Blog Archives
Smack Talk
My man Ezra flipped a sweet Dazed article about music and heroin into our {R}emnants mag on Flipboard yesterday, and sitting down to post it caught my eye. Here’s a bit from Dazed… But heroin has consistently eluded this ebb and flow, from its prominence and influence in the jazz and blues era of the [...]
Jarman’s Jubilee
This year we celebrate the 75th birthday of British filmmaker Derek Jarman. Jarman was born on January 31, 1942. I’m always discovering and then keeping tabs on these timely anniversaries of our countercultural forebears, and I’m happy to highlight this one even if I’m getting to it about 7 months too late. The good news [...]
Defy Day
If you love experimental cinema and you live in Nashville then you’re in luck: the second annual Defy Film Fest starts on Friday night and the event includes screenings of 64 experimental films through Saturday. Here’s a bit from my Critics’ Pick in this week’s Nashville Scene… I was only able to screen a couple [...]
Year of the Blade
Today I came across an RT article where Slovenian philospher Slavov Zizek outlines his conviction that as humans and machines merge, people will lose their individual freedom. Here are some words… “The fact that is what possible to break into, to hack a computer through a DNA, means that our identity, determined by DNA is [...]
PSH at 50
I recently got on a kick of remembering the late great Philip Seymour Hoffman before I realized that I’d missed the chance to observe what would have been the actor’s 50th birthday on July 23. Most of Hoffman’s fans didn’t know that he’d struggled with substances in his early 20s. And it came as a [...]
Le Morte du Monster
Godzilla, the King of Kaiju, died on Monday. The actual monster will likely live on in big screen iterations for generations to come, but we’ve lost Haruo Nakajima, the actor who played the massive dragon who became a symbol for the dawn on the nuclear age in the creature’s very first feature in 1954. It’s [...]
Osiris Rising
I spent the morning writing a review of the 1970, psychedelic classic Performance. For me this is one of the few films from America’s mid-century cultural revolution that still lives up to its shocking reputation. Most people associate Performance with its cinematographer and co-director Nicolas Roeg. Even if you are a die-hard fan of outre, [...]
Sid & Nancy Return
Gary Oldman might be my favorite living actor. Nowadays he’s probably best known for playing Commissioner Gordon in Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy, but back in the 1980′s when Oldman made his first breakthroughs as one of the very best actors of his generation, he set cinemas on fire with go-for-broke performances in films like [...]
Funky Spidey
So I saw the new Spider-Man film at a preview in Nashville tonight. I’m not sure when the review embargo gets lifted, but I’m not going to offer any judgments or spoilers here. If you saw Tom Holland’s turn as the web-slinger in his extended cameo in Captain America: Civil War you’ve got a good [...]
Cocteau 21C
55 years ago, in 1962, playwright, painter, poet, novelist, and film director Jean Cocteau recorded an address to the people of the world in the year 2000. The artist died the following year on October 11, 1963, and while these aren’t literally his last words they make a nice parting message from one of the [...]
