Posts Tagged ‘George Lucas’

  
Monday, October 5th, 2009

CD Review: Kiss, “Sonic Boom”

by Popdose Staff

BoomAny good label manager would tell you: don’t name your album something a reviewer could turn into a catchy, snarky counterpoint. But as we know far too well, most of the labels are hanging by a thread, the management inside reduced to bean counters versus quality controllers and, heck, if Hollywood keeps naming their movies in blindly self-insulting ways, why can’t the record industry follow suit?

Besides, we’re talking about Kiss here, who have built an iron-clad and insular fanbase that views such flaunting of common sense as an act of rebellion. Who cares if the new album Sonic Boom, the first since 1998’s Psycho Circus, opens itself up to opening paragraphs such as this, begging the question, “Boom or Bust?” What really matters is if the band has spent the decade-long downtime productively or not, and luckily for you, the Popdose staff has gone through the work of sussing it out so you don’t have to. Strap on your steel dragon-face boots, smear on your kabuki greasepaint and shake off your love gun. It’s time to rock and roll.

Rob Smith: I mentioned in my Overnight America Popdose segment a couple weeks ago that I cannot name a single Kiss studio album that’s great from start to finish (I hate “Beth,” so suck it all you Destroyer fans). After listening to Sonic Boom, I can still say I cannot name a single Kiss studio album that’s great from start to finish.

That said, I like “Never Enough” a lot, though the verses remind me of Poison’s “Nothin’ But a Good Time” a little TOO much.  Wasn’t Paul Stanley supposed to produce that album, too? (more…)

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Posted in CD Reviews, Music | Comments

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009

Book Review: Matt Springer, “Unconventional”

by Jeff Giles

zoom_777290[1]See, now this is what Fanboys wanted to be.

The debut novel (or novella, as somewhat grumpily conceded in the Author’s Note) from AlertNerd’s Matt Springer, Unconventional is, according to the front cover’s helpful summary, “a tale of sex, booze, and geeks”…pretty much in that order. And as unappealing as a book filled with drunk, naked nerds might seem, Springer makes it work, thanks to his effortlessly conversational writing and a plot that actually has less to do with Star Wars and Lord of the Rings than it lets on.

The story follows a sci-fi-loving trio of longtime friends (Marty, Ron, and Ham — a nickname, short for Hammerhead, as in the minor Star Wars character) on their adventures through one weekend at the UnConvention, “Chicagoland’s number one sci-fi con,” working in plenty of basement-dwelling misfits in Jedi costumes while building toward a few life-changing decisions for the main characters. It’s a framework you’re probably overly familiar with — as you’ll be with Unconventional’s habit of flashing back and forth between past and present in order to give the reader additional context — and pop metaculture has been drowning in geek heroes for years. At a fundamental level, the book is utterly ordinary, and it shouldn’t work as well as it does — but unlike most writers who dabble in geekdom, Springer actually has something to say, and instead of just presenting his characters as empty vessels for Klingon jokes, he uses them to deliver some trenchant, poignant messages about making the awkward transition into adulthood, and the nature of fandom in general. (more…)

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Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

Sugar Water: Black and/or White

by Robert Cass

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Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing opened in theaters on June 30, 1989, and as he told the Associated Press recently about the film’s controversial climax, “White people still ask me why Mookie threw the [trash] can through the window. Twenty years later, they’re still asking me that. No black person ever, in 20 years, no person of color has ever asked me why.”

Perhaps the white people who’ve asked Lee that question also wondered why black people across the United States celebrated the 1995 acquittal of O.J. Simpson, a famous black football player accused of murdering his white wife. As Todd Boyd, a professor of popular culture at the University of Southern California, noted in the HBO documentary O.J.: A Study in Black and White (2002), the gut reaction boiled down to psychological payback. In other words, for every black man in this country who’s been beaten, lynched, shot, or thrown behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit, you didn’t get this one.

It didn’t have to be O.J., who wasn’t exactly a shining beacon of black pride. And it wasn’t that every black person in America thought he was innocent. But, as Boyd noted on ESPN.com two years ago when discussing Barry Bonds’s home-run record, “acquittal in a court of law was trumped by conviction in the court of public opinion” in the following decade. Now Simpson is behind bars, for armed robbery and kidnapping — the verdict in that 2007 case was handed down exactly 13 years after he was acquitted for the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman — and it’d be difficult to believe that the jury wasn’t influenced by the general perception that Simpson had gotten off scot-free in the ’90s.

The black community had a similar, though more muted, reaction when Michael Jackson was found innocent of child molestation in 2005: “the powers that be” had failed to bring down another rich and famous black man who had risen to the top of his profession. (R&B star R. Kelly, who wrote Jackson’s 1995 hit “You Are Not Alone,” was acquitted of 14 counts of child pornography last year. So far, his career hasn’t been affected the way Jackson’s was.) But the biggest musical star of his generation wasn’t a symbol of black pride, either, at least not on the outside: since the mid-’80s his skin color had become lighter and lighter, his hair straighter and straighter, and his nose smaller and smaller due to an overabundance of plastic surgery. In 2002, when he accused his record label, Sony Music, of not supporting its black artists, the standard joke was “Who is this white woman and why is she calling Tommy Mottola a racist?”

(more…)

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Posted in Current Events, Film, Music, Sugar Water | Comments

Monday, April 27th, 2009

21st Century Digital Boy: TV Turn-Offs, Sylar Knifed, and Bye-Bye Dorothy

by Peter Chakerian

e00005201TV Turn-Off Week: While it’s not my official excuse for being away from you, this is my story and I’m sticking to it: Last week was “TV Turnoff Week”—an opportunity for the boobtube addicted (like me) to take a break and concentrate on the lost art of what us late ’70s/early ’80s kids used to experience as “family time” and “outside time.” Back then, family and outside time was more than just important… it was a way of life.

I grew up in an era when television was really hitting its stride and swelling with popular culture. We also had the hottest video gaming system in the universe (the Atari 2600) back then as well—the retro equivalent of the Nintendo Wii, Sony PlayStation and Xbox 360 all rolled into one. But we knew when to turn it all off.

Never mind that some of us remember what black and white television was like; we also knew the guerilla George Lucas Marketing™ on commercial television when we saw it. Everything was ultra-marketed. But none of those things seemed to be our undoing, because we knew how to park it in front of the small screen AND how to use our imaginations when our TV time was up. Our parents had a hand in that action. And we burned up whatever junk food we scarfed up by running around like banshees outside.

Our parents kept and eye on the clock and sent us out into the yard, where you’d re-enact your Starsky & Hutch, Knight Rider, The Dukes of Hazzard, Battlestar Galactica or Buck Rogers in the 25th Century episode(s) you just watched, or talked about how well you played Space Invaders and Pac-Man that week. The neighborhood kids were all into TV and video games, but they often spent four to five times the number of outside hours as inside. Especially during the prime outdoor seasons.

Back then, you didn’t see the level of obesity in kids (or adults, for that matter) that you do now. Or the level of mental “checking out” that you see in a lot of kids today. Everyone seemed to know when to turn it off and focus on physical activity. The boobtube wasn’t babysitting. (more…)

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Posted in 21st Century Digital Boy, Featured, Featured - Frontpage, Television | Comments

Tuesday, April 7th, 2009

DVD Review: “Howard the Duck”

by Dw. Dunphy

The question is not whether Howard The Duck has aged well, nor is it whether the movie was ahead of its time and is only now finding an appropriate audience. It isn’t even if the film is better than you remembered. Clearly it is not. This is still the movie that was too Eighties for even the 1980s, relentlessly silly, and cursed at the heart of it with the surefire box office dynamite that is a bestial romance.

Now that we have that all out of the way, is Howard The Duck a good ‘bad’ movie, the kind of cinematic junk that has a degree of charm because of just how junky it really is? Actually, no. Time has not been a friend to this movie — but not in the way you’d think. Back in its time, the movie was slightly shocking, but mostly a loud, somewhat obnoxious blowback of comic book aspirations paired with the ridiculous tropes of the times. Instead of just being a bombshell, as she was in Steve Gerber’s comics, Beverley Switzler is now a wannabe rockstar. Portrayed by Lea Thompson, fresh from her Oedipally complicated role in Back to the Future and her career-defining role in… uh… Space Camp, Beverley is a bit perkier and spunkier than her four-color role’s sake. Too perky, in fact, which makes it even creepier that this attractive waif of a girl wants to get it on with anthropomorphic water fowl.

And what of the duck? Despite what was touted as the best character costuming of the time, you never, ever, ever for the teensiest second buy into this thing being anything other than ILM mechanics shop 101. The choice of Chip Zien as the voice of Howard was equally misguided, as his shrill interpretation is neither funny nor charming. Just as shot-out is Tim Robbins in one of his first film roles, a fact he has been trying desperately to forget for the past couple decades.

It would be easy to blame George Lucas, the executive producer of the movie, for the mess it is. The blame instead has to go to the writer/producer/director team of Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz. Fresh from success with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, they looked for something a little less disturbing than the Thuggee Cult to continue their streak, but that is the major problem with the movie. The comic book was very disturbing. By trying to split the difference between the freak fandom that formed around the comics and the youth audience that was supposed to catapult the flick into the Summer box office stratosphere, they sided with the worst of each and got nowhere. In this case, it would have been better to go big, or not to have gone at all.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: Dunphy, you’re shooting fish in a barrel. You knew this movie was a stinker, and not a Plan 9 From Outer Space stinker either. What did you gain from revisiting it? Did you think the two decades this sat in the cinematic cave, away from the digital revolution, would somehow age it into a fine cult classic? Yeah, I kind of did think that would be the case. I was wrong, and the reason why is because time hasn’t caught up with the film’s insanity, it’s made it all incredibly dull. Manic acting, big special effects, Jeffrey Jones as an alien-posessed evildoer, duck nipples, boring, boring, boring. It either is an indictment of how far, and how twisted our cinematic visions have become, or just confirmation of what we knew all along… This is a bad movie. This is a bad, bad movie.

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Friday, March 13th, 2009

The Bigger Picture: The Paradox of Poverty

by Arend Anton

85073915There is a sentiment, shared by many followers of great art, that monetary success strips an artist of his inspiration. It is the idea that once the artist has little left to prove, the quality of his work will take a dive and said artist will be a shell of his former self. In popular culture, it’s the idea behind “keeping it real.”

This is somewhat shortsighted.

There are several major cinematic examples people like to toss out. Lucas and Coppola often come to mind. After all, these two cinematic luminaries have their own empires but have done little of relevance within the past 20 years or so. When they have attempted to work, their films have been largely panned by most discerning viewers.

It makes sense to think that the success and money went to their heads, and that they lost touch with the common man. Take George Lucas, who was notoriously shy and quiet as a young man. I can relate to this, having spent most of my young life with the same temperament. Often, when someone is quiet it means that his mind is speaking louder than his mouth. Lucas proved this to be true, as his early characters exhibit his great understanding of our humanity.

Francis Ford Coppola mentored George Lucas. Throughout the 1970s, Coppola made a string of four absolutely incredible films. Three of these are considered among the greatest of all time, and the one that isn’t usually mentioned (The Conversation) just might be his greatest work. After Apocalypse Now, something happened to Francis Ford Coppola and he never again produced films with the same brilliance.

There is a lesser-known example of a filmmaker who has failed to live up to his early success: Roland Joffé had one of the best debuts of any filmmaker I can think of. His first two films, The Killing Fields and The Mission, gathered him Best Director nominations at the Academy Awards. The Mission won the coveted Palm d’Or award at the Cannes Film Festival. After The Mission, Joffé virtually disappeared from cinematic relevance. The most well-known film he is responsible for since is the Demi Moore version of The Scarlet Letter, a film known primarily for its dismal failure. The only memory I have of this movie is from high school, when we tricked our substitute teacher into showing us that version instead of the less graphic version on the syllabus. (more…)

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Saturday, January 10th, 2009

The Bigger Picture: Disaster Movie!

by Arend Anton

The average movie is mediocre at best. This is not meant as an insult to hardworking filmmakers. The simple fact of the matter is that few films in a given year can actually be given the label of a “good movie.”

People often look back fondly at a cultural era. In our short-term memory, this is often reduced to decades. Looking further back, cultural movements generally take up more time and are given weighty names (the Renaissance, the Enlightenment). Often someone will say “Remember the music in the ’90s? It was so much better than it is today” or “Movies were a lot better in the ’70s.” Think about it rationally, though: What possible reason could there be for the quality of art to change from one period in history to the next? It’s not as if new generations are less talented than previous ones, as much as Tom Brokaw tries to convince us otherwise. Generations are made up of individuals. Sometimes we lose sight of this much like we fail to acknowledge the tiny pixels that form our computer screens.

Let’s take a look at the conditions art needs to survive. First, there are the technological advances in artistic mediums. Oil-based paints and watercolor paints both developed at different times in history. The electric guitar spawned a revolution in music, just as programmed beats and synthesized instruments have done in more recent decades. The biggest technological change right now in film is the use of digital technologies. Even if a movie is still shot on film it will pass through a computer at some point, be it for color correction, CGI, titles, or DVD production.

The other major requirement is something that is more difficult to pinpoint. I call it cultural inspiration. These are the societal tendencies that are working both for and against the artist, and are often easier to pinpoint in hindsight. The great thing about art is that the forces working against it are easily neutralized by the work. The Vietnam War is an example of a cultural inspiration. Music underwent a fundamental change during this time, and films as well. For all the peace and love in the air, films seemed to get grittier and more cynical from this point forward. Star Wars, though an attempt at more uplifting cinema, was even inspired by the Vietnam War. George Lucas was originally scheduled to make Apocalypse Now, but when this plan fell through he began forming his space epic by following the same threads of rebellion and empires stretched too far.

(more…)

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