Better comparison. So that makes Jack White…Alexandre Aja?

Rob Zombie is to horror cinema what Jack White is to blues-based rock and roll: A man with an encyclopedic knowledge of the genre's conventions and an ability to aesthetically recreate them, but no understanding of what gave the originals their soul.

Bah, you're right. Crossed those two figures in my mind.

In the past year or two:

Nail on head. I really do sympathize with people who are forced to make moral compromises in their jobs because they can’t survive without the paycheck it provides. Most of us really don’t have the leeway to live up to our principles without suffering real consequences for it, and for most of us, those consequences…

I was always wondering how the younger generation would finally elbow me out of cultural relevance. Naively, I thought I would be okay. I still enjoy pop music as a thirtysomething – even the more disposable crap that I’m probably not supposed to like. I was never even remotely annoyed by the newer iterations of boy…

It took a long time for me to get into YHF, which is where I started with the band. (At the time, being a college student who didn't know Wilco had just become an untenable proposition. They were the "American Radiohead," after all.) I thought it was sonically interesting, but aside from Jesus Etc and Heavy Metal…

Real talk: Joy Division were very good; New Order was great.

What's truly extraordinary is the fact that absolutely no one would know or care about this fact if he hadn't obsessed over it for the last three decades. It would never have occurred to anyone to actually measure his hand size. Shortness of fingers has really never been a mark of masculinity. But a long-defunct…

His campaign has definitely been myopic, or to say the least, intransigent.

That theory hardly even seems speculative.

One of my favorite podcasts. A lot of these stories aren't even particularly "forgotten" or "secret," but she's just so good at making them compelling and finding weird little details that even a lot of film dorks might not have known.

I still think this is the most thorough description of Kanye's career I've ever seen.

I'll wait for the spin-off on the continuing adventures of Arizona Ron from Tucson.

The specificity thing is the key. I write about movies on the internet, and get tons of "you're a fucking idiot!" "kill yourself" and "let's get this guy fired." But the women writers I know get references to a particular neighborhood where they reviewed a concert months ago, references to something they were wearing…

I am a white suburban American dude married to a Mexican woman. Our families have blended together mostly seamlessly, but I'll never forget our first big two-family dinner after we'd gotten engaged. We were eating at a Mexican restaurant, and my dad asked for no cilantro on his meal. My sister-in-law-to-be turned to…

Here’s why I really, really can’t see an ironic reappraisal of Limp Bizkit ever happening, and obviously this is partly a matter of taste, but only somewhat: Limp Bizkit’s songs are really, really bad. Or, put in somewhat more objective terms, they don’t have any obvious musical qualities that can transcend their…

That I just assumed half of them were already Academy members.

As a born-and-bred 'murican who genuinely loves soccer and spends entirely too much of his life watching glitchy streams of the European leagues, I always approach the World Cup with a sense of dread. The worst people are the aforementioned, who somehow equate soccer being on TV for a month every four years with it…

A lot of the new actors added are pretty young/just now emerging, but the list of directors is kind of crazy. Ken Loach? Hou Hsiao-hsien? Melvin Van Peebles? Abbas Kiarostami? The idea that Kiarostami and Dakota Johnson were both invited into the Academy the same year is kind of stupefying.