The Best of the Decade
When this decade began, Paste’s website was barely a year old, and the magazine was still a twinkle in its daddies’ eyes. So looking back over the first 10 years of the 2000s feels like looking back over our own history. There hasn’t been a new album, film, TV show, video game or book Paste has covered that wasn’t eligible for our “Best of the Decade” consideration. We had dozens of critics vote in each of these five categories, and then we argued some more until we’d focused our spotlight onto the very best pop culture created during the aughts—whether... read more
Film Friday: A Weekend of Pushing Buttons
This weekend at your local Big Screen, the movies are about pushing buttons. In The Box, directed by Donnie Darko creator Richard Kelly, a mysterious man in a long coat who appears to have been slapped in the face on more than one occasion shows up at the home of Cameron Diaz and James Marsden to ask if this attractive, cash-strapped couple wants to see what’s in his box. Spoiler: it’s a button. Push it and you get a million dollars, but when you do someone on the other side of the earth whom you do not know will be... read more
Catching Up With... The Men Who Stare at Goats Author Jon Ronson
Jon Ronson knows his way around weird. The author and documentary filmmaker has spent his career tracking down some of the most wildly weird people on the planet to bring their stories to us normal folk. His bestseller, Them: Adventures with Extremists, chronicled the tales of wannabe global dominators like Islamic fundamentalists and neo-Nazi Ku Klux Klansmen. But it’s his book, The Men Who Stare at Goats, that’s putting his name on the map—in part thanks to George Clooney. The book, about the secret army unit of soldiers with psychic power called the First Earth Battalion, was just made into... read more
Salute Your Shorts: Dan Harmon's Channel 101 Shows
Salute Your Shorts is a weekly column that looks at short films, music videos, commercials or any other short form visual media that generally gets ignored.For any longtime fans of Dan Harmon’s work, Community is a surprise. Not the fact that it’s good, no, that’s something that we could all be pretty sure of. It’s that the show, a relatively conventional sitcom, could come from the avant-garde co-founder of Channel 101, whose prior claim to fame involves shows such as Computerman and Laser Fart. He’s long been a superstar for a relatively niche group of Los Angeles filmmakers and comedians,... read more
American Casino Doc Sees Banks As Economy-Wrecking Gamblers
You want a villain, a bad guy you can blame for the financial crisis that’s torn a hole in the American economy? The gripping new documentary American Casino—just released on DVD like to nominate Phil Gramm.... read more
Best of What's Next: Moneybrother
Anders Wendin makes music as Moneybrother, but he's first and foremost a tourist... read more
The Booky Man: Maus... or There's No Place Like Home for the Holocaust
Comic books in their most familiar form—tales of super-heroes and adventurers—sprang from pulp novel potboilers of the 1930s and ‘40s. They were often lurid, licentious, shocking. In fact, by the 1950s, as America focused on the Red Scare and those dirty Commies tunneling like termites under our American way of life, ‘seditious’ comic books grew so popular among impressionable young people that authorities passed laws banning comics… and even burned them.... read more
Catching Up With... Tegan Quin
When Tegan and Sara Quin speak of devotion, they do not speak of its most traditional sense. read more
Where Have All The Weird Girls Gone? Gone to the Big Screen, (Nearly) Every One
Her clothes aren’t right. Her old man doesn’t understand her. And her love life? Nonexistent to abysmal. She’s too cool for the nerds, too square for the cool kids. She’s the alterna-girl, one of television’s most beloved archetypes—and she’s in trouble.... read more
Catching Up With... Jemaine Clement
Anybody who's been exposed to Jemaine Clement, also known as the Hiphopopotamus half of Flight of the Conchords, knows that the New Zealand native has turned awkwardness into an art form on screen and MP3 alike. In his new film, Gentlemen Broncos, Clement joins forces with Napolean Dynamite and Nacho Libre director Jared Hess to form a perfect storm of self-conscious absurdity, playing an egotistical sci-fi author who flaunts a vestigial Blue Tooth and hi-jacks adolescent fiction about yeast-empowered space rangers. So what's next for one of folk comedy's international figureheads? Clement offered Paste a few lucrative hints about the future of Conchords, his Rock Band... read more
Start Press: Lost In Space
Lately it’s been getting dark around five o’clock in the evening. Ireland is situated far enough north that it won’t be long before the daylight—notice I said ‘daylight’ and not ‘sunshine’—will fizzle out each afternoon around 3:30pm. I like to imagine that the sun has gotten sick of its job and begun showing up late to work, slipping out the backdoor early. I don’t mind the shorter days. Nighttime amplifies the comfort of your domestic environs. Like when you’re watching a stage play with an elaborate set and all the lights fade to black except for one spotlight trained on... read more
Readers' Picks: Best TV Shows of the Decade
We spent a lot of time brainstorming, voting, arguing and refining our list of The 20 Best TV Shows of the Decade. But, of course, we got it wrong. Here’s what our readers chose as the 10 Best TV Shows of the Decade:... read more
Best of What's Next: Nurses
It’s an amusingly incongruous sight to see the makers of such delicate music hauling around in such a brawny boat... read more
Readers' Picks: Best Movies of the Decade
We spent a lot of time brainstorming, voting, arguing and refining our list of The 50 Best Movies of the Decade. But, of course, we got it wrong. Here’s what our readers chose as the 10 Best Movies of the Decade:... read more
High Definition: Modern Family Finds Its Funny
Despite my high hopes for Joel McHale, John Oliver, Ken Jeong and the rest of the cast of NBC’s hit-and-miss Community, the funniest new comedy this season is Modern Family on ABC. The story of three inter-related families works because its characters seem familiar to life but fresh to the screen.... read more
Best of What's Next: Kristina Train
The soulful saunter of Kristina Train's debut Spilt Milk hints at her roots in Savannah... read more
Listen Up: The Tourettes Are Dead, Long Live The Tourettes
I wore a lot of skirts my freshman year of college, but one of my favorite songs that year was “Pants Fever,” a catchy little tune by a band that I’m pretty sure you’ve never heard of. And I mean that in absolutely the least snobby way possible. You don’t not know them because you’re not cool enough. You don’t know them because, really, there’s just not that much to know.... read more
Sufjan Stevens: On the Road to Find Out
On Nov. 2, 2009, Paste magazine released its list of The 50 Best Albums of the Decade, and topping that list was Illinois, the 2005 masterpiece from Sufjan Stevens. Paste’s Kate Kiefer talked to the Illinoisemaker about the album, his 50 States project and his recent orchestral creation The BQE.... read more
The Best Albums of the Decade (Readers' Picks)
We spent a lot of time brainstorming, voting, arguing and refining our list of The 50 Best Albums of the Decade. But, of course, we got it wrong. Here’s what our readers chose as the 10 Best Albums of the Decade:... read more
Best of What's Next: Hello Seahorse!
Born in California and raised in Mexico, Hello Seahorse! lead singer Lo Blondo... read more
Where Have All The Weird Girls Gone?…
Evil Dead to Rise Again to Theaters…
The 50 Best Movies of the Decade…
Heather Greene - Moon Hangs Fire
James Yuill - This Sweet Love (Earth…
Orenda Fink - That Certain-Something Spring
Colin Hay - Down Under
Fun. - All The Pretty Girls
Susan Enan - Paste Reviews: Plainsong
