Author: Eric

Movie review: “Mad Max: Fury Road” (2015)

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“If I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die historic on a fury road!”

I am a man who loves his adjectives, and, as a film and concertgoer (and general pop culture participant/enthusiast/reviewer/critic), someone who also, I think, chooses, deploys, and wields them with not a little facility. After thirty years of semi-serious or better moviegoing, I feel, on some level, that I’ve seen it all before, and lately it feels I’ve described a good deal of it to boot. Standard, shopworn superlatives shrink in the face of an uncompromised, uncompromising, full-tilt action odyssey like Mad Max: Fury Road, however. They feel laughably inadequate, and frustratingly incomplete. They burst into the same sort of flames director/writer/creator George Miller uses so often as visual punctuation, or else shrivel and blow away harmlessly into his vast desert setting, a merciless wasteland that, even in a film absolutely teeming with desperate, violent, flamboyant life, is still Fury Road’s most important and, at times, unforgettable character. Continue reading “Movie review: “Mad Max: Fury Road” (2015)” →

On Letterman, a very “Late Show”, and the noble endings of numerous things

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“It’s beginning to look like I’m not going to get The Tonight Show…”

Among a handful of standard, fallback jokes for the (temporarily) floundering late night talk show host – at least for as long as I’ve observed the form – is some variation of the following: any viewer who is still up and watching TV at this ungodly hour of the night has to have at least a little something wrong with him/her. It’s kind of a brilliant conceit, not to mention evergreen, not so much a blanket characterization as a sly, subtle method of bonding viewer to host via self-deprecating confession. There’s nothing more wrong with you than there is with me, the host is effectively saying. I’m the person you’re watching, after all. Why don’t we just be weird together! Continue reading “On Letterman, a very “Late Show”, and the noble endings of numerous things” →

Movie review: “Avengers: Age of Ultron” (2015)

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“Does anybody remember when I put a missile through a portal, in New York City? We were standing right under it. We’re the Avengers. We can bust weapons dealers the whole doo-da-day, but how do we cope with something like that?”

“Together.”

“We’ll lose.”

“We’ll do that together too.”

Whereas comic book superheroes and heroines have a long-standing, time-tested, free-swinging tradition of either brokering guest appearances in one another’s pages or, occasionally, full-on intramural team collaborations against a common enemy and/or towards a common goal, superhero movies have generally operated in hermetically sealed bubbles all their own, using house money and fighting the simplest, most obvious threats. Marvel’s decision, circa 2006, to revamp its existing film studio into something more robust and thus shepherd its own projects, independent of the sort of uninformed, high level meddling that helped turn promising sequels like Spider-Man 3 and X-Men: The Last Stand into underwhelming, overstuffed disappointments, or worse, didn’t immediately signal a seismic shift in the superhero game, though it did strike most observers as a pretty good idea. Little could anyone then have truly realized the scope of Marvel’s master plan Continue reading “Movie review: “Avengers: Age of Ultron” (2015)” →

Concert review: Southern Culture on the Skids (second opinion)

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SouthernCultureontheSkidsSITE

also appearing: The D-Rays
Rumba Café, Columbus, Ohio – May 3, 2015

My left ear is still adjusting to life spent at a greater than two-foot distance from the hanging P.A. speaker at extreme stage right of Columbus’ Rumba Café, which freshly charms me each new time I enter. The stage harkens back to better, more defiantly low-fidelity times by standing little more than a foot off the floor, and is itself a weirdly angled thing that juts out from two walls like a peninsula from the mainland. I was jammed up against not just the hanger but a standing speaker as tall as Ryan Seacrest. On this, their second year in a row playing Columbus after many years of conspicuous absence, surf/garage/rockabilly juggernaut Southern Culture on the Skids put on a fantastic show, full of unflagging energy and crowd-pleasing, adrenalized rockers, countrified anthems and plucky underdogs drawn from every album (and several E.P.s) in their close to thirty-year career. Continue reading “Concert review: Southern Culture on the Skids (second opinion)” →

“Money’s” Worth: Floyd Mayweather UD12 Manny Pacquiao

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Excessive time spent in the game has weathered me, and, consequently, I’m not nearly the boxing evangelist I was even a year ago, let alone five. Used to be, I was insufferable in addition to being long-winded, but now I’ve bumped up against the walls and limits of indifference (and that weird species of unsolicited antagonism that fans of other sports sometimes offer up to boxing) so much that I’m generally content to live, let live, and keep the majority of my opinions to myself. I can show you an entire parade of boxing matches that might curl your toes and make your hair turn white, not that it particularly matters. I am forced to admit that the sport will probably never again have a transcendent moment in the national sun of the likes that happened so regularly in the ‘70s, ‘80s and before. It’s just a different world. Continue reading ““Money’s” Worth: Floyd Mayweather UD12 Manny Pacquiao” →

Miscellanity #1 (5/4/15): Notes from “Capacity Weekend”

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Did you ever have one of those weekends? I’m thinking of a tightly compressed span of days that was so abnormally packed with business and interest and distractions and various things of note that it exhausted and exhilarated in essentially equal – though, in real time, constantly shifting – measure? Yeah, me neither, or at least not with any regularity, though every once in a while the worm (or is it the screw?) just turns and turns. This debut edition of DAE’s (latest) new column, “Miscellanity”, may well end up being both its first and only issue. It’s a practical matter, really. This past weekend, which featured, in Saturday, the widely touted “busiest day in sports history” since at least the last one, was such a convergence of “must see” events in several of the arenas that most interest me – Music, Football, TV, Boxing – that I could well have emerged from it having written not one but four new columns.* Continue reading “Miscellanity #1 (5/4/15): Notes from “Capacity Weekend”” →

Movie review: “Focus” (2015)

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“I can convince anyone of anything. I once convinced a man that an empty warehouse was the Federal Reserve. So I’m good.”

Con men and women are such inherently fascinating people, with their outward adherence to a professional code but otherwise subjective morality, with their investment in and facility with appearances belying what one imagines might be a fairly empty soul beneath. I welcome any chance I can get to learn more about this mindset, this appealing, alien lifestyle, which for an ordinary workaday drone like me is really wish fulfillment on a level just below that of “super hero”. Somewhere along the way, though – I’m thinking around the time of David Mamet’s ingenious, insinuating House of Games – movies about con artists stopped so much being character studies, and became little more than overly elaborate twist engines designed to fool the audience first and the protagonist second, if at all. I realize that with such a statement I may be eulogizing a form that actually never existed, but I have, at any rate, noticed that the balance seems to have irretrievably tipped in a direction that just doesn’t particularly appeal to me. Continue reading “Movie review: “Focus” (2015)” →

DVR Hindsight #11 (4/23/15): The Americans – Season Three finale

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The Americans – “March 8, 1983” – Season 3, Ep. 13 (FX) SPOILERS

“You can’t see ten feet in front of you. I’ve done nothing but try to take care of you, and because you’re not getting what you want, you think I’m the enemy. And when Elizabeth doesn’t see things exactly the way you see it, you think there’s something wrong with her. You know who there’s something wrong with. Grow up.”

As KGB spy handler Gabriel, played with a precise mixture of grandfatherly warmth and icy detachment by Frank Langella, dresses down his charge, Philip Jennings, thusly, the two have arrived at a long-deferred, finally unavoidable turning point in their relationship. Philip, of course, has been a Soviet spy embedded in Washington, DC for his entire adult life, having navigated a fraught, prickly, at least initially window dressing marriage to fellow homegrown soldier Elizabeth. The Americans is set during the early ‘80s height of the Cold War, a time during which many Soviet and American pawns and proxies (Cuba, South Africa, Afghanistan) were erupting in civil unrest bordering on revolutionary violence and actively affecting the larger chess game in disproportionate ways. Stateside, Philip and Elizabeth are entrenched and invaluable operatives, skilled and deadly intermediaries involved seemingly in every covert Soviet action on the Eastern seaboard, not to mention the parents of two teenagers. Continue reading “DVR Hindsight #11 (4/23/15): The Americans – Season Three finale” →

Baptism by Fire: Lucas Matthysse MD12 Ruslan Provodnikov

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Of all the televised sports, boxing is arguably the most visceral, the most capable of transmitting the action on screen directly into the brain and gut of its viewer with straight line speed and deadly accuracy. Most everyone, after all, can appreciate and wonder at the artistry of a transcendent basketball player like LeBron James soaring some four feet off the ground and covering an eight-foot distance on his way to a ferocious slam dunk, though very few could imagine ourselves in the same position, except maybe as comic relief. Every American kid dreams growing up of throwing the game-winning touchdown in the Super Bowl, or catching it, but the event itself, and the giant men who take the field for it, still seem otherworldly to us as adults. But almost every weekend, a cross-section of American sports fans sit on their couches, attentions fixed on in-ring competition between skilled and supremely willful combatants, men who are paid to punch each other until the other can take no more, and, once immersed, it takes a certain amount of will in itself to not react to particularly hard, clean, or thudding connects with a wince, an involuntary, spasm-like affirmation, or an audible indication of appreciation for the aggressor, or sympathy for the assaulted, or both. Continue reading “Baptism by Fire: Lucas Matthysse MD12 Ruslan Provodnikov” →

Steelers Thoughts #8 (4/16/15): Poets, Seers, and Warrior-Kings

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Because of the (seeming) increased importance, or at least commensurate media coverage, of the free agent period and draft, fans like me can often find themselves with a skewed subconscious understanding of the NFL off-season. With the draft a mere (albeit punishing) two weeks away and free agent activity now reduced to a trickle, it feels on many levels like the off-season is winding down when, in reality, it’s barely half done. Fans of the Pittsburgh Steelers might particularly already wish it was over, for the 2015 off-season – which, you’ll remember, began with Dick LeBeau’s emotional departure and Keith Butler’s promotion to defensive coordinator – has had a whiplash-inducing quality to it so far, with exceedingly long periods of eerie quiet suddenly punctuated not by a free agent signing, the kind of good faith reloading efforts that provide fans a moment’s excitement during the extended doldrum periods, but rather a full-blown life event, the magnitude of which might cause the recipient to update his insurance in real life. Continue reading “Steelers Thoughts #8 (4/16/15): Poets, Seers, and Warrior-Kings” →