Monday, May 3 2010
Straight Down the Middle: The 2010 PopMatters Summer Movie Preview
More than likely, this will not be the best Summer season in recent memory. Nor will it be the worst. Unfortunately, it looks like the final assessment will be somewhere straight down the middle. Today: May films, including Iron Man 2 and Sex and the City 2.
Friday, January 29 2010
The Best Music Scribing Awards 2009
Covering the media now is like working in the obits section of a small town paper. Still, Gross finds plenty of music-related highlights for the eighth annual edition of his best music writing picks, sans PopMatters.
Wednesday, January 27 2010
Slipped Discs 2009
PopMatters is offering a look at those Slipped Discs, the ones that our writers dearly loved and thought were important, but simply didn’t draw enough votes to make the top 60. With that much great music to digest, we’re splitting these picks up over the next three days. So dive in and discover something new or revisit some of last year’s favorites.
Friday, January 22 2010
The Best of Books 2009
As you will see in the selections we present here, there were more than enough great books by great writers in the past year to more than make up for all the other shouters and malingerers.
Friday, January 8 2010
PopMatters Picks: The Best Film, TV and DVD of 2009
No, no fancy or fun subtitles. No all encompassing phraseology meant to delineate the entire 12 months in a particular medium. It was that kind of year -- 2009, the end of the new millennium's first decade. It was not a year where one filmmaker or film stood out. It was not a time when TV reinvented itself. DVD remains a strong, if starting to struggle format.
Friday, December 18 2009
PopMatters Picks: The Best Music of 2009
Regardless of whether the past year lacked superstar moments or even a strong genre trend or two, we weren’t lacking for strong recordings. As ever, it’s a grab bag of styles, themes, and emotions, but this year proved to have a lot of quiet greats.
Wednesday, November 25 2009
Re-Meet the Beatles: PopMatters Salutes the Still Fab Four
Where do you begin? How do you encapsulate the legacy of a media myth that is still rewriting and refining its legacy some five decades after the fact? The influence is undeniable, entire generations of musicians and songwriters stumbling through their archive, marveling at the achievement and strident originality. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr set the benchmark for lasting pop stardom, a standard that to this day has the four lads from Liverpool earning the endearing tag of greatest rock and roll band ever.
Friday, November 20 2009
Director Spotlight: Pedro Almodóvar
Pedro Almodóvar is one of the most important directors currently working in film, a true legend. What is it about the great Spanish director that resonates so profoundly with spectators worldwide? His signature, colorful visual style? His keen awareness of and sensitivity to the issues of women? His audacity when portraying a large cross-section of sexuality in new, thrilling ways?
Friday, October 23 2009
PopMatters @ 10
It is this very week that PopMatters passes a milestone and celebrates our 10th Anniversary in existence: ten years of interviews, reviews, thorough features, and smart, analytical cultural commentary. From all walks of life with a wide sampling of global perspectives, PopMatters writers have spent the last ten years picking apart just about every aspect of popular culture and how it fits in -- and reflects -- with our modern-day society.
Friday, September 25 2009
Rest in Pieces: Eulogies of the Past, Present, and Future
Just visualize yours for a moment. Just listen to the radio that announces their death. Stop for a minute, and image if you can a world without that person, no more interviews, no more books, no more living legend. Perhaps you’ve never met your character in person, and yet you’ve pulled your vehicle over to the shoulder, crippled with existential dread, furious and suffocating, the inevitable suddenly announced to the world as reality. Can you feel that pang of grief for those beloved figures now gone? Can you remember that afternoon drive when the reporter broke the news, breaking your heart in the process?
Friday, September 11 2009
Feast or Famine: The 2009 PopMatters Fall Movie Preview
Today: December 2009: The big guns -- James Cameron, Clint Eastwood, Peter Jackson, Terrence Malik -- are still putting the finishing touches on their over the top treats. As usual, it looks like the Hollywood heavyweights are once again saving some of the best for last.
Friday, August 28 2009
Hellboy Sweet Sixteen
PopMatters offers an in-depth cultural analysis of the Hellboy phenomenon. Today: "The Devil You Know: Mignola's Hellboy in the Chapel of Moloch and the Old Debate" AND "The Horror of Science and Magic in Hellboy".
Friday, August 21 2009
Casablanca Records: Play It Again
Thirty-five years ago, KISS and Parliament debuted on Casablanca, a label that influenced generations of music listeners and defined an era in popular music. Join PopMatters and more than 50 artists and executives for our exclusive, five-part oral history of Casablanca.
Friday, July 31 2009
100 Essential Male Film Performances
Part 1: Life Support
Part 2: The Dark Side
Part 3: The Classics You Should Have Seen By Now
Part 4: From Page to Screen
Part 5: Under the Radar
Friday, July 24 2009
Pixelated Brains and New Media
In Pixelated Brains, a four-part section spanning June and July, we consider: R WE UNABL 2 THNK & COMMUNIC8 N MENINGFL WYZ NE MORE?
Thursday, July 9 2009
The Love You Save: A Tribute to Michael Jackson
Today: The MJ Top Ten Tribute | The Fawn in the Burning Forest: Our Beloved Monster | The Teflon King: Ronald Reagan and the Death of Michael Jackson | Artomising MJ | 'Thriller': The First in Meta Horror | Michael Jackson Forever.
Monday, June 29 2009
The Edge of Change: The Most Memorable Albums of 1999
PopMatters turns 10 this year and to celebrate we are looking back at the popular music that defined the year of our birth. [Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5]
Friday, June 5 2009
Let’s Go Crazy: Celebrating 25 Years of Purple Rain
Some 25 years after it was released, PopMatters proudly celebrates Purple Rain in its entirety, looking at the album and film from every angle.
Thursday, April 30 2009
Summer of Same: The 2009 PopMatters Summer Movie Preview
It will be a Summer of Same: same old franchises seeing multi-million dollar updates; same old actors in rote roles; directors digging deep into their cinematic bags of tricks, hoping they can find meaning out of one more mainstream paycheck. [May | June | July | August]
Wednesday, April 1 2009
Wham!‘s “Make It Big” Turns 25
An April Fool's Day special: When Wham! named its second record Make It Big, is was a statement of purpose and a prophecy. Wham! reshaped our understanding of what a pop song could achieve and produced an album that became the definitive musical statement of a generation.
