Nate Haduch

Hey, Merry Ehrlichmas! David Ehrlich’s video countdown of his top 25 films of the year is one of my most anticipated end-of-the-year thingers. Viewing it always makes me want to watch movies for three straight days. As a companion, Ehrlich listed the movies here, along with the most memorable moment from each.

Watching “The Irishman,” especially for the first time, you get the sense that it’s teeming with hidden moments that will cling to you like barnacles for the rest of your life. Some of them are more apparent than others: Pacino chanting “Solidarity!” Pesci saying “It’s what it is.” Ray Romano asking De Niro if he’s really guilty at heart. The film’s most indelible treasures are lurking a bit deeper under the surface. On my second viewing, nothing hit me harder than the rhyme between two distant confrontations: As a child, Peggy suspects that her father is hiding some demons, but Frank directs his daughter back to her breakfast. Years later, Peggy wordlessly confronts her dad with daggers in her eyes, and Frank is so far beyond salvation that his only recourse is to keep eating his cereal like nothing ever happened.

Some random thoughts on the list and the year in movies: Surprised to see Ad Astra so high — I didn’t hear great things so I skipped it. I thought I saw a lot of movies this year, but this list once again proves me wrong. I can’t wait to see Uncut Gems. No Booksmart? I really loved Booksmart. I did not like Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Knives Out as much as everyone else did. I mean, they were fine, but… Great to see Hustlers on the list — when Jennifer Lopez gets good roles, she knocks the cover off of the ball. Give Jennifer Lopez more good roles!

See also these two 2019 movie trailer mashups:

(thx, brandt & david)

Tags: best of   best of 2019   David Ehrlich   lists   movies   video

Olga Khazan writes about How to Flake Gracefully:

I am the queen of cancellation.”Heyyyyy guyyyyyyyssss-” begins a typical email from me backing out of plans, yet again. (The Ys multiply the guiltier I feel, and the more recently I’ve no-showed.) A book thing came up, and it has to be done by Monday, so I can’t use that non-transferable ticket you got me after all. Or I’m sick, again. But actually sick this time — not pretending to be sick so I can run errands without making anyone mad. To make time to copyedit something, I canceled on a work party of my boyfriend’s, then canceled on my own work party for good measure. I’ve started feebly sending this same boyfriend to social engagements in my stead, like a sad foreign minister from Flake Nation.

Part of the secret is not to overbook yourself in the first place. I’m a long-time practitioner of this technique — I say a straightforward no to lots of things, and if I say yes to something, I almost never cancel. And lately I’ve been saying yes more often, because as Khazan writes, getting out and doing stuff, even if it’s potentially uncomfortable and maybe not even your cup of tea, is part of caring for yourself. Human souls are not meant to be left on shelves; they need to run and play with others in the real world. Still though, as an introvert, I have to admit that nothing feels better than when someone cancels plans with me. The pure luxury of unanticipated JOMO knows no equal.

Tags: how to   introversion   Olga Khazan

Elem Kilmov’s 1985 Soviet anti-war film Come and See is getting a 2K restoration and theatrical re-release in 2020. In a 4/4 star review of Come and See, Roger Ebert called it “one of the most devastating films ever about anything”:

It’s said that you can’t make an effective anti-war film because war by its nature is exciting, and the end of the film belongs to the survivors. No one would ever make the mistake of saying that about Elem Klimov’s “Come and See.” This 1985 film from Russia is one of the most devastating films ever about anything, and in it, the survivors must envy the dead.

Director Steven Soderbergh called it “one of the best things I’ve ever seen”.

Tags: Come and See   Elem Kilmov   movies   trailers   video   war

The Grammys have announced their slate of Special Merit Awards for 2020. As Variety reports, Chicago, Roberta Flack, Isaac Hayes, Iggy Pop, John Prine, Public Enemy, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe will receive Lifetime Achievement Awards, celebrating "performers who have made outstanding contributions of artistic significance to the field of recording." Notably, neither Pop … More »

A Linguist on What Baby Yoda’s First Words Might Be:

An excellent article in Slate by linguist Lisa Davidson addressing the important question on how Baby Yoda might talk. Excerpt:  

When we hear characters in the Star Wars universe speaking English, they’re really speaking Galactic Basic. There are various accents and dialects, but the most famous variant may be Yoda’s, which changes the word order of Galactic Basic Standard. In terms of English grammar (since that’s how we hear Basic anyway), this means that while most characters speak with subject-verb-object order (“You must have patience”), Yoda often, but not exclusively, produces object-subject-verb order (“Patience you must have!”). This is a simplification of Yoda’s syntax, but for the sake of simplicity we’ll use that label to describe his word order. […]

As for Baby Yoda, at least in the current moment, he’s living with speakers of Galactic Basic Standard who use subject-verb-object order. We do not know, however, what he experienced in the past. Perhaps he lived with other members of Yoda’s species for a part of his life, which might mean that he received language input from adult speakers of this species. Could that be enough to justify speaking like Yoda when he finally talks? Considering that he doesn’t speak now (and barring the “he just doesn’t want to talk out loud yet” option), even if he lived with other Yoda-style speakers in the past, it’s still doubtful that he would have typical Yoda syntax. Between whatever language was spoken around him when he lived with the Nikto mercenaries and the Galactic Basic spoken by the Mandalorian, Dr. Pershing, and the Sorgan villagers, his exposure to Yoda’s variant of Basic would become less salient over time. If Baby Yoda is like a human, his first words should reflect the language environment he’s in once he begins to talk. This would track with cases of young adopted children, from preschool through early elementary school, who rapidly lose access to the first language they were exposed to, even within three to six months of being adopted.

On the other hand, since so little is known about Yoda’s species, there’s a possibility that the members of this species actually speak a different language. Because Yoda traveled throughout the galaxy so much, perhaps he learned Galactic Basic as an adult. This might mean that Yoda’s object-subject-verb word order is a result of what linguists call “transfer”: As Queen Mary University of London professor David Adger pointed out in 2017, Yoda could be applying the word order from a hypothetical native language “Yodish” to his command of Basic. If this were the situation, then it would be even less likely that Baby Yoda would have been exposed to the object-subject-verb variant of Basic, presumably because the first adults he lived with would have been speaking Yodish around him. The end result of this situation would be the same as above: If Baby Yoda did not yet reach the critical period for language before he left his Yodish home, then his access to Yodish would quickly decline now that he’s surrounded by Basic speakers.

A last option to consider is that the Yoda species is in some way hard-wired for object-subject-verb word order. This possibility would mean that Yoda is much less humanlike than we have been considering. One of the goals of the field of linguistics is to understand all of the variations found in human language, from the possible sounds of language, to how words are built, to possible word orders and more. Languages can differ greatly from one another on these dimensions, but one of the hallmarks of human language acquisition is that no one is hard-wired for any specific language. Instead we acquire whatever language or languages are spoken by the people around us and with whom we want to communicate. We could envision a scenario in which Yoda and others of his species are somehow neurologically committed to object-subject-verb word order, but it would be curious and rather arbitrary that Yoda then learned to speak the same Basic as all of the other speakers in the galaxy in every way except for word order.

Read the whole thing. 

In 2019, it’s difficult to say what isn't electronic music. Software dominates every genre, and everything we listen to and make is bought and sold through the internet. Some see AI as the next big step, others are terrified of it. But both sides of the argument carry an air of … More »

If you haven't been watching Watchmen, HBO's adaptation and continuation of the classic Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons graphic novel, you've been doing yourself a tremendous disservice. Watchmen is a hell of a thing -- a sweeping and big-budget story that treats its source material with reverence while jumping headlong into ideas that the original comic book … More »

Do you love the long-running California garage-rock institution Thee Oh Sees/Oh Sees/OCS? Do you love 8-track tapes? If you answered yes to both of those questions, then today is your lucky day: The DIY label 5Seven Records has announced that they're going to be selling a box set collecting 12 albums from the … More »

They've been showing up again in my social-media feed lately: Fiona Apple and Paul Thomas Anderson at the Out Of Sight premiere in 1998. There's a context for all this, of course. In the great recent stripper caper Hustlers, Jennifer Lopez makes a grand entrance while dancing to Apple's song "Criminal." And in a recent … More »

Maybe it’s that Christmas is little over eight weeks away, but October’s turned us into very positive people. In the veritable rush from record labels to release everything that’s been gathering dust on the shelf this year, there have only been a couple of howlers. The strength of this month leaves us with a substantial list and plenty of honorable mentions that didn’t make the cut, too – just listen to Vagabon, clipping, Patrick Watson. And brace yourselves: here are the 15 best releases from October. You can listen to one every other day next month while we decide if the rest of the year’s worth telling you about.

Artist: Big Thief
Title: Two Hands
Label: 4AD
What is it? The second album Big Thief release this year is the earthy companion piece to their celestial first, filled with the raw folk songs Adrianne Lenker is proudest of.
L&Q says: “Two Hands is a musical treat, full of aching fervour; sincere and honest without feeling overwrought or affected.” 

Read Katie Cutforth’s review.

Did Joker kill his neighbor? How much of the movie is his fantasy? Everything you wanted to know about the ending of “Joker,” explained.

For as long as he's been a recording artist, Kanye West has had Jesus on the mind. On one of his earliest hits, he rapped, "So here go my single, dawg, radio needs this/ They say you can rap about anything except for Jesus/ That means guns, sex, lies, videotape/ But if I talk about … More »

Musician Pharrell Williams now sees why some found his hit song with Robin Thicke was offensive, as he has realized we live in a “chauvinist culture.”

In this video, CGP Grey investigates fast and not-so-fast methods for boarding commercial airline flights. Most airlines board passengers using the relatively slow back-to-front method — with a bit of the even slower front-to-back method at the start for first, business, premium economy, and frequent flying passengers — even though boarding in a random order would be quicker. In 2008, physicist Jason Steffen determined the optimal boarding method, which involves passengers boarding in a precise order to minimize people waiting for other people putting their luggage in the overhead bin.

Tags: flying   Jason Steffen   video

We're a few months removed from the release of Carly Rae Jepsen's newest album, Dedicated -- the more low-key followup to 2015's blockbuster E•MO•TION -- and Jepsen has spent much of that time on the road. But today she's back with some new visuals, a music video for "Want … More »

Last week, Charli XCX released her damn good new album, Charli, and this week she's rolling out the red carpet for it in style. Today, she's sharing a music video for "2099," the album's Troye Sivan-featuring closing track. In the video, which was directed by Bradley&Pablo, they both zoom around on jet skis … More »

Ever since Charli XCX dived into the sickly sweet, avant-garde world of PC Music – releasing an EP produced by...

The post Charli XCX – Charli appeared first on musicOMH.

The servers at The Restaurant of Mistaken Orders, a series of pop-up restaurants in Tokyo, are all living with dementia, which means that you might not receive what you ordered.

All of our servers are people living with dementia. They may, or may not, get your order right.

However, rest assured that even if your order is mistaken, everything on our menu is delicious and one of a kind. This, we guarantee.

“It’s OK if my order was wrong. It tastes so good anyway.” We hope this feeling of openness and understanding will spread across Japan and through the world.

At the first pop-up, 37% of the orders were mistaken. This video explains a bit more about the concept and shows the restaurant in action.

Tags: food   Japan   medicine   restaurants   video

Lana Del Rey got it before the rest of us did. When Del Rey first showed up on the collective radar, smack in the exact middle of the Obama era, she came off as an actress giving life to a great gimmick --- a film-noir starlet adrift in time, floating on Lynchian breezes and midday … More »

The digital version comes with three bonus tracks.
…On Fear Inoculum, Tool’s first album in 13 years, the band remain defiantly contrary to the auto-tuned, digitally-quantized world in which we now live. They continue to blur the lines between art, psychedelia, alt metal, and prog rock with undiminished curiosity and skill. This commitment to blazing their own path has already earned the band three Grammys and an army of fans too large to be called a cult following, and yet too fervent to be anything else. Those who have waited since 2006’s 10,000 Days for a new full-length album will find much to feast on among Fear Inoculum’s seven new songs.
…Tool have never followed the structures or strictures of pop music, but still, there is…

204 MB  320 ** FLAC

…something surprisingly accessible about the album’s overall effect. The title track begins disarmingly with a repeating three-note pattern, evoking Philip Glass as much as Metallica, slowly building into a work of somber beauty and grandeur. (You can listen to it here.) Yes, there’s still drama, and darkness lurking not far beneath the surface, but—dare we say this?—it sounds like men approaching the apocalypse with a grin.

The band’s musical wanderlust is evident not just across the album’s tracks, but within each one. For example, “Pneuma” shifts from a vaguely Middle Eastern musical adventure layered with psychedelic synth lines to bluesy guitar lines played on a clean electric to massive slashing walls of distorted guitar, tripping through ‘60s blues rock, ‘70s prog rock, and ‘80s alt metal.  It’s like a musical time machine, or rather a machine that questions the idea of linear time itself.

As with previous work, on Fear Inoculum, the band’s songwriting can at times seem like a riddle, daring listeners to lean in and figure out exactly what is going on. “Invincible” kicks off like the sonic equivalent of an M.C. Escher drawing, with a series of notes that turn in on themselves in a Gordian knot. It begins with disarmingly pretty vocals and guitars for a few bars, but even when a gripping assault of drums and bass come in, there is a sense of startling beauty, like stumbling onto a sylvan oasis in the middle of a war zone.

The album also finds Tool exploring some familiar musical themes: “Descending,” for example, showcases the kind of long-simmering tension the band is known for, with several parts moving in different harmonic and rhythmic directions. But instead of chaos, there’s a feeling of carefully controlled complexity. It’s a multivalent experience, like sonic cubism, almost as if listeners are hearing several points of view at once.

But if there is one overarching theme to the album, it is that things are not what they seem because reality is constantly changing. “Culling Voices” finds frontman Maynard James Keenan singing a melody that seems to bend—but not break—the rules of the Western tonal system. The song reveals itself slowly, like a snake wriggling out of its old skin. “Legion Inoculant,” one of the bonus tracks, is a short piece of sound design that creates a ghostly atmosphere, with low subsonic bass tones and rising mass of filtered human vocals; it transports listeners, but it never takes us to any specific world for long. Equally mysterious is an instrumental called “Chocolate Chip Trip,” an evocative cinematic experience that defies categorization. What we can say is there are bells—bells in a haunted belfry, bells in a dungeon. If this were a movie and you heard these bells, you would know something awful was about to happen.

01. Fear Inoculum (10:20)
02. Pneuma (11:53)
03. Litanie contre la Peur (2:14)
04. Invincible (12:44)
05. Legion Inoculant (3:09)
06. Descending (13:37)
07. Culling Voices (10:05)
08. Chocolate Chip Trip (4:48)
09. 7empest (15:43)
10. Mockingbeat (2:05)

Lover finds Swift getting back to the business of writing aching, universal love songs, and business is good.

The long, strange, delightful story of Lil Nas X's run at #1 has finally ended. Three weeks ago, Lil Nas X and Billie Ray Cyrus' "Old Town Road" blew past all possible precedents, breaking the record for most weeks at #1. And after 19 weeks, we finally have a new #1 … More »

David Berman, the poet, cartoonist, and singer-songwriter behind Silver Jews and Purple Mountains, has died. Berman's record label, Drag City, confirmed the news in a tweet: "We couldn't be more sorry to tell you this. David Berman passed away earlier today. A great friend and one of the most inspiring individuals … More »

I collaborated on another video with Tom Scott! 

“Hello!” “Thank you!” “You’re welcome!” These are all phatic expressions, and people can argue about them.

An entomologist rates the ant emoji from a number of services including Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and Twitter. You can check out more reviews here.

Tags: ants   emoji

Mahershala Ali will appear in season two of the Hulu series “Ramy,” though the specifics of his role have not yet been disclosed.

Indiewire is early out of the gate with their list of the 100 best movies of the decade, betting that anything coming out in the next 5 months will not be worthy of inclusion. There are a few eyebrow raisers on there — 75. A Star Is Born? 26. Magic Mike XXL?? 5. Inside Llewyn Davis??? 2. Under the Skin?????!!? (reader, I didn’t like it) — but mostly this list is a goldmine for good movies I haven’t seen. Here are some that I have seen and enjoyed seeing on the list:

92. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
78. Inside Out
72. The Handmaiden
63. Inception
60. Black Panther
37. Roma
32. The Grand Budapest Hotel
23. O.J.: Made in America
13. The Tree of Life
9. Mad Max: Fury Road
7. Carol

I love that Fury Road made its way into the top 10…it might be my favorite film of the past decade.

Update: Also from Indiewire, the 25 Best Movie Scenes of the Decade.

Oh, and I thought of some films that definitely should be on that list but weren’t: Arrival, Dunkirk, Selma, Upstream Color, Senna. And I will continue to stubbornly go to bat for Cloud Atlas.

Tags: best of   best of 2010s   lists   movies

Whether it's in person at Vulture festival or on their show Difficult People, if there's one sport Billy Eichner and Julie Klausner excel at, it's reading other people to filth. (How are your burns healing, Kevin Spacey?) If celebrities aren't immune to their insults, neither are regular people. In this promo for the upcoming second season of Difficult People, Billy and Julie take on various subway riders like the manspreader and the guy who eats a sandwich. See? Billy and Julie aren't difficult, it's the world. If only you could have them with you on your morning commute. Difficult People returns to Hulu on July 12 with two episodes.

Last night, we learned that Grimes is the star of a new Adidas ad campaign. And in announcing her Adidas gig, Grimes posted on Instagram about her workout regimen. Somewhere in there, Grimes made a truly shocking announcement: She's had experimental eye surgery, replacing the "top film" of her eyeball and replacing it … More »

Happy World Emoji Day! To celebrate this made-up holiday, Emojipedia (?) has shared a preview of all the new emojis to be added to our keyboards in 2019. Included with this update is a brand new banjo emoji -- which is a pretty cool selection considering the yeehaw renaissance we've collectively embraced … More »