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Bombast #100
Technically this is my 101st weekly column in this space, given that the last couple of weeks were devoted to a two-parter covering two of my very favorite subjects, boundless sorrow and...
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Bombast #101
I’ve been working YouTube music links into this column for as long as I’ve been writing it—at first wherever they fit, later as a send-off. Usually the chosen song has some vague thematic connection...
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Bombast #102
I first visited Montréal on July, 13, 2001, when I was twenty, on a meandering road trip with my then-girlfriend. It’s easy to date: Sigur Rós’ album Ágætis byrjun had then recently been released in...
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Bombast #103
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “PUNK: Chaos to Couture,” a fashion exhibit organized by the museum’s Costume Institute, will close in a couple of weeks. Though it will retire as a success,...
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Bombast #104
25 SITUATIONS ONLY FILM PPL CAN UNDERSTAND I BET YOU RECOGNIZE AT LEAST 1 OF THESE!!! IF U LIKE PLEASE FWD. : ) : ) : ) : ) : ) : ) : ) : ) : ) : ) : ) : ) : ) : ) : ) : ) : ) : ) : )...
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Bombast #105
I don’t know what it is exactly that movies do. I’m still working on it. There are, though, at least two things that they do particularly well: adding an additional element of choreographed...
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Bombast #106
Californians always think of sex Or think of death - The Fall, “C’n'C-S Mithering,” from 1980’s Grotesque (After the Gramme). If that’s true—and The Fall’s Mark E. Smith did marry a Los Angelino, Brix...
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Bombast #109
“If it were just a question of mutilating bodies the way that hack-and-slash movies often do, I wouldn’t find extreme imagery interesting. People often say to me, ‘Why don’t you do it the way...
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Bombast #110
I’ve failed to go to the Toronto International Film Festival so many times in my life as a critic that I might as well pretend that I’m boycotting it, rather than being merely too lazy and distracted...
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Bombast #111
If you read about movies enough, you will repeatedly encounter certain stock phrases meant to explain, in shorthand, the historical and sociological forces at play in pop cultural movements. “Nuclear...
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Bombast #112
The cult of family, I suspect, is responsible for a great deal of the wickedness in this world. So many things that are done for family—that noblest and most totalizing of causes—must necessarily be...
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Bombast #113
Can there be such a thing as too much virtuosity? Certainly every time that Floyd Mayweather, Jr., among the greatest defensive boxers in the history of the sport, delivers another of his slippery...
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Bombast #114
In the 1926 short story “Pickman’s Model,” the narrator’s sanity has been frayed by a brush with things beyond everyday comprehension, with beings eldritch and architectures cyclopean. “You needn’t...
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Bombast #115
When Lou Reed died this week, the obituary consensus was that we’d lost the embodiment of “New York cool”—though if that really was all that there was to the man and his art, I would’ve said “Good...
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Bombast #116
While the etymology of the word “blockbuster” is unclear, most of the best guesses have it originating sometime during World War II. It was coined in reference to heavy-duty incendiary bombs—4,000 lbs...
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Bombast #117
Alexander Payne and Wes Anderson both make comedies, albeit comedies laced with strychnine and a dab of treacle. They are less than a decade apart in age—Payne was born in 1961, Anderson in ’69—and...
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Bombast #118
[Through the magic of cinema, the author of this piece appears to perform a one-finger handstand pushup, playing the role of Merlin Forbes in 1997’s That Darn Genie Kat.] I must ask for more than the...
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Bombast #119
Making art is an expensive habit. If your family was rich to begin with, you’ll drain their resources in pursuit of that habit, with long odds of paying dividends in the end. If nothing else, your...
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Bombast #120
Like everyone else, I’ve been sworn to silence on the subject of The Wolf of Wall Street, but I don’t suppose anyone at Paramount Pictures will mind my saying that it’s one of the best American...
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