Author: Eric

Movie review: “The Witch” (2016)

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“I cannot write my name.”

“I will guide thy hand.”

It’s a rare occurrence anymore that viewing a new film makes such a subconscious impression upon me that I carry it forward into my dreams. I didn’t have a bad night per se, a mere handful of hours removed from viewing writer-director Robert Eggers’ grim and engrossing period piece The Witch, but I will say it was emotionally fraught. Nor did I dream outright of witches, the existence of which, with their wanton, many would say dangerous perversion and sublimation of the established word and will of God, was an accepted if not central tenet of the Puritan faith, and for a simple reason. Traditionally, I have never found witches particularly scary, though I’m sure your mileage will vary. Though accomplished and involving in its own right, Eggers’ film subtly gains or loses potency depending, in part, on the personal baggage – faith, fears, family – his viewer brings to it, but operates at such a level of sustained tension, even during those great stretches when nothing much appears to be happening, that I’m certain I wasn’t the only one so affected. Continue reading “Movie review: “The Witch” (2016)” →

Movie review: “Deadpool” (2016)

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“What if I told you we can make you better? You’re a fighter. We can give you abilities most men only dream of. Make you a superhero…”

“Just promise me you’ll do right by me, so I can do right by someone else. And don’t make the super suit green. Or animated!”

There is a level on which practically any information I divulge about Deadpool below the purely superficial could be construed as a spoiler, so I must be especially light on my feet – or, at any rate, more careful than is the man of the hour, a shoot-first, quip-second, slash-third, wash-rinse-repeat rolling ball of destruction with a delightful tendency to leave any room he enters looking like a smoldering ruin and/or the aftermath of a successful large-scale weapons test. Yes, I plan to tread carefully. Luckily, the film is such a riot of rapid fire sass, fury, and invention (and bullets!) that it doesn’t have to pivot on plot in order to surprise. You can take it from me that Deadpool has lots to spring on what will either be its fully primed, giddily anticipatory or, failing that, completely unprepared, fairly aghast audience. Much of the movie’s appeal undeniably lies in its conspicuous lack of a middle ground. Continue reading “Movie review: “Deadpool” (2016)” →

Movie review: “Hail, Caesar!” (2016)

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“Bless me Father, for I have sinned.”

“How long since your last confession?”

“Um, twenty-seven…hours.”

“It’s really too soon, my son. You’re just not that bad a person.”

“I don’t know, Father. I snuck a cigarette, I didn’t get home in time for dinner…and I struck a movie star in anger!”

As a writer/director/production team, brothers Joel and Ethan Coen are responsible for some of the unquestionably best and most esoteric movies of the last thirty years, a roll call – including Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Miller’s Crossing, Barton Fink, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, No Country for Old Men, and Inside Llewyn Davis, among others – consisting of equal parts unvarnished Oscar bait and uncompromised wish fulfillment as high art, even if the wish itself sometimes seems culled from common stock. Part of the joy of following the Coens’ career has come from the fact that their pictures are so patently unlike anyone else’s, although they do display a tendency toward circular self-reference – perhaps unintentional, perhaps not, depending on the title – the further into their filmography one ventures. Continue reading “Movie review: “Hail, Caesar!” (2016)” →

My Top 20 Albums of 2015 + supplemental lists

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2015

Introduction

I have always had a procrastination problem. To hear my mother tell, it’s more like a birthright. My parents are both procrastinators and so I was hit with both barrels. I “never had a chance,” she’s told me more than once. At the conclusion of what I thought was a fairly banner second year, I closed up shop for DAE on December 18, 2015, leaving myself time off for all my various holiday travels and, in theory at least, building in enough room to comfortably finish my traditional year-end album countdown within the roughly three-week window. Or so I thought. Unlike last year, this vacation time did not especially cry out to be shared, plus I received a slew of unexpected bumps and priority adjustments that I did not experience in 2014. I still occasionally get annoyed that essentially taking the month of August 2014 off in order to write my “Iron Maiden Saved My Life” essay precluded me from reviewing Guardians of the Galaxy or paying my proper, bottomless respects to the late Robin Williams. Unless I have something at least under construction at all times, I can’t maintain the schedule I want for this blog, which is, roughly, to produce one reasonably thorough/polished piece per week. Continue reading “My Top 20 Albums of 2015 + supplemental lists” →

Concert review: Anthrax

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Anthrax - 2015

Newport Music Hall, Columbus, OH – January 27, 2016

People enjoy and continually return to live music for myriad reasons: they love its immediacy, its intimacy, or, by contrast, they are overawed by spectacle, or love the near unmatchable feeling of being one among many, sometimes among thousands, united in a common passion. Some want to hear a recording they’ve always loved duplicated perfectly on stage, while some explicitly desire to see it taken in new and unexpected directions. Some thrive on the inherent intensity that happens whenever a band is operating in high gear. Some want to literally bounce off of every person they can, while others internalize the music and move in their own deliberate and inimitable ways. Underlying everything is the simultaneous sense of renewal and strengthening of an already powerful bond between artist and listener, quite likely forged far away from the stage, often under the most personal of circumstances. Continue reading “Concert review: Anthrax” →

Steelers Thoughts #12 (1/18/16): House Money

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The 2015-16 Pittsburgh Steelers season was one wild ride – silly, sublime, heartbreaking, exhilarating – full of adversity and transcendence, rewards and regrets, devastating injuries and edifying teamwork, on field potential both realized and left dangling, tantalizingly unfulfilled…in other words, a football season. The clock finally struck midnight on Pittsburgh’s fairy tale playoff run at Denver’s Sports Authority Field at Mile High – one of the league’s few truly authentic and historic home field advantages – and the Steelers’ golden coach grudgingly turned back into a pumpkin, though the men remained men and not mice. I think those men left everything out there on the field. They have exceedingly little to hang their heads about today, and reason for real optimism going forward. Continue reading “Steelers Thoughts #12 (1/18/16): House Money” →

David Bowie: An Appreciation

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To a self-trained and finely conditioned amateur musicologist like me, Greatest Hits albums have always been the music industry’s signature cop-out, a sort of mercenary placeholder designed to reward artists (or, more often, record companies) for minimal work ethic or creativity while, in effect, also encouraging and congratulating nascent fans for their insufficient curiosity or incomplete devotion. A “real” fan – went the considered reasoning, since adjusted, of an unnamed critic who, full disclosure, shamefully counts a couple dozen or more such hits compilations among the several thousand albums he owns – would surely already know, love, and possess all those songs from their original releases. Even if the record company made the artist tack one new song onto the end in order to justify the record’s purchase by completist dead-enders, it’s most likely a “hit” of substandard quality Continue reading “David Bowie: An Appreciation” →

Movie review: “The Hateful Eight” (2015)

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hateful

“Move a little strange, and you’re gonna get a bullet. Not a warning, not a question…a bullet!”

The first one-sheet poster I recall seeing for Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight was wondrous in its stark, throwback simplicity. It depicted a lonely stagecoach being drawn by a team of six horses across a forbidding, bone white landscape, scrubbed clean of any other hint of terrain save a cabin in the distance. Instead of wagon treads in the presumed snow, the coach trailed a great wash of fresh blood behind it. The end. Interested? I sure was. The mercurial director has, of course, long exercised a singular gift for turning the straightforward into the convoluted, and, by the same token, for instilling sense, order, and gravity onto the hopelessly labyrinthine. It all depends on your perspective. Continue reading “Movie review: “The Hateful Eight” (2015)” →

Ian “Lemmy” Kilmister: An Appreciation

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I foolishly tasked myself with the impossible, to attempt to sum up Motorhead’s Lemmy Kilmister for posterity. My head was spinning at the news of his sudden loss – at the age of seventy following a very public year in precisely the wrong sort of spotlight, and a late cancer diagnosis kept sensibly private from everyone but those who most needed to know – and the tears were still uncomfortably fresh. If the world this morning after is full of shocked music fans who surely felt themselves existing on an intimate, “need to know” basis nevertheless, that only serves as another bit of evidence of how far the man’s reach extended and how deeply his impact was felt. Ian Fraser “Lemmy” Kilmister was so many different things to a sneaky large segment of the music-going public: a figurehead, a fountainhead, a guru, a gadfly, a hedonist, an evangelist, a hellraiser, a barnburner, a stoic professional and rock and roll raconteur all rolled into one, with countless miles of astonishing history behind him and a cheering crowd before him each and every night. Continue reading “Ian “Lemmy” Kilmister: An Appreciation” →

Movie review: “Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens” (2015)

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“This is the ship that made the Kessel Run in fourteen parsecs?”

“TWELVE!”

My third grade class descended on the local mall on a glorious spring Monday morning in 1983 like a swarm of army ants, on a school-sanctioned field trip to see Return of the Jedi. The powers that be felt it would be the most efficient way to sate the thermonuclear excitement of a bunch of little hellions, and possibly the only ruse by which to attempt to focus their attention on schoolwork the entire rest of the week. Breathless speculation at the bus stop morphed into giddy anticipation on the rides both to and from school, before giving way to unalloyed joy in the movie theater. Afterward, we ate lunch at McDonald’s and played, en masse and single-minded, at a local park, pretending the wooden fort, with its suspension bridge, slides, and turrets, was Jabba the Hutt’s opulent pleasure barge, and that a giant rock jutting out of the ground just past the line separating sand from grass was the skiff from which Luke, Han, and Chewie were supposed to sacrifice themselves to the great and powerful Sarlacc…but rebelled. Continue reading “Movie review: “Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens” (2015)” →