A.V. Club Blog

Noel Murray, Scott Tobias, and I talk about the new Jonathan Demme movie Rachel Getting Married (don't expect too much sparring) and the career of Jonathan Demme (mild sparring). This is a pretty spoiler-free conversation, for those who care about such things.

The Box Of Paperbacks Book Club: Thunderball by Ian Fleming

(Not long ago, A.V. Club editor Keith Phipps purchased a large box containing over 75 vintage science fiction, crime, and adventure paperbacks. He is reading all of them. This is book number 48.)

Post foreword number one:

Sorry it’s been so long between posts. I’ll try not to let that happen again. I’ve been trying to keep to a three-weeks-on/one-week-off schedule but that fell by the wayside. There are projects in the works that have been eating into the time I usually use for Box Of Paperbacks. One will be unveiled very soon. One not so soon.

Post foreword number two:

Obligatory passage for all James Bond posts suggesting that Ian Fleming might not have had the most progressive views on race, ethnicity, other cultures… basically anything outside the life of a tea-drinking, Eton-educated Englishman whose views were forged while the sun never sat on that particular... read more

Hey you guys,

Things have been a little slow here on the A.V Club blog as of late so I figured I'd throw a question out to the group and see what you beautiful people have to say. When I was in college I once rented American Graffiti for my girlfriend. She was underwhelmed. To her it was neither good nor bad, just kinda average and forgettable. I remember thinking very vividly, "Christ, I don't know if I can have any kind of a future with somebody who thinks American Graffiti is at best affably mediocre." To cite another example, I have another ex-girlfriend who realized a guy she was seeing probably wasn't the one for her when he took her to see Armageddon on their first date.

For some reason, not liking American Graffiti was something of a deal-breaker relationship-wise. I don't exactly know why. There are some things we love so strongly that they become a huge part of who we are and how we see the world. I can never see myself marrying, for example, anyone who doesn't like The...

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I was watching the pilot episode of Quark, Buck Henry’s short-lived seventies sci-fi spoof yesterday, and I was distracted something awful by the incessant braying of the laugh track, by the mindless guffawing of an easily amused phantom audience. It seemed not only gratingly fake but monstrous. It was as if Quark was jabbing me in the ribs every few seconds and screaming, “These are the jokes folks, and oh boy are they hilarious!”

The laugh track stood out in part because the show lacked genuine laughs. Quark is not a bad show. But its pilot is easily the weakest episode. It was trying way too hard. Like most pilots, it was burdened with clunky exposition, with the unwieldy business of introducing lots of characters and gags that would pay off later. The explosive, wall-to-wall guffawing on the laugh track of a show that was largely devoted to setting shit up felt like a flopsweat-drenched new Broadway show that insists...

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A few weeks back we ran a piece called "The Old Cult Canon" designed to bring readers up to speed on the roots of Scott Tobias’ weekly New Cult Canon column while Scott took a week off. It occurred to me later that there are a lot of songs from and about these and other old cult movies. Enough to make a playlist? Indeed. Here’s what I came up with, using mostly movies from the list, with a few others thrown in for good measure. I’m sure I’m missing a lot, so consider this side one and feel free to drop in your suggestions for side two.

1.“You Can’t Live In Isolation” (Dialogue from Carnival Of Souls)

We probably should have thrown one-film-wonder Herk Harvey’s great low-budget horror movie Carnival Of Souls onto the list. The soundtrack album is a guaranteed room-clearer when the party’s gone on too long, consisting... read more

Fans of science fiction know that the mark of a superior story is its willingness to ask the Big Questions. You know, "what's the meaning of life?" and "what makes us human?" and that sort of thing. In this alarmingly comprehensive fan-made compilation of clips from Doctor Who (in chronological order, covering the entire run of the series from 1963 to 2008, and including at least one segment from an episode that was never broadcast), you'll see that the show was always willing to ask one of those Big Questions. Repeatedly.

Whoever made this compilation has achieved a kind of apotheosis of nerdosity, of the kind where it's clear that so much loving, obsessive effort has gone into something so completely ephemeral that it's achieved a transcendence of its own. Of course, I might be saying that because after watching the whole thing I'm now a... read more

In the summer of 2003 a friend handed me a copy of the Young Liars EP and my musical hall of fame was expanded by one. That “band”—then more of a bedroom duo plus talented neighbors—with a cumbersome but catchy name found its place amongst the highly specific and arguably acquired tastes that I wholly worshipped, which included anything wrought by the hands of Mike Patton, the entire Anticon collective (especially cLOUDDEAD), and now, TV On The Radio. “What in God’s name,” my friends and I would dare to dream, “would happen if they all got together to make an album?”

We didn’t actually believe it could happen. It was just one of those things—you know, that nagging art/noise/rap fantasy that keeps you up at night? Well, the dream may be coming true: Mike Patton, TVOTR singer Tunde Adebimpe, and Adam “Doseone” Drucker (cLOUDDEAD, Subtle, 13 & God) are indeed tangled up in something.

In an A.V. Club interview to be published later this month, Adebimpe tells me that the three of them are “working on a project that I’m thinking will congeal toward the end of the year. It came from an idea that Adam had, to have the three of us... read more

The “rules” for whether a musician qualifies for one of these Great Vintage Blues posts are just loose guidelines, to keep myself from getting so narrowly focused that I run out of material. Basically, the guiding principles have been: 1) The artist should have begun his or her career before the primacy of rock ‘n’ roll changed all the rules, roughly in the late 1950s, and preferably should have had a significant career started before World War Two. 2) The artist should have video clips of several live performances available on YouTube or elsewhere on the web. (Fan-made videos where a slide show of still photographs scrolls over the audio of a studio recording don’t count.) 3) The artist should be, for preference, somebody that makes your jaw drop when you see them for the first time.

Magic Sam Maghett just squeaks by rule 1. His first record came out in 1957, when he was 20, and he’s a full two generations separated from the pre-war Delta blues players, having been inspired to become a... read more

The Bill Maher-starring, Larry Charles-directed anti-religion documentary Religulous is pretty much designed to provoke controversy. It certainly had us talking after a recent screening. What follows is a spirited (no pun intended) discussion between Scott Tobias, Josh Modell, Tasha Robinson, and myself.

Granted, it's a bummer that there's no new episode of The Office tonight, but what's airing in its stead has just as much potential for cringe-inducing, awkward hilarity. That's right, the Vice Presidential debate airs tonight, pitting Sarah "I read ALL the newspapers" Palin against Joe "Gaffe-o-matic" Biden. In case you're still recovering from last Friday's Presidential Debate drinking game--drinking whenever someone says the words "change" or "my friends" results in blackout after 20 minutes--here's a more wholesome play-along option: Palin Bingo. There are four card options you can print out and play, including the one above. Winner gets a Sarah Cuda.