Salute Your Shorts: The Golden Age of Television
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.The title of the Criterion Collection’s The Golden Age of Television can seem like quite a misnomer. For my money, the greatest age for television is right now, and to anyone who’d dispute this, I’d just send a link to Paste's list of the top 20 shows of the decade. We could’ve easily continued the list to 50 without breaking a sweat. Hell, if you include some more idiosyncratic favorites, there are more than 100 shows... read more
Film Friday: Werner Herzog Goes Nuts Twice (and Other Observations About Crazed Filmmakers)
A new movie called Bronson by filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn is traveling around the country, three screens per week. It’s about a man (true story) who’s so incorrigible that British authorities had to lock him up in a jail (or rather, a gaol) for 30-odd years. He’s the kind of chap who hauls off and belts people just for being within arms’ reach: school teachers, police officers, you name it. Bald, mustachioed, and hard-knuckled like a carnival strongman, he has no place in a civil society, even though his crimes don’t seem to warrant three decades in solitary confinement, either.... read more
Salute Your Shorts: Wes Anderson's "Bottle Rocket"
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.Whatever else he may be, Wes Anderson has been a large figure in American filmmaking for the past decade. When the AV Club put out its list of 10 Films that Couldn’t Have Happened Without Wes Anderson two years ago, the publication could've kept the list going for ages, and since then the number of films and filmmakers he’s influenced has only grown longer. Especially of late, Anderson tends to have apologetic fans who love... read more
Catching Up With... Sam Rockwell
With over a dozen films to his credit since 2007, Sam Rockwell is currently garnering Oscar buzz for his performance(s) in Moon. He discussed the role with Paste as well as his dual portrayal in the just-released Gentlemen Broncos which was helmed by Napoleon Dynamite director Jared Hess.... read more
Catching Up With... Jared Hess
Director Jared Hess loves science fiction. If you wanted to talk to him for hours on end about rocket ships, space rangers and David Lynch's Dune, he would happily oblige. The dead-pan visionary behind Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre loves the genre so much, that he projected some 16-odd years of mechanical beasts and galactic intrigue into his quirk masterpiece, Gentlemen Broncos. "I had drawings of Battle Stags in my Trapper Keeper," Hess recalls. "That was the kind of crap that I drew when I was 14. It was fun to be able to bring those bad boys to life."... read more
The Best Albums, Movies, TV & More From the 2000s
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
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
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
Film Friday: George Lucas and the Canadian Force
When the National Film Board of Canada released an iPhone application last week, I naturally thought of Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, and Yoda. For some people, trolling through the NFB’s video archives will undoubtedly bring to mind those three famous Canadians.... read more
Salute Your Shorts: Paris, je t'aime
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.Anthology films have been around since at least 1932, when Grand Hotel won the Academy Award for best picture. It’s only recently, though, that micro-anthology films have become a fad. Previous works had compiled various shorts, but these shorts were rarely less than 20 minutes long and because of this were frequently no less accomplished than features themselves. Even when films themselves weren’t made in this fashion, they’ve sometimes been grouped together simply because non-feature... read more
Catching Up With... Battlestar Galactica's Edward James Olmos
Admiral Adama talks about directing Battlestar Galactica: The Plan, nuclear annihilation, God and how bloggers influenced the series. read more
Catching Up With... Antichrist's Lars von Trier
In mid-September, Danish director Lars Von Trier appeared-via a Skype video chat-at a press conference for the New York Film Festival, which screens his controversial new shocker Antichrist. The film, which Von Trier has said was born out of a terrible depression, is the story of an unnamed married couple (Charlotte Gainsbourg, Willem Dafoe) who take refuge at a cabin in the wilds after their toddler son has died in a fall.... read more
Salute Your Shorts: Mira Nair's Short Films
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. Criterion’s new DVD/Blu-Ray release of Monsoon Wedding offers not just a beautiful new print of one of the most successful foreign films ever released in America, but also a majority of its directors short films. Its seven shorts span the length of Mira Nair's career, from just out of school to last year. Perhaps moreso than her feature work, which has included some films that seem made more obviously for pay rather than personal... read more
Prank You Very Much: The Yes Men Document Their Anti-Corporate Hijinks
You’re at GO-EXPO, one of North America’s fastest-growing oil-and-gas events... read more
Where the Wild Things Are Roundup
A review, two columns, an exclusive and hilarious behind-the-scenes documentary, a cover story and an interview with Karen O... read more
Film Friday: Drag Me to Where the Wild Things Are
The long anticipated Spike Jonze-Dave Eggers adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are arrives in theaters this weekend, and Sam Raimi’s latest film Drag Me to Hell is newly out on DVD and Blu-Ray. I could be wrong, but I suspect the audiences for these two films overlap more than you might expect.... read more
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