The A.V. Club - Better Late Than Never?

Books: Better Late Than Never?: Post Office by Charles Bukowski

Tue, 16 Aug 2011 12:00:00 -0500

In early March of this year, Titus Andronicus came to the A.V. Club office to record their (controversial) version of They Might Be Giants’ “Birdhouse In Your Soul.” My favorite part of their performance was the prologue, where the band used an audio recording of Harry Dean Stanton reading Charles Bukowski’s poem “Bluebird.” I knew Bukowski’s name and his reputation, but had never read any of his stuff. In my mind, I lumped him in with Raymond Carver (justifiably, given the existence of a book called The Dirty Realism Duo: Charles Bukowski & Raymond Carver) and Jack Kerouac ...

Music: Better Late Than Never?: Meat Loaf, Bat Out Of Hell

Mon, 20 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0500

How many people bought the Meat Loaf album Bat Out Of Hell because of the bitchin’ Richard Corben cover, with its bare-chested hunk blasting out of a grave on a phallic motorcycle while a gargoyle-like bat looks on? And how many were confused by the actual music on the record: a pastiche of Phil Spector and Broadway that barely resembles the screeching, possibly Satanic hard rock the cover promises? There are two ways to read the disconnect between the grim exterior of Bat Out Of Hell and the florid pop music inside. Perhaps the irony is an intentional extension of ...

Film: Better Late Than Never?: Woody Allen

Mon, 11 Apr 2011 12:00:00 -0500

It’s been pointed out before in this feature that many pop-culture blind spots aren’t caused by choice so much as by our environment. Such is the case with my distance from the films of Woody Allen. Save for a study of a few scenes from The Purple Rose of Cairo in a college film course, I’d somehow made it into my early thirties without ever having seen a film from one of America’s most celebrated writer/directors. It wasn’t that I had anything against Allen; it’s just that it was more difficult to get ...

Film: Better Late Than Never?: The Thing From Another World/The Thing

Mon, 28 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0600

There is no good reason why I haven’t seen Howard Hawks’ The Thing From Another World or John Carpenter’s The Thing until recently. Both men are national treasures. The films are considered classics. Yet I never quite got around to seeing them, perhaps because in the abstract, The Thing From Another World sounds ridiculous. Reduced to mere plot summary, it sounds more like the rightfully forgotten dreck the gang over at Mystery Science Theater 3000 would heckle rather than a timeless classic. The cheese begins with a title that sounds both generic and like a parody of hyperventilating ...

Books: Better Late Than Never?: Stephen King’s The Stand

Mon, 14 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0600

Nixonland, Rick Perlstein’s mammoth survey of a political landscape polarized by one powerful, vindictive man, addresses Nixon’s followers’ habit of “heightening the contradictions.” They picked up the trick from leftist protesters, of all sources—those who sought to intensify confrontations with police with obscenity and inflamed rhetoric, picking fights to bring out the worst in their opponents. Nixon knew how to play the game on a national scale, drawing the supporters of what he dubbed “the silent majority” to one side, and portraying the opposition as suspect, un-American sorts living on the other end of a great divide ...

Film: Better Late Than Never?: Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer

Mon, 31 Jan 2011 12:00:00 -0600

I think part of the reason I’d never seen Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer before today was its reputation for ultra-realistic portrayals of murder. Because I’m such a well-adjusted fella, I’m more inclined toward the type of action movies with no real-world ties. Even though Henry has a pretty rock-solid critical reputation, I didn’t think I’d be up for what I expected it to be. (And hell, I’ve already absorbed the terrific punishment of the Michael Haneke collection.) But what pushed me to finally give Henry a shot was the essay Patton Oswalt ...

TV: Better Late Than Never?: Sex And The City

Mon, 17 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0600

Because I only became an HBO subscriber a couple of years ago, I witnessed the reputation of Sex And The City evolve from a distance. I remember when the show was an under-the-radar favorite, before it became a cultural phenomenon, and then, ultimately, Exhibit A in “Why They Hate Us.” Yet I’d never actually watched an episode. I have seen the two Sex And The City movies—that’s one of the perils of being a DVD columnist—and didn’t like either one of them. The dialogue in both is insufferably quippy, the stories are overstuffed, the pacing ...

Music: Better Late Than Never?: Bill Hicks

Mon, 03 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0600

Much of Bill Hicks’ renown is posthumous; he gained a good bit of respect, and notoriety, while he was alive, but after his death at age 32, he ascended to near-prophet status, cited as either a hero of modern stand-up or an overrated asshole. As with any artist struck down in his or her prime, the question of what Hicks would be doing if he were still alive and performing today has been asked again and again. I know I’ve been wondering about it a lot for the past month or so as I’ve been steadily making my ...

Film: Better Late Than Never?: Tron

Mon, 20 Dec 2010 12:00:00 -0600

When I was a kid in the 1980s, I saw virtually none of the movies my peers saw at the time. Ghostbusters? No. The Goonies? Absolutely not. Top Gun? What are you thinking? Part of this was where I grew up: the middle of nowhere, with the closest movie theater more than 40 miles away. If you didn’t manage to catch a movie in the single week it played there, you’d have to wait and hope it showed up on the local gas station’s rental wall, or on TV. I was also a weirdly sensitive kid, prone ...

Film: Better Late Than Never?: The Rocky Horror Picture Show

Mon, 06 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0600

The energy of a live performance is not an easy thing to capture. A theater production or a rock concert happens as you watch; a film is a record of something that’s already happened. Of course, that cuts both ways. Barring environmental details like whether the person next to you is texting incessantly throughout, the movie I see today is the one you saw last week, but there’s no guarantee that the band who blew my mind last time they came through town will be as good the next time through. The Rocky Horror Picture Show is a ...

Film: Better Late Than Never?: The Karate Kid

Wed, 24 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0600

When I was in college, I had trouble convincing my cinephile pals that Rocky is a good movie. When they thought of Rocky, they thought of the pumped-up, greasy Sylvester Stallone of the ’80s, not the doughy palooka of the original. They thought of underdog sports-movie clichés, and often didn’t even know that Rocky lost the fight in the first film. I tried to tell them that Stallone and director John G. Avildsen made a movie that savored the humor and drama of simple, everyday interactions; my friends countered with their memories of training montages and “Yo, Adrian ...

Music: Better Late Than Never?: Belle & Sebastian's If You’re Feeling Sinister

Mon, 08 Nov 2010 12:00:00 -0600

It seems impossible to describe Scottish band Belle & Sebastian without using words like “precious” and “whimsical,” which are the two adjectives least likely to describe any of my favorite bands. That precious whimsy (or whimsical preciousness) is the cardigan-sweater-wearing heart of twee pop, the fey subgenre that typically grates on my nerves—and the one Belle & Sebastian came to epitomize beginning with 1996’s If You’re Feeling Sinister. When the album came out, I was in my junior year of college and spending a lot of time at my school’s radio station, KCOU, which opened my musical horizons ...

Film: Better Late Than Never?: The Nightmare Before Christmas

Mon, 25 Oct 2010 12:00:00 -0500

A major criteria for picking Better Late Than Never subjects is incredulity, by which I mean how shocked the rest of the A.V. Club conference room acts upon learning that somebody hasn’t experienced a particular piece of pop culture. And my colleagues were shocked upon learning that I’d never seen Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas. Their shock shocked me: Nightmare isn’t the most pervasive or universally revered film around. It’s far enough under the radar that 17 years after its release, I couldn’t tell you even the most basic bits of plot ...

Books: Better Late Than Never?: The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy

Mon, 11 Oct 2010 12:00:00 -0500

Why have I never read Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, that irreverent touchstone of science fiction and British comedy? Allow me, in typically discursive Adams fashion, to offer up an explanation. Eventually. Whenever I meet fellow pop-culture junkies, I’m always interested to hear their origin stories, specifically that moment in their childhood or adolescence when they broke from the mainstream and started paddling down obscure tributaries. Some had a guide, like an older sibling who funneled them hand-me-down Replacements albums, or alterna-parents who wanted them to inherit their own curiosities. Other were forced down that ...

Music: Better Late Than Never?: Joni Mitchell's Blue

Mon, 27 Sep 2010 12:00:00 -0500

Six years ago, I was riding in a car with my girlfriend at the time and was struck by the otherworldly voice emanating from her CD player. It seemed simultaneously familiar and beguilingly foreign. It was high and wild and free. I had read enough Mojo to recognize the sound as Joni Mitchell, and was well versed enough in the pop canon to feel guilty for not owning any of her albums. I vowed to rectify my unconscionable ignorance of Mitchell’s oeuvre immediately, but never got around to it. The window of opportunity had passed. The ideal time to ...

Books: Better Late Than Never?: Fahrenheit 451

Mon, 13 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0500

There ought to be a better explanation. At the height of my science-fiction phase (junior high, naturally), I counted Ray Bradbury among my favorite authors. And yet it took me more than two decades to get around to Fahrenheit 451, easily his best-known novel, and perhaps his best-known work, period. This was in the pre-critical phase when I devoured everything by authors I loved, with no judgment I can remember as to each work’s relative quality. How else to explain the complete series of Lucky Starr novels, the juvenile adventure stories written by a pseudonymous Isaac Asimov, that now ...

Film: Better Late Than Never?: Saving Private Ryan, Band Of Brothers, and The Pacific: Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks’ World War II

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 12:00:00 -0500

The Second World War has been an interest of mine since I was a kid, bordering on an obsession. In this, I’m hardly unique; it can be fairly argued that the entirety of what we reckon as modern culture dates from the period immediately after the war ended. It shaped the political struggles, cultural shifts, and economic factors that made our society what it is. The first truly global war—a claim it stakes even over World War I—is a subject of deep fascination for historians, military strategists, biographers, economists, and specialists from almost every field of human ...

Music: Better Late Than Never?: Big Star

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 13:33:00 -0500

The first album I ever bought with my own money was a cassette tape of Elton John’s The One. I thought it was pretty awesome, although I only liked maybe a third of the songs on it: “The One,” and that one about the guy dying of AIDS who gets visited by his dad in the hospital, and something more upbeat. I grew up listening to Air Supply, James Taylor, and Michael Bolton. The radio station my parents played in the car most often: 94.9 WHOM, soft pop 24-7. While most people my age were using singers and ...

DVD: Better Late Than Never?: Footloose

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Maybe if I’d seen Footloose for the first time in 1984, or any year close to 1984, I could look it straight in the eye. But when I finally got around to watching it in 2010, I saw double. As a grown-up film-critic type, I saw a movie set in the ’80s that looks better suited to the 1950s. Here was a film about championing rock ’n’ roll and rebellion in their mildest forms. Kevin Bacon stars as a Chicago kid who moves to Middleofnowheresville, USA (actually Boden), a town that’s outlawed dancing and turned rock music into ...

DVD: Better Late Than Never?: A Fistful Of Dollars/For A Few Dollars More

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 12:00:00 -0500

Given that I think The Good, The Bad And The Ugly is one of the most genius films ever to walk the earth, I’m helpless to explain why I’d never seen any of the movies that preceded it. Everything after, sure, even Duck, You Sucker! But while picking up the Dollars trilogy—A Fistful Of Dollars, For A Few Dollars More, and The Good, The Bad And The Ugly—on the third film isn’t akin to starting Star Wars with Return Of The Jedi, it might seem odd that I’ve only seen one of them, and ...