Parliament - Up For The Down Stroke (1974), Chocolate City (1975), Funkentelechy Vs. The Placebo (1976), Mothership Connection (1976). George Clinton’s other outfit. So great that it is unnecessary for me to point out that these are truly great albums. The first and last of these are among the best damn funk albums ever made.

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Treating teenage growing pains with a sensitivity that frequently trips into singer-songwriter-ish mushiness, Tiger Eyesnonetheless stands as a respectable first cinematic adaptation of a Judy Blume novel. Directed and co-written by her son, Lawrence, Blume’s tale follows 15-year-old Davey (Willa Holland) as she relocates, in the wake of her father’s murder, from Atlantic City to New Mexico with her grieving-mess mother (Amy Jo Johnson) and younger brother in order to live with a pushy aunt (Cynthia Stevenson) and judgmental uncle (Forrest Fyre).

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by Phil Dyess-Nugent, Scott Von Doviak, et al.

With a handful of exceptions—mostly anime and miniseries made by acclaimed foreign directors—it’s been extraordinarily hard for Americans to get their hands on even the most highly acclaimed foreign-language TV. The idea of TV as art worth being challenged by is a relatively new one, even though there’s been good TV in all languages since the medium’s inception. That’s all changing with the recent flood of cable channels and streaming services devoted to outside-the-box material in recent years, however.

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A few months back, I attended SXSW 2013 as a correspondent for The North Adams Transcript and Rocker.  In addition to my Best of the Fest coverage, I shot a Q&A with Our Nixon director Penny Lane and performances by Billy Bragg and Amanda Palmer.

I also wound up with a lot of bonus footage, which I’ve compiled into the following video diary of the bands, barbecue and bacchanalia of the most recent South by Southwest Music, Film & Interactive Festival in beautiful Austin, Texas (featuring cameos by Bragg, Palmer, Chloe Sevigny, James Franco, The Spirit Family Reunion, Feathers and a riveting acting tutorial by the one and only Jeffrey Tambor)…enjoy!

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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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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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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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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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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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.

I mean, I get why Amanda’s hateable, I suppose.  She’s a brash attention whore who seems to delight in rubbing people the wrong way.  Yet whether you think she’s a bad person and/or makes bad music — which I don’t and don’t (in fact, quite the opposite) — the furor over the poem seems overblown.  Sure, nerves are raw in Boston, and people are always looking for stuff to get all het up about in general, especially when it comes to traumas and tragedies.

But, I dunno…I think she was just speculating about the dude in an artsy way, like artists do.  I mean, countless people (myself included) reacted to the whole Marathon situation in different ways and will continue to do so, from Stewart/Colbert/Maher monologues to essays to other forms of expression.  (And it’s not like she pulled some Madonna type move like wearing a “Free Dzhokar” t-shirt in concert or that kind of nonsense.)

People who hate Amanda Palmer are always looking for reasons to hate her even more — and writing poems is an easily mockable pursuit — but it’s not like she’s championing the surviving Boston terrorist.  As for the inherent artistry of the poem itself, I’m not really qualified to judge…I just know it’s better than what John Cusack wrote.  I mean, seriously…that shit was whack.