July 2009
4 posts
3 tags
Put a little love in it.
Quick observation: Both John Ottman’s Urban Legends: Final Cut and Tommy Wirkola’s Dead Snow feature rabid-horror-fan characters who end up being killed by the antagonist early on. With the Ottman film, a lazy and cynical bit of goods near the bottom of the neo-slasher barrel, it’s hard not to see it as a nose-thumbing at its intended audience: The filmmakers believe themselves...
2 tags
She's all growns up.
Lily Allen’s Alright, Still… is a pretty terrific pop album. It’s also decidedly one written by a callow youth, all sneers and blown raspberries at stoner brothers, doddering grannies, cheating boyfriends, skeevy barflies and whoever else happens to bounce towards her. Her new joint, It’s Not Me, It’s You, doesn’t represent a big leap forward in terms of...
2 tags
The Monday gauntlet: 4/27/09
Oronoco, a new Brazilian rum made with pure sugar cane. I generally don’t care for rum, but this is pretty delicious, with a mellow sweetness that takes the edge off the alcohol. This could make a pretty dynamite mojito, now that I think about it.
An Arneis from Barale, an Italian vineyard. Great summer white — light and flavorful, with an aromatic, almost perfumed quality that...
4 tags
You have a kind of sick desperation in your laugh.
In his autobiography Everything I Needed to Know About Filmmaking I Learned from The Toxic Avenger, Lloyd Kaufman (perhaps apocryphally) quotes “Li’l Abner” cartoonist Al Capp as having uttered, “All humor is based in cruelty.” His career is yet young, but Jody Hill thus far would seem to agree with that. With his features The Foot Fist Way and Observe and Report, as...
