And so it ends… for now. Welcome to the final installment of the Oscar Songs Project, where Roommate Joe and I revisit every Oscar-nominated song from 1980-1990.
Today’s entry, hosted on Low Resolution, is for 1990, where Madonna and Sondheim became the unlikeliest bedfellows since Madonna and Vanilla Ice.
(To see all the entries in the project, just go here.)
Listen up ya’ll it’s Best Of · Movies · Music · Oscar Songs
Welcome back to the Oscar Songs Project, where Roommate Joe and I revisit every Oscar-nominated song from 1980-1990.
Today’s entry, hosted right here, is for 1989, when the script was flipped by a happy little crab.
(To see all the entries in the project, just go here.)
Listen up ya’ll it’s Best Of · Movies · Music · Oscar Songs
Welcome to Sucker Punch, the only blog post that ranks the gaudiest moments on this week’s episode of True Blood.
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This year, I am thrilled to announce that Sucker Punch is being hosted by NPR’s Monkey See blog. You can find the first installment right here.
Once you read, please leave a comment. Monkey See has never hosted a feature like Sucker Punch before, and it will help the series stay alive if the editors see that people are really engaging in a thoughtful discussion about True Blood.
And since thoughtful discussions are what you guys do best, I would love you forever if you started a conversation at Monkey See. You have to register to leave a comment, but it’s totally painless. I’ve been registered for over a year, and I haven’t gotten any email from NPR or anything.
So… I’ll look forward to chatting with you over at Monkey See!
And of course, I’ll continue posting original content here on The Critical Condition.
Listen up ya’ll it’s Bylines · Television
Welcome back to the Oscar Songs Project, where Roommate Joe and I revisit every Oscar-nominated song from 1980-1990.
Today’s entry, hosted on Low Resolution, is for 1988, when we chose to let the river run. Or did we?!?!?
(To see all the entries in the project, just go here.)
Listen up ya’ll it’s Best Of · Movies · Music · Oscar Songs
By Doug Strassler
Believe it or not (and sometimes I still don’t), this column reaches a TON of people. And thanks to Facebook, Twitter and word of mouth, probably way more readers than I will ever realize. Certainly more readers than comment on some of the columns I write. I wanted to share some recent conversations I have had away from The Critical Condition, sprung from what readers have read right here.
Listen up ya’ll it’s Doug Strassler · Movies · Television
Welcome back to the Oscar Songs Project, where Roommate Joe and I revisit every Oscar-nominated song from 1980-1990.
Today’s entry, hosted on The Critical Condition, is for 1987, when mannequins had the time of their lives.
(To see all the entries in the project, just go here.)
Listen up ya’ll it’s Best Of · Movies · Music · Oscar Songs
Country radio is currently holding a summit on how white, rural communities have ingested and appropriated hip-hop culture.
First, there’s “Dirt Road Anthem,” Jason Aldean’s country-rap song (featuring Ludacris on the remix), which I wrote about last week and which appropriates the language and rhythms of hip-hop to celebrate fishin’ and such.
This song’s success is fascinating because it implies country music is becoming slightly post-racial.
By and large, of course, country music is still “white” music and hip-hop is still “black” music. The success of, say, Darius Rucker in country and Eminem in hip-hop suggests a certain permeability, but those artists are exceptions proving the rules. It will take many, many more “Come Back Songs” and “Love the Way You Lies” to make either genre seem integrated.
But “Dirt Road Anthem” is pushing racial boundaries in a different way. Aldean is a white man using the tropes of hip-hop to tell a story about the white, rural south. In a way, he’s stripping the “blackness” out of hip-hop and implying that its rhythms and slang and sound belong to everyone now… that hip-hop has become so popular that everyone can own it, even artists in a genre that’s antithetical to the black, urban roots of hip-hop culture.
(Note: I know I’m not the first person to make an argument like this. People have been discussing the white appropriation of black cultural forms since Al Jolson was doing Vaudeville.)
But at the same time that Jason Aldean is quasi-rapping, Eric Church, whose songs I have praised, is subtly chastising him for doing it.
Take a listen to his new single “Homeboy,” which is currently in the top 20 of the country chart:
Listen up ya’ll it’s Music
Welcome back to the Oscar Songs Project, where Roommate Joe and I revisit every Oscar-nominated song from 1980-1990.
Today’s entry, hosted on Low Resolution, is for 1986, when Berlin got really, really lucky.
(To see all the entries in the project, just go here.)
Listen up ya’ll it’s Best Of · Movies · Music · Oscar Songs
You guys, I’ve had great luck with summer films this year. I’ve enjoyed arty flicks like The Tree of Life and Midnight in Paris, and I’ve gotten a kick out of tentpoles like X-Men: First Class and Super 8.
(The latter, by the way, seems destined for my year-end top ten. I cared about the characters, I was delighted by the acting and the emotional twists regarding the alien, and I was totally absorbed in the pace of the storytelling.)
And yet this joy has been tempered by the threat of horrible pictures to come. Before every good movie, I’ve seen trailers for inevitable dreck like Captain America, Transformers 43: The Moon Is My Bitch, Horrible Bosses, and Real Steel, which the good people at Extra Hot Great have helpfully dissected in all its crappiness.
And let me just add: The trailer for Real Steel wants us to get emotionally invested in robots that aren’t sentient. They just sit there lifeless until that irritating kid controls them with a joystick, yet we’re supposed to care about them. There’s an essay to be written here… about how this movie reflects our culture’s emotional and spiritual alienation as our personal experiences are replaced by the proxy experiencesof by machines. As these robots do our fighting for us, so email does our talking for us, etc. But I doubt I can write that essay, because every time I try, I’ll just get distracted by that irritating fucking kid.
Ahem.
But even Real Steel looks better than Zookeeper. It’s clearly going to be the worst movie of the year. Maybe of all time.
Here’s a clip-n-save reference guide to the reasons this movie will blow :
Listen up ya’ll it’s Movies · Trailer Scaler
Do you want to kick off your week with a saucy conversation about the movies? Me too!
Just head over to The Film Experience, run by my friend Nathaniel, to hear a rousing podcast about Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, the revised (yet again) rules for the Best Picture Oscar nominees, and much more. I was thrilled to join the conversation, along with Nathaniel and Kurt, who runs the website Your Movie Buddy.
And if you’ve never visited The Film Experience before, I’d encourage you to poke around. It’s a fantastic website that fuses film news, commentary, clever games, and the occasional ironic poem.
Note: Nathaniel made that image up there, too.
