Culture Snob 
Year-end lists of the best albums of the past 12 months are cruel, because either you’ll go bankrupt buying all these fantastic records or you’ll resent how much great music you’re missing because you can’t afford to buy them. I’m not typically a nice person, but these are the holidays, so my year-end list is something that most anybody can afford.
The unfathomably fashionable torture film has spun off a welcome girl-power subgenre, in which determined, attractive young females facilitate the agonizing dispatches of men who have committed atrocities against youth. But two early entries – Hard Candy and Lady Vengeance – are misguided.
Now that filmmaker Robert Altman has died, we’ll find out how prophetic his 1990 film Vincent and Theo turns out to be.
In Inside Man, director Spike Lee and screenwriter Russell Gerwitz announce early that nothing too traumatic will befall any of the characters, and then they keep that promise; they implicitly give the audience permission to enjoy the film.
The disappointment of Christopher Nolan’s enormously entertaining – and slyly provocative – The Prestige comes in its closing minutes, when it adds a fourth act to its illusion: the final reveal. As any magician will tell you – as the movie itself reminds the audience – knowledge of the secret robs the trick of its power and allure.
Film Experience Blog is hosting a Vampire Blog-a-Thon just in time for Halloween. I was delighted to see that three bloggers saw fit to write about George A. Romero’s criminally overlooked Martin.
In the 1985 HBO mockumentary The History of White People in America, co-writer and host Martin Mull offered the world mayonnaise-loving WASPs – suburbanites who had lost any sense of their roots, to the point that one child’s understanding of his own heritage was limited to the streets on which he and his parents had lived. White people, the show seemed to be saying, are beyond ethnicity and culture. Mull doesn’t see a meaningful connection between that work and his paintings, which are presently touring the country in a retrospective. The only link, he said in a recent interview, is that they reflect his childhood in Ohio. “It comes from the same vein,” he said, “the same mother lode.”
It might sound like a lame excuse. But if a man cheats on his wife, he might explain himself this way: “I couldn’t help it. My evolved psychological mechanisms made me have an affair.” And he’d be right. Sort of.
You hear it and you cringe immediately. Who the fuck thought of that stupid-ass name? So Culture Snob here introduces a regular feature, offering free band names to whoever wants them.
The suspension of disbelief, to borrow a hackneyed maxim, is a privilege, not a right; you need to earn it. And last year’s holiday hit The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe doesn’t.