A.V. Club Blog

Japan: land of the rising sun. The ancient empire we nearly blew off the map in World War II. Home to high-quality electronics, bizarre game shows, and vending machines that dispense beer and used girls’ panties (not together…yet). The country teeming with room-clearing avant-garde noise experimentalists and garage-rock revisionists. The Simpsons went there in one episode, and in another, Homer’s likeness appeared on a box of Japanese detergent called Mr. Sparkle.

Until a couple weeks ago, that was basically the sum total of my knowledge of Japan, and at least one of those tenets proved to be untrue. (In a crackdown on sleaze, Tokyo’s mayor banned the vending machines that hawked used undies. Rest assured, though, that the city still has sleaze in spades.) On April 11, my wife and I undertook a fact-finding mission to Tokyo and Kyoto (hey, you can’t write it off if it’s a “vacation”) and returned with an inordinate amount of food for Taste Test, a few words of Japanese,... read more

In Vinyl Retentive, A.V. Clubbers share what we find while crate-digging in our own houses.

Woody Allen

Standup Comic, 1964, 1968

United Artists, 1978

Format: Double LP

File under: Vintage wretchedness.

Inside the gatefold of this compilation of Woody Allen's early live comedy work, it's clear that Allen sent the press' Thesaurus into a tizzy even before he started making memorable films. (That said, several bits from these days went straight into Annie Hall.) Apparently, Time called him " A flat-headed, redheaded lemur with closely bitten fingernails," and Vogue broke out the baffling phrase "Soft as coffee."

Compared to the Allen who sulked through Stardust Memories, he's... read more

If this hasn’t been floating around the ol’ blogosphere yet, it deserves to be: a particularly confrontational 10-second scene from Full House repeatedly re-enacted by actors culled from Craigslist all over the world. The audio from each take layers over the one preceding it, which in time takes on hypnotic powers equaled only by Dave Coulier’s mullet.

Dallas, Texas multimedia artist Paul Slocum conceived of the You’re Not My Father project three years ago and paid each actor $150. Here’s what three years of hard work looks like from actors who don’t have to listen to their wise-cracking, Bullwinkle-impersonating, quasi-uncles:

In honor of the late Roy Scheider--and because it was already on my DVR--I watched 2010 again last week. The last time I'd seen it was in a multiplex, back in 1984. At the time I'd just seen 2001 on TV a few months earlier, then read Arthur C. Clarke's novel 2001, and then read 2010, so this may have been the first time I'd ever read a book before seeing a movie. I could tell already, at the age of 13, that 2010 was just well-crafted entertainment, not aspiring to art. But because director Peter Hyams wasn't in his full-on hack phase yet, 2010 has some moments of real suspense, like when computer programmer Bob Balaban tries to convince the revived HAL 9000 unit to sacrifice itself for the good of the crew, and some moments of real spine-tingling grandeur, like the closing shot of a black monolith rising out of a newly formed swamp on one of Jupiter's moons.

What startled me though,... read more

Yesterday saw the slightly overdue arrival of Isabel Tobias, born to A.V. Club film editor Scott Tobias and his wife Alison Rieger Tobias. Our congratulations go out to the happy couple!

(Also, Scott, The Hottie And The Nottie screens Tuesday night. Do you think you could make it or am I going to have to cover for you?)

Due to popular demand and the fact that we love trying weird foods and candies, The A.V. Club will now regularly feature “Taste Tests.” Feel free to suggest disgusting and/or delicious new edibles for future installments: E-mail us at tastetest@theonion.com.

 

 

Uncle Oinker’s Bacon Mints

 

At long last, the theory that you can improve anything by adding bacon has been disproven, courtesy of a mysterious, pig-faced individual known only as Uncle Oinker. The presumed ideal for Bacon Mints: Tasty, tiny, refreshing bacon-flavored confections in a convenient tin, suitable for freshening your breath and satisfying your bacony cravings. The reality: Aspirin-like poison pills that offer just enough of a hint of bacon to make you try them, even as you know you’re going to regret it.

Taste: Imagine a tin full of sugary hard mints, squirted with liquid...

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Due to popular demand and the fact that we love trying weird foods and candies, The A.V. Club will now regularly feature “Taste Tests.” Feel free to suggest disgusting and/or delicious new edibles for future installments: E-mail us at tastetest@theonion.com.

 

 

Simpsons Energy Drinks: Duff “Beer” and Flaming Moe

 

There’s a baseline problem with the Simpsons-branded energy drinks: Both are modeled after alcohol products from the show, but neither of them actually contains any booze. Way to disappoint your core audience from the get-go, Simpsons merchandise guys. Instead, they’re both “energy drinks,” i.e. highly sugary, chemically concoctions that in no way ease the pain of life, though they might make you hyper enough to ignore it briefly. (No word yet on when Fudd Energy Drink...

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Due to popular demand and the fact that we love trying weird foods and candies, The A.V. Club will now regularly feature “Taste Tests.” Feel free to suggest disgusting and/or delicious new edibles for future installments: E-mail us at tastetest@theonion.com.

 

 

Kettle Chips Fire And Spice voting pack

 

For several years running now, Kettle Chips has let consumers buy limited-edition sampler boxes of prototype chips, taste-test them, and vote on which of the included flavors should go into mass-market production. This year, the five flavors were all spicy (and mostly kind of boring, compared to last year’s Chocolate and Curry chips), and the five-flavor sampler box was collectively called “Fire And Spice.” Here in the A.V. Club’s gleaming laboratories, we sampled all five flavors to see which one would be… America’s Next Top Model....

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I like David Cross. Shut Up, You Fucking Baby! is my favorite comedy album of all time. (Not that there’s a ton of competition: That Adam Sandler tape I loved back in 10th grade with Fatty McGee and Toll Booth Willie is probably at No. 2.) And I would likely lose my A.V. Club ID card if I didn’t love Mr. Show and Arrested Development. I wouldn’t call myself a super-fan, but I expect good things from David Cross. I mean that as a compliment. I respect the guy.

Which is why, like my colleague Kyle Ryan, I was kinda bummed to see Cross lend his considerable talents to the horrid-looking Alvin And The Chipmunks movie. I want to stress the word “kinda” here. I don’t toss and turn at night if a comedian I like makes a craphole flick strictly for the money. If David Cross doesn’t care how his IMDB entry looks, why should I? Either way I’ll still think Three Times One Minus One is funny. That said, I was annoyed by this snide, dishonest, and largely unsuccessful attempt to deflect the “vitriol that's... read more

Now that it’s 2008, it’s time to let go of some words and phrases that are so 2007 (or even 2006). Sure, some slangy expressions, like “cool,” enter our lexicon and stay there (undoubtedly over the objections of beat-era squares). And others, like “radical,” come and go, and are revived periodically, albeit primarily in ironic fashion. But the four phrases below are minor nuisances on the verge of becoming annoyingly commonplace. So in the year to come, let’s all try to be a little more imaginative in how we express ourselves on message boards, e-mail and the like. And let’s begin by getting shut of…

Meh. It may be too late to stop “meh,” which is already on T-shirts and has been lovingly skewered in an episode of The Simpsons. On the surface, “meh” seems like a fine word, full of cute, rounded letters that express a simple idea: “I’m neither enthusiastic about nor furiously against the movie/band/book/idea you just... read more