Monday, February 2, 2009
Hell is plastic: 18 calamitous music and movie packaging gimmicks
1. The Simpsons head-box DVD sets Starting with the sixth season of The Simpsons, Matt Groening and company offered up DVD sets encased in limited-edition "Simpsons Head" boxes, slick plastic shells modeled after the show's stars. (Season six was Homer, Season seven was Marge, and so forth.) But as...
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Monday, January 26, 2009
Turning on a dime: 15 great gearshift movies
Warning: "Gearshift movies," a term coined by P.T. Anderson, are films that head in one direction, stop on a dime, and veer off into radically different territory. Since the turning point is usually a startling surprise, it should go without saying that the entries below contain major spoilers....
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Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Hails to the chief: 70 songs about American presidents
1. Devo, "Whip It" Given Devo's red-plastic-ziggurat hats and bouncy synthesizer-driven music, most listeners in 1980 probably thought of them as little more than a novelty act, but the Ohio-based band was as sharp and politically aware as any in the early days of punk and new wave. Case in point:...
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Friday, January 16, 2009
"The L Word" is now a murder mystery.
If you've never seen The L Word, or if you haven't watched the series as a whole, first off, congratulations. You've successfully managed to avoid five seasons' worth of a show that has no idea what it wants to be and even little idea how it should go about being those things. Having no real...
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Tuesday, January 13, 2009
15 Things Kurt Vonnegut Said Better Than Anyone Else Ever Has Or Will
1. "I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.'" The actual advice here is technically a quote from Kurt Vonnegut's "good uncle" Alex, but Vonnegut was nice enough to pass it on at speeches and in A Man...
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Wednesday, January 7, 2009
Cheap Toy Roundup
Hulkey Pokey Hulk ($23.99, from $32.99) Some fans dug Ang Lee's artsy deconstruction of The Incredible Hulk; others preferred Louis Leterrier's more conventional, action-heavy take on the material. But critics and audiences united in their desire to see the Incredible Hulk do more singing and...
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Tuesday, January 6, 2009
20 pop-cultural obsessions even geekier than Monty Python
1. Star Trek It's the elephant in the nerdy-obsessions room, and in the Venn diagram of nerd-dom, it may be the meeting point for everything else on this list, with good reason. The original Star Trek —there are only 80 episodes—spawned movies, TV series both good and bad, and a billion fantasies...
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Monday, January 5, 2009
New, not improved: 14 disastrous revamps
1. New Coke Pop-culture commentators should declare April 23rd a personal holiday, because that was the day in 1985 when the Coca-Cola company introduced a new formula for their flagship beverage, and gave people who write about modern media and consumerism a simple point of comparison for all bad...
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Tuesday, December 23, 2008
The least essential albums of 2008
Least essential album by a band that’s still a band mainly because the lead singer owns the name Whitesnake, Good To Be Bad Whitesnake was never good about keeping a steady lineup even in its prime; the band went through three guitarists between 1987’s hit album Whitesnake and its 1989 follow-up...
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Monday, December 22, 2008
The worst band names of 2008
This is not a list of the worst band names ever, just the ones that came out (or I first heard of) in 2008: METAL (OR METAL-SOUNDING) Divine Heresy Song title: "Bleed The Fifth." Puns so aren't evil, dudes. Engaged In Mutilating My Son My Executioner Lambs Of Abortion Slaughter The Weak "When you...
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