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Best Of 2018: Music

Top 5 Records of 2018

by Michael T. Fournier

Screaming Females "All At Once" (Don Giovanni)
I'm a huge evangelist for this band and their back catalog and especially their live shows. That said, I didn't listen to their last studio rec Rose Mountain as much as the others. Happily, All At Once is a return to form. Each of the four sides revels in a specific identity. Just tremendous.

Notches "Almost Ruined everything" (Salinas)
The pride of Dover, New Hampshire cranking out a second LP's worth of songs that would have fit seamlessly into the Ringing Ear Records catalog (no small compliment).

Lithics "Mating Surfaces" (Kill Rock Stars)
Jagged and prickly like Wire, tons of hooks, the occasional speedbump. What's not to love?

Collate "Liminal Concerns" (self-released)
Chilly and driving, a balm against the loss of Mark E. Smith.

Superchunk "What A Time To Be Alive" (Merge)
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss..

January 02, 2019 in Best Ofs | Permalink | Comments (0)

Best Of 2018: Movies

4 Best Movies of 2018

by Neil Tobias

50 Shades Freed
Director: James Foley
Foley here tells the story of a restless, dissatisfied young man, and his camera follows the protagonist about like a puppy, wheeling and reversing and crowding up close; switching abruptly (without dissolves) as abruptly as the young man himself loses interest in one matter and goes on to the next. Form and subject are perfectly matched in this work. I love this almost as much as I love the band Panic at the Disco.

The subject is the anti-hero-not to be described by the favorite cavil word "amoral" but immoral and living in an immoral world. He may have got there because of his revulsion or our exclusion of him, but that is where he now lives by upside-down standards. Already familiar to us through numerous works from Jairy through Celine to Camus, he now appears on the screen: fucking a chick-and engaging us. We do not bleed for him as the child of uncongenial parents or as an underprivileged waif. He is not to be cured by any of the cozy comforts of psychoanalysis or social meliorism. The trouble with this young man, although he doesn't specifically know it, is history. If we understand him, it is because we know that he is contemporary society in extremis: that the dissolution of religious foundations and conceivable futures are in him carried to the ultimate, short of suicide.

In short.....this movie is the visual equivalent of the band Panic at the Disco.

Gotti
Director: Kevin Connolly
A triumphant piece of filmmaking-journalism presented with the brio of drama. Every frame is active and vivid, and you can feel the director's passionate delight in making these pictures move....as well as my penis.

The movie's underpinnings could have been linked together: they suggest that the Mafia and other organized-crime gangs are continually being destroyed from within by raw male lawlessness.....which is awesome. I love male lawlessness....followed closely by the band Panic at the Disco.

Death Wish
Director: Eli Roth
Watching Death Wish is almost like an exercise in deciding what is more perfect: Rogier Stoffers cinematography and gorgeous deep focus; Mark Goldblatt's exceptional editing; Eli Roth's magnificent direction; or the film's superlative script told in a non-linear structure. I spaced out during a lot of it because I couldn't stop thinking about something weird that happened at work..but every time my attention returned I felt aroused. I love male lawlessness, but I also love the band Panic at the Disco.

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
Director: J.A Bayona
A work of straightforward emotion and pulse-quickening tension. Like other Marxist thinkers and artists of his time, Bayona believes that political revolution demands a revolutionary aesthetics and a revolutionary cinema....so Dinosaurs seem like the natural choice.

Bayona's radical innovations in camerawork, composition and (most of all) dinosaurs are part of a global shift in mass consciousness. T-Rex is my favorite dinosaur, but Pterodactyl put in a really solid performance and I wouldn't be surprised to see an Oscar nod for "Best Bird." The only thing obviously missing is a song by the band Panic at the Disco.

January 02, 2019 in Best Ofs | Permalink | Comments (0)