newcritics

In this quirky, personality-driven, iconoclastic corner of the media universe, any kind of year-end list-building runs up hard against two competing factors that tear at any kind of universality: as middle-brow armchair critics, our tastes are rather catholic, but our production is - in the kindest sense - distinctly idiosyncratic.
We write about what we want [...]

To get some idea of the prestige of Frost/Nixon, set aside Frank Langella’s (amazing, Oscar-worthy) performance for a second and consider two of the more throwaway appearances: Toby Jones as Swifty Lazar and Kevin Bacon as Jack Brennan, Nixon’s chief of staff after resignation. Bacon, of course, is film’s ultimate veteran, but his steely precision [...]

Out of almost anyone, Baz Luhrmann is charting the course of the modern epic. Here’s the guy who’s done the biggest, if not the only, freely created new musical on film in the past 10 years (Moulin Rouge!), and one of the best modern dress adaptations of Shakespeare (and warhorse Shakespeare at that, finding new [...]

The master of the meaningful pause dies on Silent Night, the artist of primal Jewish dread expires on Christmas eve–a Pinteresque moment in a time of turmoil.
For generations, starting with mine, Harold Pinter made art out of what was unsaid and unseen. His work took us out of the clatter and confusion of our daily [...]

Earlier this month I wrote about my favorite album of the year, Stay Positive by The Hold Steady. Today a flyover look at the best of the rest.
Vampire Weekend.  Before the government’s decisions to let the Lehman Brothers fail turned a snowballing financial crisis into an avalanche and turned a tough year into a grim [...]

It’s a very nice thing indeed to collaborate with Blue Girl on these annual Christmas songs. In 2006, we did a very quiet, meditative, woody version of the Vince Guaraldi number, “Christmas Time Is Here”; for last year’s project we acknowledged the Inner Rockabilly, doing “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.” Keep this up, we’ll have [...]

Cocaine was many a comic’s milk during the early-1980s. Several stand-ups I knew or partied with preferred the powder to just about anything else, booze included. I stuck my nose in a few times. Blow was never really my speed, which left me out of many conversations and frenzied back-and-forths. Being a pothead writer in [...]

Cross-posted at The Chutry Experiment.
Newsweek, of all places, has a fascinating intellectual exercise in which they ask several of their film and media writers to name one popular culture text that “exemplifies what it was like to be alive in the age of George W. Bush.” Obviously, the idea of capturing the zeitgeist of [...]

In the current vampire boomlet, True Blood (HBO, Sundays and elsewhere, and On Demand) serves as the erotic dark side of Twilight’s romantic intentions. Twilight made me tired; True Blood just makes me feel dirty.
Meant, I think, as a way for HBO to challenge the dominance of Showtime After Dark and Cinemax’s More Max softcore [...]

I haven’t posted in newcritics in far too long, in part because of teaching and writing obligations, but in the spirit of year-end list-making, I thought I’d share some recent reflections I posted on the practice of popular culture list-making over at The Chutry Experiment.

With the end of the calendar year fast approaching and end [...]

I am more movies than television (and surely, more filmed entertainment than live or recorded music), but there are TV things that I know and this is one of them: the Jay Leno deal is terrible. Horrible.

Set aside for the moment all the lousy mediocrity Leno represents - the middling career, the pale imitation of [...]

Last year I identified an important new school of film criticism, which I called “derrièrism,” since all schools of film criticism are supposed to have French names. Derrièrists are inspired by Jack Warner (though some say it was Harry Cohn), who once said that he judged movies by whether his ass shifted in the seat [...]

I’ve long since given up any pretense come December of being able to think in any comprehensive way about the *best* music of the year. There’s just too much new music released every year to an audience too scattered for a marketplace too micro-targeted and boutiqued for me to claim I can tell anyone what’s [...]