Top 50 Albums of 2016
As I scramble to scoop up and sift through everything I listened to in 2016, I never fail to appreciate how much music, or life for that matter, can be forgotten in even a small amount of time.
Andy & Rob Talk Sufjan Stevens
In our second installment of “Andy & Rob Talk…”, Cinema Spartan editor Rob Patrick and assistant editor Andy Ferguson dive into the oeuvre of celebrated musician, Sufjan Stevens. Here is the transcript.
What the Academy Overlooked: A Compendium
I know there is only room for so many nominations, and that complaining about the Oscars is an old hat worn by cawing bloggers and early morning television hosts, but I want to bring up a few omissions that bothered me.
The Singular Success of 10 Filmmakers
There are directors who never made a bad movie: Alfred Hitchcock, Frank Capra, Andrei Tarkovsky, Akira Kurosawa, Martin Scorsese and Billy Wilder leap to mind. There are gifted directors who made mostly great films, Stanley Kubrick and Sergio Leone fit into that category.
The Changing Face of Film Criticism
As an art form itself, criticism can be educational, confrontational, enlightening or a blunt instrument against the art or the artist.
Coachella: Satire, Satisfaction & Sunscreen
By the time my friends and I found our car, on the final evening of the festival, the windshield of my then girlfriend’s car was crawling with moths the size of coin rolls.
Breaking: Summer Cannibals Best Band on Twitter
The Hades River known as Twitter is mostly awful. Acerbic trolls slither around avatars of esoteric cartoon characters. Dudes that look like 1996 Ethan Hawke want to explain things to women, using haughty and negligent language that makes all sentient – and rational – people want to swandive off a cliff.
The Ten Best Albums of 2016
There’s no question that we’re living in an uncertain, tension-filled time, and the importance of art has never been greater. Thankfully, one of the few positive takeaways from a year filled with gloom was the monumentally terrific outpouring of excellent music.
The Daunting Strangeness of Vince Vaughn
The foley guy on “Hacksaw Ridge” really made his money. With all of the vociferous explosions and bullet clanging in the blood specked WWII opus, this guy probably looked like a blackjack dealer at the soundboard.
The Worst Films of 2016
There’s plenty of time and space dedicated to the art and nuance of film, but sometimes you just have to get into the gutter and talk about the bad, the boring and the filthy. That is what I get to do now.
