Death has the unexpected benefit of restoring relevance. Michael Jackson is dead so we forget about the bleached, siliconized, plastic surgery testing ground that was once his face, and we chose to set aside his suspicious activity with children, and we toss the Liz Taylor obsession, the crotch-grabbing, and his increasingly stilted moonwalk into a [...]

Among my friends it’s known as the boxer story—the day I ripped a wide hole in the crotch of an old pair of boxers, pulled it over my head, and wore it to the mall with a girlfriend I was desperate to dump. Of course I lacked the courage to break up with her, and [...]

The certainty of death and taxes accepts a new recruit this week: the certainty of a college freshman breaking up with her long-distance boyfriend.
I should have seen it coming. So goes the refrain of the dumped, in this case my 21 year-old self living in a basement apartment in Buffalo, NY. We met at summer [...]

Speaking of fantastic terrible movies, I watched Stuart Gordon’s From Beyond last night. It was much better than its source material—a Lovecraft short titled, oddly enough, From Beyond—and it got me thinking about that Anglophilic old mollycoddle. Lovecraft, I mean. Not Stuart Gordon (who is neither Anglophilic nor a mollycoddle, as far as I can [...]

There’s no grand unifying theme for this week’s column. Sometimes—and only sometimes—reductionism is inappropriate when referencing pop cultural artifacts, because evidence of a particular epoch need not be found within the subtext of obsolete trends and memes. Sometimes—and only sometimes—we can look at a pop cultural artifact as its own phenomenon. It remains both timeless [...]

We’ve become so cynical that even the most mediocre manifestation of the Hollywood marketing juggernaut—the video game adaptation of a Hollywood blockbuster—is now regarded with a shrug. Blame it on decades of desensitization to low quality and quick-buck schemes, but even the most reliable pop culture critics (I’m referring to that spicy blend of hipster, [...]

There are few things in life more satisfying than having bad taste redeemed. Such redemption is rare because the label “bad taste” usually applies to pop culture, and once we label something as bad taste, the label is permanent. There are exceptions, of course, mostly outside of pop culture—Nabokov’s Lolita was considered in bad taste [...]

It’s on like Donkey Kong.
You wanted that fast buck
Now I gotta light that ass up.
Thus spake Ice Cube in the single “Now I Gotta Wet’Cha” from his 1992 album The Predator. It’s an excellent album, both danceable and grim, courtesy of Ice Cube and DJ Muggs’ typical sound—loping beats, P-Funk horns, Sly and the Family [...]

A lifetime of media consumption rarely makes up for the years wasted in front of a screen—for every episode of Freaks and Geeks, we had to sit through Punky Brewster, and for every John Ritter there’s a Dane Cook waiting to riff on the profundity of hamburgers and bees. But sometimes the karmic slot machine [...]

In Mark L. Lester’s 1985 action film Commando, Arnold Schwarzenegger as Colonel John Matrix kills eighty-one people in ninety minutes. Eighty-one bad guys, most of them thin-mustached South American mercs hired by a deposed dictator. Eighty-one bad guys, a few of them former U.S. special ops badasses. Eighty-one bad guys, killed by machete, M16A1 machine [...]