Review: 'One Tough Dame: The Life and Career of Diana Rigg'

Diana Rigg seemed to take the most gratification from her stage work, but her screen genre work was what made her an icon. Say the name and one is most likely to picture her as Bond's one and only bride in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Vincent Price's costume-changing coconspirator in Theatre of Blood, the ceaselessly scheming Olenna Tyrell in Game of Thrones, or most probably, the karate-chop dishing Emma Peel of The Avengers.

Review: 'Fantastic Planets, Forbidden Zones, and Lost Continents: The 100 Greatest Science-Fiction Films'

Like horror, science fiction is a genre that can be tricky to define. Frankenstein is certainly a horror movie, but with the pseudo-scientific creation of flat-top Boris, it can also be classified as science-fiction. Bride of Frankenstein, in which Dr. Pretorius creates creatures in a way more in line with "black magic," doesn't bother so much with the pseudo science. Whatever. They both qualify as science fiction in Fantastic Planets, Forbidden Zones, and Lost Continents: The 100 Greatest Science-Fiction Films even though Douglas Brode goes to some lengths to define the science-fiction film as any that makes some attempt to explain its weirdness scientifically. 

Review: 'American Standard: Cheap Trick From the Bars to Budokan and Beyond'

Okay, maybe I'm not the brightest guy in the world. The book is called American Standard: Cheap Trick From the Bars to Budokan and Beyond. But a title that references a band's most famous gig and album doesn't necessarily mean anything, especially when the back jacket copy and foreword don't clearly lay-out the author's agenda. So, as I read the first seventy pages of American Standard, I kept thinking, "Gee, Ross Warner is sure sprinting through Cheap Trick's career." He barely spares a word about the guys' pre-band years, barely a sentence on their formation, and—upon flipping forward to get a sense of what I was reading—barely a paragraph on their only #1 hit. That last bit was fine by me though. "The Flame" is a piece of shit.

Review: 'I Spit on Your Celluloid: The History of Women Directing Horror Movies'

Pet Sematary. Near Dark. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. The Babadook. What do all of these movies have in common? They're scary. What else? They were all directed by women. 

For a lot of movie goers, even horror freaks, it's hard to name a lot more female-directed fear films than these, but there are actually quite a lot, and I'm not just talking about the explosion of them in the past fifteen years. During the early days of film, there were a number of silent films directed by women such as Lois Weber (Suspense) and Louise Kolm-Fleck (Die Ahnfrau). When the Hollywood sound era bullied to the fore in the thirties, women filmmakers were put out of business in America, but they continued to work elsewhere in the world. From the fifties through the eighties, a number of women directed exploitation films, largely because the guys producing such films, such as Roger Corman, figured that they'd just be happy to get the work and not expect the freedom or pay their male counterparts could count on. And as such injustices were finally addressed in more recent years, and digital technology democratized filmmaking in general, the number of horror movies directed by women positively exploded.

Review: 'Zowie!: The TV Superhero Craze in '60s Pop Culture'

Crashing into a Gilligan-and-Jeannie-populated TV scene too dumb to fully recognize how dumb it was, Batman dropped a big load of camp--distinct from Gilligan and Jeannie's kitsch--onto TV screens. Whether you were a hyperactive six year old or a hyper-hip sixteen year old, Batman had appeal, doing dual work as a sincere superhero adventure and a genuine and genuinely funny comedy at a time when such things simply didn't exist on American television. 

Review: Velocity Girl's 'UltraCopacetic'

When Maryland's Velocity Girl came shimmering out of Sub Pop with their debut album in 1993, Bob Weston's wall-of-noise production couldn't hide the gleeful melodism of the singles "Crazy Town" and "Audrey's Eyes" (and if this song doesn't automatically force you to picture Sherilyn Fenn in saddle shoes, you and I might have trouble relating to each other), the squalling "Pretty Sister" (my personal fave), or "Pop Loser", which is totally pop despite a lyric mocking those who sing la-la shit. And no group in that lo-fi scene had a singer like the opera-trained Sarah Shannon. Burying her clarion pipes way down in the mix couldn't hide that either.

Review: 'Ornithology: The Best of Bird' by Charlie Parker

As jazz evolved beyond hummable melodies tailored for dance halls and 78s, Charlie "Bird" Parker was right there pushing it into the freewheeling zone that would become known as bebop. Not that he couldn't play the game. Some of Parker's most memorable recordings were fit for juke boxes and barely set a toe past the three-minute demarcation. But what he did within those three minutes was something entirely new, even if he was sticking to simple, well-traveled blues progressions. The melodic riffs that ostensibly hold things like "Ko-Ko", "Donna Lee", and "Anthropology" together are remarkably complex. Without what most sensible folks might describe as tunefulness, Parker's work was pure musicianship and emotion, whether he was going for the joyful spot with "Groovin' High" or playing it dreamy and romantic on "Parker's Mood". 

Review: 'Forever Changes: The Authorized Biography of Arthur Lee and Love'

Love was the greatest American band of the sixties to never score a national hit. Arising from an LA scene that spat out superstars like The Byrds, The Doors, and Buffalo Springfield, Arthur Lee and company were widely regarded as the godfathers of the Sunset Strip. Jimi Hendrix admired Lee; Jim Morrison worshipped him. Even the Stones borrowed liberally from Love (although the reverse is true, too). Love’s first three albums, particularly 1967’s Forever Changes, are regarded as a triptych masterpiece even though each section is completely unlike the others. 

Yet Love has not endured as their contemporaries have because Lee refused to play the major label game. He hated flying and being jarred out of LA— where he lived in a castle, was regarded as royalty, and the mixed-race nature of his band wasn’t a major issue— so he refused to tour. His controlling, stubborn, angry, paranoid nature alienated many of the people who most wanted him to succeed. Eventually he became a serious coke addict who chastised his bandmates for their drug use. 

Review: 'Jim Henson's Imagination Illustrated' Updated Edition

Jim Henson was a restlessly creative guy, and like a lot of restlessly creative guys, he kept track of his endless flood of ideas in a notebook. Henson's little red one was filled with brief journal entries and marvelous sketches. It was in this book that he worked out ideas for Rowlf the dog, one of his earliest Muppets; commercial concepts; and other brainwaves.