A quick recap!
This is a series of posts “liveblogging” the Pitchfork 500, reflecting the book’s dual purpose as criticism and playlist. The ground rule is that I do the writing in real time as I listen to the music: no edits after that (except[…]

Bear in mind that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences is made up of a ragbag of old people and industry professionals. What does this superficially hip, nearly MTV edited, earsplitting, scatalogically* partial subtitled film got over t[…]

Let’s kick the BBC again. For all the rights and wrongs in the current furore over the BBC not showing the DEC appeal for humanitarian aid in Gaza, a key point appears to have been missed. I must admit the arguments over news impartiality, appr[…]

I didn’t walk out of the The Good Night because I fell asleep. HA HA – what an irony when the film itself is about sleeping! I did not fall asleep for very long, but I wish I had. You have probably already detected a theme in this list of[…]

Comics Should Be Good links to my old Pitchfork essay on THRILL-POWER, a term I use a lot without ever having managed to give a good summary of what I mean by it. (“Earthlet, if you have to ask, you’ll never know”)
This awesome comm[…]

Cassandra’s Dream
If I had seen Cassandra’s Dream in the cinema I would have walked out. As it was I got half an hour in on the DVD and then flung across the room in disgust. (And then cleaned it and hoped no-one at LoveFilm would notice)[…]

From Douglas Wolk’s Twitter account I snatch the link to the Watchmen soundtrack. Fans of the comic will be disappointed – or perhaps pleased – to note that only a handful of Alan Moore’s chapter-leading musical sources make i[…]

I think that my response to putting this at number two will be hordes (two) people telling me how much I don’t get it. Silent Light, by Mexican director (I refuse to call him an auteur) Carlos Reygadas, was critically gushed over this time last[…]

This is a graph – done by anatol_merklich off the Poptimists LiveJournal community, so massive thanks to him – showing the number of new entries in the UK singles chart for each year from 1952 to the present.
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I have a friend who saw the poster for Max Payne a couple of months in advance and got rather excited. She had worked out from the poster that it was some sort of hard-boiled cop or detective drama and was gritty and violent. As a hard-boiled fiction[…]