Presto, week one of Alcohollywood’s written content is underway! I’m pretty happy with how it’s turned out so far. With that in mind, I thought it’d be nice to start a weekly digest of all my works – both here and elsewhere – mostly so I don’t forget them all. Take a look at what I got up to this week!
One of the great pleasures of the last few months has been working with my good friend (and one of the best pop culture writers working today, though he may not admit it) Nathan Rabin on starting Nathan Rabin’s Happy Cast, the official podcast for his website.
For Episode 5, I was ecstatic to catch him in Chicago on New Year’s Day with his lovely family, and we talked about everything from Max Landis’ Netflix blight Bright, to its links to David Ayer’s previous garbage fire Suicide Squad, to Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and much, much more. Take a listen here, subscribe to the podcast here, and pledge to the Happy Cast Patreon here!
For the first written review on this site since, gosh, probably 2015, I had the pleasure of writing about Keep Talking, a charming new doc from Chicago’s own Kartemquin Films. It’s a wonderful story about Alaskan Natives fighting to preserve their dying language and endangered culture, and it’s well worth a watch. Read the review here.
In conjunction with my Keep Talking coverage, I got to interview the film’s director/producer about the project’s inception, and the struggle to preserve language and culture amidst historical trauma. Karen was a great interviewee (and collaborator on the piece), and you can read it here.
Of course, I don’t just write for my own site! As a Staff Writer for Consequence of Sound, I got to help kickstart our burgeoning TV coverage this past week.
For my first piece, I got to happily gush about one of my favorite characters on TV right now, the gangly bisexual demigod Darryl Whitefeather (Pete Gardner), on CW’s subversive musical rom-com Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. Check the piece out here.
For something a little more dour, I wrote up a mixed review of Scott Cooper’s bleak, nihilist Western drama Hostiles, starring Christian Bale and Wes Studi. Read the review here.
I wanted to start filling out op-ed material for the site as well, and top ten lists are a great way to do that in a new year. However, my top ten list looks pretty much like everyone else’s, now that the Oscar race is down to a few justified frontrunners.
So I figured, why parrot the opinions of other, smarter critics when I could just gush about my 11-20 best films of the year? This list gave me a nice chance to extol the virtues of some other great films this year not getting the same attention – e.g. A24’s The Lovers, or Professor Marston and the Wonder Women. Read the piece here.
Back at Consequence of Sound, I was privileged to write about David Bowie’s seminal debut performance in Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth around the second anniversary of his death, as well as what would be his 71st birthday. This was a joy to write, and I’d like to think the Goblin King would appreciate it. Read the piece here.
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