Throw the Horns for:

• the Devil’s music
• aging franchises
• imperiled mansions
• spicy interviews
• cats!

A full-throated growl for the contributions of scb0212 this week. Send articles throughout the next week to ploughmanplods [at] gmail, post articles from the past week below for discussion, and Have a Happy Friday!

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Eli Enis goes long on his concerns about the health of metal as a music and a subculture for Stereogum:

Without making a qualitative judgment about each of those bands’ catalogs, it’s undeniable that the contemporary state of big-room metal is less connected to metal proper than it’s ever been. The definition of metal has obviously expanded tenfold since the opening dirge of Black Sabbath’s 1970 debut, and it’s long encompassed an incalculable number of diverse sub-genres ranging from vomit-inducing extremity to ear-soothing serenity. Bands like Sleep Token and Bring Me The Horizon still fit under the broad banner of metal in the same way Yeat and Bladee both belong under the rap umbrella, even if they both bear little resemblance to their genre ancestors. But the ties that bind these new-age metal heroes to metal’s tradition of killer riffs, abrasive vocals, and provocative imagery feel looser than they’ve ever been.

At The Reveal, Keith Phipps evokes a familiar schoolyard game when he comes up with a new classification system for franchises – Feed, Starve, Bury:

Indiana Jones […] The resounding financial failure of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny pretty much ensured we’d never see another Indiana Jones film starring Harrison Ford. (Ford’s age doesn’t help, either.) Can anyone else play Jones? It’s a different character in a different universe, but Solo provides a pretty good answer. Verdict: Bury

Alien […] The Alien series has produced two all-time great films, Alien and Aliens. This is not a controversial opinion. Potentially more controversial: leaving out the schlocky Predator crossovers, there’s not a truly bad film in the series, in large part because the visions of individual directors define each entry. Even a weaker installment, like Alien: Resurrection, has a lot of Jean-Pierre Jeunet weirdness to appreciate. Fede Álvarez’s track record—particularly Don’t Breathe—suggests he could take a new entry into some weird, scary places. After him, others should get the chance to make the xenomorphs their own. Verdict: Feed

The Hollywood Reporter’s James Hibberd looks into the advances in training and effects that have allowed more live-action roles for cats that ever before:

“Cats are more expressive than people tend to give them credit for and I learned that massively while looking through the lens when making [Argylle],” Vaughn says. “There are some moments when people say, ‘Well, that shot is so obviously CG and looks fake’ and I’m like, ‘No, no, that was real.’ I was astonished at how emotive a cat is.” CG was used, he adds, when a shot was otherwise impossible. “Like, we couldn’t obviously throw a cat off a building.”

[ed. note: Under the right circumstances, you can do this.]

For Crooked Marquee, Anna McKibbin uses last week’s release of Civil War to talk about 2013 when there were two movies about the White House under siege:

In some ways these films gave tangible weight to the disappointment of a public body that had never really met the needs of their public. Rather than staring into the dark void of American political history, filmmakers offer audiences something frothy and violent — a singular event to hang their worries upon. Antoine Fuqua’s Olympus Has Fallen articulated this same demographic’s growing unease with foreign diplomacy in broad and bloody ways. Former secret service agent Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) must kill the North Korean spies, led by the ruthless Kang (Rick Yune), who are holding the President (Aaron Eckhart) hostage and using (shockingly) gruesome means to extract his nuclear missile codes. Such a plot is proof of the nationalistic ideals that sit beneath Hollywood action films, one that transposes country rivalries onto a good and bad, hero and villain, binary.  All of it is positioned to serve the conflicting, dualistic notion that America is vulnerable sometimes because, sometimes in spite of the fact, that America is exceptional. As the titles of these 2013 outings suggest, from this lofty position, the only place to fall is down. 

For NPR‘s Pop Culture Happy Hour, Glen Weldon dissects what makes a good guest on spicy interview show Hot Ones and marvels at Conan O’Brien’s recent appearance:

He guzzled Da Bomb straight from the bottle! More importantly, he committed to the bit. Completely. Consummately. He kept up the show of not being bothered, even as his face began to redden and his brow began to sweat. He kept it up, even as he started to drool, guzzle milk, pant, and give increasingly abstruse, rambling answers to Evans’ questions. And all that red sauce around his mouth made him look like an extra from Cannibal Holocaust if it had been set in County Cork.