Scott Von Doviak Recaps Survivor: Caramoan (Finale & Reunion)

This has been one of the stranger seasons in the long and winding history of Survivor. The first half was relentlessly unpleasant, dominated by the bellowing antics of Shamar and Li’l Hantz, and devoting way too much camera time to Special Agent Phil and his Stealth-R-Us nonsense. This is the downside to casting returning players: Jeff Probst, Mark Burnett, and company tend to favor loud, attention-getting personalities, no matter how grating and regardless of whether they wore out their welcomes the first time around.

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AVQ&A: The Films You’ve Loved Longest

by Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent, et al.

Welcome back to AVQ&A, where we throw out a question for discussion among the staff and readers. Consider this a prompt to compare notes on your interface with pop culture, to reveal your embarrassing tastes and experiences, and to ponder how our diverse lives all led us to convene here together. Got a question you’d like us and the readers to answer? Email us at avcqa@theonion.com.

This should wrap up our current nostalgia kick, with the obvious question to ask after the last two AVQ&As: What films did you discover earliest in life that are still on your favorites list?

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Vadim Rizov Reviews In The Fog

One of post-millennial festival filmmaking ’s favourite locations is the forest. In addition to Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s arboreally obsessed work (Blissfully Yours, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives), there are movies as dissimilar as Lisandro Alonso’s Los Muertos, Carlos Reygadas’ Post Tenebras Lux, Miguel Gomes’ Our Beloved Month Of August and Gus Van Sant’s Last Days. The visual appeal is obvious, even as the setting approaches cliché: the hypnotic textures created by trees and leaves in constantly shifting light, tiny variants usually amplified via low, slow tracking shots.

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Nick Schager Reviews Pain & Gain

Has Michael Bay acquired self-consciousness? That’s the question raised, if never convincingly answered, by Pain & Gain, an outrageous based-on-real-life tale that’s perfectly suited to the director’s insanely overblown stylistic and thematic temperament. Rife with racism, homophobia, and anti-Semitism, and infatuated with superficial beauty, physical strength, wealth, and military might, it’s the perfect encapsulation of Bay’s favorite things, a rollicking, repugnant, hilarious mess of inappropriateness that at once embraces, and condemns, its many tasteless elements.

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The Most Beautiful Fraud: To The Wonder

by Leonard Pierce

I sat down to write a review of Terrence Malick’s latest film, To the Wonder, with the goal of speaking only of the work itself, an approach I have often found valuable in music writing:  by trimming off the fat, by burying the excess, by considering only the art under contemplation and not the thick laters of cultural accretion and public opinion around a record, I am often able to get at the heart of what I love or hate about the music it contains.  But this seems impossible with the medium of film, particularly in the internet age; here, there is no opinion formed in a vacuum, and even if there were — in, say, the cold vacuum of space, to which I would dearly love to see many of my fellow cinematic bloviators condemned — someone would complain about how Ridley Scott did it better.

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A Blog Post For Amanda

by Andrew Osborne

Boy, people sure do love to hate Amanda Palmer.  Even more than they hate Lana Del Rey (though not quite as much as they hate Madonna).  First, there was the whole Kickstarter controversy, and now there’s “A Poem for Dzhokar” (which Gawker incorrectly labeled the Worst Poem of All Time…a clear misprint, since it’s been scientifically proven that John Cusack’s ode to Obama on the eve of his first inauguration was, in fact, the worst poem ever.

“Hang on. This isn’t going to be subtle.”

by Paul Clark

Here lieth my review of The Core, written for this year’s edition of the White Elephant Blogathon. And my God have mercy on my soul.

What can one write about a movie as aggressively mediocre as The Core? As those of you who follow me on Facebook can attest, I’m rarely at a loss for words. But when trying to write something readable about this movie, I find myself drawing a blank. I’m not kidding about that- this is already my third attempt at a review, and I don’t know if I’m any closer to finding a way in now than I was the first time I tried. It’s not that it’s a difficult movie by any means- it’s just that it’s so forgettable that it’s already evaporating from my memory after less than 24 hours.

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