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Still Crazy After All These Years
A combination of infrequent circumstances – including my reading of the Philadelphia City Paper – inspired me to travel downtown this weekend to visit the Ritz at the Bourse for the first time since the chain had been bought out by Landmark Theatres. The reason? To catch a limited-engagement showing of the 1986 classic Labyrinth.I hadn’t seen the movie in full in at least a decade, and like too much visual media from the 1980s, it doesn’t age perfectly. Labyrinth is a movie that makes it hard to believe that Jennifer Connelly ever won an Academy Award, impossible to believe that David Bowie went on to be a serious actor, and easy to believe that Jim Henson did some fabulous drugs. Even so, Henson’s homage to The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, and a slew of other children’s stories is a wonderful bit of entertainment, and a must-see for Muppet fans and 80s nostalgists alike.
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Taking Flight
Upon the cancellation of Arrested Development and Veronica Mars, two of television’s most intelligent shows, fans clamored for them to be transferred to HBO, where ratings are less important and advertisers are virtually nonexistent. Anyone looking for those shows to resurface is out of luck, but they can take solace in the network’s Sunday lineup, which now boasts one of TV’s smartest shows in Flight of the Conchords. -
Mad Good
Matt Nathanson is something of a paradox. He’s a serial jokester who writes intensely touching songs. He’s a radio-ready pop star who seems content having spent ten years under the radar. And while some might suggest that he “sold out” when releasing the robustly produced 2003 album Beneath These Fireworks (which didn’t really sell, per se); true to this dual nature, his sound benefited from the move. -
Listen Up
I’m still recovering from Kevin Smith’s marathon Q&A on Thursday night (he spoke for 7 hours, meaning that the event ended at 2 a.m. and we got home from Red Bank at 4), and so I don’t have much to write about, but for your information, I’ve rejoined the Last.fm community and you can now see what songs I’ve most recently listened to and click through to my profile to see my top artists.
Note: Any grammatical errors in the song labeling is Last.fm’s fault, not mine.
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Woo-hoo!
After nearly twenty years on the air, nearly 400 episodes, and thousands of quotable quotes, there was almost no need to advertise the release of The Simpsons Movie. But, as omnipresent as the show has become in our culture, so too was the aggressive marketing for the first movie featuring America’s favorite yellow family. The challenge, then, was not only to justify a Simpsons adventure thrice as long as the normal dosage but also to live up to the hype it built for itself. Fortunately, these stumbling blocks are, more often than not in the movie, no obstacle for the cultural juggernaut.
Archive: August, 2007