Several SportsAlcohol.com founders are regular viewers of Saturday Night Live, and not especially fans of Donald Trump. So when the Trump SNL aired, Marisa, Jesse, and Nathaniel got together (with founding baby Eloise serving as a silent partner) to discuss the show so far this season, and the Trump SNL in particular. We touch upon impressions, political satire, expectations of the show, and the best and (lots of) worst of the Trump episode.
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When David Gordon Green broke away from his indie roots to make the mainstream stoner comedy Pineapple Express, followed by the idiosyncratic (and less financially successful) but still mainstream Your Highness and The Sitter, much was made of this unexpected career left turn. Green has since swung back into indie territory with a trio of lower-key dramas (Prince Avalanche; Joe; Manglehorn), albeit with bigger stars than anyone who appeared in All the Real Girls or Snow Angels, and his fluid, prolific toggling between genres makes clear both his talent and his personal stamp. Though not everyone recognized it, his loopy broad comedies are not so far removed from his loopy, less broad character studies or Malick-ish dreamscapes; the scrappy chase narrative of Undertow shares a certain kinship with Pineapple Express, and the aimlessness of Pacino’s Manglehorn and Jonah Hill’s feckless babysitter have a certain, subtle rhyme scheme.
It turns out, if you really want David Gordon Green to stretch, assign him to do a George Clooney/Grant Heslov/Participant Media social-issue drama. Producing partners Clooney and Heslov aren’t formally involved with Participant, but they have a taste for the kinds of high-minded material the company seeks out; though Participant has worked on plenty of films, some of their most notable have won Clooney an acting Oscar (Syriana), announced his seriousness as a writer/director (Good Night, and Good Luck), and supported Clooney’s frequent collaborator Steven Soderbergh (The Informant!; Contagion). Now Participant has produced Our Brand Is Crisis, a fiction-film version of the same-named documentary, once earmarked for a Clooney directorial project. At some point, Clooney (who still produced with Heslov) passed the project to Green, having gained a star in Sandra Bullock, who signed on after screenwriter Peter Straughan (who also worked on the non-Participant but Participant-ish The Men Who Stare at Goats, co-starring Clooney) agreed to flip the protagonist’s gender to female. Continue reading Spotlight on the Social Issue Drama: David Gordon Green and Thomas McCarthy take their shots→
It was my experience that movies helped a lot during puberty. I don’t know about other people, but all my friends and I wanted to do was watch a bunch of R-rated films and talk until the sex scenes — when we’d stop talking.
Chris usually got up to rewind once the scenes were over.
“You’re a pervert!” we’d say. But no one stopped him. We were too guilty for soft-core porn and Monster’s Ball was teaching us stuff.
We rented everything from the oldest rental shop in town, Video Dimensions. Blockbuster was running them out of business but they still had the most bizarre VHS selection we could ever hope to encounter. I’m talking Teeth, front row center, flanked by numerous bins of narrative gold. We’d scour them for NC-17 ratings, scoring obscure titles like Bliss and The Pillow Book.
It was in one of these bins that Itoro and I first found Queen of the Damned.
Aaliyah on the cover as a badass-looking vampire was enough to pique our interest. And then we noticed a guy lurking behind her, sans shirt, with a hint of chiseled abs. The rental deal was sealed.
What I remember most about watching that movie for the first time was thinking that Lestat (played by Stuart Townsend) was a vampire-version of Frodo Baggins in resemblance and demeanor, with a tad more angst. I also thought the rock music soundtrack was super cool, and Aaliyah was a goddess.
“She was life-giving,” Itoro says now, remembering Aaliyah’s ancient Egyptian-style boob plates and ability to make other vampires incinerate from the inside-out. “We felt like outcasts in high school, and she helped us dream.”
It was true. We were not very popular, and Queen of the Damned became an outlet for our torment. A weekly tradition was born from that viewing, which involved us fighting with Itoro’s little brother for control of the television and never, ever returning the rental property to Video Dimensions.
Before watching Queen of the Damned again, this time in my late twenties, I eased myself into the experience by viewing the trailer and was struck by this summation of the film, as told by ominous voiceover:
“All she wants is hell on earth.”
She refers to the Queen of the Damned (as portrayed by Aaliyah) who, in one scene, torches a building with the enflamed corpses of 20 to 30 other vampires. “Was she really that evil?” I thought to myself now. “And why?”
Why did she do this?!
The trailer also introduced Stuart Townsend as Lestat (previously played by the superstar likes of Tom Cruise) and I thought about how interesting Queen of the Damned is timeline-wise. In terms of high-profile vampire movies from 1994 to 2008, QOD falls right in between Interview with a Vampire, Blade, Underworld and Twilight, making it the middle child of vampire movies of its era.
And after watching it again, I can safely say that, in other ways, it truly is the middle child of all vampire movies.
Gilmore Girls is coming back. The sardonic, loquacious WB series featuring fleshed-out female characters, jabs at The Strokes, at least one Elvis Costello song, a Kim Gordon appearance and a stream of Dorothy Parker references will grace your Netflix queue in somewhere between one to a million years, it’s said. Your Gilmore Girls Netflix queue will actually have new episodes. Celebrate.
As we all know, with every announcement of revived comedy-dramas about single moms raising bookworm daughters comes endless shouts from the void:
The age of the reboot! Wet Hot American Summer was funny! What about Arrested Development? Are they really bringing back Coach? TV should end forever. Binge culture is hell!
There is a gnashing of teeth. Earthquakes settle over the Earth, raging for all eternity. The shouts continue:
Predictions! Rory on Tinder? Grindr? Marriage? Uber! Babies. Is Luke real? Independence, Jess, gluten, mine shaft. Emoji! Emily. Venmo.
Adding to the noise, then, here are eight things that should happen in the new Gilmore Girls Netflix episodes, but definitely won’t.
The dream of the ’90s is still alive at SportsAlcohol.com, and during our thorough examination of the decade, we did the following:
…ranked and wrote about the top 90 songs of the ’90s in three groups (90-51, 50-11, and 10-1), and included a little behind-the-scenes about the voting process. (Before you ask: Yes, there is a Spotify playlist.) The ranked lists are worth clicking on for the era-appropriate photos of our contributors alone.
We just spent the last week exploring the ’90s through music. I know 2016 seems like an odd time to take on such an endeavor, but the decade seems to be having a moment right now, even outside of SportsAlcohol.com. The ’90s have officially passed through the era where they were embarrassing (which usually happens to a decade at the 10-year mark), and has come around to being cool again.
Don’t believe me? Here is how the Decade of Flannel is rearing its head around the interwebs.
My neighborhood had a ’90s fest, and the fest ignored almost all of what we at SportsAlcohol.com considered good about the decade (save Salt-n-Pepa). The A.V. Club did a good job taking apart how awkward it can be to go to a ’90s fest in 2016, while Flavorwire talks about the decade’s commodification through the event.
Our Spotify playlist isn’t the only place to hear ’90s music. You can also hear what Kmart was playing in its stores, thanks to a dude who took all of Kmart’s cassettes with him and uploaded them for our pleasure.
“As the ’80s wore on, [music] got less interesting and I think things got more interesting again in the ’90s. So I think it’s just the way it goes.” Who said it? Joe Jackson in Salon.
We talked about the many reasons that “Smells Like Teen Spirit” ranked as our No. 1 song, but we missed one: science! New evidence says the Nirvana tune is the most iconic song ever. (Take that, decades-older classics like “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”.)
And yet, there’s still no talk of rebooting Dead at 21.
We intentionally dedicated last week to ’90s songs, rather than albums or movies or TV shows; the decade is too big to cover in great depth in a single week. But as Rob alluded to in his essential Soundtracks with Elastica Songs piece, a lot of great ’90s tunes turned up in a lot of great (and not-so-great) ’90s movies, for reasons both artistic and mercenary. So here we’re taking a look at how some of our Top 90 Songs of the ’90s fared in movies that actually came out during the ’90s, with a big assist from film fan and music enthusiast Sara Batkie. A lot of them involve Scenes of Teen Partying.
90s Music at the (90s) Movies
“Fake Plastic Trees” (#61) in Clueless (1995)
“Wah wah wah.” This is how Cher Horowitz reacts to Radiohead in Clueless, with the band standing in for all complaint rock that typically plays on college radio or at least does in Cher’s version of California. I didn’t realize until looking the soundtrack up that it’s actually an acoustic version of the song as its appearance in the film itself is brief and pretty muffled. It is notable, however, for backing the scene that introduces Josh, Cher’s ex-stepbrother and eventual love interest, a plaid-and-Amnesty-International tee-shirt-wearing foil to Cher’s candy-colored Beverly Hills princess. Like Thom Yorke’s sweetly abrasive crooning on the soundtrack, which is otherwise a mix of peppy pop rock numbers by Supergrass and Smoking Popes and sunny covers of Mott the Hoople and Kim Wilde, Josh doesn’t fit his surroundings at first glance. But Clueless remains a classic of its genre for its inclusiveness, from Di and Murray to stoner Travis, even teachers like Ms. Geist and Mr. Hall. In the end, just like Josh and Cher, “Fake Plastic Trees” works with the film because of its differences, not in spite of them. – Sara Batkie
The SportsAlcohol.com list of the 90 Best Songs of the 90s led to our biggest podcast yet, with seven panelists — plus a special call-in guest! — talking for eighty minutes about ’90s music. In a wide-ranging discussion, Rob, Jesse, Marisa, Sara, Ben, Craig, Nathaniel, and phone participant Jason talk about where our ’90s music list went right, where it might have gone wrong, what bands got screwed over and what songs from that decade we’ll always love and/or hate. Find out:
Who wasn’t listening to ’90s music during the ’90s
What Rob and Jesse agree is the best R.E.M. album
Which album made the guy at Tower Records insult Ben during college
Why Rob feels like Marisa is gaslighting him
Why at least one of us hates that Meat Loaf song
And so much more!
Join us, won’t you? It’s like having a special ’90s music brunch with a bunch of your best nerd friends.
How To Listen
We are now up to SIX (6) different ways to listen to a SportsAlcohol podcast:
You can subscribe to our podcast using the rss feed.
I’m not sure why they allowed it, but we are on iTunes! If you enjoy what you hear, a positive comment and a rating would be great.
In the process of putting together our list of the best songs of the 90s, certain brave people made certain brave tastes known. These list-makers might not have known they were committing an act of bravery at the time, but no fewer than seven of our 22 participants submitted #1 votes – choices for the single best song of 1990-1999 – that no one else in the poll voted for at all. Some were from artists whose other works were recognized; others were from artists whose works were roundly ignored in any form. I so admire this kind of free-thinking that I asked these people to write a little about their particularly distinct choices. Below are the responses I received. (And for the record, six of my personal 40 received no other votes from anyone else.) Continue reading Best Songs of the 90s: Lonely at the Top→
One of the major themes that’s emerged from our deep exploration into ’90s music is the link between music and film. Many of us first came to our favorite songs (or several Elastica songs) by hearing them used perfectly in a movie or TV show and, in turn, directors first made themselves noticed by directing some kind of calling-card music video. These intersections really stuck with us; just look over our ’90s song list and see how many of us couldn’t help but talk about the music video when writing about the song.
Now, that cycle is mostly missing a link. Music videos aren’t the cultural drivers they once were. It’s not that there are no videos anymore; it’s just that there are so many other kinds of videos, all vying to eat up our attention and go viral, that music videos no longer get prime placement. I mean, who can focus on them when there are cats vs. shadow cats? Now and then, a music video may break through to the public consciousness—I’m thinking something like the “Single Ladies” video, or “Fancy”—but it’s not like the days when people would come home and turn on TRL.
So, it’s worth going back and revisiting what the 1990s music-video scene was like. I’ve chosen 15 to look at here. I didn’t just want to go and pick out the videos from our Top 90 songs—you can see most of those right in that list. And I didn’t want to talk about the same videos that everyone talks about in the best-of video lists, basically the ones included in the Palm Pictures Director’s Label series. If you haven’t seen those, you definitely should watch all of them. They’re amazing. But you don’t need me to tell you, yet again, that Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry are the best video directors out there, and no one needs another list that says that video where the dude is running and on fire is pretty boss.
To recap: These aren’t the best songs of the ’90s (at least according to this website) OR the best videos of the ’90s. But that’s the thing about that decade: You can lop off the top of the iceberg and there’s still so much left to talk about. So, let’s begin. Continue reading Reliving the ’90s Through 15 Music Videos→
