I link to The Onion AV Club a lot, and with good reason: It’s an endless repository of excellent media geekery, packed with entertaining, passionate essays about movies, music and television.
Better yet, its readership is equally passionate and informed; the winding comment threads that follow every article are usually as much fun to read as the articles themselves, particularly when the subject is something specifically nerdalicious.
This week, they’ve launched a series called “Better Late Than Never”, in which writers are assigned to fill in key blanks in their own pop-cultural lexicons. In the first installment, Josh Modell watches Sam Raimi’s magnificently crazy “Evil Dead II” for the very first time.
It’s an interesting counterpoint to another new series, “The New Cult Canon”, which finds Scott Tobias looking at a selection of films from the 1980s and 1990s that have become pop-cultural keystones. Kevin Smith’s “Clerks” is on deck for tomorrow, but last week’s piece, a re-evaluation of John Carpenter’s brilliant Reagan-era satire “They Live”, is a must-read.
The only downside? Reading comment after comment from people who grew up watching these on old VHS tapes, and realizing I’m old enough to be their father: “They Live” turns twenty this fall.
Sheesh.
I saw They Live twenty years ago? At the now defunct Hyland cinema? Right. There goes the day…
Didn’t we see it at the Eaton Centre? I’m pretty sure that’s where we saw it.
And yes, we are old.
I think it was the Hyland because I remember the oversized posters in glass display cases outside the theatre. And I’m stunned by both the time elapsed and the fact that Carpenter hasn’t made a decent film in that time.
In The Mouth of Madness and Vampires notwithstanding.