Biff's Favorite Pop Music Releases of 2025

                               

 1).    Tyler Childers            ---         Snipe Hunter

 2).    Little Simz                 ---         Lotus

 3).    Buck 65                     ---         Keep Moving 

 4).    Lily Allen                  ---         West End Girl

 5).    Ezra Furman             ---          Goodbye Small Head

 6).    Hailey Whitters         ---         Corn Queen

 7).    Viagra Boys              ---         Viagr Aboys

 8).    Chuck D                    ---         Radio Apocalypse

 9).    Horsegirl                   ---         Phonetics On and On and On

10).   Clipping                    ---         Dead Channel Sky

I also enjoyed albums by Marshall Allen, Iron Mike Eagle, Bootsy Collins, Tune-Yards, De La Soul, Sabrina Carpenter, US Girls, Skrillex, James McMurtry, Jeffrey Lewis, Kae Tempest, Wet Leg, Neil Young, Lucy Dawes, Big Thief, Dijon, CMAT, Wednesday, Craig Finn, Brother Ali, and the Mekons.

Caught Stealing

Austin Butler

Darren Aronofsky's Caught Stealing is another depressing failure within the decline of a promising auteur. It is not as abject a failure as The Whale, but it is also not as interesting a failure as Mother! was. The flick is a grubby lark in which Austin Butler plays a bartender mistakenly caught up in the search for a cache of ill-gotten gains. The narrative, penned by Charlie Huston based on his novel, is a MacGuffin nothing set on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1998. A host of characters intersect, including Russian gangsters, Hassidic gangsters, and a crooked cop, but the film is only fitfully amusing or engrossing.

The biggest flaw is that Austin Butler has no real character to play. He's given a traumatic back story and a devotion to the San Francisco Giants, but the audience has little to latch onto besides Butler's baby blues. Very little empathy is generated for Butler's beleaguered bartender even as he is constantly being chased and pummeled through the course of the movie. The two lead female parts are so faintly drawn that the considerable talents Zoë Kravitz and Regina King are wasted. Caught Stealing is a typical Tinseltown concoction with very few signs of a personal touch. One of the few signs of the man behind the camera are the gratuitous instances of bodily secretion.

The film almost succeeds as a spike-collared Valentine to the Lower East Side. I enjoyed Idles' score and some of the supporting players. I especially enjoyed Vincent D'Onofrio and Liev Schreiber kvetching in Yiddish and the contributions of Action Bronson, Griffin Dunne, and Carol Kane. There is the occasional interesting image, I liked the dual images of vehicles T-boning light poles, but Caught Stealing is largely forgettable.   

Walk Up

Kwon Hae-hyo and Park Miso

I know some peoples' eyes glaze over when a film is extolled for its physical beauty, but I found Hong Sang-soo's Walk Up to be not only beautiful, but charming and interesting to boot. Nevertheless, Mr. Hong's films, like those of Éric Rohmer, are of limited appeal due to the fact that they are interminable bourgeois talkfests. Walk Up has two scenes of dialogue that each last over ten minutes, with a fixed camera to boot. The action is totally contained with the titular three story apartment building. A film director (Kwon Hae-hyo) and his daughter (Park Miso), as we meet them, are checking it out under the snoopy gaze of the landlord Ms. Kim (Lee Hyeyoung). She, it turns out, is an ex-flame of the director who seems to still have designs upon him. The director seems more interested in landing his daughter a job with Ms. Kim who is an interior decorator. However, fate will lead him to a new love, an estrangement from his daughter, and a crossroads in his career.

Walk Up doesn't take a chronological approach to is narrative. It flits back and forth in time, so we don't comprehend all the character's motivations until the film's conclusion. While this aspect of the film remains cloaked, the film's themes are trumpeted: most specifically art versus commerce. Since Kwon, who has appeared in most of Hong's films, is a stand-in for the director, we know which way that argument is going to go; particularly in a film made with six actors and a skeleton crew. However, the film never descends to solipsism. Mr Kwon's wonderful impersonation of the director shows a great deal of self regard, but the role also functions as a self critique. Every character in Walk Up has his reasons and a unique point of view. The splendor of the black and white cinematography, shot by Hong, shows off the funky modernism of the walk up to smashing effect. The abode looks elegant and lived in which helps the film from becoming too didactic. All of the performers are wonderful, but Mr. Kwon is especially smooth and seamless. The duo of Kwon and Hong have joined such director acting duos as Ford/Wayne and Kurosawa/ Mifune in the pantheon. Certainly, one of 2022's better films.