Just from the title alone, you know it’s good. It’s not Lawrence of Grand Rapids, or Lawrence of San Bernardino. Lawrence of Arabia. You can’t even pronounce it the same way you pronounce other movie titles. You can’t say it matter-of-factly like “lawrenceofarabia.” You have to say it like “Lawrence of uh-RAY-bia,” with the stress […]
1. Lawrence Of Arabia (Lean, 1962) Read More »
The Last Album. Nobody calls Abbey Road a concept album, but by now, I think it’s become one anyway. The concept? The Last Album. They might as well have given it the title The Last Album. Too similar to The White Album? I guess Cream beat them to it by titling their last album Goodbye.
2. Abbey Road (The Beatles, 1969) Read More »
There are two kinds of people in the world: those who love Mary Poppins, and those who love Mary Poppins but are ashamed to admit it. ***** Some say there isn’t a word in the English language that could adequately describe Mary Poppins. On the contrary, there’s a very good word. It’s … Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, even
2. Mary Poppins (Stevenson, 1964) Read More »
He plays pinball by sense of smell? But how does he … where does he … Eh, just go with it. ***** Leave it to PBS to introduce a 14-year-old kid to the Who. In August of 1994, I’m not sure I would have known I was living through the 25th anniversary of Woodstock if
3. Tommy (The Who, 1969) Read More »
“I always think there’s a band, kid.” ***** Heard anyone say recently that America isn’t all she’s cracked up to be? That we’re undergoing some sort of identity crisis? That a better name for us might be the United Hates of America? That beneath our status as the world’s number one superpower lies an underbelly
3. The Music Man (DaCosta, 1962) Read More »
I used to think that, if you were a Beatles man, you had to be a Beatles man all the way. Never mind that the Beatles and the Stones, throughout their “rivalry,” hung out with each other like they were their generation’s Rat Pack. Never mind that the Beatles and the Stones staked out distinctly
4. Let It Bleed (The Rolling Stones, 1969) Read More »
Sometimes with a movie, it’s all about the tagline: “They’re young … they’re in love … and they kill people.” [record scratch] Say what? ***** Until a couple of weeks after I turned seventeen, Bonnie and Clyde was one of those movies I vaguely knew existed but didn’t know the first thing about. Sort of
4. Bonnie and Clyde (Penn, 1967) Read More »
The English poetic tradition is a long one, but in the vast annals of British verse – a lineage stemming from Shakespeare, Milton, Spencer, and Dryden on to Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Coleridge – only a few scattered lines in a few select works have scaled the heights of linguistic incisiveness and rhetorical dexterity. Though
5. Led Zeppelin II (Led Zeppelin, 1969) Read More »
Uh … didn’t that year happen already? Are they going to update the movie so that it’s accurate? Seriously? You mean I’m supposed to watch some movie that includes a bunch of mistaken predictions? At least when Prince wrote “1999,” he didn’t fill the lyrics with a bunch of mistaken predictions about the year 1999.
5. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968) Read More »
What the white whale was to Ahab, has been hinted; what, at times, he was to me, as yet remains unsaid. Aside from those more obvious considerations touching Moby Dick, which could not but occasionally awaken in any man’s soul some alarm, there was another thought, or rather vague, nameless horror concerning him, which at times
6. The Beatles (The Beatles, 1968) Read More »