This Sunday, Maya Arulpragasam is going to the Super Bowl, which is like Harold Bloom going to Disney World. It's hard to imagine M.I.A. having much fun at America's premiere chauvinist orgy of consumption, and her recent interview with BBC's Radio 1 suggests she was still trying to psych herself up for the event. "If you're gonna go the Super Bowl," she told Zane Lowe, "you might as well go with America's biggest female icons." And indeed, it's somewhat gratifying to think of M.I.A., Nicki Minaj, and Madonna unleashing the hot pink stinker that is "Give Me All Your Lovin'" on the most hallowed ground of American masculinity, during a halftime show typically dedicated to the geezer-rock pantheon. Ultimately, though, not even M.I.A. can make playing the Super Bowl sound badass or defiant. Walking into the epicenter of the American media to sing and dance between millions-per-minute car commercials with two thoroughly mainstreamed pop stars can mean only one thing, and that's that you yourself must also be a pop star. Continue Reading »
"Have you ever watched a dog vomit and then immediately lap it up?" That was one of the only notes I made after a demo of Madonna's new single, "Give Me All Your Luvin'," leaked last November. I can't be 100% certain where I was going with that indelible image, but it seems instructive, perfectly encapsulating the essence of Madonna's music career as she approaches the end of her third decade as a pop star. Indeed, the very title of "Give Me All Your Luvin'" tells you all you need to know about Madge's primary purpose for continuing to make music today. That might sound cynical, but for the last few years, the Queen of Pop has been peddling a brand, not necessarily art, regurgitating the same themes and images and asking us to continue to consume them, no questions asked. After all, what were songs like "4 Minutes" and "Celebration" if not commercials for Madonna Inc.? Continue Reading »
Author Damien Bona, who I met some 15 years ago right out of NYU and humbled me not long after by thanking me in the pages of Inside Oscar 2, passed away yesterday at the age of 57. He will be missed for his wit, sensitivity, and bringing sanity to the yearly Oscar chatter.
Just before she was publicly shamed with a plate of planted truffle fries, M.I.A. tried to secure her avant-pop bona fides by going after Lady Gaga, accusing the ascendant starlet of ripping her style (dubious) and of getting the ratio of awesome songs to awesome outfits wrong (pretty fair). One couplet in Santigold's "Big Mouth" could be interpreted as a swipe at Ms. Germanotta ("Ga-ga-ga all slightly off/Not me I'll take the loss"), but that would be just one more example of Santigold running congas-first into the M.I.A. comparisons that have dogged her since her debut. Santigold's M.I.A. problem is actually a lot like Adele's former Amy Winehouse problem: In one corner, you have a trendsetter who also happens to be an unstoppable font of charisma, and in the other, a challenger with a more powerful voice, a purer pop sensibility, and a thankfully diminished tendency to show up to shows on Ketamine or go on contentless rants about Sri Lankan terrorists. Continue Reading »
A guy goes to a farmers market and busy a copy of Alexander Payne's Election and it turns out to be an original cut of the film with an alternate ending, which he subsequently uploads to the Internets, available for everyone to watch here.
A gay-rights activist showers Newt Gingrich…in glitter. The video below:
Links for the Day: A collection of links to items that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to ed@slantmagazine.com and to converse in the comments section.
[Editor's Note: Fabcast is a new video series where Slant's music editor talks to gay social network Fab.com about which new singles, leaked songs, and album tracks they (and you) need to hear.]
I was a little unprepared this week, but the mustache is gone! Also, if you're a Robyn fan, I recommend watching this week's segment until the very end:
Guess what film tops the Vulture Critics Poll this year?
"It's very hard to talk about this movie because almost anything I say will reduce it and make it seem prosaic and simplistic," says a cagey Emmanuel "Chivo" Lubezki about working on Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life.
Behind the backlash to the backlash surrounding M.I.A.'s last album, Maya. (FYI: You can download the singer's recent, and quite awesome, mixtape here.)
A sneak peek at this week's cover of The Stranger, conceived by Dan Savage and Aaron Huffman.
For Sight & Sound, Jim O'Rourke lauds Alan Arkin's 1971 directorial debut Little Murders.
In the Los Angeles Times, obituaries for Touched by an Angel star John Dye, La MaMa founder Ellen Stewart, and TV writer Del Reisman.
Naturally, Snake Mountain FOX News had problems with the Arizona memorial "show":
Links for the Day: A collection of links to items that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to ed@slantmagazine.com and to converse in the comments section.
Because someone has to, the Self-Styled Siren remembers Hideko Takamine.
Pete Postlethwaite died yesterday at the age of 64. The actor, Oscar-nominated for In the Name of the Father, most recently appeared in The Town and Inception.
Expect Republicans to threaten more than just science in the next two year.
"Continuing our annual tradition, we invited our regular contributors and colleagues, as well as some writers and artists, to select their moving image moment or event of 2010—anything from an entire movie or TV series to an individual scene or shot, from a retrospective or exhibition to a viral video or video game."
Per Oscarsson, who won a Cannes prize in 1966 for his remarkable performance in Henning Carlsen's Hunger, is feared dead.
Todd Haynes is 50. Celebrate by watchingSuperstar: The Karen Carpenter Story.
The writers of Reverse Shotshare 11 offenses from 2010.
For Artforum, J. Hoberman ponders pop before pop: "There was always in twentieth-century cinema an implicit promise of inclusion: the sense that the same movies might hold both the mass audience and the avant-garde cognoscenti spellbound, if not always at the same time."
Over at The Guardian, composer Carl Davis on the challenge of reconstructing Charlie Chaplin's original scores
Adrian Curry shares his favorite movie posters of 2010.
I can't believe this is still up:
Links for the Day: A collection of links to items that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to ed@slantmagazine.com and to converse in the comments section.
On Friday, the Abu Dhabi Film Festival announced the winners of its 2010 Black Pearl Awards. Among the winners: Aleksei Fedorchenko's Silent Souls for Best Narrative Film, Andrew Garfield (Never Let Me Go) for Best Actor, and Patricio Guzmán's Nostalgia for the Light for Best Documentary.
The Guardian reports that "BP and several other big European companies are funding the midterm election campaigns of Tea Party favourites who deny the existence of global warming or oppose Barack Obama's energy agenda, the Guardian has learned."
Alexander Anderson—creator of the "characters Rocky the flying squirrel, Bullwinkle Moose and Dudley Do-Right, and the vaudeville-style format for the 1959 animated program Rocky and His Friends and its 1961 spin-off The Bullwinkle Show, known collectively as The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show—died on Friday at age 90.
Links for the Day: A collection of links to items that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to ed@slantmagazine.com and to converse in the comments section.
Madonna talks to Gus Van Sant about Sean Penn, Wong Kar-Wai, Hagen Bogdanski, making movies, making music without a record label, and more in the latest issue of Interview Magazine.
Spielberg, Scorsese, Soderbergh, De Niro, and others have joined in the condemnation of Iran's detention of acclaimed filmmaker Jafar Panahi. Check out the official press release and petition.
Steven Boone points us toward some more chatter about M.I.A.'s controversial new music video.
Links for the Day: A collection of links to items that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to keithuhlich@gmail.com and to converse in the comments section.
Stripped of its YouTube permissions at least twice in its immediate afterbirth, but proliferating now like the illicit piece of footage it was always meant to be, Romain Gavras's apocalyptically brutal music video for M.I.A.'s "Born Free" has disturbed a lot of people, perhaps most notably among them, the ginger set. (Full disclosure: I speak on their behalf. Though age has darkened what locks stand atop my scalp into burnt umber, rest assured that in my heyday, my head could have been illuminated and used to ward off ships at sea.)
On first listen, "Born Free" is a propulsive piece of punk-pop, a new primal scream from one of pop music's most adept voices of dissent. With an accelerating snare roll-off, it electrifies a sample of Suicide's "Ghost Rider" with gutbucket rock drums that sound as if a Frankie Avalon/Annette Funicello surfer epic just ran up against a tsunami. Over it, bathed in viscous distortion, M.I.A. ruminates, "I was close to the amps staying under cover/With my nose to the ground, I found the sound." No one listening will be the slightest bit surprised that introspection fuels something so unyieldingly hard, so BPM-addicted. Continue Reading »
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