My sister reported watching and hating Reds, maybe my all-time favorite movie. It got me thinking about the best movies I have seen, and the movies I have seen that were highly touted, yet I didn’t like. Here are some the Academy Awards for Best Picture, ones that I have seen, and ones I thought…

I first saw Purple Rain in about 1987, during a period when girlfriend Kathy and I were renting movies about four times a week. She loved the movie at the time, but I think she would agree that it has aged poorly. Purple Rain is an attempted fusion of a concert movie with a biopic….

I am a fan of several movies about the Vietnam War: Apocalypse Now and its companion piece  Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, Coming Home, The Deer Hunter, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, We Were Soldiers, and even The Post. There are also some not-so-great movies about the Vietnam War: Born on the Fourth of July,…

“I’ve been downhearted, baby, ever since the day we met.” The song Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money in My Hand is an excellent example of one of the dirtiest tricks the record industry played on us music-hungry fans: find an artist with a quirky, catchy song, have him or her record it…

Updated in December 2021 to include a review of Creep by Radiohead Around the dinner table with my Norman, Oklahoma friends (a group known at the time by several names, such as The Thirty Something Group [despite the fact that they weren’t 30-something any more], The Breadmaker Group, and The Bohemian Continuum) in 2009, I…

Soundgarden has a bit more polish than it’s contemporaries. It is more densely layered than Nirvana and Pearl Jam. In Soundgarden’s Black Hole Sun, I am reminded of Alice in Chains: driving, deep, super-masculine vocals, harmonic, dynamic instruments, and a song structure that narrates and navigates us through the story. The lyrics are brilliant. If…

As I have noted in a couple of previous movie reviews, futurism – the fictional depiction of how the future might look for humanity – is notoriously inaccurate. But what about fiction that is set in the present, but accidentally depicts – with alarming accuracy – actual events that come to pass? Contagion is just…

Dan most recently challenged me to review Rearviewmirror by Pearl Jam. Dan’s really getting into 1990s grunge/garage recently, and I approve of this message. It took me a while to get down to listening, but I am now, and I like it. It’s got that “I don’t care what the record producers says, let’s jam”…

In Woody Allen’s Manhattan, Diane Keaton plays a neurotic New Yorker named Mary Wilke. On the night Mary and Woody’s character meet, she and her date discuss the “Academy of the Overrated,” an imaginary collection of musicians, intellectuals and entertainers whose work isn’t nearly as great as they are generally regarded. Musician Sting, the former…

I grew up watching b-grade war movies. My dad was a war movie fan, but never wanted to spend the money to take us to the cinema. He would sit up many nights watching “Five Star Treater” (on channel 5), and the station didn’t have the budget for top-tier films. Some of the titles we…

Imagine it’s 1971. The Apollo Program is wrapping up its missions that the public has come to regard as commonplace and expensive. Star Trek‘s three short seasons are done, and it is in reruns. Television has moved into the era of Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In and All in the Family. Futurism is a tough nut…

For decades I have been hoping that a big Hollywood studio would remake a couple of my favorite, but achingly terrible, war movies, The Battle of the Bulge (1965) and Midway (1976). In 2019, one big studio made one of my wishes come true: they remade Midway. My first criticism is a big one: why…

A song like Big Empty by Stone Temple Pilots summons nice memories of an era of music that was a lot freer than more recent genres. They were free to scratch along a warbly guitar, free to write lyrics that mixed sleaze with perfection, free to go from quiet introspective to bridge to chorus without…

I was watching MTV in my rooming house in college in 1984. A U2 video, probably Sunday Bloody Sunday, came on. One of other roommates who happened to be in the room said, “They’re so concerned.” U2 has done a pretty good job of reinventing themselves as the years have gone by. That’s pretty rare….

Shades by Iggy Pop (whose actual name is James Newell Osterberg Jr.) shares a lot with the 1980s sound: primitive gated reverb drum tracks, that ringing rhythm guitar, the obvious and predictable bass line (blum, bluh-blum), and the exactly-in-1986 lyrics. And do I hear a keytar in there somewhere? I guess there were certainly worse…

I challenged my writer/blogger friend Dan Marsh to review a song, and he counter offered by suggesting an additional song for us both to review. The song I suggested, Carnage Visors, is a 27 minute instrumental musical orgasm of darkness that was offered as a cassette-only b-side recording by The Cure in 1981. The music…

My first LP was Led Zeppelin IV. My first CD was Peter Gabriel’s So. I don’t know what my first download was because my first downloading experience was during the Napster era, and it was a little like looting a liquor store after an earthquake: we grabbed anything our bandwidth could carry. In 1979, Michael, my…

When I was a kid, I watched a lot of television. Too much, probably. One show that was clean and square and, by today’s standards, unwatchably predictable, was Emergency!, a show about the burgeoning paramedic program in Los Angeles. Emergency! Opening Credits Dialog… Dispatcher: Squad 51, informant reports toxic chemicals in the tanker, use caution….

I was thinking about this persistent question the other day: what the hell did we do before the internet? I put in St. Elmo’s Fire recently. I own the DVD as something of a tribute to the 1980s and the Brat Pack, and because the DVD was 99¢. It’s not very good. I also own…

Years ago, circa 1987 as I recall, Robert shared an apartment with about five other guys in Tulsa. I went up there for a weekend to hang out, and while waiting for Robert to return from work one morning, I met one of his roommates. I don’t know his name, but I will never forget him,…

When I was ten, my family and I saw Lost Horizon at the Vaska theater in Lawton, Oklahoma. For former Lawtonians, the Vaska is a legendary landmark, and mention of it for them will surely stir some memories. The film, which I found and started watching on YouTube over the past few days, is often…