pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

yeah so far the column hasn't been much more than 'man, remember the 90s?' which tbf i did go 'o wow i had wiped disclosure from my memory. truly this was a forgotten blockbuster.' i wonder how it's doing also, av club got by w/ some original ideas (including some of rabin's stuff) but also w/ alot of of output so if you were bored well av club probably has something new up. this doesn't seem to have nearly that.

I think you are underselling the power of cult fandom

― Bitch Fantastic (DJP), Friday, October 11, 2013 11:45 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Like you're saying the Onion has a cult following? Or has they following of people who would watch something called "Dr. Horrible's Sing A Long Blog" and therefore have no screen when it comes to what media they consume

i mean in some ways i can respect it, it's not listicles, it's not intro paragraph setup two paragraphs plot synopsis concluding paragraph 'review' no paragraph more than thirty words pop crit, and it's not the same points about the same movies again and again or 'the 10 best movies you haven't seen you should see! *click to next slide* #10 the shawshank redemption'. but it's not really doing anything as film crit and it's not really working as a time sink either.

whiney befuddled by concept of 'joss whedon cult'

"i don't get why they keep making comic book movies, nobody cares about this crap, make a mike patton biopic already, give the ppl what they want"

it is kinda funny to have a spin writer apopleptic at the idea of a website w/ a fetish for 90s nostalgia though

dissolve is kinda useful in that it's an effective quarantine for a bunch of boring critics.

Look, I'm not even going to dive in to WHAT they cover, I'm befuddled by HOW they cover things as a model that people are super into

it's not like they're the only ones using that model or having success w/ it, it's nearly the default for pop cult coverage

here's the rare case where it's recommended to read the comments if u want the answer to your questions

i mean, it's basically an ilx thread except the opening post has 50,000 words from nate rabin.

i dont really ascribe 3000 words on "lol remember hannibal??" to any kind of cult following

to me it's like a formalized version of a stoned party conversation, nothing wrong with those, but they belong in weed-haze-filled parties

and making it your lead story when you have:

- interview with jia zhangke about what is prob the best film of the year
- starred review of captain phillips
- buncha other stuff about movies opening TODAY

is insane to me

like that should be back-of-the-book, read-everything-else-already material at best

avc's "forgotten blockbusters" thing feels similiar to ilm figuring out all the "New Jersey"s

ilm figuring out all the "New Jersey"s is a lot like the a/v club turn this site has taken in the last year or so

Well the reviews of new releases tend to show up on Thursday, rather than the Friday. So they've already been up there for a day.

ya but what do you think readers are gonna be most interested in seeing on a friday afternoon, stories about the movies opening that day that they could potentially see that weekend, or "hey... remember that hannibal movie, how weird was that??"

ilm figuring out all the "New Jersey"s is a lot like the a/v club turn this site has taken in the last year or so

― smangerz (Whiney G. Weingarten), Friday, October 11, 2013 3:45 PM (39 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this kinda stuff is fine at a party or on a message board or IM or whatever but when you're headlining your important new film site with it yeesh

http://www.lowculture.com/archives/images/farley-show.jpg

and making it your lead story when you have:

- interview with jia zhangke about what is prob the best film of the year
- starred review of captain phillips
- buncha other stuff about movies opening TODAY

is insane to me

― socki (s1ocki), Friday, 11 October 2013 18:01 (2 hours ago) Permalink

i guess it's headlining because of moderate fanboy interest in the tv show but at the same time the movie is such a grotesque piece of shit imo and while sometimes films w/that 'description' can be interesting, this is not interesting whatsoever.

jesus fucking christ whiney it was one fucking little timer killer thread you act like i ruined gertrude stein's paris salon or some shit

lol

Is this the 'Keep The Faith' or the 'Have A Nice Day' of Whiney gripes about ilx?

whiney doesn't have time to kill he has zings to make goddammit

Another good example of what I'm talking about: http://www.avclub.com/articles/how-homestar-runner-changed-web-series-for-the-bet,104146/?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=SocialMarketing&utm_campaign=Default:1:Default

http://www.theonion.com/articles/internet-rocked-by-blogger-with-sarcastic-sensibil,34212/

yeah this relentless mining of everything that ever happened or didn't happen in pop culture ("splitsider presents a look back at the roles bob odenkirk didn't get!") is just so exhausting

it turned that into a series of web shorts that pointed the way forward not just for the legions of web series to follow but also a host of TV shows, from Adventure Time to Bob’s Burgers, from Community to Parks And Recreation.

Did Homestar Runner influence all of those programs? Most likely not

how is it not incredibly sad to write 3000 words about a web cartoon no one has cared about for 9 years and come to this as your strongest conclusion? like, why would you do that to yourself?

Should I have written this article? Nah, I guess not.

it turned that into a series of web shorts that pointed the way forward not just for the legions of web series to follow but also a host of TV shows, from Adventure Time to Bob’s Burgers, from Community to Parks And Recreation.

Did Homestar Runner influence all of those programs? Most likely not

how is it not incredibly sad to write 3000 words about a web cartoon no one has cared about for 9 years and come to this as your strongest conclusion? like, why would you do that to yourself?

― call all destroyer, Monday, October 14, 2013 3:29 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

also i like how we're reached this point where the idea of actually doing any kind of journalism and actually, i don't know, ACTUALLY ASKING THE FUCKING PEOPLE THAT MADE THESE SHOWS is completely out of the question. like just speculate and then say "neat think piece huh? i mean, it's not actually true but sounds good :)"

yeah thinkpiece has kinda come to mean "i googled a little but i didn't dare go anywhere in person or interview anybody"

it amazes me how those onion "inventory" lists (like "14 tv characters who should have been fired from their jobs" or w/e) always have half a dozen or so credited authors.

http://www.avclub.com/articles/we-burned-down-their-city-hall-14-epic-rivalries-b,103974/

Eakin &
Handlen &
Harris &
McFarland &
O'Neal &
Ryan &
Semley &
Vago.

inventory something where they clearly exhausted the premise for the feature many many many years ago. that homestar runner thing is kinda hilarious, that sort of feature can be worthwhile if you're treating whatever you're examining as a model organism and saying something larger about the medium or the time or ascribing some sort of historic import to it but, again, none of the above occurring here. like you could very easily come up w/ a thinkpiece on jennicam or whatever and then use jennicam as a means of examining the internet then, the internet now, the internet in general, hey maybe even something larger than the internet, but this avclub approach has generally been to not go beyond 'man, remember jennicam' and maybe you stretch that out but you certainly don't develop it. and now post-phipps they can't even be bothered to come up w/ an idea, however trivial or whatever, for a feature, they just have 'watch this' or 'listen to this', makes buzzfeed look like harpers.

i don't like the angle that the new Tim Hecker album was "recorded live". from that Spin article (and from listening to it) it sounds like it was labored over in the computer as much as anything else, even if it uses more identifiable instruments as a starting point.

the press material for it says something to that effect so (w/o having read the review of which you speak) I suspect someone has taken that as gospel. it struck me as perhaps a liberal use of the term as well

its pr bs yeah, hecker labored over live orchestral sessions w/ a computer

Though it's rarely noticed, the publicity one-sheets for his albums read like Andy Kaufman-esque pranks lobbed at lazy music writers: The promo material for 2004's Mirages reads, "Hecker solves the Rubik's cube and penetrates the liquid magma, revealing the truths of dirty sodium light pollution, love on the rocks, and toothhunting in the garden of evil."

its pr bs yeah, hecker labored over live orchestral sessions w/ a computer

― puff puff post (uh oh I'm having a fantasy), Tuesday, October 15, 2013 11:36 AM (50 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Sometimes fictional food is a pleasant pause in the action; sometimes it’s crucial platform for exposition. And sometimes it’s Uma Thurman’s $5 milkshake—a telling detail about a person. Sitting down to do what pretty much everybody does at least a couple times a day can advance the plot of a movie, show, novel, or serialized streaming dramedy—and occasionally the food itself takes center stage. Possibly because we’re kind of hungry at the moment, The A.V. Club has decided to spend time looking at some memorable foods in storytelling.

For the record:

http://no-trivia.tumblr.com/post/64660558089/wondering-what-happens-behind-the-scenes-at-p4k-i-knew

I also thought it was weird how album scores were delivered to HQ by Andrew Fastow in a wax sealed envelope with prominent Masonic square and compass. Just being real about my time at p'fork.

...BREAKING...

http://thedissolve.com/features/performance-review/231-reassessing-the-best-actress-of-2001/

scott p left?? remember fondly when he'd show up to defend p4k in ilm best of 20xx threads

I like that No Trivia piece a lot. One thing though - in my experience music publications don't micromanage reviews to remotely the same extent as P4K seems to. Q, for example, has given even its cover stars 3/5 reviews on occasion.

are people surprised that pitchfork manages scores on big albums? what year is it right now

also if you're reviewing a niche album that's in your wheelhouse -- i.e. basically every time i reviewed a rap mixtape -- no one questions your score

don't follow it closely anymore but scottpl must have a claim to having molded P4K's current ~aesthetic~, at least the more ILM-acceptable pts of it

that old skool P4K best of the 1990s someone posted in another thread, which ws presumably mostly ll cool schreibs, was laughable