Rawson Thurber has been so busy the past few days that by the time he finally returns a reporter’s phone call, he does so at 1:30 in the morning and he doesn’t even realize the late, or early, hour till he hears the groggy croak on the other end. He’s…
First off, make no mistake: Biker Boyz is not, and has no intentions of being, The Fast and the Furious on two wheels, which will be considered a serious shame by the 12- to 12-year-old demographic who were hoping to chug a little more Diesel fuel until the official sequel’s…
James Taylor’s stab at “Everyday” was just underwhelmingly twee; Andy Bell makes the Buddy Holly tune full-blown gay, which is precisely the point, since few singers are so loud or proud about their sexuality as the Erasure singer. Erasure’s “Everyday” plays even sweeter than the original, but not so syrupy…
Well, well, Weller another album hailed as “comeback” in the U.K., where it’s been available in altered form since September, and another album sure to be labeled “sell back” in the U.S. You can’t damn the man for growing up and out of his angry phase; that’s what men do…
These are the dog days of January, the poor, put-upon month used by studios as a dumping ground for product considered too lethally toxic for release during those real moviegoing months December, say, when audiences are buzzed on two weeks of vacation and award-contenders do their Oscar striptease and reveal…
Spike Lee’s adaptation of David Benioff’s 2001 novel The 25th Hour hews closely to the original tale, which the author has adapted in screenplay form: Montgomery Brogan, a working-class white boy who dreamed of being a New York City firefighter ’til he fell into a soft pile of easy money…
It’s easy to presume that About Schmidt isn’t much of a movie, since its protagonist, Warren Schmidt, isn’t much of anything. He’s portrayed by Jack Nicholson, but the actor is actually someone who looks like he used to be Jack Nicholson. This Warren, this rinky-dink actuary banished to the wasteland…
The biggest event to happen to television this year took place at the multiplex last summer: My Big Fat Greek Wedding, a one-woman show that has blossomed into a one-woman franchise. This spring, CBS-TV will debut My Big Fat Greek Life as a midseason replacement, featuring the entire cast of…
In all, a far better year than any in recent memory, so much so that it feels impolite and irresponsible to choose a mere 10 best among the annum’s offerings. This list remained in flux ’til the last possible moment; five seconds ago it featured, among others, Signs, Full Frontal,…
Now that they’ve busted up, like pumpkins smashed on curbs the night after Halloween, it’s time to admit that most everything post-Siamese Dream was overrated by the kids who found much meaning in bald Billy’s dreary fart-rock; look, when the words don’t say nothin’, they don’t mean nothin’. Tried giving…
Everything about Catch Me If You Can, the loosely based-on-fact tale of a teenager who swindled millions while posing as, among other things, a Pan Am pilot, a doctor and a lawyer, is breezy and easy to swallow. Its maker, Steven Spielberg, hasn’t had so much fun in two decades,…
Adaptation is the most overrated movie of the year (of all time?) by people who should know better. Film critics have either been suckered in by its gimmick (Being John Malkovich screenwriter Charlie Kaufman can’t adapt a book for the big screen and winds up writing himself into his screenplay,…
Maid in Manhattan, in which Jennifer Lopez goes from pauper to princess, comes not from a screenplay but from a handful of self-help books and fairy tales and fashion magazines cut and pasted together in a glossy montage committed to celluloid. Characters, made from the highest-grade cardboard and resplendent in…
Notes from a network executive’s forthcoming biography, pilfered from the desk of an editor at a major publishing house. This was hard to read, as it was scribbled in crayon on the back of a copy of Highlights taken from a pediatrician’s office. From page 412: “Last week, I met…
“God knows how I adore life,” Beth Gibbons whispers at album’s dawn, before it gives way to 10 songs that suggest the opposite; “so tired of life,” she sings one track later. The singer, late of the lamented Portishead, and Paul “Rustin Man” Webb, ex of Talk Talk (wha?), have…
The tragedy is that even those who should have known better didn’t know at all; how could they? The names they sought weren’t listed, their contributions weren’t cited, their influences weren’t credited, so even those who spent hours and days and forevers wearing out the grooves in search of holy-mother-of-God…
It’s doubtful Robert Louis Stevenson imagined his Treasure Island populated by cyborgs and scored to Goo Goo Dolls outtakes; and one has to wonder what the author would have made of his characters being turned into talking and walking dogs and cats who, gulp, copulate and reproduce mangy hybrids. Far…
The acolyte will deride the obvious misses amid this collection of hits; the casual fan won’t even notice, since the casual fan skipped most of the band’s ’90s output anyway. Still, it’s amazing that U2 could fill two discs this go-round, since there were half as many albums to choose…
Three years on, the besieged phenomenon — the scourge, the antichrist or the Vanilla Ice of the ’00s, pick ’em — has been rendered beloved; when they, slick bizzers in suits and cell phones, speak of “Eminem” and “gross” in the same sentence, they’re talking only receipts, merchandise, profit. The…
Late last month, Interscope Records at long last released Nirvana, a 14-song best-of with not only tracks from Bleach, Nevermind, In Utero and Unplugged, but also the long-lost “You Know You’re Right.” The song, recorded in 1994 by Kurt Cobain, Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl, had been stalled by litigation…
By now, the story of the Foo Fighters’ fourth album has been well-documented. There was drummer Taylor Hawkins’ near demise from the dumbass cocktail of booze and painkillers last year, the scrapping of four months’ worth of recordings, Dave Grohl’s decision to play drums with stoner-rock kings Queens of the…
The Santa Clause, released at the height of Home Improvement’s popularity, played like a Very Special Holiday Episode of that now-defunct television series — what might have happened if an eggnog-saturated Tim Taylor fell asleep with visions of sugarplums in his head and woke up sporting a white beard and…
