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Music

Meet Your New Favorite Band: Majical Cloudz on Radical Vulnerability and the Mythologizing of Montreal

By Tom Hawking on

Meet Your New Favorite Band is a new regular feature where Flavorwire interviews an emerging band whose work we love. This month: the marvelous Majical Cloudz, who are due to release their excellent new album Impersonator next Tuesday via Matador.

Devon Welsh is standing on a chair. He and Matthew Otto, make up the duo Majical Cloudz — a band whose intimately melancholy music rather belies its rave-tastic moniker — have been on stage at Brooklyn’s Bell House for about half an hour. While they’re ostensibly here to support Youth Lagoon, a significant proportion of the crowd has clearly either come to see them or has been won over by their songs. … Read More

Books

In Case You Hadn’t Noticed, Dan Brown Is Really Freaking Weird

By Emily Temple on

Dan Brown’s newest much snickered-at mega-blockbuster novel hit shelves this week, and all the ensuing publicity for the author should be reminding you of something: Dan Brown is a really, really weird dude. Sure, he’s a writer, and writers often have strange habits. But, as the evidence below proves, Brown is a head above the rest — whether that head is upside down or not. … Read More

Film

Gorgeous Original Posters for Paul Thomas Anderson Movies From Mondo

By Jason Bailey on

Well, looks like Mondo has off and done it again. The collectible art division of our beloved Alamo Drafthouse Cinema has a new series of posters dedicated to the work of Paul Thomas Anderson, and they’re knockouts. Mondo artist Aaron Horkey curated the series; after the jump, you can see their posters for Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood, Magnolia, Punch Drunk Love, and Hard Eight (aka Sidney), along with Horkey’s thoughts on the pieces and the artists responsible. … Read More

Music

ABBA’s ‘Gold,’ Ranked From Gleeful to Glum

By Tyler Coates on

ABBA were one of the greatest pop acts in global history, and part of what made them so impressive was their prolific output of hit songs. The foursome, made up of two real-life couples (Björn Ulvaeus was married to Agnetha Fältskog and Benny Andersson to Anni-Frid Lyngstad), churned out eight albums during their ten-year recording career before the respective marriages failed by the early ‘80s. The band’s songs chronicled the ups and downs of their relationships, often pairing misery and hopelessness with their big, flashy pop sound. In honor of the museum dedicated to the band that opened in Stockholm last week, as well as this week’s Eurovision Song Contest — which launched ABBA’s worldwide success — here’s a look at the band’s most popular hits in descending order from glee to despair. … Read More

Television

Flavorwire Exclusive: S.E. Hinton on Her Epic Love of ‘Supernatural’

By Emily Temple on

This week, while in a Twitter black hole of sorts, I made my way to the profile of legendary author S. E. Hinton (of The Outsiders and Rumble Fish fame). I was surprised to find that she described herself thusly: “writer for a long, long time Supernatural fan horsewoman wife mother friend.” Now, being a (semi-closeted) Supernatural fan myself, I was tickled to see that the writer loved the show enough to make it part of her online identity. With a bit more research, I discovered that she is a committed fan who has appeared on the show and has even been known to write Supernatural fanfiction. So, just in time for tonight’s Season 8 finale, I emailed Hinton to ask about her love for the show. And she wrote back! … Read More

Film

The 50 Greatest Movie Villains of All Time

By Jason Bailey on

The true nature of Star Trek Into Darkness’s villain has become perhaps the Internet’s worst-kept secret, but don’t worry — you’ll not have it spoiled here. Suffice it to say that the film’s antagonist is fiercely intelligent, physically brutal, and hellbent on revenge. In other words, this is a great movie villain. But what makes a truly memorable one? Sifting through the scores of iconic movie bad guys and girls reveals that villainy comes in all shapes, sizes, and levels of intensity; ranking them against each other is a tall order, but your Flavorwire was willing to give it a… Read More

Books

17 Things We Learned From Bret Easton Ellis’s Reddit AMA

By Emily Temple on

Yesterday afternoon, famed novelist, screenwriter, and Twitter terrorist Bret Easton Ellis graced Reddit with his presence for an AMA (that’s Ask Me Anything, for the uninitiated). Unsurprisingly, it was full of cheeky questions, blunt answers, and insights into the mind of Patrick Bateman. Surprisingly, there was not much in the way of ranting about GLAAD. Check out the most interesting tidbits after the jump, and sound off on them in the comments. … Read More

Uncategorized

What’s On at Flavorwire: Links You Need to See

By Lillian Ruiz on

A Lego video that’s a shot-for-shot replica of Casino Royale? Yes, please. We’re pretty pleased with this roundup of eerie resemblances between biopic actors and their real-life counterparts. The 2013 World Press Photo’s winning submission was actually Photoshopped; a computer science whiz explains how. It’s Sofia Coppola’s birthday — and… Read More

Books

The 20 Most Absurd Quotes From Guy Fieri’s New Book

By Sarah Fonder on

Today Guy Fieri released his new book Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives: The Funky Finds in Flavortown. This travel guide/recipe book is more or less what you’d expect from the human embodiment of an Ed Hardy shirt: it’s full of bad jokes and backhanded compliments (he calls a favorite milkshake in Chicago “[a] poor man’s milk shake”), and a major theme is the Food Network personality’s strange fixation on Kid Rock. Fieri’s usual flamboyance is a bit muted in this book, however, and there are a couple of occasions where it seems like he almost wants you to take him seriously. He frequently refers to his time studying in Chantilly, France, and reveals he “was raised in a really big art community” on the same page where he commissions the owner of a Kansas City pizza place to construct “a twenty-five-gallon margarita machine.” It’s clearly only a matter of time before Michelin takes notice, but until then, enjoy the rest of book’s most ridiculous passages. … Read More

Music

A Selection of Criminally Underrated Britpop Anthems

By Tom Hawking on

It’s the time of year for hilarious reader-voted music lists, it seems. First there was Rolling Stone‘s Worst Bands of the 1990s, which embarrassingly dubbed Nirvana the fifth-worst band of the decade, and now there’s the NME‘s Greatest Britpop Anthems, in which the first five spots are all filled by Oasis songs. If you go by the NME readership’s version of history, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Oasis and Blur were the only two bands writing decent songs during the 1990s, with the occasional token mention for Suede and Pulp. Clearly, this isn’t the case. So here’s a selection of underrated Britpop anthems by bands — some of which even include women! — that didn’t make NME‘s list. … Read More