Just in time for the weather to get a little more frigid and a Frozen sequel to blow into theaters, we’re talking this week about the original Frozen. While its popularity is unquestioned, the boys talk about what makes it so appealing and how it stacks up to the other Disney fairy tales it follows in the footsteps of. Also, we get in a decent-sized conversation about Terminator: Dark Fate for those of you looking for a follow-up to our Universal Soldier episode. Continue reading
I spent a chunk of the early 2010s waiting for Dum Dum Girls to really become a thing, but it never really happened. Not that any of their albums were underwhelming. In fact, all three of them are quite good. It’s just that they never really broke out from the pack of all the other retro-leaning indie rock bands of the era in terms of mainstream success. Still, I Will Be stands as perhaps the band’s finest moment (along with the End of Daze EP), and as a testament to lead singer Dee Dee’s ability to craft delicious hooks draped in dread. Continue reading
For basically every year of the 2010s, we’ve done a bunch of half-baked album reviews to catch-up on writing about music we never reviewed during the year. You would think that because of this, in addition to our regular reviews and end-of-the-year Top 10s that we’d have already covered all of the notable albums to come out this decade. Well, you’d be very wrong, since it felt like there was more good music this decade than any that had come before it.
So for the next few weeks, I’ll be reviewing albums that have never been reviewed on this blog or mentioned in end-of-the-year Top Ten lists. Some of these will be albums that slipped under my radar when they were released, or I didn’t appreciate at the time and have come to enjoy as the decade wore on. I’m not sure how frequently I’ll post these, but the every-other-day of the week approach that Sean took with his Avengers Retrospectus seems like a good one to shoot for.
Roland Emmerich has blown up the White House (twice!), ravaged Earth (twice!), and unleashed a giant lizard on Manhattan (once, that we know of). But Universal Soldier is where his road to action movie immortality started, by making a movie about PTSD-laden super soldiers trying to blow up each other. This all intersects with Emmerich’s Midway hitting theaters today, as well as Terminator: Dark Fate currently underperforming at the box office. As we’ll discuss, it turns out Universal Soldier is a pretty big knock-off of Terminator 2, but also pulls from many other action blockbusters that reigned over the movie landscape in the ’80s and ’90s. Continue reading
I wouldn’t say that seeing Angel Olsen in concert on Halloween caused me to truly appreciate her latest, All Mirrors, but it also didn’t hurt. If anything, it made it clear that the album is on some level an attempt to break with the relative crossover success of 2016’s My Woman, considering the only track she played from it was her now-signature song “Shut Up Kiss Me”. She even made a remark after playing it that she’ll be performing the song forever, since she’ll always be known as the “Shut Up Kiss Me” girl. All Mirrors doesn’t really have any stand-out bangers on the scale of the aforementioned track, but in its overall grandiosity and emotional power, it transcends the need to. Continue reading
After a month of writing about people trapped in spooky houses with Shocktober, on this latest episode of The Pick we talk about the spookiest house of all. A house that’s a byproduct of capitalism! Parasite has been regarded by many as a film that is best enjoyed if you know as little going into it as possible. So in this episode, we don’t even try to make it a non-spoiler review. This is an episode for those that have already seen Parasite, and hopefully one that helps any viewer appreciate its many twists and turns and little details. Continue reading
