Sadly, the images alongside this Esquire article about a live-action Thundercats movie were too clearly Photoshopped for the gag to really sell for more than an instant, but they do seem to have pegged my generation: For a split second, I was pretty excited.

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For reasons not entirely clear even to me, I was looking over Rolling Stone‘s list of “The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time”, which gives a little précis of each record and also reports its total sales. I don’t think I need to fear revocation of my libertarian decoder ring if I make the trite […]

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Slate nails the allure of the Ocean’s X movies: Only the first is even approximately watchable as a story, but they’re all fantastic as “luxury brands.” A smarter distributor would release DVDs with a special feature allowing you to keep the excellent David Holmes soundtracks rolling, but mute the dialog—that’s how they ought to be […]

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Ezra links to philosopher Slavoj Zizek’s critical review of the excellent movie The Lives of Others, drawing special attention to this passage: Like so many other films depicting the harshness of Communist regimes, The Lives of Others misses their true horror. How so? First, what sets the film’s plot in motion is the corrupt minister […]

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The first single off Spoon‘s forthcoming album is out. (Thanks Laure!) It’s good stuff, though also feels like a clear departure from their last few albums, sounding a bit like a B-side from a New Wave band fronted by Steve Reich. (I actually had to go check Wikipedia to make sure drummer Jim Eno wasn’t […]

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A great book review in New Statesman finds that the artists most revered for their authenticity are the ones who’ve best perfected their artifice. The book under review, Faking It, looks to be worth reading in its entirety.

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Since this has been around for at least 48 hours—which is eons in Internet time—I’ll assume many of you have already seen this Alanis Morissette parody of the execrable, inexplicably popular Black Eyed Peas abortion “My Humps.” But the spoof nevertheless deserves an extra nod for managing to simultaneously be hilarious as a satire of […]

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So, I finally got around to listening to The 6ths, one of many intriguing side-projects to spring, Athena-like, from the mind of Magnetic Fields impresario Stephin Merritt. And in a way, what’s most immediately interesting is the way the Wasps’ Nests album prefigures so much of Merritt’s later, better known work. (For context, the conceit […]

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In addition to the excellent Lives of Others, I caught The Pillowman with a group of Americas Future Foundation kids last week. Andrew Sullivan saw it too… and reveals that the guy in the background who seemed vaguely familiar under all that makeup was, in fact, his boyfriend Aaron. I was a little worried at […]

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I finally got around to seeing The Lives of Others last week. For those of you who’ve missed the buzz, the film follows Stasi captain Gerd Wiesler and the couple he’s been assigned to surveil: writer Georg Dreyman and his actress girlfriend Christa-Maria Sieland. Each begins—whether from fear, conviction, or some mixture of the two—as […]

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