Author Archive
Movie
Joyce Brewster (Barbra Streisand) is the kind of doting mother who can’t just let things be. And she’s really insecure. She thinks her son Andy (Seth Rogen) moved from their New Jersey home out to Cali just to get away from her...
Album Reviews
We’ve reached the 13th anniversary of the Magnetic Fields‘ landmark release, 69 Love Songs, and – after many recent listenings – it occurs to me this 3-CD set could use a reappraisal. When it initially came out in 1...
Movie
Getting old is a bitch. At least that’s the point of This is 40, writer-director Judd Apatow’s sort-of sequel to 2007’s Knocked Up. The film centers on Debbie (Leslie Mann) and Pete (Paul Rudd), a couple (still) struggling with...
Movie
Based on “On Seeing a Sex Surrogate,” the article Mark O’Brien wrote for Sun magazine in May 1990, The Sessions isn’t as compelling as Breathing Lessons, an Academy award-winning 1996 documentary that addressed this story...
Movie
As big fans of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, we were excited to see The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, the prequel that will subsequently launch a new trilogy. Helmed by Peter Jackson, the director behind Lord of the Rings, Th...
Flicks
Director Malcolm Leo, whose work includes This Is Elvis and films on The Beach Boys and Crosby, Stills & Nash, interviewed the late Jerry Garcia in 1987. He recently unearthed the footage and decided it would make for a gre...
Movie
Killing Them Softly writer-director Andrew Dominik (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford) has said he sought to bring out the relevance of George V. Higgins’s 1974 novel Cogan’s Trade about the criminal un...
Movie
The story behind Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock’s most popular movie and a cinematic masterpiece, has a good deal of drama built into it. Once he decided he would adapt Robert Bloch’s gruesome book into a film, the esteemed director ...
Q&A
Some 15 years ago, indie rockers Of Montreal coalesced in Athens, Georgia and quickly became part of a loose collective of neo psychedelic bands dubbed Elephant 6. Led by singer-songwriter Kevin Barnes, the group stands poised ...
Movie
Before Ang Lee (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) signed on to direct Life of Pi, the film based on Yann Martel’s 2001 fantasy novel by the same name, a few other notable directors came and went. First, it was M. Night Shyamalan ...