It’s a brave thief who reveals his booty to the man from whom he stole it. But Jim Jarmusch could not resist showing his film, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai to Seijun Suzuki, the 76-year-old Japanese director whose 1967 film Branded to Kill is echoed throughout Ghost Dog…
It was the most unlikely reunion — and, perhaps, a most empty one, because it would lead to absolutely nothing at all except more hard feelings, more regret, and more pain. There they were only last April at the San Francisco Film Festival, together for the first time since their…
Do not be fooled: Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley, Ace Frehley, and Peter Criss receive top billing in Detroit Rock City, but Kiss doesn’t actually appear in the film until its final three minutes. And when the band members do show up, clad in their de rigueur leather-and-greasepaint getups, it’s simply…
Ask for James Baldwin. That’s how you get Chris Rock on the phone this morning, by telling the hotel operator in Philadelphia you want to talk to the author of Go Tell It on the Mountain, The Fire Next Time, and Blues for Mr. Charlie. The operator chuckles slightly when…
Hedwig and the Angry Inch Original Cast Recording (Atlantic Records) Hedwig Schmidt’s ill-fated pecker is the biggest thing off-Broadway in years. Apparently nothing gets the culturati in the seats quicker than rock operas about botched sex changes, especially when the star of the show’s a guy pretending to be a…
Golden Smog Weird Tales (Rykodisc) Lost in the shuffle of last year’s best-album lists was this stellar October effort. It’s fitting that Weird Tales came out just before Halloween, not just because of the spooky title, but because Golden Smog is something of a Frankenstein’s monster, cobbled from pieces of…
Blondie No Exit (Beyond) 1. Start with a joke: If this isn’t the most anticipated album of the first half of the year, then I’m Amelia Earhart. 2. Follow with dense critical sentence heedless of its own unwieldy syntax: Twenty years after their hip, smart, and pile-driving fusion of rock,…
It seems like forever ago that R.E.M emerged from Athens, Georgia, looking like art-school students who drove pickups to class (except for Michael Stipe, who probably rode his bike). What has it been now, seventeen years, since the first single? How time flies when you’re having no fun at all…
The Beach Boys The Pet Sounds Sessions (Capitol Records) Not long ago VH1 aired a documentary on the making of some Fleetwood Mac record — it hardly matters which. Lindsey Buckingham sat behind the console, fiddling with knobs and dials until he managed to completely deconstruct one song, isolating the…
The Replacements All for Nothing, Nothing for All (Reprise Records) Sometimes I listen to old Replacements records and wonder why I still listen to old Replacements records. Their Twin/Tone albums were loaded with Kiss riffs and Beatles rips, novelty songs and poignant ballads, country goofs and punk poses — it’s…
For more than a decade, John Fogerty has not been heard from much, since 1986’s Eye of the Zombie (which, in rare form, came merely a year after he released his double-platinum comeback Centerfield). During those eleven years he surfaced with the infrequency afforded rock and roll legends and shut-ins,…
Howard and Emily’s marriage is the talk of Greenleaf, Indiana, a small town idyllic enough to repel Norman Rockwell. The town has waited three years for the couple to make it official, and slimmed-down Emily (Joan Cusack) has waited three long years for Howard (Kevin Kline) to consummate their relationship…
During the first few minutes of Howard Stern’s romp through his inexplicable life, he spells out his mission: Private Parts will both convert the nonbelievers and entertain the cult. Stern wants to give you plenty of hot lesbian action (and freed from FCC restrictions, he takes real pleasure in saying…
It could have been any town in America, and it often was: Athens, Chapel Hill, Minneapolis, Austin. Seattle was just another stop on the A&R Express, another destination where the gold-card crowd could run up their expense accounts while they looked for the Next Big Thing. At the end of…
On its 30th anniversary, Star Trek exists only as a fetish or a fool’s pastime. The original series continues to air as a faded relic; the Next Generation cast was put to pasture as a film enterprise before its time; and Deep Space Nine and Voyager run and rerun so…
Warner Bros. paid $80 million for this? Hard to believe a decade ago Robert Christgau was praising “this talented minor band,” harder still to believe this is where they headed after that decade passed. New Adventures in Hi-Fi is the new Southern rock — the sound of miniature rock and…
Randy Newman’s publicist is on the phone one more time apologizing for the delay: Newman wants to do the interview, she explains, but he’s locked in a room trying to finish his songs for the upcoming Disney film Toy Story. The first movie made completely with computer animation, it features…
