The Booky Man: Jeeves Saves

T’was the day before Christmas. The sky was gray, sleety. I’d been out shopping, had all the family-and-friend gifts now smug in their beds....  read more

Start Press: The Emperor Isn’t Wearing Any Overalls

In a recent installment of his must-read weekly column for Edge Online, Chris Dahlen urges his fellow critics to quit bitching for a second about games' perennial bungling of story elements, and “focus on something they do really well: characters.” He argues, “If you have characters that people love, they will stick around while you flog the property years past its sell date. And if you don’t have good characters, the most radical plot twists in history will not save you.” To stress the character-driven nature of contemporary game development, Dahlen cites Nintendo’s beloved Zelda franchise with its notorious green-clad...  read more

Best of What's Next: Visqueen

Nothing about this album or the band that made it seems...  read more

High Definition: Watching Soccer From Across the Pond

I’ll be the first to recognize that I have a bit of an obsessive personality. So, since I decided this summer that I’d adopt the football club of my hosts at the Manchester International Festival, I shouldn’t be surprised by how quickly my soccer mania has developed. But what has caught me completely off-guard has been my ability to watch nearly every one of the club’s 19 matches so far this season....  read more

Best of What's Next: Miike Snow

“I don’t think we ever intended to make anything mysterious about the band..."  read more

Vic Chesnutt: 1964-2009

Vic Chesnutt, the wheelchair-bound singer/songwriter whose voice rose from Athens., Ga. to become a fixture on the Americana scene, died Christmas Day from an overdose of muscle relaxants, according to The New York Times....  read more

Listen Up: High-Brow, Low-Brow, No-Brow, Schmo-Brow

Over the past few weeks, as my Paste co-editors and I have shot repeated, fervid glances over our shoulders at the year 2009 and the preceding decade, tallying up the supposedly-best music, movies and everything else from those ultimately arbitrary but nonetheless psychologically compelling periods of time, we've been called many names. Among them: "losers," "douche[s]," "pussies," and "sad, sad people." There were a couple of subtle, and then some not-so-subtle, suggestions that we all kill ourselves, or maybe it was to allow ourselves to be killed by someone else—I can't remember which. Either way, thanks for the ego check,...  read more

Best of What's Next: Michael Ford, Jr. & The Apache Relay

It was a match made in heaven. Or, at least, in Nashville...  read more

Police, Adjective Review

Release Date: Dec. 23 Director: Corneliu Porumboiu Writer: Porumboiu Starring: Dragos Bucur, Vlad Ivanov Cinematographer: Marius Panduru Studio/Run Time: IFC Films, 113 mins....  read more

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus Review

While James Cameron recently spent $250 million for the technical wizardry to create a cinematic experience like we’ve never seen before, Terry Gilliam spent about a tenth of that amount on The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus and created a world we’d never imagine. Cameron’s plot was compelling but conventional; Gilliam’s was compelling, anything but conventional and eventually frustrating....  read more

Start Press: Is Avatar The Ghost of Videogames Future?

Easily the most fun I’ve had watching blue-skinned aliens run around in a tizzy since The Smurfs. Yes, I’m talking about James Cameron’s Avatar—a visual feast that causes your eyes to balloon to the size of DDD breasts (at least I think that’s what they meant by “3D”). I loved the film. I loved the polarized Buddy Holly glasses that caused Pandora’s luminescent wildlife and vegetation to flutter off the screen and into my lap. I loved the Dances With Extraterrestrial Wolf-like Creatures love story. I loved the sense of being invited to a graduation ceremony, popping the champagne cork...  read more

Best of What's Next: Capgun Coup

By the time Sam Martin finally wakes up...  read more

High Definition: AfterSCRUBS

When it came on the air back in 2001, Scrubs pulled off the seemingly impossible—it was a hospital-based show that felt completely original. With J.D.‘s absurdist fantasies, a sharp cast and a unique sense of humor, Bill Lawrence had created one of the funniest network sitcoms of the decade. As the characters developed over the course of its seven-season run on NBC from interns to full-fledged doctors, the accumulation of running gags and inside jokes flowed naturally: the unnamed Janitor’s (Neil Flynn) schemes to torture J.D. (Zach Braff), Dr. Cox’s (John C. McGinley) verbal abuse of J.D., J.D. and Turk’s...  read more

Best of What's Next: A Place To Bury Strangers

The October release of Exploding Head...  read more

Listen Up: The Best Christmas Album Ever

I'm about to make my annual December pilgrimage to Ikea and then peace out for two weeks of pretty intense holidaying-it-up, so let's not mince words: Hanson's Snowed In is the best Christmas album ever.  read more

Getting to Know... Bell Horses

A harmonious mixture of organs, percussion and vocals, a mellow amalgam...  read more

Elf Heads to Broadway

“The best way to spread Christmas Cheer is singing loud for all to hear.” So says Buddy the Elf....  read more

James Cameron to Develop "Sci-Fi Adventure" for Fox

According to a tweet by Production Weekly, Avatar director James Cameron will have more work coming his way, this time for television. The post reads: “James Cameron is developing a Shane Salerno-scripted sci-fi action script for Fox, described as an event film set in the future.”...  read more

Jimmy Chamberlin Spills Details on New Band, This

When he severed ties with Billy Corgan, Jimmy Chamberlin also separated himself from Corgan’s penchant for bombastic names (e.g. Smashing Pumpkins, Zwan, Teargarden by Kaleidyscope). His latest efforts prove this, as they fall under a band that’s actually called This....  read more

Can The Hurt Locker Unseat Up in the Air as the Oscar Frontrunner?

It’s been a shaky year for film, or at least a shaky year for the kinds of movies that traditionally vie for awards consideration in general and the Oscars in particular. Thus a muddled, shapeless version of the normal buzz cycle has emerged, with few clear contenders running ahead of the rest....  read more