THIS is a CLOSE-UP?

Since the days of Marilyn Chambers in Behind The Green Door ['72], there has always existed a glass ceiling (or K-Y floor) for those that attempt to transition from adult to mainstream cinema. After her porn debut, Chambers starred in Rabid ['77] from noted auteur David Cronenberg ( A History Of Violence, Videodrome, Dead Ringers ) but never had a mainstream role again, if one could call Rabid mainstream. A few months ago, Chambers was found dead in her trailer park home at the age of 56, the former Ivory Snow girl as the most famous victim of a soulless industry, a cautionary tale for all to heed. [For more cautionary tales than you can shake a dick at, read The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History Of The Porn Film Industry by Legs McNeil & Jennifer Osborne.] And then there's Sasha Grey. Grey is the star of the newest film from Oscar-winning writer-director Steven Soderbergh ( Traffic, The Limey, Ocean's Eleven ) entitled The Girlfriend Experience , t...

So the season five finale of Lost came and went last night, two hours of riddles, questions asked and posed, and a few genuine "WTF?" moments here and there. In other words, it reaffirmed Godhead status for me, and now I'll have to wait until 2010 to see the sixth and final season wrap up some of the mysteries. Here's what I wrote before seeing last night's capper: My assumptions are that the atomic bomb will detonate, causing the flood of electromagnetic energy that the concrete slab at The Swan will attempt to contain. Furthermore, the energy will push the time-displaced people ahead to the future, where they will band together to save the island from the newest plane crash survivors, who are most likely connected to the original '50s military presence in some fashion. People will die and stay dead, and some people will die and stick around. And there's a great possibility that everything I've conjectured won't happen, either. The fifth seaso...

OK, Martin Gore, we get it with the themes of sex and religion and violation and debasement and love's twisted path to fruition. And bad haircuts in S&M gear...let's not forget that, either. After Vince Clarke left Depeche Mode in the early '80s to shack up with other muses (Alison Moyet in Yazoo, Andy Bell in Erasure), Gore stepped into the songwriting shoes by playing down the overt pop from their first record Speak And Spell in favor of amping up the faux-Goth perversity, hot topics before there was Hot Topic. It took a while to gain traction, but once it did -- viva la Violator , amigos y amigas -- it seemed to speak for a generation of awkward teenage couplings. But then they kept going after somewhat losing the plot, flirting unconvincingly with guitar-based rock and dissonant soundscapes before getting their DM groove back with '05's Playing The Angel . [Seriously, "John The Revelator" is one for the DM hall of fame, all throbbing pulse and...

Most people are familiar with Sweet from their '70s U.S. radio hits like "Ballroom Blitz," "Fox On The Run" or "Little Willy." But as the late Paul Harvey always said, there's the rest of the story, and it's here on the just-released two-disc collection entitled Action: The Sweet Anthology . A simple nomenclature would put Sweet under "Seventies U.K. glam-rock" and be finished, and there's some good evidence for that, especially on the first disc. Their first few singles saw the Sweet finding their way, and it's not until "Alexander Graham Bell" (a b-side, no less) where the boogie begins in earnest. But once it's found, it's shaken to the ground, especially on "Blockbuster," their British #1 hit from '73; starting off with an air-raid siren and launching into a beat pulled from Bowie's "The Jean Genie," it's amazing to hear something that so clearly should have been an Amer...

My choir teacher in middle and high school was a rotund and robust fellow named James Mahoney, a lover of wine and food and song alike. While I was never the most talented singer in the world, Jim saw fit to showcase me from time to time – a solo here, a jazz choir placement there – knowing full well that putting me in front of a microphone was a recipe for trouble. [Like most people in Roscommon, he knew my grandfather as well as my parents, so I always suspected that he went a bit easier on me than I probably deserved.] And my memories of Jim are oversized, just like the man himself. From the view of a teen-aged dullard such as myself, adults like Jim were open to superficial ridicule. He always wore an ample cardigan and a world-weary attitude (most likely from decades of hearing bum notes and complaining kids) but even at my intellectually limited age, I knew that he never once compromised his love for music. So many memories: Jim chuckling at Aaron Clark as he stormed out of...

If you would have told me ten years ago that Seth Rogan (one of the peripheral characters from the television shows Freaks And Geeks and Undeclared ) would be one of the biggest comedy movie stars today, I’m not sure I would have believed you. [James Franco? Oh, sure. Martin Starr? Never thought he’d act again, much less anchor Knocked Up and Adventureland .] And yet, here’s Seth Rogan in Observe And Report , a film that dares to make Rogan largely unlikable but still capable of eliciting laughs, a mainstream comedy star twisting that mainstream status quite winningly. The writer/director is Jody Hill, who made a similarly squirming comedic effort called The Foot Fist Way a few years ago, and while that film was embryonic and sporadically humorous, Observe And Report is a big professional step forward. The movie looks better, and the trade-up in star power (from FFW 's Danny McBride to Rogan) works better for two reasons: it subverts our expectations of what ...

When I first started to make treks to Cabo San Lucas over a year ago, I noticed all the delightful wonderful junk food they had, from Oreos on down to Pepsi, that was sweetened with sugar as opposed to high fructose corn syrup (which has been shown to facilitate hyperobesity in lab rats, among other creatures). I even smuggled some of the Coke (and a Mexico-only drink called Pepsi-Cola Retro) back in my luggage to luxuriate in the gustatory joys of sugar sugar sugar. But thanks to the marketing savants at Pepsico, I no longer have to hide my drives. A few weeks back, I became acquainted with the great taste of Mountain Dew Throwback ("for a limited time!"), which has natural sugar and the original full-on-hick logo. [And since the can itself says "natural sugar," one can assume that the verbiage acknowledges that high fructose corn syrup is "unnatural sugar."] How long will it last? Who knows. One would assume that as long as the sales figures hold ou...

To be a lifelong Morrissey fan(atic) such as myself is to above all else endure, to slough off the scorn and derision of the pedestrian music fan whilst defending to the grave Moz tunes great and small. [Such as the merits of the studio version of "Jack The Ripper" versus the more widely-disseminated live version, or whether the crooning direction of his cover of "Moon River" is worth further exploration.] And the older I get, the more intractable I become with my musical affections, which explains why Years Of Refusal is one of my favorite '09 albums. [And why his adolescent Coachella walk-through was my biggest disappointment of the fest.] So when it was announced that two of Morrissey's least-celebrated works ( Southpaw Grammar from '95 and Maladjusted from '97) were being reconfigured to Morrissey's ephemeral yet exacting standards -- from track listing to cover art to liner notes -- it was clear that no matter my hesitations, I would lay...