsay Lohan remake of The Parent Trap and a supporting role in Maid in Manhattan, successful but unmemorable, she never made waves in the deeper pools of film and TV. (more…)

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Friday, March 6th, 2009

Letter from the Editor: Tuning Out the Static

by Jeff Giles

200420350-001I miss buying an album and lying on the floor for three days and going over it with a magnifying glass. I still go to the record store and spend hours there and buy a big bag of CDs. –Stevie Nicks from a recent interview with Rolling Stone

I think most music lovers over the age of, say, 25 can feel Stevie’s pain. Our readership skews slightly older here, so I think I can say with confidence that my early listening experiences mirrored many of yours — hours spent poring over an album’s artwork (either vinyl or cassette, natch), reading the fine print in the credits, memorizing musicians’ names, looking for hidden meaning in the lyrics. (Or just trying, and failing, to understand them at all.) Each major label had a different feel to me back then — from the cool blues of Reprise’s distinctive cassettes to the cheap, bare-bones packaging of MCA’s titles. While other kids my age were diagramming sentences, watching Nightmare on Elm Street movies, and requesting Bon Jovi on our local Top 40 stations, I was learning names like Joe Chemay, Jeff Bova, and Judd Miller.

And although music was portable back then — I never started my walk to school without my Walkman — it wasn’t the bite-sized commodity it is now; if you bought an album, you were probably going to develop more than a passing acquaintance with its contents, whether or not you liked every song. This happened for two reasons: One, because fast-forwarding through a track was a tedious, inexact process that sometimes took half as long as just listening to the damn song; and two, if you spent $10 to $15 on an album, you tended to feel like you needed to spend a little time with it.

I’ve talked before about how I feel like the advent of the CD sort of destroyed our relationship with music — how the ability to push through a song with a single tap of a button, and let a machine randomize an album’s running order, snapped the first tether between us and any kind of consistently deep emotional response to a song. But that isn’t what this column is about — not really, anyway. Today, I want to talk about where snapping that tether has led us — specifically, to a place where we can carry music with us literally everywhere we go, but really listening to it is damn near impossible.

I know my perspective as a music consumer isn’t totally unique, but I think my progression — from a typical ’80s kid who bought albums sparingly (and listened to them for years on end), to a writer who spent the late ’80s and early ’90s gorging on scads of free music (and discovering much of it wasn’t very good), to a thirtysomething critic with 200,000-odd mp3s in his library and an inability to remember enough favorite albums to fill out the latest Facebook meme — reflects the way our relationship with music has changed, and how our untrammelled access to cheap or free songs and albums has backfired on us, specifically those of us who really love music enough to spend time seeking it out. (more…)

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Monday, February 16th, 2009

Unsolicited Career Advice for… Tupac Shakur

by Rob Smith

Hip-hop music is not typically Uncle Donnie’s thing, nor is hip-hop slang, nor hip-hop fashion. Basically, Uncle Donnie doesn’t understand hip-hop, though he does try. Apparently, he doesn’t read much about it, either, because he’s still wondering why he hasn’t heard back from Tupac, whose estate received the following missive from Uncle Donnie about a month ago. —RS

TO:  Tupac Shakur
FROM:  Don Skwatzenschitz
RE:  Career advice

Hi, there, Pac. You might not remember me, but we ran into each other in the men’s room at the Palladium back in ‘94, at a Janet Jackson show. Wasn’t she great that night? My God, the sheer athleticism of that show—now there’s someone who has talent, who never has to stoop to silly publicity stunts (like, you know, public nudity or something) just to get people to listen to her music. Awesome. Though, I did really want to see the end of her show but couldn’t, because that one overly eager bodyguard of yours snapped my collar bone like he was breaking a pencil. But I let bygones be bygones, you know? Life’s too short.

So here it is, 2009, and I’m just now hearing the last record you put out, Pac’s Life, from 2006 (my wife Mitzi and her hip-hop tai chi class use “Playa Cardz Right” in their “2zday Mix”). What amazing poetry you, um, drop. Bringing in T.I. and Ashanti on the track “Pac’s Life” was a stroke of genius too, uh, playa. They’re totally hot right now. Why haven’t you done anything in the last two or three years? I went back to some of your other records, and was just floored by your delivery and the way you bring in these awesome guest stars and producers. “Fuck ‘Em All,” from Better Dayz? Talk about universal sentiment, uh, dawg. And “Thug N U Thug N Me,” from Until the End of Time is my new anthem. I’m even getting a t-shirt made with that on it.

Anyway, uh, homie, I think you need to get back out in front of people again, and I have some ideas to help you do just that. Be open-minded, though—some of these might seem odd, particularly to an obvious recluse like yourself. Just hear me out, though, um, yo. Check out this, uh, fly shizznit: (more…)

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