A.V. Club Blog

Hey you

Yeah, you, loyal A.V Club reader,

If you’re like most A.V Club readers you’re probably worried that The A.V Club isn’t introducing new features fast enough. Sure, we have seventy-three or so recurring features we trot out on a regular basis in our ongoing effort to overwhelm readers with new content. But we haven’t introduced a new feature in a good three or four hours.

That’s why we’ve created a brand spanking new feature called “Ephemereview” that will chronicle some of the most useless pop-culture detritus known to man. “Ephemereview” will fearlessly explore all sorts of stupid, stupid shit that really does not merit being covered in any other context. Or at all. Needless to say, your suggestions are more than welcome. For the very first installment I’m going to write about Dane Cook: The Lost Pilots, two failed pilots everybody’s favorite comedian filmed shortly before he became dispiritingly ubiquitous.

Pilots are like fetuses:...

read more

The first, or maybe second, third or even fourth Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday or Friday of every month Nathan Rabin writes about three DVD premieres for Dispatches From Direct-To-DVD Purgatory. Today’s entry features boobies, brooding and drugged-up instacult weirdness

Blonde And Blonder: Creepy human Barbies/sentient sex dolls Pamela Anderson and Denise Richards had the misfortune to be born in the wrong era. If they’d come of age in the fifties or sixties they could have collaborated with Frank Tashlin or Russ Meyer, two iconoclastic filmmakers who understood intuitively how to make the most out of the actresses’ unique, um, talents. And by “unique talents” I of course mean “cartoonishly over-sized fake tits”.

Alas, the buxom twosome had the misfortune of working with Supermodel In The Rain Forest: Costa Rica auteur Dean Hamilton on Blonde And Blonder, a slapdash aggregation of half-assed action, labored farce and hoary dumb blonde jokes that were...

read more

The first, or maybe second, third or even fourth Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday or Friday of every month Nathan Rabin writes about three DVD premieres for Dispatches From Direct-To-DVD Purgatory. In this latest round-up of DTV joints The Dude and Sam Malone make a porno, Buffy gets literary and Michael Ian Black gets directorial.

The Amateurs Back in the day, Mr. Show had a skit about a curious phenomenon called “Imminent Death Syndrome” wherein an unknowingly terminally ill person is indulged endlessly by sympathetic good Samaritans who have been informed to make the IDS sufferer’s last days as kick-ass as humanly possible. I hope he’s not reading this blog entry because I now strongly suspect that Amateurs writer-director Michael Traeger must be suffering from one hellacious case of IDS. How else do you explain Jeff Bridges, Tim Blake Nelson, William Fichtner, Lauren Graham, Ted Danson, Joe Pantoliano, Patrick Fugit, Judy Greer, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Steven Weber and... read more

The first, or maybe second, third or even fourth Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday or Friday of every month Nathan Rabin writes about three DVD premieres for Dispatches From Direct-To-DVD Purgatory.

DOA: Dead Or Alive: I admitted early on that I’d be cheating a li’l bit in this column by writing up films that got a small theatrical release but didn’t play wide enough to merit a proper A.V Club review. Well, I’m cheating a whole lot this entry by writing about DOA: Dead Or Alive, a film that opened on a whopping 505 screens. Why? Cause it’s a hyper-kinetic video game adaptation where a bunch of sexy starlets beat the crap out of each other against a series of amusingly artificial CGI backgrounds. As such, it is also quite possibly the single most important film ever made, and also the bestest as well. Yet the A.V Club has remained perversely silent on the merits of this masterpiece of the cinema.

You’ve undoubtedly gazed rapturously at DOA’s video box,...

read more

The first, or maybe second, third or even fourth Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday or Friday of every month Nathan Rabin writes about three DVD premieres for Dispatches From Direct-To-DVD Purgatory.

Nearing Grace: Ever since being bowled over by Mean Creek I’ve kept an eye out for a young filmmaker named Jacob Aaron Estes with a keen visual eye, a flair for creating compelling, multi-dimensional characters and a genius for capturing the fumbling, inarticulate rhythms of adolescence. So I was surprised to see him credited as the sole screenwriter of Nearing Grace, a maddeningly generic-looking teen romance about a brooding intellectual in love with the most popular girl in school. The DVD box makes it look exactly like every other teen movie ever made, as does its plot. But the standard-issue trappings mask surprising ambition. For starters the film is both a period piece and an adaptation of a 1979 novel by Scott Summers. Gregory Smith stars as an intense, self-stylized... read more

The first Monday of every month Nathan Rabin writes about three DVD premieres for Dispatches From Direct-To-DVD Purgatory, unless, of course, he gets really, really busy, in which case he has to push it back to Wednesday and he feels bad about it, sure, but that Jay-Z album review and Jay-Z Primer aren’t going to write themselves, are they, and besides he’s got about a million other things to do, not to mention his nighttime job as a professional skip tracer, which you probably didn’t even know about it, so please, just be cool about it and don’t make a big fuss or nothing or the next sentence will be three times as long and half as coherent. Seriously.

Danny Roane: First Time Director (2006):

Andy Dick devolved into grotesque self-parody so long ago that it’s easy to forget that he was once an accomplished young comic actor better known for his virtuoso sketch work on The Ben Stiller Show than for stumbling deliriously through an endless series of drunken,...

read more

I went on a road trip this past weekend, and the prospect of four hours in the car prompted my boyfriend to bring up a diversionary discussion topic he doesn’t normally explore: my sexual interest in celebrities. Which is actually very limited, with two exceptions: Antonio Banderas (circa Desperado, not circa Spy Kids 3) and Christian Bale. Meeting and interviewing Christian Bale put me about as close as I get to fan-girly, and all my female friends were screamingly jealous. My boyfriend, however, was dubious, largely because of Bale’s past roles. He asked whether I actually thought any of Bale’s characters would really be any good in the sack.

And when I started thinking about it… Actually, no. Sure, smoldering intensity can be pretty sexy, but when that intensity doesn’t make it to the bedroom (or worse, it does but it isn’t actually aimed at the partner or the act), it just...

read more

I am a big fan of Snoop Dogg, horror anthologies and blaxploitation fare even if none are synonymous with quality. So what happens when you combine all three under the banner Snoop Dogg’s Hood Of Horror? Fun, fun, fun, right? Nope: Hood Of Horror is just the latest example of a can’t miss premise that fails egregiously.

On the DVD box Ain’t It Cool News calls it “the first studio quality horror movie I’ve seenin (sic) a long time…Unapologetic in its offensiveness and blood-splattered gore (cause daisy and lilac-covered gore just doesn’t cut it these days)” which no doubt represents the first time the word “quality” has ever been positively applied to this bottom-feeding junk.

Alas, A.V Club readers voted for Mr. Quality Control’s masterpiece of the cinema as the third and final entry in this week’s Dispatches From Direct-To-DVD purgatory so last night I suffered through the latest from art house director-gone awry Stacy (The Last Supper)...

read more

The first Monday of every month I deliver capsule reviews of the latest, if not greatest, new direct-to-DVD titles for a little feature we like to call “Dispatches From Direct To DVD Purgatory”. This week I’ll be checking out Jeff Goldblum in Pittsburgh, Paul Walker in Bobby Z and a third direct-to-DVD joint of your choosing. What would you, the long-suffering A.V Club reader like me to write about? The horror anthology Snoop Dogg’s Hood Of Horror, Rise, a horror movie with Lucy Liu as a sexy vampire lady or Species: The Awakening, a sequel about a sexy killer alien lady or something? Vote for your favorite and I’ll spend my evening watching whatever steaming pile of cinematic magic you’ve chosen for me. Cause I’m masochistic like that.

Pittsburgh (2006): Robert Smigel’s short-lived T.V Funhouse spin-off had an amusing ongoing feature called “The Baby, The Immigrant and the Guy On Mushrooms” The thin but resonant joke behind the...

read more

I just bought the fourth DVD player I’ve ever owned.

I still remember the first one. Bought in early 2000, after much hand-wringing by my wife and myself about whether we could afford it, and whether we needed it. We picked it up at a big box retailer for around 250 bucks, and bought three DVDs to start with: Out Of Sight, A Bug’s Life and Rushmore. We watched all three from start to finish, including the featurettes and commentary tracks, and we immediately put ourselves on a DVD budget, buying one disc a month—usually some pricey special edition that we’d also devour. When friends came over, we’d show off our DVD player, and most of them would say it was neat, but that they couldn’t imagine buying one themselves. As soon as my mom found out you couldn’t record on it, she said she’d never get one.

Well, my mom finally got a DVD player two years ago, though it’s one with a VCR attached, so she can still record her quilting shows. My friends all have DVD players too—and now it’s a DVR they swear they’re never going to get. My wife’s and my “one DVD a month” plan went off the rails after about three months,... read more