A.V. Club Blog
Dispatches from Direct To DVD Purgatory: The Manic Pixie Dream Girl Edition
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 its purest form, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl can be downright insufferable. Landmark Manic Pixie Dream Girl joints like Garden State and Elizabethtown are fundamentally...
read moreYesterday, completely by coincidence, I saw Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York for the first time and listened to Guns N’ Roses’ Chinese Democracy, also for the first time.
I’m guessing this parallel has been drawn by some sharp word-jockey already: SNY is a movie—a fantastic movie—about a guy who spends his whole life and inordinate amounts of money trying to create art that is “true” and “honest.” Chinese Democracy is an album made by a guy who didn’t seem to blink at the idea of spending more than a third of his life (read that again—a third of his life!) and untold millions to make it exactly the way he wanted to.
And while Chinese Democracy didn’t move me at all, I find it incredibly difficult to dismiss after watching the painful (and often painfully funny) Synecdoche. More than that, I find myself creating a new movie in my head, a sort of post-modern reality show following the creation of Chinese Democracy as seen from Axl’s eyes. read more
Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club #17: George Plimpton's Fully Charmed Life
One early evening about a half decade ago a seventy-something George Plimpton put on an argyle sweater and a pair of khakis and pitched a game of softball against my colleagues on the Team Onion New York softball team alongside his compatriots in the Paris Review squad. Oh sweet blessed Lord do I wish I could have been there. I treasure the mental image of a grey-haired, distinguished-looking, impossibly lanky and still youthful Plimpton staring down the Team Onion softball team, then taking them out afterwards, apologizing profusely for not being able to procure better scotch and trying to arrange an ad trade between the Paris Review and The Onion.
I’m pretty damned happy here in Chicago but I wish my graceless existence had overlapped with Plimpton’s charmed life for even a single preposterous evening. Before reading George, Being George, Nelson W. Aldrich Jr.’s delightful oral history of the late writer, raconteur and...
read more(While we don’t get too spoiler-y talking about the film, there is some discussion of the later books in the series, so those planning to see what all the fuss is about are forewarned.)
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Silly Show-Biz Book Club #16: Stephen Baldwin's Guide to Better Sex Through Christ
I owe a debt of gratitude to Daniel Radosh’s Rapture Ready! Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture for hipping me to the existence of today’s entry in the Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club, The Unusual Suspect: My Calling to the New Hardcore Movement of Faith as well as the mind-boggling genius of Larry Norman. If you own just one album by a freakishly pale, long-haired eccentric Christian outlaw obsessed with the Rapture you cannot do any better than the utterly essential Norman retrospective Rebel Poet, Jukebox Balladeer: The Anthology. Seriously. Buy that shit. You won’t regret it.
I was a little wary of Radosh’s book initially. If it were dedicated exclusively to ridiculing what Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip...
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-It fucking rules.
-It gets me happy.
-It’s so, so insanely obscure that it makes our dear readers shit themselves out of fear of the unknown.
Read it and weep, wipe it and cry:
Say you're a beautiful woman. This will be easier for some than for others–me, I'm stuck as the lady gremlin from Gremlins 2: New Batch--but let's start with the premise. And then, say you're somewhat morally ambiguous, sexually adventurous, and have the misfortune of being employed by one of the world's "aggressive problem solvers" on a series of vaguely legal but ethically suspect exploits. Still with me? Suddenly, a handsome man enters your life. He's dashing, debonair, aggressive, and very handy. After a quick bedroom romp, he starts nosing around your employer's business. It's very important, he tells you. No one needs to know.
See, this would be the point where you'd shoot him. Right in the head, preferably. Because charming as the sonofabitch may be, he's about to get you killed. And unlike you, it's not going to be pretty.
It's no secret that the Bond franchise has a formula. There are the exotic locales, the gadgets, the super villains, the action set-pieces; and of course, there are the women. As each new entry...
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The Box Of Paperbacks Book Club: Cleopatra by H. Rider Haggard (1899)
(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 51.)
Egypt is, of course, a real place, part of the continent of Africa, (if you’re Sarah Palin and need such things explained to you.) But in fiction it practically belongs to another world. For Western writers, Ancient Egypt lends itself to the double exoticism of time and place. It’s a culture linked, but not that closely linked, to the Greek and Roman worlds, one ruled by strange customs, strange gods, and centuries-old mysteries. And yet it’s close enough to visit and familiar enough from movies and postcards (and, before that, museum exhibitions, paintings, and travelogues) that it has the feel of the familiar. It’s perfect, in other words, for projecting Western notions of otherness, allowing... read more