Jaws: The Shark Has Always Worked

By Lisa Anderson

One of my favorite movies was released three years before I was born.

Jaws, the ground-breaking 1975 film by Stephen Spielberg, is one of the movies that I’ve seen more times than I can count. Like The Matrix, it’s also a film that I consider perfect; I can’t think of anything that could be added, altered, or removed to make it better. That’s not surprising, either; Jaws changed the way movies were made and marketed forever.
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Homesick For Sadness: The Night Porter

By Less Lee Moore

As a film exploring the sadomasochistic relationship between a former Nazi officer and a concentration camp survivor, The Night Porter has received its share of controversy. In an article about The Night Porter called “Ideas of Sex,” writer and film scholar Nick Impey describes how its “detractors accused [director Liliana] Cavani of exploitatively using the Holocaust as a backdrop for salacious spectacle.” At times, watching The Night Porter feels less like an erotic journey than a particularly gore-free horror movie. It is frequently almost difficult to watch. Yet, persistence provides evidence that The Night Porter is not “Nazi porn” but an examination of the grey areas in a black and white world.
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Too Much Perfection Is Not A Mistake: Sound And Landscape In El Topo

By Less Lee Moore

Preface

For those who have never seen an Alejandro Jodorowsky film, describing one seems a daunting task. Furthermore, once you have seen a Jodorowsky film, such descriptions prove to be a poor substitute for the experience itself.

At present, Jodorowsky is 82 years old. With a life full of many artistic accomplishments, a description of them all is beyond the scope of an analysis of his films, but some introduction is needed in the hopes of illuminating how his background has informed his art.
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The Holy Mountain: Does Real Life Await Us?

By Less Lee Moore

Preface

For those who have never seen an Alejandro Jodorowsky film, describing one seems a daunting task. Furthermore, once you have seen a Jodorowsky film, such descriptions prove to be a poor substitute for the experience itself.

At present, Jodorowsky is 82 years old. With a life full of many artistic accomplishments, a description of them all is beyond the scope of an analysis of his films, but some introduction is needed in the hopes of illuminating how his background has informed his art.
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That Beatty Touch: Heaven Can Wait

By Less Lee Moore

Although it was released in 1978, Heaven Can Wait was one of my favorite films to watch again and again on HBO in the dawn of the 1980s.

Along with Foul Play, which was released in the same year (and is another fave), it’s a film that’s intended for adults, but which still possesses enough sweetness to appeal to a younger audience.
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Summer Of Grease

By David Speranza

I can’t speak for any adults at the time, but for those of us in our teens when the movie version of Grease hit theaters in 1978, it was more than just the latest in a line of summer-movie blockbusters (a concept that was still fairly new). Imagine, if you dare, two or three Twilight movies condensed into a single summer, with a hit soundtrack by Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift. Grease—with its catchy, inexhaustible pop tunes—represented the crest of the 1950s nostalgia that had been coursing through the decade.
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Can’t Fight The Fever

By David Speranza

When the movie Saturday Night Fever was released in December of 1977, it became a smash critical and popular success that delivered disco to the masses, John Travolta to movie theaters, and a soundtrack that became the biggest-selling of all time. But in my household, the film’s influence was precisely . . . nil. Considering my family’s strict rock & roll diet, at 13 I didn’t have to be told that a movie about disco was persona non grata. (Say it with me now: “Disco sucks.”) But beyond hewing to the party line, we also thought those high-pitched Bee Gee voices were whiny, nasal, and annoyingly ubiquitous in the months following the film’s release.

And those voices—along with the other Fever songs cramming the airwaves—were everywhere. I don’t remember how many times we’d be driving somewhere when that thumping bass and Gibb-brother whine would suddenly infect the car radio, causing one or the other Woodstock-era parent to reach violently for the tuner with a stream of R-rated invective. I knew the rules: if it had a dance beat, it was shunned—as clear as the laws of physics.
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So They Were Stars: The Razzle Dazzle Rockin’ Reign of the Hudson Brothers

By Cait Brennan

The Bible says music tore down the mighty walls of Jericho. In the 1960s and ’70s, rock and roll did the same for a generation of girls and young women. The rise of pop culture brought women and girls an unprecedented level of freedom, power, and influence. Perhaps it can’t quite be called “feminist,” and it may seem like a small thing, but before the mid-’60s, before the Beatles and Monkees, who could have imagined whole magazines devoted to pin-up boys?
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Linda Ronstadt: Not So Easy

By David Speranza

She’s not in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. She’s shockingly absent from Rolling Stone‘s list of Top 100 Singers. And yet in the 1970s she went where no woman had gone before, a female superstar in a male realm, clearing the way for the generations of pop, rock, and country superstars to come. She was featured on six Rolling Stone covers, the covers of Time and Newsweek, and received such appellations as “queen of rock,” “first lady of rock,” “rock’s superwoman,” and “top female pop singer of the decade.”

She was the first artist since the Beatles—and the first woman ever—to have two Top Five singles at the same time. Her string of multi-platinum albums and unprecedented (for a woman) arena rock shows made her the highest-paid female musician of the decade. Critical approval included a satchel-ful of Grammys, multiple Vocalist of the Year awards, and a date singing “The Star Spangled Banner” at Game Three of the 1978 World Series. Her voice was a technically perfect yet heartfelt instrument capable of expressing a multitude of emotions in an intimidating array of styles. Where female rockers were concerned, there was Linda Ronstadt—and there was everyone else.
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Way Out Sounds: Roger Joseph Manning, Jr. and Synths That Defined The Seventies

By Ayan Farah

Multi-instrumentalist, singer, and songwriter Roger Joseph Manning Jr. is renowned for the melody-rich, intricately arranged compositions his fans have latched onto throughout his nearly 25-year musical career. In each of his diverse band projects (Jellyfish, Imperial Drag, The Moog Cookbook, TV Eyes, Malibu), his ongoing collaborations with Beck, as well as his stellar solo efforts (2006′s The Land of Pure Imagination and 2008′s Catnip Dynamite), what remains constant is Manning’s unshakable ability to create very complex yet highly enjoyable music that is punctuated by his keyboard wizardry.

His indelible mark in the world of keyboards is embodied by his innovative use of vintage analog synthesizers, while his vast collection of those instruments over the years has cultivated a greater proficiency, intimacy, and almost encyclopedic knowledge of his primary instrument of choice. ” I did a lot of treasure hunting”, explains Manning. “I spent a lot of time in the early Nineties looking for stuff. I was quite the addict for those antique keyboards.”
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