Snobbin: Beautiful Trash in the Pop Culture Gutter

A spiritual successor to Anthropophagus , Joe D'Amato's  Absurd borrows heavily from John Carpenter's  Halloween , adding gore in the inimitable Italian fashion. Eastman plays the hulking killer who was the victim of an experiment that gave him healing powers at the cost of his sanity.

I had never seen a Yasujiro Ozu film, including his oft-mentioned classic, Tokyo Story (1953), when I watched this movie a couple of years ago. I started with Good Morning  (1959) because I figured a comedy would be a good place to start and felt the premise of Tokyo Story to be somewhat daunting. It made me excited to see more examples of his famous "pillow shots," where Ozu cuts away from the narrative to focus on a landscape, an empty room, or a household item, and build his world. This interest in Ozu's framing was only a starting point because now I plan on watching his entire filmography for narrative as well as cinematography and everything else that makes his mise-en-scene and ideas so enjoyable. I will write about fifteen of them for the blog and rank them.  One of his later comedies,  Good Morning  examines how two young boys challenge their parents' rules because they want them to buy a television to watch Sumo matches. As with most of Ozu's ouevre, t...

Sight and Sound 2021 #93. Senegalese magic realism meets the French New Wave in the guise of a lover's journey.

I watched another film from the 2022 Sight and Sound Critics' poll: # 52, Chantal Akerman's 1976 documentary, where she reads letters from her mother in Belgium over footage of her new home, New York City. The distance between them feels more palpable with each letter.

Joan Baez's interpretation of "Don't Think Twice, It''s All Right" is my favorite because her vocals add soulful clarity to Bob Dylan's thorny narrative. Track This  is a recurring feature of Snobbin' that turns the music appreciation dial up and rips it off of your stereo. It introduces a new track, allows readers to rediscover an underappreciated one, and serves as a forum to discuss a song that falls into the ear candy category and should be listened to unabashedly for years to come.

It's that time of year when I start listening to records from my Wintry mix that skirts the borders of autumn and winter. While Illinois is an amazing record, Avalanche has "Springfield, or Bobby Got a Shadfly Caught in his Hair" and three more interesting versions of "Chicago." These Sufjan Stevens records grow on me more each year. There's history and depth in these grooves.