newcritics

It all started innocently enough over at my place when I put up this charming clip.
One of the two or three regular readers of my blog, who chooses, perhaps out of laziness, to go by the moniker Anonymous, left this comment:
Great 60’s Male Vocalists in No Particular Order:
John Lennon Elvis Presley
Paul Jones Paul McCartney
Roy Orbison [...]

We Philly kids grew up with great rock and roll radio in the 60s. You’d switch on the transistor and you had it all, from the Supremes and the Four Tops to the Stones and the Beatles to the more obscure but fantastic Dyke & the Blazers and the Shadows of Knight and the Seeds. [...]

The thing about writing about comedy is that writing about comedy is usually not funny. Let’s face it, comedy itself is usually not funny, so it stands to reason that talking about comedy is even more likely not to be funny.
So I won’t bore you with a shot-by-shot exegesis of some of my favorite [...]

Americans are an optimistic people. Most of us are descended from men and women who came over here because their lives in the old country sucked, and so they uprooted themselves and their families and left everything they knew to come to a country in which they hoped to have a better chance for happiness. [...]

Death Proof was Quentin Tarantino’s half of his and Robert Rodriguez’s homage to trashy double-features, Grindhouse (complete with some fake trailers for imaginary movies directed by some other schlockmeisters). When I saw my first internet ad for this movie I e-mailed it to a friend who shares many of my own louche tastes, saying, “At [...]

I bow to no man in my avant-gardity. My avant-gardedness? My avant-gardicity? No matter, you get my point.
I’m so avant-garde I once did a performance piece where I played Andy Warhol come back from the dead. (Some of my audience felt I was more life-like than Andy himself had ever been.)
I once directed another piece [...]

I don’t know about the rest of you, but my own life has been a series of defeats, humiliations, pratfalls, and disasters (and one or two of these have not even been my fault) against a background of tedium, boredom and neurotic dissatisfaction.
Is it any wonder that I am a fan of Extras?
Ricky Gervais [...]

I took a mini-vacation last week, and for once I chose not to do battle with the big bluefish off Cape May or to stride manfully into each of the Atlantic City casinos in turn, clad in my finest white dinner jacket and breaking their baccarat banks one by one. No, this time I stayed [...]

Sometimes I think that the problem with TV shows and books and movies is that writers write them. The very fact that a writer is doing the writing casts a heavy pall of dubiety upon the enterprise from the get-go.
Ladies and gentlemen, presented for your consideration: Californication, premiering tonight on Showtime right after the season [...]

Like any good American I have spent a vast portion of my pathetic life planted in front of a TV set watching crap.
But on the other hand I’ve gone long stretches in which I didn’t own a TV or didn’t have cable (which in downtown Philadelphia means you don’t watch TV); I used to [...]

In the past twenty years or so the last of the great twentieth century writers passed away: Samuel Beckett, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Jorge Luis Borges. They haven’t been replaced, and they won’t be replaced.
Now the last of the great masters of cinema is gone. There are still some fine movie makers around, but I don’t [...]

Well, Sarah Michelle Gellar’s back on TV with Phil Leotardo’s new Lifetime series, Touched By a Zombie. Premiering tonight at 8:00 EDT (with repeats at 9:00, 11:00, 1:00 AM, 3 AM, etc.), Gellar plays hardbitten veteran Philadelphia homicide detective Grace Dumbrowski. Grace, we gather from the opening sequences, is a damned good cop even if [...]

So I’m reading the Shamus’s perfectly nice recent article in these parts about that perfectly nice artist Stevie Wonder and I had the awful urge to leave a comment, but after for once thinking it over, I desisted. So now I’m writing this instead.
Because I have to admit I fucking hate Stevie Wonder. No, [...]

License to Wed, the delightful new comedy from Ingmar Bergman (I know, he keeps saying he’s going to retire, but it’s like my old man used to say, some of these guys you gotta beat into the grave with a stick), starring Robin Williams and some other people, should be seen by anyone considering marriage, [...]

Jerry Schatzberg’s The Panic in Needle Park has finally come out on DVD, 36 years after its theatrical release. Warning: this movie is a scabrously realistic story about junkies, with close-up shots of needles entering flesh. So if you can’t handle this sort of thing (and I don’t blame you if you can’t) cross this [...]

The Dum Dum Boys
(written by Iggy Pop and David Bowie; from Iggy’s The Idiot, 1977)
What happened to Zeke
He’s dead on (unintelligible) man
How about Dave
OD’d on alcohol
Well what’s Rock doin’
Ah he’s livin’ with his mother
What about James
He’s gone straight

Things have been tough
Without the dum dum boys
I can’t seem to speak
The language
I remember how they
Used to stare [...]

I’ve got this extremely fragile and yellowed page from the Philadelphia Bulletin, Wednesday, Jan. 31, 1945. I keep it folded up in the back of a photo album. The page has a round-up of the latest military casualties: killed, wounded, missing, taken prisoner. My father is listed in there:
Sergeant Edward J. Leo, 22, son of [...]

I have been enjoying the pinnacles of cinematic art since my late teens, when I began haunting a beautifully shabby repertory theatre in Philly’s Germantown called The Bandbox. Those were the days, those pre-home-video days, of going to see Himalayan double bills of Fellini and Bergman, of Kurosawa and Godard, and all for the first [...]

The French director and writer Jean-Pierre Melville (1917-1973) is mostly known for gangster movies: Bob le flambeur, Le Doulos, Le Samouraï, Le Cercle rouge, Un Flic, movies inspired by American film noir, so much so that sometimes the characters have American-sounding names (Bob, Jef, Corey), and in the case of Un Flic (A Cop), even [...]

Gabby and the Gazelles were probably the most notorious of the rock groups that sprang up in Philadelphia’s sprawling and mysterious Olney section n the post-British invasion era of 1964-66. Gabrielle “Gabby” Dunne, the girlfriend of Tom Dooley of the popular band the Rear Ends had gotten increasingly annoyed at Tom getting all the attention, [...]

(It occurs to me that the “Olney” in the above headline means nothing to non-Philadelphians, and even to some Philadelphians it means little. Perhaps an explanatory note would be in order. Olney is one of those neighborhoods that no one ever really has any need even to go through to get anywhere, and, at least [...]