The A.V. Club - Features

Books: Comics Panel:November 6, 2009

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:35:00 -0600

In 1975, cartoonist and children’s book illustrator Stuart Hample had the bright idea to take the luckless, lovelorn, philosophical persona of Woody Allen—then famous for what the aliens in Allen’s Stardust Memories would later call his “early, funny films”—and turn it into a daily newspaper strip. Amazingly, Allen agreed, and even offered to provide Hample with a thick stack of pages compiled from his old notebooks, full of jokes and fragments of ideas. In 1976, Inside Woody Allen debuted from King Features, and it ran until 1984, by which time Allen’s stature in popular culture ...

Film: A.V. Talk:A Christmas Carol / The Box

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:31:00 -0600

Keith Phipps, Scott Tobias, and Tasha Robinson talk about two very different movies featuring men and money: Robert Zemeckis' A Christmas Carol and Richard Kelly's The Box. Subscribe to A.V. Talk iTunes http://feeds.theonion.com/avtalk

TV: Interview:Wanda Sykes

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:32:00 -0600

Wanda Sykes got a relatively late start in show business, beginning her stand-up career in earnest when she was nearly 30 years old. But it didn’t take her long to become a familiar face (and voice) in comedy. From starting as a writer and performer on The Chris Rock Show, Sykes has gone to become a reliable supporting player in sitcoms like Curb Your Enthusiasm and The New Adventures Of Old Christine, as well as a go-to voice actress in animated features like Over The Hedge and Barnyard. Lately, Sykes has become more involved in political causes, coming out ...

TV: AVQ&A:Drop-everything movies

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600

Welcome back to AVQ&A, where we throw out a question for discussion among the staff and readers. Consider this a prompt to compare notes on your interface with pop culture, to reveal your embarrassing tastes and experiences, and to ponder how our diverse lives all led us to convene here together. Got a question you’d like us and the readers to answer? E-mail us at avcqa@theonion.com. What’s your “drop everything” movie? You know the moment; you’re flipping through your channel guide, not looking for anything in particular, and you run across that film: It ...

TV: Hatecast:Men text like this, but metrosexuals text like xxx

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600

It's Entomology Appreciation week on the Hater podcast, which means that Amelie Gillette and Dan Mirk, Senior Staff Writer for The Onion News Network, recorded the podcast in a room that also contained a Musca domestica. It was thrilling. You can almost hear the housefly-related excitement in Dan and Amelie's voices as they discuss the horrors of "metrotextuality;" ABC's plan to create YouTube videos of celebrities dancing popular dances; and Wal-Mart caskets. Subscribe to The Hatecast iTunes feeds.theonion.com/hatecast

Books: Gateways To Geekery:Philip K. Dick

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 12:00:00 -0600

Pop culture can be as forbidding as it is inviting, particularly in areas that invite geeky obsession: The more devotion a genre or series or subculture inspires, the easier it is for the uninitiated to feel like they’re on the outside looking in. But geeks aren’t born; they’re made. And sometimes it only takes the right starting point to bring newbies into various intimidatingly vast obsessions. Gateways To Geekery is our regular attempt to help those who want to be enthralled, but aren’t sure where to start. Want advice? Suggest future Gateways To Geekery topics by ...

Film: The New Cult Canon:Hedwig And The Angry Inch

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600

“I gave a piece to my mother I gave a piece to my man I gave a piece to the rock star He took the good stuff and ran.” —“Hedwig’s Lament,” Hedwig And The Angry Inch “This is San Francisco? But it’s so clean!” Every time I think about Rent—or really any enterprise that repackages unruly culture for mass consumption—the Mr. Show sketch “San Francisco: The Theme Park” inevitably springs to mind. Thanks to the omnipresent, all-powerful GloboChem corporation, a once-scary city known for “hippies, angry lesbians, and Chinese” has been transformed into a happy-faced amusement ...

Film: Interview:Lee Daniels and Gabby Sidibe

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600

In his movie Precious, producer-turned-director Lee Daniels has the kind of cinematic success story that gives hope to generations of independent filmmakers and other assorted dreamers. On paper, the film looks almost comically non-commercial. It’s a kitchen-sink melodrama about a morbidly obese, illiterate black teenager in 1980s New York who is physically abused by her monstrous welfare-cheat mother and sexually abused by her father, who is also the father of her two children. Throw in a complete unknown in the lead (Gabby Sidibe) and a director whose only other directorial effort (2005’s Shadowboxer) came and went without a ...

Music: Interview:Jim O’Rourke

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 13:06:00 -0600

Jim O’Rourke is a storied musician and producer who has cut something of a Zelig-like figure in indie music in the 1990s and 2000s. He came up with the prescient avant-folk group Gastr Del Sol, made numerous records full of drones and noise, and played crucial roles in such big bands as Wilco (he helped conceive Yankee Hotel Foxtrot) and Sonic Youth (he was temporarily a fifth member of the band). His studio credits, as a producer and/or mixer, include records by Stereolab, John Fahey, Joanna Newsom, Faust, Beth Orton, and many more. Alongside all that, O’Rourke ...

Music: Interview:Daryl Hall and John Oates

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600

When Daryl Hall and John Oates met in 1967, both men had been kicking around the Philadelphia music scene for nearly a decade. They immediately found common ground, and they began collaborating a couple of years later, releasing their first album, Whole Oats, in 1972. In 1973, they notched their first hit single, “She’s Gone,” from the album Abandoned Luncheonette, though follow-up successes were more scattered throughout the ’70s, as the duo experimented with different sounds and styles. With the 1980 album Voices, Hall and Oates began to hit their stride, and for the next half-decade, they released an ...

DVD: I Watched This On Purpose:S1m0ne

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600

Sometimes, even The A.V. Club isn’t impervious to the sexy allure of ostensible cultural garbage. Which is why there’s I Watched This On Purpose, our feature exploring the impulse to spend time with trashy-looking yet in some way irresistible entertainments, playing the long odds in hopes of a real reward and a good time. Cultural infamy: In 2002, screenwriter Andrew Niccol was on a roll, sort of. He penned and directed Gattaca in 1997, and followed it by writing and co-producing The Truman Show in 1998. Both films dealt with characters trapped in social infrastructures that value ...

Music: Nashville or Bust:Week 22: Lee Hazlewood, space cowboy/peculiar guy

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 13:48:00 -0600

A.V. Club head writer and hip-hop specialist Nathan Rabin recently decided to spend a year or two immersing himself in the canon of country music, a genre he knew little about, but was keen to explore. The result: “Nashville Or Bust,” a series of essays about seminal country artists. After 52 entries, Rabin plans to travel south and explore some of country music’s most hallowed landmarks and institutions. I first remember reading about Lee Hazlewood in one of the British music magazines I devoured rapaciously during my sorry stint as a teenybopper music obsessive. That’s how friendless ...

Film: Interview:Charlotte Gainsbourg

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600

The daughter of French singer-provocateur Serge Gainsbourg and Swinging London icon Jane Birkin, Charlotte Gainsbourg was born to fame, but her career path hasn’t been a straight line. At the age of 12, she dueted with her father on “Lemon Incest,” a proclamation of paternal devotion whose ambiguous lyrics and semi-clad video prompted public outcry. She quickly followed it in 1986 with the album Charlotte For Ever, but it took two decades for her next album, 5:55, to arrive. She started young as an actress as well, playing the lead in 1988’s The Little Thief and an ...

TV: Interview:Chris Pratt

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600

Chris Pratt kicked around Hollywood for a few years following an inauspicious debut in the 2000 horror film Cursed Part 3, but in 2002, he got his first regular television gig, co-starring as Bright Abbott on Everwood. After a handful of other roles, he landed a high-profile gig as Ché on The O.C., but he found a whole new audience of comedy fans starting in 2008. In addition to bigger movie parts, he landed the choice role of Andy Dwyer, Rashida Jones’ hapless ex-boyfriend on NBC’s Parks And Recreation. Pratt recently spoke to The A.V. Club about ...

Film: Inventory:Get omnibus: 17 salvageable segments from multiple-director anthology movies

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600

1. Jim Jarmusch’s “Int. Trailer. Night” from Ten Minutes Older: The Trumpet (2002) Beware the omnibus project so vaguely defined that filmmakers can basically do whatever they want, confident that the theme is abstract and generic enough to admit any concept imaginable. Ostensibly organized around the notion of time as perceptual river (per an opening epigram from Marcus Aurelius), the twin Ten Minutes Older films—one subtitled The Trumpet, the other The Cello; thankfully, we were spared The Accordion—found an alarming number of world-class directors, from Claire Denis to Werner Herzog to Jean-Luc Godard, just dicking around for ...

Music: Beat Connection:November 2009

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600

There’s simply too much house, techno, dubstep, downtempo, electro, ambient, and whatever the hell else they’re calling it all this week (Special 12-Inch Remix Dub Edit, of course) for even the full-time culture geeks at The A.V. Club to make sense of. So every month, we’re letting resident freelance beat-head Michaelangelo Matos sift through the teeming, overproductive world of post-rave electronic music to try and sort it all out. Beat Connection will attempt to keep on top of the albums, EPs, DJ mixes, and compilations competing for the attention of the glazed-eyed wannabe-androids who dance to ...

Film: Better Late Than Never?:The Seventh Seal

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600

Spoiler alert: In the end, everybody dies. There’s this phase people go through—it happens differently for each person, and some people never get it, and some people never really get out of it. But for most of us, it’s a phase. It isn’t just that you’re suddenly aware of death; it’s that you suddenly feel as though you can see through everything, like realizing that the whole world is made up of atoms playing at being solid, only instead you’re seeing corpses everywhere that don’t have the dignity to rot. Like Peter ...

Film: Random Roles:Penelope Ann Miller

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:24:00 -0500

The actor: Penelope Ann Miller, who began her career on Broadway in the ’80s, then became a Hollywood “It Girl” in the early ’90s, thanks to hits like The Freshman and Kindergarten Cop. Miller migrated to character parts and television roles over the past decade. She’ll soon be seen in the new TNT series Men Of A Certain Age, and can currently be seen in the motocross melodrama Free Style. Free Style (2009)—“Jeanette” Penelope Ann Miller: I play a single mother for the first time. Wait… no. Is it the first time? I shouldn’t say that. Anyway ...

Film: Interview:Jemaine Clement

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Most people think of Jemaine Clement as part of a unit—the Costello, or possibly the Abbott, to pal Bret McKenzie in their New Zealand folk-comedy duo Flight Of The Conchords. But lately there have been signs that Clement is close to breaking out on his own, beginning with his “Best Actor” Emmy nomination for the Conchords’ HBO show and his starring role in Eagle Vs. Shark, and now his prominent role in Gentlemen Broncos, the latest from Napoleon Dynamite director Jared Hess. Though his actual screen time logs him as a supporting character, it’s unquestionably Clement’s film ...

Books: Hatecast:Y'all Jealous Of Sarah Palin

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500

On this special Halloween edition of the Hater podcast, Amelie Gillette and former Onion video contributor/current writer/producer for Grist.org, Jennifer Prediger, don't mention Halloween once! But they don't need to because there is something inherently scary about every topic they discussed— which fictional characters are jealous of Sarah Palin; Charmin's devious plan to confine people to bathrooms in Times Square; and Sandra "Here's A Stack Of Cakes" Lee. Enjoy, but watch out for razorblades. Subscribe to The Hatecast iTunes feeds.theonion.com/hatecast