In the tradition of Art Spiegelman's Maus, Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan, and Charles Burns's Black Hole, Anders Nilsen's underground graphic novel Big Questions was serialized over a decade or so, and has now been compiled into a thick, single volume that's being touted as a magnum opus. The deluxe hardcover edition of Big Questions, which is signed by Nilsen and has supplemental extras, is very beautiful, expensive, and hefty (over 600 pages long). The designers at Drawn and Quarterly in Montreal deserve real credit for being able to make a book look so dignified and serious.
Unfortunately, Big Questions, despite its page count, its august packaging, and its toiling-cartoonist origin myth, is no grand thing. It's a very quiet series of events—it doesn't even feel right to call it a story—that take place on a desolate plain and involve disaffected birds wondering about a plane and the pilot that has crash-landed in their territory. There's also an ambivalently helpful snake, devious crows, an insect-grubbing man-child, and a quiet old lady who's killed by the plane crash.
The birds, which are drawn so simply as to be pretty much indistinguishable, talk to each other as if they're exhausted, suggesting androgynous hipsters lounging around all day at a café. Some of them ask basic philosophical questions such as, "Well, like, to what extent are we responsible for the fulfillment of our destinies?" Others get very paranoid about the plane crash and come up with strange hypotheses for what it means. Some of the birds get involved in curious little scenarios, which at times become threatening and dangerous. As for the pilot, he pops a tent, has some bizarre dreams, is annoyed by the birds, and then freaks out and goes on a rampage. In general, not very much happens. Continue Reading »
Jani Lane, the golden-haired former lead singer of 1980s hair-metal band Warrant, was found dead on Thursday in a hotel room in Woodland Hills, California. He was 47.
So, who do you think won last night's Republican snipefest?
Adrian Martin takes a look at the work of Larry Clark.
Below is the Spike Jonze-directed music video for Jay-Z & Kanye West's "Otis," from their Watch the Throne album:
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.
For the Vulture, Lisa Kudrow talks aboutWeb Therapy's move to Showtime and The Comeback's cancellation.
Watch out Todd Haynes! Below is the extended 11-minute music video Spike Jonze directed for the Beastie Boys' "Don't Play No Game That I Can't Win":
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.
Get Spike Jonze's "Scenes from the Suburbs" while its hot.
Matt Zoller Seitz has problems with Treme's impatient rythms.
The TSA tries to keep it real
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.
When the Criterion Collection released their DVD collection of Beastie Boys music videos back in 2000, it was one of the earliest significant breaks in the then-pretty-crusty boutique label's home-video format, raising a few eyebrows. Dreyer, Buñuel, Bergman…and Ad-Rock? Sure, "Sabotage" had already been canonized as one of the greats, the clips from 1998's Hello Nasty were taken as part of an overall renaissance for the only partially reformed punks, and their alignment with Spike Jonze looked pretty good in the immediate aftermath of Being John Malkovich. But are their videos art? Who cares? At their best, Mike D, MCA, and Ad-Rock's videos are giddy snatches of raw id, audio-visual counterbalances to their still-flowering lyrical focus on freeing Tibet, atoning for earlier homophobia, and booting George W. Bush from the White House. They must think so too, because in its full version, their clip for "Make Some Noise" (the first single from their new album, Hot Sauce Committee Part Two) recruits pretty much everyone in Hollywood to revisit "Fight for Your Right," a gleefully regressive move that ultimately winds up in a literal pissing match somewhere along Stuyvesant. In that spirit, here are 10 of the best moments in the Beasties' MTV careers. Continue Reading »
Trying to fit in, like, four or five screenings a day at South by Southwest—a task at which I mostly failed until, maybe, my last two days in Austin, Texas—inevitably took away valuable time to write about everything I saw at the festival that I found of interest, for well and ill. So while I managed to squeeze in time to write about some of my favorites (The City Dark, American Animal, and Bellflower, especially), consider this last dispatch (from me, anyway) a run-down, with brief commentary, of a few others I saw that I either loved, liked, or didn't like but at least found interesting enough to say something about. Oh, and yeah, Natural Selection, the big SXSW narrative feature award winner. Continue Reading »
Blake Edwards, director of comedy classics such as Breakfast at Tiffany's, The Pink Panther, and (a personal favorite) The Party, passed away last night at the age of 88.
Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman are planning to collaborate again.
A.O. Scott presents his Top 10 of the year. (Is his line about 127 Hours actually meant as a defense of the film?) Also: J.R. Jones shows us his.
On the DVD front, check out these lists of favorite video releases of the year from Video Watchdog's contributors.
Karina Longworth traces the career of Sofia Coppola from hanging out inside the Chateau Marmont on her 21st birthday to the release of her new film, Somewhere.
Richard Brody on Claude Lanzmann's Karski's Report.
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.
Below, the Spike Jonze-directed video for Arcade Fire's "The Suburbs":
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.
Glenn Kenny catches up with a few July Blu-ray releases.
Jonathan Rosenbaum on Orson Welles's Don Quixote from CANTV's "Unseen Orson Welles: A Conversation with Jonathan Rosenbaum."
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.
MacGruber (Jorma Taccone). You might think a full-length feature about MacGruber, Will Forte's bumbling '80s action hero, would feel at least an hour too long. Even Steven Carrell couldn't lift his lumbering feature about Maxwell Smart, the '60s version of MacGruber, off the ground—but maybe he needed Jorma Taccone at the controls.
Saturday Night Life actor/writer/director Taccone, one of the three guys who does those funny videos with Andy Samberg (he also shot a lot of the MacGruber shorts for SNL and is the man behind a Pepsi ad for the Super Bowl), has great sense of comic timing and a deep and gleeful knowledge of comedy conventions and pop-culture icons. In the Q&A after the film, he revealed that he loves late-'80s/early-'90s action movies like Die Hard and Lethal Weapon and Rambo 3 ("not one or two or four—though four is pretty great too"), and that he and his cast intended their movie to be more of a comic tribute than a spoof.
You probably have to love those movies to embrace this one fully, but for those of us who do, it makes for a wildly entertaining night at the movies. Action movie clichés, like the way people keep telling MacGruber, "I thought you were dead!," are given just the right emphasis. You laugh at the dick jokes and gay jokes too, partly because they're cathartic, surfacing and then blowing up all the unacknowledged homoerotic machismo that fuels those movies, but also because Forte does blustery incompetence so well and the editors always know just where to cut. And Michael Bay has taken things so far that you pretty much have to chase your bad guy off a cliff, fire two big guns at him as he goes down, and reduce him to a blackened hole in the ground at the bottom of a canyon if you're going for laughs. This movie also has the funniest sex scene since the South Park movie with the puppets. Continue Reading »
In the tradition of Art Spiegelman's Maus, Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan, and Charles Burns's Black Hole, Anders Nilsen's underground graphic novel Big Questions was serialized over a decade or so, and has now been compiled into a thick, single volume that's being touted as a magnum opus. The deluxe hardcover edition of Big Questions, which is signed by Nilsen and has supplemental extras, is very beautiful, expensive, and hefty (over 600 pages long). The designers at Drawn and Quarterly in Montreal deserve real credit for being able to make a book look so dignified and serious. 
MacGruber (Jorma Taccone). You might think a full-length feature about MacGruber, Will Forte's bumbling '80s action hero, would feel at least an hour too long. Even Steven Carrell couldn't lift his lumbering feature about Maxwell Smart, the '60s version of MacGruber, off the ground—but maybe he needed Jorma Taccone at the controls.
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