Long Beach is not an attractive city. Downtown, where a shopping mall is under construction, is filled with thick concrete barriers and overhanging chain-link fences.It feels like a demilitarized zone….
Zack Dennis
1 Min Read
Explosions in the Sky is possibly my favorite band in the world right now. The first song of theirs that I ever heard was Á¢€Å“Your Hand in Mine,Á¢€ which I…
Zack Dennis
1 Min Read
My evening on Saturday seemed to consist mainly of mild swings of fortune. Two years in LA have taught me to lunge at empty parking spaces, so I was feeling…
Zack Dennis
1 Min Read
Like many students, I was assigned to read Tom StoppardÁ¢€â„¢s existential classic Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead during my junior year of high school. IÁ¢€â„¢ve always hated reading plays Á¢€”…
Zack Dennis
1 Min Read
Hi all. I’m guest-posting for Jeff today. When I was probably about 13 or so, my Uncle Mark made a series of mixtapes for my family that I’ve tried to…
Zack Dennis
1 Min Read
In my post about The Rules of Attraction a few weeks back, commenter Idp presented the idea that many of the heroes in action movies fall into a subclass of…
Zack Dennis
1 Min Read
Even though I live in Los Angeles, I’ve never been an actor, a writer, a director, a writer-director, a grip, a cameraman, or worked in the film industry in any…
Zack Dennis
1 Min Read
There’s a certain art to crafting a great movie trailer that is sort of a scale model of the art of crafting the advertised movie itself. Often a trailer contains…
Zack Dennis
1 Min Read
Most people are familiar with the concept of the alpha male. Aggressive and dominating, he exists in our society as a result of our evolution as primates, when relatively small…
Zack Dennis
1 Min Read
The last time I went to Tangier, almost two years ago, it was a bit of a disaster. A few weeks before at my first Beverly Hills party, filled primarily…
Zack Dennis
1 Min Read
Sometimes, when you’re choosing the soundtrack for an adapted screenplay, the source material hands your songs right to you (such as in the novels High Fidelity by Nick Hornby, and…
Zack Dennis
1 Min Read
I don’t think Michael Mann is particularly interested in popular music. It’s practically impossible to think of Phil Collins’ classic song “In the Air Tonight” without thinking of the iconic…
Zack Dennis
1 Min Read
The first time I ever visited Sherman Oaks and saw the childhood home of my old roommate Miles (this was back when we lived in San Diego, before he got…
Zack Dennis
1 Min Read
As I expect every one of you knows, Heath Ledger died yesterday. I won’t speculate as to the details of his death (I’m sure the tabloids and gossip websites will…
Zack Dennis
1 Min Read
Exit Music is a sister series to Motion Picture Soundtrack. Yeah, they’re both named after Radiohead songs. So what? You wanna fight about it? As long as you’re less than…
Zack Dennis
1 Min Read
To begin: Music has been a essential part of movies since the very first images were committed to celluloid — in fact, motion picture scores existed before spoken dialogue did…
Zack Dennis
4 Min Read
Here’s a brain teaser: Most days, my commute to my downtown day job consists of a bumpy bus ride straight down Olympic. When I have a good book to read,…
Zack Dennis
1 Min Read
My friend Solly came down last weekend on a miniature vacation from Seattle. She was unlucky enough to have the rain follow her down and catch up to her by…
Zack Dennis
1 Min Read
This is a pretty vast digression from the concerts I’m normally going to review here. For one thing, I don’t normally patronize “the arts.” For another, the bands I see…
Zack Dennis
1 Min Read
Before heading over to the Troubadour for the Matt Nathanson show I took my girlfriend out for an Á¢€Å“appreciation nightÁ¢€ to thank her for enduring some horrendous traffic the previous…
Zack Dennis
1 Min Read
On Friday morning, driving down Olympic, I noticed that the marine layer was conspicuously thick and gray. I had been out of town for the fires last month, so I…
Zack Dennis
1 Min Read
It was recently reported (by Fox News, of all places) that Clear Channel radio stations had been instructed not to play tracks from Bruce SpringsteenÁ¢€â„¢s new album, Magic. ItÁ¢€â„¢s been…
Zack Dennis
1 Min Read
Why am I rooting for the Red Sox in the World Series? Because I grew up in New England. That should be all there is to it, right? I could…
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