The A.V. Club - Inventory

Film: Inventory: Landmark films: 13 newly constructed buildings prominently featured in film

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0600

1. Burj Khalifa (built in 2010), Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol (2011) Big, ambitious buildings have a way of capturing the world’s attention, especially in Hollywood, where a cool new one can provide the perfect backdrop for a movie—giving the film a timely hook and the building a profile boost, especially if the building is only a few years old. The Mission: Impossible films rely on exotic destinations, perhaps none more so than Ghost Protocol, which shifts from Budapest to Moscow to Dubai to Mumbai to, um, Seattle. The third leg of that journey is basically just an excuse ...

Film: Inventory: Whose horse is it, anyway? 20 stories that follow property from owner to owner

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0600

1. Black Beauty (1877) Usually, “everything is connected” stories center on a single uniting event, a chain of meetings between people, or both. But once in a while, an author or screenwriter will base a story around an object traveling from hand to hand, or living property being transferred between owners, usually to make a point about how mundane things connect people, how different people relate to the same thing, or how physical objects can outlast ephemeral things like relationships, lives, and even civilizations. Anna Sewell wasn’t nearly that ambitious with her novel/educational tract Black Beauty, but she ...

Features: Inventory: When the commentariat attacks!: 14 entertaining cases of collective Internet satire

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 00:01:00 -0600

1-2. Paula Deen’s English Peas/Rachael Ray’s Late Night Bacon Food Network stars like Paula Deen and Rachael Ray pride themselves on uncomplicated dishes that viewers can easily recreate for their disappointed families on dinner tables across America. The recipe for Deen’s English Peas is roughly this: Drain a can of peas, add half a stick of butter, heat on the stove, and serve with middle finger raised in the air. The recipe for Ray’s “Late Night Bacon”: Eight slices of bacon, a bunch of paper towels, a microwave, and fuck off. Both were easy pickings ...

Music: Inventory: Maybe 1 million Lou Bega fans can be wrong: 14 albums that surprisingly went platinum

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0600

1. Hammer, The Funky Headhunter (1994) Countless albums have gone platinum in spite of their meager artistic merits. It’s not surprising that bad records sell millions; what’s surprising is when bad records by artists who are way past their commercial prime sell millions. That’s the case with Hammer’s The Funky Headhunter, the misbegotten (yet decent-selling) album that attempted to reshape the pop-rapper’s nice-guy image into a harder, more “street” mold. Headhunter hardly succeeded in that goal, considering the professional and personal misfortunes that befell Hammer in the wake of the album’s release. The video ...

Film: Inventory: Cartoon break: 20 live-action movies with one animated scene

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0600

1. Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (2010) It’s common enough for films to mix live-action and animation onscreen at the same time (going back to 1914’s “Gertie The Dinosaur”), or to alternate between live-action and animation (à la Song Of The South or Pink Floyd: The Wall), or to toss a handful of animated sequences into a largely live-action movie for color (like Better Off Dead or Eagle Vs. Shark), or to animate the opening or closing credits (like Ruthless People or A Series Of Unfortunate Events). Much less common: A purely live-action film that finds ...

TV: Inventory: “You’re on television for some reason, cow from The Far Side”: 15 comics that inspired forgotten TV adaptations

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0600

1. The Far Side As if in tacit agreement that no one reads newspapers anymore, comic-strip characters rarely leap from the funny pages to television these days—and the ones that once did can no longer find airtime if they aren’t connected to a boy named Charlie Brown. Then again, no single contemporary strip enjoys the complete cultural penetration achieved by strips like Peanuts, Garfield, or even Blondie at their creative and popular peaks. Considering that company, Gary Larson’s single-panel feature The Far Side is by far the strangest comic enterprise to ride a wave of desk calendars ...

Film: Inventory: The waiting will always be the hardest part: 64 of our most anticipated entertainments of 2012

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0600

1. The return of Mad Men, Game Of Thrones, and many more (various launch dates) The A.V. Club could have populated an entire Inventory just with ongoing TV shows we’re excited to see returning in 2012, but that wouldn’t have left room for all the films, books, and music we’re also excited about. Suffice to say we’re particularly excited about Downton Abbey (season two aired in Britain in 2011, and is coming to America in January), The Walking Dead (back in February after a four-month break), Mad Men (hopefully returning in March or April after ...

TV: Inventory: “Every time a bell rings...”: 22 TV variations on It’s A Wonderful Life

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0600

1. Raising Hope, “It’s A Hopeful Life” (2011) Though it took some time for It’s A Wonderful Life to become the seasonal staple it is today, Frank Capra’s 1946 film serves dual purposes in TV land. One, it reliably fills in a few two-hour programming holes around Christmastime; two, its most famous sequence—where destitute protagonist George Bailey wishes he’d never been born, and his guardian angel Clarence shows him the flaw in that logic—has become a perennial source of inspiration for television writers. In one of the most recent It’s A Wonderful Life ...

TV: Inventory: When 5 cents is too high a price: 26 destructive fictional therapists

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0600

1. Lucy Van Pelt, Peanuts Sure, 5 cents is a bargain when it comes to therapy, but the advice Peanuts’ Lucy Van Pelt dispenses from her psychiatry booth isn’t really worth much more than that—and if you happen to be Charlie Brown, it’s probably worth even less. (Though if you seek comfort from the girl who consistently humiliates you on the football field, then buyer beware.) Lucy apparently practices an extreme version of Gestalt therapy that involves belittling her patients, pointing out their myriad faults, and telling them to “snap out of it,” though her professional credentials ...

Music: Inventory: “Here I am, on the road again”: 16 convincingly dire songs about touring

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0600

1. Bob Seger, “Turn The Page” Like most people, musicians occasionally let off steam by complaining about their jobs. Much of the time, these gripes are hard for listeners to relate to—who wouldn’t want to travel the country and enjoy the spoils of adoring fans, free booze, easy sexual conquests, and lots of money for doing something that seems really fun? Because touring is sometimes like Bob Seger’s “Turn The Page,” a song that reveals certain realities about life on the road that have nothing to do with the good-time fantasies that the rest of us buy ...

Books: Inventory: Pure Sabacc wins again: 22-plus fictitious pop-culture games with convoluted rules

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

1. Whackbat, Fantastic Mr. Fox Games reflect the culture that created them, and in fiction, they can serve as an easy way to distinguish a fictional world from our own, while often commenting on ours. Well, “easy” in theory, because these alternate-world games often have complicated or confusingly vague rules, though they’re often easily understood by the characters in that world. Owen Wilson’s Coach Skip rattles off the rule set for Whackbat in Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox as if its convoluted mixture of baseball, cricket, and track and field is so familiar, it hardly warrants explanation ...

TV: Inventory: “You either have a wedding or you burn something down”: 24-plus TV episodes featuring ratings-grabbing stunts

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0600

1. I Love Lucy, “Lucy Goes To The Hospital” (1953) In the modern television landscape, transparent attempts to increase ratings are largely relegated to the so-called “sweeps” periods of November, February, May, and July—the months where viewership numbers help set the advertising rates that keep your TV brimming with new content. The most successful ratings stunt in the early years of television, however, was born of necessity, when the star of the biggest show on earth, Lucille Ball, became pregnant by her husband and co-star, Desi Arnaz. At a time when married couples weren’t even allowed to share ...

Film: Inventory: Stockholm swooning: 22 films where women fall in love with their kidnappers

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

1. In Time (2011) Cinema has a grand old tradition of leading men who romantically sweep ladies off their feet—and another, darker tradition of leading men who unromantically sweep ladies into vehicles at gunpoint. Much as stalking in romantic comedies is generally rewarded by love, kidnapping in dramas often turns romantic once the victim realizes that the man had really good reasons for threatening her life and using her as a hostage or bargaining chip. The idea that a bullied, abused woman will eventually come around to affection for her attacker is a particularly weird fantasy, combining a touch ...

Film: Inventory: More than just a week with Marilyn: 14 variations on Marilyn Monroe

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 00:01:00 -0600

1. The Goddess Portrayals of Marilyn Monroe as a basket case and sacrificial victim were already starting to appear before her death. The Goddess, the first movie to present a fictionalized treatment of her life and career, hit theaters four years before she died, the same year that she made her best movie, Some Like It Hot. Screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky was always on the lookout for some ultimate symbol of the overblown emptiness of American society, and he finds it here in the title character, a lonely, none-too-bright sexpot and pitcher of fits who, renamed “Rita Shawn,” becomes a big ...

TV: Inventory: Jack The Ripper in the 23rd century: 21-plus unexpectedly scary episodes of not-so-scary TV shows

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0500

1. Garfield’s Halloween Adventure Sure, there are TV shows that aim to be scary, like The Twilight Zone or The X-Files, shows that are famous for inventing horrific moments that keep us up nights and make us laugh with recognition when someone says “Flukeman” or “The Gentlemen.” And there are more and more of these shows now, in the wake of The Walking Dead. But far scarier is when a show you’d never expect to be horrifying—one that seems innocuous on its face—abruptly comes up with a scenario straight out of a terror-filled classic. Take the ...

Film: Inventory: Rewriting the world: 12 works of art that provoked real-world social and/or legal change

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 00:02:00 -0500

1. Paradise Lost: The Child Murders At Robin Hood Hills (1996) To claim that Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s Paradise Lost: The Child Murders At Robin Hood Hills or its follow-ups—Paradise Lost 2: Revelations and Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory—were responsible for the release of “The West Memphis Three” earlier this year would be inaccurate and grossly unfair to the lawyers and other advocates who labored for 18 years to free them. However, the films undeniably lit a spark that grew into a persistent flame. In 1994, three Arkansas teenagers—Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jesse Misskelley, Jr ...

TV: Inventory: “Your mother can’t be with you anymore”: 17-plus entertainments that teach children about death

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0500

1. Bambi (1942) It may be the most traumatizing death in cinema, even though it happens offscreen and the body is never seen: With the crack of a hunter’s gunshot, Bambi’s mother dies, leaving the fawn alone in the blinding snow, futilely calling for her. In the frantic moments between the gunshot and Bambi’s father telling him, “Your mother can’t be with you anymore,” his innocence and vulnerability pierces the heart; the child isn’t ready to face the world alone yet. But Bambi is fundamentally a movie about life, and though Bambi’s mother dies ...

Music: Inventory: Short paths to the canon: 22 influential artists with tiny bodies (of work)

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0500

1. Sex Pistols Ask the average Joe to name the first punk band that comes to mind, and he’ll most likely say “Sex Pistols,” possibly with an aggro, faux-Cockney accent. There’s no question as to whether the band has been massively influential: Rock historians can even name-check a specific gig—Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall, June 4, 1976—that launched an entire genre. Perhaps even more than one. The band absolutely shook the music world, and managed to do it while releasing exactly one proper studio album: 1977’s classic Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The ...

Music: Inventory: “Spotlight on Lou Rawls, y’all!”: 20 songs that name-drop numerous other artists

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0500

1-2. Arthur Conley, “Sweet Soul Music” and The Soul Clan, “Soul Meeting” It’s become an honored tradition to name-drop other artists in song, especially if the name-dropper might benefit from a piggyback ride on the names of those more famous. To his credit, Arthur Conley was already a promising R&B upstart—and a protégé of Otis Redding—when he made “Sweet Soul Music” a hit in 1967. Co-written with Redding, the song borrows heavily from Sam Cooke’s “Yeah Man.” But where Cooke’s tune celebrates the generic joys of dancing to pop music, Conley names names ...

Film: Inventory: Signs of life in the 3rd dimension: 13 recent films that show 3-D shouldn’t die

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 00:01:00 -0500

1. Coraline (2009) It’s hard to think of a more germane use of 3-D than stop-motion animation. The environments already exist in three dimensions, and yet they’re artificial enough to avoid pesky comparisons with the real world. For Coraline, director Henry Selick captured his elegantly crafted puppets in all their tactile glory, using variations in depth of field to delineate the distinction between the cramped confines of the real world and the endless space ruled by the seductive Other Mother. Selick is almost alone in thinking of 3-D not as a gimmick or simply a device to suck ...