The A.V. Club - Inventory

Film: Inventory:Inventory book excerpt: No, seriously, you’re next! 15 movies where the crazies are right

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600

Here’s another list written for our new book Inventory: 16 Films Featuring Manic Pixie Dream Girls, 10 Great Songs Nearly Ruined By Saxophone, And 100 More Obsessively Specific Pop-Culture Lists. 1. Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (1956) There’s no more famous small-town crazy whom no one’s ever going to believe than Kevin McCarthy in Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. And there’s no more famous unheeded warning than his chilling prediction, delivered straight at the camera, “They’re here already! You’re next!” This was meant to be Body Snatchers’ final scene; the alien pod creatures that ...

Books: Inventory:Checking out of the Overlook: 16 ways to survive a Stephen King story

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600

1. Don’t be evil. In Stephen King’s vast library of work—more than 60 books and nearly 400 short stories written over 35 years, according to The New York Times—the death tolls are vast, and the antagonists are monstrous, powerful, and often arbitrary. The protagonists often make it out in one piece, but there are no guarantees for anyone else. There are a few helpful paths to survival, though, starting with the most boring, obvious one: Don’t be the bad guy. While King’s has drawn from early predecessors like Edgar Allan Poe and H.P ...

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 ...

TV: Inventory:It’s a cookbook, or something: 14 types of Twilight Zone endings

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500

1. There’s a perfectly logical explanation for all this. In October 1959—50 years ago this month—renowned TV writer Rod Serling introduced his new fantasy anthology series The Twilight Zone with the episode “Where Is Everybody?”, starring Earl Holliman as a man who wanders through a recently abandoned town until he flips out, driven mad by loneliness. What weird juju caused the population of the Earth to vanish? Actually, no juju at all. It turns out that Holliman is an astronaut-trainee who hallucinated the empty town while in an isolation booth for a training exercise. For his first ...

Film: Inventory:Is Wayne Brady gonna have to choke a bitch?: 21+ guest stars who stretched the meaning of "as himself"

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500

1. Merv Griffin, The Man With Two Brains Nowadays, goofy star cameos are a dime a dozen, and many celebrities have realized that, far from damaging their careers, a well-deployed bit of self-mockery can make them seem human and relatable, and even give their reputation a needed jolt. That wasn’t so clear 25 years ago, which gives the big twist ending of Steve Martin’s hit-and-miss comedy The Man With Two Brains its staying power. A subplot involves the activities of a serial murderer known as “The Elevator Killer,” a mysterious figure who corners strangers in lifts and gives ...

Books: Inventory:Restart the presses! 23-plus entries we wish we could add to our new book Inventory

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500

This week finally sees the release of Inventory, The A.V. Club’s book of mostly new lists in the spirit and style of our weekly Inventory feature. We spent about a year putting it together, but even after turning in the final manuscript in February, it was still on our minds, especially when we ran across items that could have been in the book if they’d come out or come to our attention earlier. So here are the titles of 21 of the 102 lists you’ll find in Inventory, plus extra entries in the spirit of what ...

Film: Inventory:The amazing Dr. What?: 26 real titles from old movies, shorts, and cartoons that wouldn’t fly today

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500

1. The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse (1938) 2. “Billion Dollar Boner” (1960) 3. “Don’t Get Gay With Your Manicure!” (1903) 4. The Bank Dick (1940) 5. “Pussy Willie” (1929) 6. “The Boob Detective” (1914) 7. Three Nuts For Cinderella (1973) 8. “On The Knocker” (1963) 9. Dandy Dick (1935) 10. “Oh, What A Boob!” (1913) 11. “Burlesque Cock Fight” (1903) 12. “The Gay Shoe Clerk” (1903) 13. “Bush Doctor” (1954) 14. “Beaver Trouble” (1951) 15. “A Boob For Luck” (1915) 16. The Gay Divorcee (1934) 17. “The Boob’s Nemesis” (a.k.a. “Nuts Nuts”) (1914) 18. “The Hairy Ainus ...

Music: Inventory:“Alice’s Restaurant” doesn’t live here: 42 10+ minute “pop” songs worth your time

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500

1. Neil Young, “Cowgirl In The Sand” (10:06) Neil Young has a knack for making 10 minutes sound like not nearly long enough. On “Cowgirl In The Sand,” from his first album with Crazy Horse—the unstoppable Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere—Young sets a template that he’d repeat plenty of times in the future: Start with a gentle pop song and then let your guitar do the talking for a few minutes. “Cowgirl” never feels wanky, even as it offers up gnarly solos for minutes at a time. 2. Low, “Do You Know How To Waltz?” (14 ...

Music: Inventory:God said, “Rock!”: 8 artists who left secular music for God, then returned

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500

1. Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens) The former Steven Demetre Georgiou entered the pop-music world at the tender age of 18, and cut his first monster record (Tea For The Tillerman) in his early 20s. Songs like “Peace Train” and cult successes like the soundtrack to Harold And Maude planted Stevens firmly in the center of the adult-contemporary consciousness. But a series of brushes with death led him into an exploration of spirituality in the 1970s, and in 1977, he converted to Islam and changed his name. Yusuf left the music business entirely for more than a decade to work for ...

TV: Inventory:Behind the glass teat: 14 worthwhile television shows about television

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500

1. The Larry Sanders Show Garry Shandling drew heavily on his experiences guest-hosting The Tonight Show when he co-created and starred in The Larry Sanders Show, a brilliant deconstruction of show-business artifice and the late-night talk show that doubled as one of the most penetrating, darkly funny explorations of male neuroses and sexuality this side of Philip Roth. In a performance so perfect that it seemingly inhibited his ability to play any other character, Shandling takes on the role of a narcissistic talk-show host who relies on his hard-drinking bulldog of a producer (a gleefully profane Rip Torn) to protect ...

Film: Inventory:You'll lick this picture business: 27 movies about the difficulty of making movies

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500

1. State And Main (2000) From time to time, viewers and critics accuse the Hollywood elite of being out of touch with the real world, of actually believing that there’s always a convenient parking space open in front of every building, or that even the lowliest New York City wage slave can afford to live alone in a vast, palatial-yet-funky loft apartment. Which is why it’s often fun to see movies tackling something that even the most out-of-touch filmmaker knows all about: the process of making a film. And while films about filmmaking can sometimes seem navel-gazing and ...

TV: Inventory:Gettin’ horizontal with Maddie: 22 TV series not ruined when two characters hooked up

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500

1. Cheers (Sam Malone and Diane Chambers) The whole idea of using a “will they or won’t they” slow-burning romance as a recurring plot driver on a TV show is largely attributable to Cheers, where the five-season cycle of flirtation, consummation, and rejection between a likeable bartender and a prim waitress kept generating new stories and new viewers. The genius of Cheers was that the writers were willing to risk alienating the audience by letting Sam become more than a little jerky once he finally hooked up with Diane. They made each other miserable, so they split up (not-so-amicably ...

Music: Inventory:Don’t try suicide, you’re just gonna hate it: 25 (mostly crappy) songs that try to talk you off the ledge

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500

1. Third Eye Blind, “Jumper” The old saying goes, “Why should the devil have all the good music?” There’s no good answer, but it’s pretty true that he does. The anti-suicide angels have been mostly left with ridiculously unsubtle songs like Third Eye Blind’s “Jumper,” whose chorus—“I wish you would step back from that ledge, my friend”—doesn’t even sound all that convincing. In fact, the whole song seems to make the singer more important than the potential victim. The only positive to remaining in this life is that the singer essentially promises that he ...

Music: Inventory:Don’t try to wake me in the morning: 36 (mostly excellent) songs to soundtrack your suicide

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500

1. The Smiths, “Asleep” There’s no song better suited for the sensitive depresso to shuffle off this mortal coil to than The Smiths’ classic “Asleep,” which paints the act of dying as necessary and almost pleasant. “Deep in the cell of my heart, I really want to go,” Morrissey sings—and he later wondered why they called him the Pope Of Mope. In the context of his other lyrics, it could be taken as dramatic hyperbole, but still, “Asleep” uses warm, melancholy piano to make death seem like a reasonable option. After all, “There is another world / there is ...

Film: Inventory:Learning to die: 23 fictional schools that might kill you

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500

1. Unnamed English public school, If…. (1969) At the end of a turbulent decade that found the counterculture revolution spreading around the world, Lindsay Anderson’s 1969 classic If…. represented a shocking call to anarchy. The action is set in an all-boys high school where the brutal power structure in greater England is enforced by the tacit rules governing the students. All the authority in the school belongs to the “Whips,” a group of privileged seniors who wield their power over the freshman “Scum” with sadistic glee. (For instance, the Scum have to warm their superiors’ toilet seats.) Nobody questions ...

TV: Inventory:“Now I’m bored and old”: 27 deliberately confounding follow-ups to popular successes

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500

1. Nirvana, In Utero (1993) “Teenage angst has paid off well / Now I’m bored and old” go the blunt first lines of “Serve The Servants,” the opening track on In Utero, Nirvana’s prickly follow-up to its millions-selling major-label phenomenon Nevermind. Fed up with the trappings of fame and the other baggage that went along with his success, Kurt Cobain pushed back with an abrasive album that pointedly rejected the slick, multi-layered studio sound that made Nevermind such a singles factory. The band threw down the gauntlet by hiring Steve Albini to apply his stripped-down, minimalist production aesthetic to ...

TV: Inventory:Souls for sale: 20+ fictional ad or PR professionals in need of redemption

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500

1. Steve Martin, Planes, Trains And Automobiles Because writer-director John Hughes started his career as a copywriter, “ad-man” has been the default career for many of his characters; and as a probable expression of how Hughes felt about his years in the industry, his ad-men are typically miserable souls, quietly yearning for meaning. Consider Teri Garr in Mr. Mom, or Kevin Bacon in She’s Having A Baby; or Steve Martin as Planes, Trains And Automobiles’ Neal Page, a man so uptight that it takes a disastrous cross-country trip with a salt-of-the-earth shower-curtain-ring salesman to teach him the values of ...

Film: Inventory:Are you faux-real? 18 “documentaries” that blur the line between truth and fiction

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500

1. The Last Broadcast (1998) The Last Broadcast’s greatest strength is its central gimmick: before Blair Witch Project exploded on the scene and made cheap, videotaped horror films into a cliché, Broadcast used grainy footage and cheap visual effects to tell its story about an ill-fated public-access TV show’s foray into the New Jersey woods. Broadcast never admits its fictional basis, and it’s easy to imagine someone stumbling across it some late night and falling for the gag; on the surface, it’s believable enough, built out of interviews, old footage, and the sonorous narration of supposed ...

Music: Inventory:You rarely get a second chance to make a first impression: 23 pop songs that lived twice (or more)

Mon, 27 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500

1. UB40, “Red Red Wine” UB40’s fourth studio album, Labour Of Love, found the UK reggae act paying tribute to its influences by reviving songs from The Melodians, Jimmy Cliff, and others. Among its tracks: a Neil Diamond song called “Red Red Wine” that had been a reggae hit for Tony Tribe in 1969. UB40’s version went over big in the UK and elsewhere in 1984, but just cracked the Top 40 in the U.S. That changed in 1988 when, after getting revived in an Atlanta club, the song caught fire again, becoming an inescapable No. 1 ...

Books: Inventory:Reinventing the pencil: 21 artists who changed mainstream comics (for better or worse)

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500

1. Jack Kirby Simply put, no artist had more of an influence on American comics this century than Jack Kirby. The former Jacob Kurtzberg was a restless self-improver, a workaholic, and a veteran idea man who created an art style that was highly distinctive and a massive influence on the rest of the industry. It’s easy to forget that by the time he and Stan Lee transformed Marvel Comics into a culture-shifting powerhouse, he’d already been in the business for more than 25 years. Though Kirby is rightly remembered for the miracles he worked in superhero comics, with ...