A.V. Club

Music: Newswire: Be a patriot

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 13:00:00 -0500

Go back and read last year's July 4 inventory. It was lots of fun. Baseball, apple pie, and kicking your fucking ass. We're taking the rest of the day off!

TV: Buffy the Vampire Slayer: “Doppelgangland” etc.

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 12:08:00 -0500

“Doppelgangland” After the Xander-defining showcase of “The Zeppo,” it was high time for Willow to grab the spotlight. I know from my past Buffy-related reading (including the comments on this column) that “Doppelgangland” ranks right up there with “The Zeppo” in terms of fan-love, and I am not about to offer any kind of critical corrective. “Doppelgangland” is terrific on myriad levels, from the dialogue to the plot twists to the multiple spot-on character moments. But mostly it’s a top-drawer episode for the way it binds the Buffyverse together, by demonstrating how adept the writing staff is at ...

Music: AVQ&A: American pop-culture pride

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Welcome back to AVQ&A, where we throw out a question for discussion among the staff and readers. Consider this a prompt to compare notes on your interface with pop culture, to reveal your embarrassing tastes and experiences, and to ponder how our diverse lives all led us to convene here together. Got a question you’d like us and the readers to answer? E-mail us at avcqa@theonion.com. This week’s question came out of our weekly staff meeting, looking ahead to July 4th: “What part of pop-culture makes you proudest to be an American?” Donna Bowman My ...

TV: So You Think You Can Dance: Week Four Performance/Results

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 22:37:00 -0500

First of all, a thousand apologies for abandoning you all for two whole weeks, and a million thank yous to Todd and Donna for filling in as your SYTYCD guides while I was on various planes and boats in the Caribbean. After returning from vacation I had six hours of the show to catch up on before tonight’s episode, and going through the last couple of weeks, I felt myself starting to get worried. It seemed like this season had a dearth of breakout stars and far too much dead weight remaining considering how close we’re getting to ...

Music: Hatecast: Diddy Schools Everyone On "Man In The Mirror;" Real Products Of The Real Housewives; Carl's Jr Wins For Most Depressing Casting Call

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 22:32:00 -0500

This week on the Independence Day edition of the Hater podcast, Amelie Gillette and Onion Staff Writer John Harris don't mention anything related to Independence Day at all. That would be tacky. Instead, they concern themselves with the many products of the many Real Housewives, awful Carl's Jr. casting calls, and Diddy's instructions on how to mourn Michael Jackson. Go ahead, concern yourselves with their concerns on these topics. Subscribe to The Hatecast iTunes http://feeds.feedburner.com/hatecast

TV: Hater: This July 4th, Why Not Make A Cake Pile?

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 17:14:00 -0500

Happy Independence Day, America! To celebrate, Sandra Lee teamed up with Mario Lopez's pectorals and made you a nightmare cake. (Okay, technically she made it a few months ago. But nightmare cakes are good for every occasion!) And don't worry, you don't have to thank her: It took absolutely no effort. Yum! Can't you just smell the stale, vaguely rancid supermarket air? That's what that frosting definitely tastes like. It's the flavor of unrelenting, aggressive nonsense that Sandra Lee adds to all of her creations, and it's what makes America great. That overwhelming ...

Film: Review: The Beaches Of Agnès

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:00:00 -0500

Though Agnès Varda claims in her cine-essay The Beaches Of Agnès that she’s not nostalgic by nature, the movie belies her point. Starting with a re-visitation to the site and characters of her 1954 debut film La Pointe Courte, Varda jumps from one memory to another, recalling her adventures in big-time moviemaking, the life and death of her husband Jacques Demy, her global political engagement, the impoverished-but-wonderful people she’s met around the world, and all her lovely friends in the French New Wave. Though “the beach” is a recurring theme—whether it’s in France, California ...

Film: Review: Surveillance

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:00:00 -0500

David Lynch has spawned a vast army of imitators, acolytes, and wannabes, but only one can claim a genetic pedigree. On the basis of 1993’s famously botched Boxing Helena and its extremely tardy follow-up Surveillance, Jennifer Lynch feels no need to establish her own voice or emerge from her famous father’s outsized shadow. The younger Lynch’s aesthetic is borrowed entirely from dear old dad, an American-gothic pop surrealism rife with black humor, kink, and cheap transgression. Lost Highway’s Bill Pullman stars as a shadowy FBI agent who arrives alongside partner Julia Ormond at a small town ...

Film: Review: The Girl From Monaco

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:00:00 -0500

Wherever writer-director Anne Fontaine’s romantic drama The Girl From Monaco is headed, it’s in no hurry to arrive, and viewers’ patience with the movie will likely be tied to how much they’re enjoying the company and the scenery. Fabrice Luchini stars as a Parisian attorney (and unlikely lady-killer) working a mob-related case in Monaco. While there, he gets involved with gum-popping, happy-go-lucky sexpot TV weathergirl Louise Bourgoin, who either loves him madly or is working in an undercover capacity to undermine his professional resolve. The latter’s the primary concern of Luchini’s bodyguard Roschdy Zem, who ...

Film: Review: I Hate Valentine’s Day

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:00:00 -0500

A certain level of gimmickry is expected from romantic comedies, a genre that requires obstacles be continually put in the path of true love. Few resort, however, to the desperate measures of I Hate Valentine’s Day, an unspeakable nadir in the career of its writer-director-star, My Big Fat Greek Wedding’s Nia Vardalos. Here Vardalos plays a woman with a romantic philosophy as novel as it is idiotic. She doesn’t believe in relationships or commitment but considers herself something of a love guru. So she’ll go on exactly five dates with prospective suitors, then disappear dramatically before ...

Music: Gateways To Geekery: Detroit Techno

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 12:00:00 -0500

Why it's daunting: It’s a strange irony that techno is regarded as an American music in pretty much every country except America. But so it goes—and all the more intriguingly, once the story of techno's origins starts to make sense. The first thing to know is that, within the context of dance-music, "techno" signifies a specific sound, as opposed any and all sounds that count as vaguely dancey and electronic. The sound of techno proper is like something dreamt up by robots in a bad mood, with telltale sweeps of melancholy synthesizers and beats that drive ...

Film: Hater: Katherine Heigl's New Movie Has To Be A Joke

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 11:59:00 -0500

By now I'm sure everyone has seen some of the viral marketing for Judd Apatow's upcoming Funny People—there's Jason Schwartzman's parody inspirational teacher sitcom Yo Teach!, Aziz Ansari's dead-on Dane Cook-esque stand-up Raaaaaaaaaaandy!, etc. Most of it has been pretty sharp, but it all pales in comparision to the following clip from The Ugly Truth, what's supposedly a new romantic comedy starring Katherine Heigl. She totally nails the frigid, Type-A shrew who just needs a total jerk to break down her icy exterior role. And the high-concept, impossible, vaguely disturbing chain of events ...

Film: Newswire: Sony changes release dates for Green Hornet and 2010 Sandler, Spade, Rock, James, Schneider buddy comedy

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 11:47:00 -0500

According to the good folks over at Variety, Sony has shifted the release dates of the Seth Rogan/Michel Gondry/Stephen Chow Green Hornet adaptation and Grown Ups, the ironically named new Adam Sandler/Chris Rock/Kevin James/Rob Schneider/David Spade buddy comedy. Grown Ups was originally set to open on March 12th but has been bumped to June 25th. It might seem odd that Sony would release a comedy as commercial and star-studded in the relative wasteland of late March but the similarly star-studded, similarly crappy-looking Wild Hogs opened in March of 2007 and made a fuck-ton of ...

TV: The A.V. Club Blog: Web Soup vs. Tosh.0

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 11:25:00 -0500

E!’s Friday-night favorite The Soup has all-but-perfected the art of cherry-picking the lowlights of a week’s worth of trash TV and presenting it in a package that’s cohesive, coherent and funny. Their “lone guy stands on a skimpy set and makes puckishly ironic comments about video excerpts” model has now superseded VH1’s “assorted comedians and semi-celebs spew sarcasm about everything that crosses their view-screen regardless of actual quality” model. One of the reasons I prefer The Soup to pretty much every one of those VH1 clipfests is that The Soup has a more carefully constructed point-of-view ...

Games: Newswire: Asteroids: The Movie coming soon from Universal

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 09:42:00 -0500

Just when it seemed like the trend of studios licensing non-narrative properties for the movies couldn't get more ridiculous, along comes the word that Universal has inked a deal to make a movie out of Asteroids. Yes, Asteroids: the classic videogame that consists of a triangular spaceship firing dots at lumpy floating shapes. (The movie's big action sequence will occur when one character accidentally bumps the control panel, causing the ship to thrust forward and disappear off the left edge of the screen momentarily, before reappearing on the right.) Even weirder than the news that Asteroids will be ...

TV: Newswire: Neil Patrick Harris to lend Emmys the awesomeness it doesn't deserve

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 09:11:00 -0500

If you’re like us, you watched the Tonys (or the highlights anyway) thinking, “Neil Patrick Harris should host every awards show every year for as long he’s taking in oxygen.” It would appear that the Emmys have taken notice, too: According to an article in today’s Variety, Harris is cutting a deal with CBS (home of his excellent sitcom How I Met Your Mother) to host the broadcast when it airs September 20th. So while you roll your eyes at how woefully out of touch Emmy voters reliably are—that is, unless you think Boston Legal ...

TV: Star Trek: "The Trouble With Tribbles" / "The Gamesters Of Triskelion"

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 09:00:00 -0500

Did you know there was a commemorative plate made for the original Trek? Probably more than one, I guess, but the one I remember had Kirk in a pile of tribbles, in a painting inspired by one of the series' most iconic scenes. I've never understood the appeal of commemorative plates, and I'm not sure anybody actually does; I think it's one of those things they sell on TV that doesn't have a reason to exist, but costs money so we assume it's worthwhile. Like Chia Pets or trailers for Transformers 2. (Okay, I guess ...

TV: Newswire: TV promotion news: Roller-skate with Robot Chicken and read along with Castle

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 06:45:00 -0500

Here's two clever approaches to marketing TV shows: 1. In honor of the July 21st release of the Robot Chicken: Star Wars Episode II DVD, series co-creators Seth Green and Matt Senreich will be traveling the country by bus for nine days, hosting skate parties at roller rinks in San Diego, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Denver, Kansas City, Indianapolis, Richmond, Philadelphia and New York. More details on venue, admission policies, special guests, etc. can be found here. 2. ABC will be working to maintain public awareness of its surprise hit mystery series Castle by serializing the first half of ...

Books: Review: Cooking Dirty

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Denver-based alternative-weekly food writer Jason Sheehan earned a James Beard award for his essay “There’s No Such Thing As Too Much Barbecue,” written for National Public Radio’s “This I Believe” series. During his teenage years in Rochester, New York, Sheehan boosted his parents’ station wagon late at night and drove to the city for barbecue at Hercules Chicken And Ribs. And it wasn’t even good barbecue, he writes in his memoir Cooking Dirty: A Story Of Life, Sex, Love, And Death In The Kitchen: “I know now that it was terrible barbecue, smoked in an old oil ...

Books: Review: Commencement

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Smith College, the largest of the Seven Sisters, is one of the most prominent universities in the United States that doesn’t admit men. For everyone wondering about the impact of the single-sex policy on feminism, transgender issues, lesbian behavior and orientation, dating, and the aspirations of graduates, J. Courtney Sullivan has produced the definitive fictionalized anthropological study in her first novel, Commencement. Fortunately, however, the book isn’t a breathless exposé. Following four hallmates who become best friends through their Smith years and then through four years of transition, Sullivan produces a page-turner about the personal implications of an ...