With an extra day off, I had planned a big post to catch up on all the stuff that’s been occupying my free time lately, but instead I spent the weekend watching the Rapids beat LA in front of a sellout crowd, getting drunk, suffering a bad hangover, and best of all... working. Needless to say, I’m a little worn out from this long weekend, so no pretty pictures this time, just a list. I’m sure you’ll all survive.
MOVIES
Just one, an oldie but goodie: Fistful of Dollars. I had never seen this groundbreaking Western from beginning to end, but spending all day on the couch yesterday gave me a chance to explore the free movie list in the OnDemand menu. When I saw they had a remastered widescreen version of Fistful, I couldn’t pass it up. The movie itself was decent, although I thought both Yojimbo (Akira Kurosawa’s samurai masterpiece that inspired FOD) and Last Man Standing (a remake of FOD starring Bruce Willis set during Prohibition) were both a little better in providing motivation for the main character. On the other hand, Clint Eastwood was pretty bad-ass as the laconic but deadly gunslinger, but I kept getting distracted by Ennio Morricone’s eccentric spaghetti western score.
BOOKS
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke. Another re-read I pulled from my shelves recently. Here’s my original review. I didn’t get quite as caught up in the story this time, but that was partly because I was conciously reading slowly to appreciate the richness of the language. Clarke does some amazing things with her words, and more than once, I found myself longing for a return to the days of a more formal approach to the English language. There are some amazingly haunting passages in what is at times a dark and mysterious book, and the payoff was just as good the second time around. UPDATE: Happily, I’ve just discovered that Clarke has a collection of short stories, The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories, that take place in or are related to the world of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, and that she is also at work on a sequel of sorts that follow some of the lesser characters from the novel. Looks like I’ll be making a trip to the bookstore tomorrow.
COMICS
The Losers: Complete Series. A gripping and epic international espionage story about an Army Special Forces unit that goes “ghost” after the government tries to kill them. Since everyone thinks they’re dead, they are able to work under the radar to unravel the twisted threads leading back to the mysterious man with CIA ties who set them up. Kinda like the A-Team, only people actually die, and they don’t build some kind of crazy tank thing at the end of every issue. For a story told in comic book form, it was heavily cinematic (both in scope and in the way artist Jock made use of the frames), so it was no surprise to me to find out that a movie is in the works.
The Walking Dead, Vol. 6. More great post-apocalyptic zombie stuff. This story gets crazier and and life just keeps getting harder for the rag-tag band of survivors, much like I would assume the world would be if it was overrun with shuffling brain-chompers.
Spike: Asylum. Buffy’s second-favorite vampire gets tricked into entering an asylum where they claim to be able to “cure” vampires and demons. Predictably, this is not the case, and Spike meets some other wrongly-imprisoned peeps and helps them get free, smashing a lot of stuff in the process. Good solid fun.
Star Wars: Legacy, Vol. 1. It’s 120 years after Return of the Jedi. The Empire has rebuilt itself and formed an alliance with a new order of Sith, who promptly betray the Imperials and take over the galaxy. Now the remains of the Empire, the Republic, and a new order of Jedi (including Luke Skywalker’s grandson, who has a rather rocky relationship with his Jedi heritage) must band together to fight the Dark Side once more. (Hey, I should write cover blurbs.)
MUSIC
Dinosaur Jr., Beyond. Awesome comeback album from the original lineup. J Mascis is a god.
Travis, The Boy with No Name. More mellow Brit rock, less politics than the last album. All good.
Bright Eyes, Cassadaga. Folky, rootsy, kinda mediocre.
Stars, Do You Trust Your Friends? Remixes and cover versions of Stars’ Set Yourself on Fire album, all created by (as the title implies) their friends in other bands.
Explosions in the Sky, How Strange, Innocence. More back catalog post-rock instrumentals from this Texas group.
William Parker & Hamid Drake, Piercing the Veil. Jazzy bass and percussion, with a slightly African slant. Maybe a little esoteric for my tastes. Dad, I’m sending this one your way.
Rush, Snakes & Arrows. Decent, but nowhere near their classic work. It might be time for these guys to coast on their greatest hits.
Adult Swim, Warm & Scratchy. A free mix from the Adult Swim website featuring bands like TV on the Radio and Asobi Seksu. One more reason to love Cartoon Network.
5.28.2007
A long time ago (well, 30 years, anyway) in a galaxy far, far away...
WARNING—This post has a higher-than-normal amount of nerd content. Not for the faint of heart.
As you may have heard, it’s the 30th Anniversary of the theatrical release of the original Star Wars—back when it was an unsullied masterpiece, not the bastardized version Lucas pushes on everybody these days. Apparently, there was a big celebration in L.A. this weekend. Lots of geeks in costumes and so forth (see above)—sounds like a lot of fun. Anyway, the anniversary has provided an opportunity for all kinds of random media outlets to jump on the bandwagon—I mean, a History Channel special? Seriously?
But there is one special treatment that has me excited. Robot Chicken is one of the shows in Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim lineup. It’s the brainchild of Seth Green (you may remember him as Scott Evil in the Austin Powers movies) and one of his buddies. Basically, the show skewers the nerdier aspects of pop-culture through short sketches using stop-motion action figures. Sounds weird, I know, but trust me—it’s ridiculously funny. I love the show, not least because they’re usually making fun of a lot of my favorite things and using toys I played with as a kid to do it. Clever. Anyway, Robot Chicken is doing a Star Wars special in honor of the anniversary, bringing their trademark humor to bear on George’s epic universe. It premieres on June 17th, and they’ve got a trailer posted on the website. Hi-freakin’-larious. I can’t wait.
5.20.2007
Gone to the Movies
Here’s what’s been keeping my eyeballs stimulated lately:
The Last King of Scotland. Decent. To be honest, outside of Pan’s Labyrinth, I wasn’t too impressed with any of the Oscar-nominated movies I saw this year, and this was no exception. Forest Whitaker was pretty good as Idi Amin, but I think it’s criminal that James McAvoy gets no play on the DVD cover. He probably had more screen time than Whitaker, and in my opinion, was just as strong in terms of acting.
Spider-Man 3. Boo. As a comic reader and life-long Spidey fan, it hurts me to say that. But this movie was guilty of trying way too hard. One too many villains and two too many plotlines, at the expense of character development. Instead of throwing Sandman in there solely to have 3 scenes to show off the neat tricks CGI can do these days, how about spending a little more time developing the tension between Peter and Mary Jane so that I might actually care whether they stay together or not? And that dance scene? Please. The Venom suit is supposed to turn Peter into a badass, not a gay man stuck in the disco age. What is this, Spider-Man or A Chorus Line? This movie’s lack of quality is sad, but not entirely unexpected. One need look only as far as the X-Men trilogy and the Batman movies of the 90’s to know that the 3rd movie of a comic book franchise is where it all goes wrong. Unfortunately, Spidey 3 is hauling in wagons full of money, so Hollywood will take that as validation to make more crap.
Smokin’ Aces. Speaking of lack of character development... I couldn’t believe so many decent actors (Ray Liotta, Jeremy Piven, Ryan Reynolds, Andy Garcia, and even my old pal Affleck) ended up in this glorified music video until I saw that it was directed by Joe Carnahan, who also directed the fantastic Narc. Based on the strength of that film, I’m not surprised so many actors wanted to work with him. But now I can’t understand how Carnahan went from Narc to this mindless muddled shoot-’em-up. A bunch of hired killers are trying to kill Jeremy Piven, who’s holed up in a Lake Tahoe penthouse with a bunch of coke and hookers. (Based on what I’ve heard of the life of Piven, doesn’t sound like much of a stretch.) Something about testifying against the Mob, yada yada, now shoot things up. Obviously, the writers didn’t care much beyond that, so neither did I.
Shaun of the Dead. Lest you think I’m going to trash everything I’ve watched lately, here’s a movie I really liked. It had a bit of everything—comedy, romance, zombies, and British accents. What else do you need? I know this was intended to be a send-up of zombie movies, but it works on so many levels, it goes well beyond simple satire. Like all good movies, it’s built around a solid story. Beyond that, everything else is gravy. Oh, and in between all that other stuff I mentioned, they still managed to get me to care about Shaun and his friends. How about that? Maybe Hollywood can take a lesson from the Brits in the lost art of character development. Now I really want to see Hot Fuzz.
The Wire: The Complete Second Season. I know this doesn’t really fit with the title of my post, but The Wire has been more entertaining to me lately than 90% of the movies I’ve watched in the past 6 months. I was warned that season 2 starts off a little slowly, but I’m still fascinated by the way the show’s writers manage to tie so many disparate threads together into one cohesive whole. I haven’t been this absorbed by a show since the first two seasons of Lost.
The Last King of Scotland. Decent. To be honest, outside of Pan’s Labyrinth, I wasn’t too impressed with any of the Oscar-nominated movies I saw this year, and this was no exception. Forest Whitaker was pretty good as Idi Amin, but I think it’s criminal that James McAvoy gets no play on the DVD cover. He probably had more screen time than Whitaker, and in my opinion, was just as strong in terms of acting.
Spider-Man 3. Boo. As a comic reader and life-long Spidey fan, it hurts me to say that. But this movie was guilty of trying way too hard. One too many villains and two too many plotlines, at the expense of character development. Instead of throwing Sandman in there solely to have 3 scenes to show off the neat tricks CGI can do these days, how about spending a little more time developing the tension between Peter and Mary Jane so that I might actually care whether they stay together or not? And that dance scene? Please. The Venom suit is supposed to turn Peter into a badass, not a gay man stuck in the disco age. What is this, Spider-Man or A Chorus Line? This movie’s lack of quality is sad, but not entirely unexpected. One need look only as far as the X-Men trilogy and the Batman movies of the 90’s to know that the 3rd movie of a comic book franchise is where it all goes wrong. Unfortunately, Spidey 3 is hauling in wagons full of money, so Hollywood will take that as validation to make more crap.
Smokin’ Aces. Speaking of lack of character development... I couldn’t believe so many decent actors (Ray Liotta, Jeremy Piven, Ryan Reynolds, Andy Garcia, and even my old pal Affleck) ended up in this glorified music video until I saw that it was directed by Joe Carnahan, who also directed the fantastic Narc. Based on the strength of that film, I’m not surprised so many actors wanted to work with him. But now I can’t understand how Carnahan went from Narc to this mindless muddled shoot-’em-up. A bunch of hired killers are trying to kill Jeremy Piven, who’s holed up in a Lake Tahoe penthouse with a bunch of coke and hookers. (Based on what I’ve heard of the life of Piven, doesn’t sound like much of a stretch.) Something about testifying against the Mob, yada yada, now shoot things up. Obviously, the writers didn’t care much beyond that, so neither did I.
Shaun of the Dead. Lest you think I’m going to trash everything I’ve watched lately, here’s a movie I really liked. It had a bit of everything—comedy, romance, zombies, and British accents. What else do you need? I know this was intended to be a send-up of zombie movies, but it works on so many levels, it goes well beyond simple satire. Like all good movies, it’s built around a solid story. Beyond that, everything else is gravy. Oh, and in between all that other stuff I mentioned, they still managed to get me to care about Shaun and his friends. How about that? Maybe Hollywood can take a lesson from the Brits in the lost art of character development. Now I really want to see Hot Fuzz.
The Wire: The Complete Second Season. I know this doesn’t really fit with the title of my post, but The Wire has been more entertaining to me lately than 90% of the movies I’ve watched in the past 6 months. I was warned that season 2 starts off a little slowly, but I’m still fascinated by the way the show’s writers manage to tie so many disparate threads together into one cohesive whole. I haven’t been this absorbed by a show since the first two seasons of Lost.
5.15.2007
Book Smarts
Been doing a little reading here and there lately:
The Pale Blue Eye, Louis Bayard. When a cadet is found murdered and mutilated at West Point in the mid 19th Century, the commandant contacts Augustus Landor, a former New York City detective who has retired to the countryside. As Landor begins to dig into the death, he decides he needs a youthful assistant from within the cadet corps, and recruits to his cause a young Edgar Allan Poe. The story cleverly unfolds through letters and journal entries by both Landor and Poe, and rather unsurprisingly, the story takes a markedly Poevian turn before it reaches its climax. Bayard established a clever grasp of Victorian literature with his first book, Mr. Timothy, a detective novel starring Tiny Tim of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. But The Pale Blue Eye feels more fully-realized, and I enjoyed the Poe allusions throughout.
A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole. I pulled this one off my bookshelf one night when I was in the mood for a comedy. It’s been 5 years or so since I last read it, and I had forgotten how wonderfully absurd this novel is. Toole created an amazing cast of misfits, then threw them into the chaotic cauldron of mid-century New Orleans, and the result is a rollicking farce that continually makes me laugh out loud. Every time I read the dialogue of the story’s main character, Ignatius J. Reilly, I always hear it in my head in the voice of Comic Book Guy, probably my favorite of all the secondary Simpsons characters. And I can’t help but think that in some way, The Simpsons writers owe a small debt to Toole’s writing. It’s a shame that Toole took his own life before writing another book. He truly was an amazing talent who was ahead of his time.
The Pale Blue Eye, Louis Bayard. When a cadet is found murdered and mutilated at West Point in the mid 19th Century, the commandant contacts Augustus Landor, a former New York City detective who has retired to the countryside. As Landor begins to dig into the death, he decides he needs a youthful assistant from within the cadet corps, and recruits to his cause a young Edgar Allan Poe. The story cleverly unfolds through letters and journal entries by both Landor and Poe, and rather unsurprisingly, the story takes a markedly Poevian turn before it reaches its climax. Bayard established a clever grasp of Victorian literature with his first book, Mr. Timothy, a detective novel starring Tiny Tim of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. But The Pale Blue Eye feels more fully-realized, and I enjoyed the Poe allusions throughout.
A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole. I pulled this one off my bookshelf one night when I was in the mood for a comedy. It’s been 5 years or so since I last read it, and I had forgotten how wonderfully absurd this novel is. Toole created an amazing cast of misfits, then threw them into the chaotic cauldron of mid-century New Orleans, and the result is a rollicking farce that continually makes me laugh out loud. Every time I read the dialogue of the story’s main character, Ignatius J. Reilly, I always hear it in my head in the voice of Comic Book Guy, probably my favorite of all the secondary Simpsons characters. And I can’t help but think that in some way, The Simpsons writers owe a small debt to Toole’s writing. It’s a shame that Toole took his own life before writing another book. He truly was an amazing talent who was ahead of his time.
5.02.2007
Dinosaur Act
I'm listening to Dinosaur Jr’s great new album, beyond, but I didn’t buy it. And no, I didn’t download it illegally like one of them lawless kiddies, either. Then how, you ask, am I managing to do this? Why, I’m using Spinner, a pretty cool section of the AOL music site, which is going a long way towards making me forgive them for those ubiquitous CDs. Every week, Spinner streams 8-10 full-album new releases, and surprisingly, they’re usually pretty good stuff. I’ve been able to listen to the latest albums from Modest Mouse, Fountains of Wayne, Kings of Leon, and now DJ. Good for me, because I get entertainment at work and get to decide whether the disc is worth buying, and also good for the record company, because in every case, I’ve ended up buying the music I listen to.... which I plan to do with beyond just as soon as I get home tonight. The reunited original lineup sounds much tighter than they did on the early albums, and J Mascis’ epic solos just get better with age. Love it.
5.01.2007
C is for Cookie
Sadly, no Sesame Street songs on this mix. But that reminds me of this ridiculous story. I’m all for instilling healthy habits in kids at a young age, but come on. Are American kids are fat because they’re imitating Cookie Monster? Very doubtful. Is it because they’re sitting on their asses watching too much TV (PBS included)? More likely, but I seriously doubt that Sesame Street can claim any responsibility for childhood obesity, cookie-induced or otherwise. Cookie Monster shovels cookies in his mouth. That’s what makes him funny (although if you really watch, more of the cookie falls out than makes it in his mouth... and that’s funny too). And really, “Fruity Monster” just doesn’t have the same ring to it. Besides, everybody knows Bert & Ernie are the fruity ones.
1. Cliffs Of Dover [Live]...Eric Johnson
2. Communication Breakdown...Led Zeppelin
3. Capital H...Motion City Soundtrack
4. Can I Get With Ya Crazy Butt...The Notorious BIG vs. Gnarls Barkley
5. Classic...Hieroglyphics
6. Cellphone’s Dead...Beck
7. Clear Day Thunder...Jay Farrar
8. Cuts You Up...Peter Murphy
9. Cannonball [Radio Remix]...Damien Rice
10. Can’t Find My Way Home...Blind Faith
11. Cinnamon Girl...Matthew Sweet & Susanna Hoffs
12. Chills...Ben Lee
13. Center Of Attention...Guster
14. Close Your Eyes...Christophe Beck
15. Chocolate...Snow Patrol
16. Clarity...John Mayer
17. Corners Of Your Mind...Ivy
18. Coulibaly...Amadou & Mariam
19. Camera One...Josh Joplin Group
20. Crazy About You...Whiskeytown
21. Can’t Get Out Of Bed...The Charlatans UK
22. Chewbacca...Supernova
23. (Bonus Track)
1. Cliffs Of Dover [Live]...Eric Johnson2. Communication Breakdown...Led Zeppelin
3. Capital H...Motion City Soundtrack
4. Can I Get With Ya Crazy Butt...The Notorious BIG vs. Gnarls Barkley
5. Classic...Hieroglyphics
6. Cellphone’s Dead...Beck
7. Clear Day Thunder...Jay Farrar
8. Cuts You Up...Peter Murphy
9. Cannonball [Radio Remix]...Damien Rice
10. Can’t Find My Way Home...Blind Faith
11. Cinnamon Girl...Matthew Sweet & Susanna Hoffs
12. Chills...Ben Lee
13. Center Of Attention...Guster
14. Close Your Eyes...Christophe Beck
15. Chocolate...Snow Patrol
16. Clarity...John Mayer
17. Corners Of Your Mind...Ivy
18. Coulibaly...Amadou & Mariam
19. Camera One...Josh Joplin Group
20. Crazy About You...Whiskeytown
21. Can’t Get Out Of Bed...The Charlatans UK
22. Chewbacca...Supernova
23. (Bonus Track)
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