Archive for June, 2008

First Prose Entry

June 30, 2008 at 3:38 am · Filed under Creative Writing, Prose

A man sitting behind me on the train knocked on the window.  At first I thought he was getting the attention of the platform outside, but we were on the side of the train that faces the tracks, with the platform that houses Grand Central-bound travelers on the far side, too distant for window-knocking attention-getting, but not so far as to obscure the faces of the travelers.

That same man knocked again, more insistently and more rapidly, and I realized he was knocking at me.

“Oh,” he says, in the Goodfellas-style Italian-American vernacular.  For the WASP layperson, that translates to: Hey! or, more formally, Excuse me! I turn around almost involuntarily.

“Two of ya girls over there,” he mumbled and jerked his head, indicating their position on the far platform.  I swiveled, searching for my girls, and finding three sitting on a bench directly under the Dobbs Ferry sign.  One of them flipped her hair and grinned at her friends; she had blonde hair, white teeth, and wore sunglasses at 10 o’clock at night.

“Lots of legs they showin’,” he chuckled.  I gave him a sideways glance and said nothing, hoping that he would understand what I meant by sitting back down in silence.  He chuckled again.

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The Tappan Zee bridge was a thousand points of light, orange and green stark against black sky, obscuring the pale headlights of the small cars it carried across the Hudson.  The way our train moved gave me the impression that the bridge was pivoting, using Nyack as its center and moving south to latch on somewhere downriver.  I smiled inwardly and broke out my notebook, wanting to record what I felt was one of the more literary thoughts I’d had in a while.  The train shook and trembled every time my hand and its pen drew nearer to the paper.

The floor around my feet bled coffee in long streaks.  A mug had rolled from the front of the car to the back, someone muttered when I slipped and fell down while attempting to trace the source of the train’s flesh wound.  Funny, I thought, I didn’t smell coffee.

——————————————————————————————–

As I exit the train, the woman ahead of me on the stairs from the platform is carrying a bike.  I hadn’t seen her on the train.  The back wheel of the bike is rotating from the up-and-down of the stairs.  The wheel clicks as it rotates, and when it slows down, the slowing of the clicks reminds me of the Wheel of Fortune, when one click is the difference between a puny $300 space and a trip to California.  I wonder if I would win the trip to California, but the bike doesn’t stop clicking while I’m watching.  Imagine how maddening that would be for a live studio audience.

My name is Matt.  All of the things stated above actually happened on a recent train ride which I took from New York City, with no exaggeration on my part in the telling of the story, not even of my own thoughts.  What follows from this point did not actually happen, and is in fact completely fictionalized.

This is as yet untitled, and is Part One of a story that has numerous parts.  I don’t know how many parts, and I don’t know what will be in them.  To be perfectly frank, I haven’t written them yet.  Stay tuned.

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You Can’t Keep Jumping Over The Bar If You Keep Raising It: Ben’s WALL-E Review

June 30, 2008 at 12:23 am · Filed under Movie Reviews

Note from Matt: Hey everybody, this is the first review from our third contributor, the illustrious and talented Ben! This is our longest review yet, but sometimes a real read is great, especially when it’s about what looks to be an awesome movie.  I’ll shoot you guys a music review tomorrow.  Thanks all!

When I went to see Pixar’s newest contribution to modern, feature-length animation, my expectations were more than a little high.  Ever since its inception, Pixar has continued to blow me away with their advances in just about every movie.

Toy Story recaptured much of Disney’s old glory, and created a series of moments that will always stick in my memory.  Bug’s Life was less adult than its contemporary, Antz, but had much more heart.  Toy Story 2 was in no way a step down from the original.  Then came Monsters Inc., which, both visually and emotionally, opened up a new era.  The hair on the monsters was lifelike, and demonstrated that CG animation could look real without focusing on characters that were, well, plastic.  More importantly, Pixar reinforced its dedication to the heritage of animation.  The sequence in which Sulley believes that Boo is being crushed by a garbage machine is a marvelous tribute to the classic shorts of Tex Avery and Chuck Jones, but doesn’t feel like Pixar is just rehashing old ideas.

Since then, Pixar has continued to do nothing but raise the bar on itself.  In the end, this studio has been successful because they’ve hired and kept the best talent: Brad Bird – Ratatouille and The Incredibles, Andrew Stanton – Finding Nemo, and John Lasseter – Toy Story come to mind.  More importantly, unlike Dreamworks, they understand that classic cartoons can entertain viewers of all ages, without resorting to peppering pop culture references and sexual innuendo sporadically into a kids’ movie.  And perhaps most importantly of all, these filmmakers understand the heart and soul of moviemaking.  These movies entertain, but you end up caring about the characters, and they’re people (or fish or creatures or action figures) that you’ll always remember.  The Incredibles demonstrates that honoring superhero mythology can succeed with a wide audience if you do it in a fresh, innovative way.  Ratatouille was an enormous step forward in animation, as particularly the first kitchen sequence illustrates how vividly the animators can create a universe and then portray it from the point of view of a mouse.

This summer, Pixar has brought us the latest and final creation resulting from that first creative meeting that brought us A Bug’s Life, Finding Nemo, and Monsters Inc.  Needless to say, I had enormous expectations for this movie.

WALL-E begins on a desolate, futuristic Earth, abandoned by mankind due to over-pollution.  Left alone to clean up the mess, WALL-E has developed a distinct curiosity in the items he finds in the trash, and, more importantly, feelings.  He has a strong affinity for his cockroach companion and an obvious soft spot for Hello Dolly (this is one of those times where you have to suspend your disbelief and accept that some people might actually like that film).  The first half hour of the film has very little interaction between characters; it merely features a lone robot interacting with his environment.  It is done with a great deal of heart, and no less than some of the most effective physical comedy Pixar has ever given us (and that’s quite a complement, especially after the opening short film that accompanies WALL-E).  However, it took a lot of balls for Pixar to start a potential blockbuster with 30 minutes of what many young children watching may see as drudgery to sit through (although they probably won’t use such elevated diction).

Soon, EVE arrives, and WALL-E has a companion, albeit one that resembles an iPod with a laser.  Their interactions are very sweet, as WALL-E tries to establish a connection with another being, having not had anyone to talk (or in this case, beep and hum) to for centuries.

Just when you think this movie is going to result in a simple story about robots in love, Pixar decides to change things on its audiences.  As I mentioned in the title of this article, Pixar had raised the bar so high that I don’t think it would have been possible to jump over it with this film.  Thus, as innovative filmmakers would, they decide on a different strategy: Andrew Stanton straps this film (and its protagonist) to a rocket and shoots it into outer space, well above whatever bar critics were holding it to.

I don’t want to spoil the final 2/3 of this movie for any of you, so I will avoid major plot points.  Basically, this movie has a great deal of commentary on the current direction of our society and our social interactions (some of you might recall my ranting about the evils of iPods during a few sequences).  It also continues Pixar’s proud tradition of recognizing its cinematic roots, and appreciating the movies that came before it.  Although I didn’t catch any overt R2-D2 references (even though the “voice” of WALL-E, Ben Burtt, was the sound designer for all Star Wars products in the last 30 years), the film spoofs 2001: A Space Odyssey and Titanic.  Both of these jokes are done with love, and far from the sort of style you’d expect from something like Family Guy.

The movie truly is captivating.  The plot moves along quite well, and despite throwing some very heavy revelations about our consumerism in our faces, it never lingers too long on darkness surrounding the plot, preferring instead to move the plot along.  I like this element of WALL-E; I think it achieves a great deal as a science-fiction movie, but decides to ultimately be a family flick.  The movie itself is surprisingly dark.  I can’t recall a children’s movie with as dark a view of humanity in my lifetime.  It (as far as I know) is also the first Pixar film to mix some live-action shots into the CG universe (which is handled quite well by the ever-dutiful Fred Willard), but these never end up distracting you.

The strictly limited doses of dialogue may throw some people away from this movie.  I urge you not to be turned off by it.  Not since Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton have filmmakers been truly able to speak the language of movies without dialogue, but this film pulls it off with little more than a few beeping noises.

I admit being afraid, when I first began seeing advertisements for Pixar’s latest creation, that this would be a cute, talking-robot comedy – something akin to Robots.  I now realize the error of ever doubting Pixar (with the exception of Cars), but I still am reminded of Anton Ego’s wisdom at the end of Ratatouille:  “In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations, the new needs friends.”

This movie dares to achieve greatness without the use of significant dialogue (and aspiring filmmakers should take that lesson to heart).  I hope that none of you are turned off by this decision, but instead appreciate it for what it is: a glorious addition to the already proud collection of Pixar movies.  I’ll be slotting it in my list just below Ratatouille, right next to Monsters Inc, and just above Finding Nemo, Toy Story, and The Incredibles.

I hope to do some more blogsturbating on this site soon, when I am not preoccupied with my own, less culture-related blog.

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3-hour games that last 9 hours; Get Smart review

June 29, 2008 at 1:55 am · Filed under Movie Reviews ·Tagged , , , , , , ,

So I was planning on not reviewing Get Smart and instead reviewing old-skool King Kong, but I didn’t have enough time to watch the latter movie because of my attendance at a certain unenjoyable Subway Series game.  I left to catch a 2:00 train, got to the park at 4, the game started at 4:20, was delayed an hour, ended at 8:20, I got home back at 11.  9 hours for a 3-hour game.  Unbelievable.  Johan Santana started out fantastic before he lost control of his fastball, the Mets couldn’t hit Pettite (especially Beltran), and Yankees fans are so fucking annoying.  Tom Seaver t-shirts > Joba Chamberlain t-shirts.

Get Smart was a really fun movie that was based on a 1960’s TV show to which it bore very little resemblance.  Steve Carell plays Maxwell Smart, a pencil-pusher for spy agency CONTROL who is reluctantly pushed into service (a day he loudly dreams about) when the secret identities of almost all the agents are compromised.  In the TV show, Don Adams plays Maxwell Smart, and the differences between the two are immense.

While both are awkward and prone to all-too-quick thinking, the main difference with which I had a problem was the fact that Steve Carell’s Smart is actually a good agent, making correct judgments and doing his job.  Adams’ Smart did no such thing, and managed to save the day using pure dumb luck.  I can understand playing the character differently, since there are no two Don Adamses, but such a 180 is low-level blasphemy.

The other main character difference is expected with such a difference in actors; while Don Adams was cross-eyed and vacant, with hardly a smart word ever coming out of his mouth, Carell has an obvious twinkle in his eye as soon as he becomes an agent; both Smart and Carell enjoy the hell out of this movie.

These were basically my only problems with the entire movie, and in light of all the hilarity that goes on otherwise, they are small gripes.  The sight gags are all fantastic (the code word is swordfish).  Alan Arkin is gold as The Chief, as are David Koechner and that guy who played Damon in Friday After Next (Terry Crews) as Larabee and Agent 91, respectively, Masi Oka (Hiro/Franklin)  and Nate Torrence (Studio 60 rookie) as Bruce and Lloyd, the tech guys, and Bill Murray (!) and Patrick Warburton in small roles that just killed me.  Did I mention that Steve Carell is hilarious in this? Because he is, no matter how different he played Smart.

Anne Hathaway and Duane (formerly known as “The Rock” in casting, presently known as “The Rock” to the world) Johnson are good with each of their roles, but not great, and they do nothing to take away from scenes – they basically clear the path for the pros.

The action in this movie is good, not great, but I don’t get what I heard about it splitting time between its action and its comedy – there are plenty of gags in the middle of action scenes, like the banner behind the plane, etc, etc.  And every comedy has to wrap up somehow, or else it’s just a super-long episode of live action Robot Chicken, as amazing as that would be.  So you can’t really fault it for that.

I don’t think anyone is expecting to be blown away by Get Smart – they were just expecting a really funny action movie and another Steve Carell vehicle.  That is exactly what we have here, so go and see it and have a great time.  Just don’t expect an episode of the old show.

P.S. – Who the fuck am I kidding? NO ONE HAS SEEN THE OLD SHOW WHO WOULD READ THIS BLOG.  Jeez’m craw.  Sorry about the whole beginning wasting your time, but at least now you have a way to act pretentious about film interpretations to your friends if you talk about this movie.

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Now give me some damn sand; the real Girl Talk review

June 27, 2008 at 2:41 am · Filed under Music Reviews ·Tagged , ,

Sorry I didn’t post a review yesterday, but I had to get to bed early to fix my car.  (Thanks, parents.  Big help you were.  Second time that this tire has gone flat since I’ve been home, and they were both your fault.)  You know how it is, life intervening with blogging – it has a pesky way of doing that.  This one shouldn’t be a long review, hopefully after my scheduled break tomorrow (anyone want to post one in my absence? Anyone? Bueller?) I will be back on the wagon with a review of old-skool King Kong.

My last Girl Talk review was a real review of a fake album, so here’s a fake review of the real album.  Ben told me while we were listening to a couple tracks off the fake that he could recognize that it wasn’t Girl Talk’s work.  I was taken aback, for two reasons: how could any rapid mash-ups be recognizable from others, as long as they’re done with any competence, and how was Ben a Girl Talk connoseiueiuoer? I will answer the first question, and you can ask Ben the second if you care to find out.

There’s a very good reason Girl Talk, AKA Greg Gillis, seems only to release albums during the summer.  These albums are perfect summer jams.  But then, what is a summer jam? I think I’d like to define a summer jam as a track you can play at a beach party with your friends (and probably some substances) and feel really glad you did.  Tracks or albums that could fit in there need to combine pure danceability with a lack of depth (you don’t want to think at a beach party) and a sense of catharsis.  You can listen to Girl Talk for less than 30 seconds and know it satisfies the first part, and probably for 30 seconds more and do the same for the second.

The third part is trickier, after all, musical catharsis is tough, and anyone can spot and frown at a moment of catharsis that isn’t earned.  But there has to be some sort of release that makes the listener go, “fuck yeah!” or something to that effect.  You can feel catharsis in your upper chest when it’s good enough.  That’s why Girl Talk makes Top 40 rap good – instead of just shitty rhymes over repetitive beats, Girl Talk mixes and matches until he gives you that catharsis.  See “Shut the Club Down” – near the end, I have no idea what that rap is, or what that 80’s music is, but they work so damn well together.  A better example is in “Still Here”, when Blackstreet’s “No Diggity” (hey! that’s actually a good song!) is preserved pretty well, and you get some head-bobbing going, and then you hit the chorus, and it’s played over FUCKING RADIOHEAD.  It works so well, and it’s a “fuck yeah” for sure.  The best example (though it doesn’t involve hip-hop) is the last 40 seconds of “What It’s All About”, and I just can’t spoil that for you.  You’ll have to hear that one yourself.

Feed the Animals is a better album than Night Ripper, pretty easily.  The mixes are tighter, the flow is better (Gillis lets the songs get up a head of steam before he switches them) and listening to the two back-to-back showed me how much more enjoyable the former is than the latter.  I said before that I would have reservations about putting Feed the Animals in my year-end list; I have no such reservations now.  It’s hard to imagine that too many albums will be ahead of this one.  At any rate, this has “summer jam” written all over it, and that counts for something.

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Catch the Ocean’s 13 reference; Lawrence of Arabia review

June 25, 2008 at 3:20 am · Filed under Movie Reviews ·Tagged , , , , , ,

Four words: Pay-me-my-money! I’m really tired of not getting paid; my last summer job loved to play little jokes like paying me two dollars per delivery when I only had one delivery per night – plus tips, that was five dollars a night, basically.  Ah, those were hilarious jokes.  Now, despite repeated promises of “we’re not going to screw you”, I still have not been paid anything at my current job.  Hilarious, I must admit.

I’m really glad Lawrence of Arabia came on two discs.  It provided a nice stopping point for those of us who can’t commit four hours to a movie at once – you  know, normal people, people with jobs that don’t involve watching movies.  I’m now one of those people, only without the money that normally comes with it.  I’m still laughing.

It’s impossible to review this movie in any concise way like I’ve reviewed movies so far, so I’m going to bullet this one.

  • Writing: Impeccable.  There are so many lines that feel historic and monumental; the writing really suits a movie of such epic proportions.  I especially like the non-pejorative attitude towards the Arabs in the movie; it kind of reminds me of Syriana in that respect.  However, the quality of the writing could never have shone through if not for…
  • Acting: Also fantastic.  Though Peter O’Toole is great and idiosyncratic as Lawrence, Omar Sharif stole the movie for me, much as Alexander Siddig did as Prince Nasir in, you guessed it, Syriana.  Lots of parallels between the two – proud leaders of their people who wish to bridge the gap between the West and the Middle East while retaining cultural pride.  Also, it’s a brave casting move to have cast a real Arab in the role, though they didn’t quite have the guts to do the same for the part of Prince Feisal – they still have the fabulous Alec Guinness in that part, wearing brownface.
  • Directing: Very very good, but not visionary.  I wouldn’t disagree with any of the choices, and I especially like the decision to stage all action from left to right, to symbolize the film as a journey.  Still, everything about the movie semed like it wasn’t directed at all – like it was just a fantastic read-through.
  • Claude Rains: A real favorite of mine, he’s fantastic in everything he’s in, adding a wry smile to every movie from Casablanca to Mr. Smith Goes to Washington to this, which was basically his swan song.

This movie is a real commitment, but it’s one of those essentials that every movie fan should set time aside for – something that informs your opinion of all other movies and of what movies could be.

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The Ikiru review that wasn’t

June 24, 2008 at 3:11 am · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged

This is officially my first beef with WordPress.  Oi, WordPress! Next time you log me out, tell me, yeah? Jesus! 500 words, and when I click Publish, it gives me a log-in screen and when I click “Log In”, it shows me all of 83 words! You were about to get my first negative review for the blog, but WordPress has ruined everything! FUCK! DO YOU HEAR ME, WORDPRESS?! I WAS DECEIVED AND BETRAYED!!! (shakes fist at top of cliff in heaven-shaking rage)(gets struck by internet lightning and falls off cliff)

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Phone numbers here, getcha phone numbers; Girl Talk review

June 23, 2008 at 12:50 am · Filed under Music Reviews ·Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

So Jonathan Smith has me looking through a bunch of call lists (lists of people to call for donations) to find ones we haven’t called yet, to find ones that we have called so that we don’t call them twice, to find ones who asked for literature so that we can smoke out the spy who has been prevented said literature from being sent. (Really.  That is really a job I was asked to do.)  I will dream about phone numbers tonight, for sure.

I promise to have a movie review tomorrow, probably of Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru.  It’s so much easier to listen to music I haven’t heard before than it is to do the same for movies.  But for now, let’s turn our attention to mash-ups.

UPDATE: So, charitable commenter too_legit was correct, the version that I heard was, in fact, fake.  I didn’t think it was terrible at all, though.  Maybe I just don’t have a discriminating eye for these things.  Regardless, I will have an abbreviated review of the real version up later in the week.  Hey, two for one ain’t bad, right?

Mash-ups are interesting things – some people really love to get down to a mash-up of, say, “Country Grammar” and “Sweet Home Alabama” (that’s a great one, I swear), and some even deny the power of “Bittersweet Symphony/ Dirt Off Your Shoulder”, which is one of my favorites.  Regardless of opinion, everyone will agree that the combination of two or more songs in one creates something entirely different.  That’s its whole appeal – if not to the listener, than to the artist in making it.

Girl Talk (AKA Greg Gillis) is the king of the mash-ups.  As opposed to putting the lyrics of one track against the instrumentation of another, with adjustments for pitch, like most mash-ups, he combines lots of songs in one, with rapid-fire references and drastic changes in effect, like octaving up or down lyrics of one song to complement lyrics of another, while both play over the instrumental lines of one or two more songs.  The end result is basically Auto-DJ: hundreds of songs dumped into one album to blast at a party and let the partygoers grin whenever they hear a song they recognize.

As Pitchfork pointed out in their review of Girl Talk’s last album, Night Ripper, pointing out all the songs is half the fun of listening to his music.  And it is fun.  Oh, is it fun.  Is it fun?  Regardless, Girl Talk’s new album, Feed the Animals, is just that: fun.  I’m not sure if it has been officially released yet, but if it is, then it’s just a digital release for the time being.  Either way, I downloaded it…legally.  Legally.  Legally.  Hey, shut up.  Listening to it is just a joy for me.  But why?

By rights, I shouldn’t like this album.  Those who know me know well my total distaste for Top 40 music these days.  I just can’t stand it at all and I gnash my teeth and get morose and annoyed whenever I hear it.  But there’s plenty of it on here, so what gives? The only explanation I can give for it is two-pronged: a) the total mutation that music undergoes here means that you can’t really compare one version to the other, and b) the songwriting REALLY doesn’t matter here.  This is for dancing and head-bobbing.  This is club music.  People don’t listen to the lyrics in club music.

Feed the Animals gets better as it goes on, and the references get more grin-inducing.  My favorite is in the track “Rockin”, when the song “Freak on a Leash” by Korn (yes, that one – don’t tell me you don’t know it, you fucking do unless you’re Kriti) is octaved up so that the lead singer sounds like a freaky chihuahua/midget hybrid, like he’s meant to.  That is followed by a sample of the piano figure from “My Moon My Man” by Feist.  He really goes everywhere with these.

Other favorite samples include: Vampire Weekend, The Beatles (twice), Outkast (twice – including “Sorry Ms. Jackon), Eminem (thrice), Beach Boys, Jimi Hendrix (with some Jamaican rapper over him [pitch-adjusted Sean Paul, perhaps?]), and the capper, DMX played over Queen and then Black Sabbath in “Watch What You Do”.  Now you know what I mean by grin-inducing.  I can’t say that this will be at the top of my end-o’-year list, because it doesn’t seem fair to put it over people who wrote their own songs.  Then again, I could have a change of heart by the end of the year because of how much fun this is.  Just plain fun.  That’s the one word you should take out of this review, because I’ll still be grinning from listening to this album when you’re reading this.

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Getting through a long movie; Wolf Parade review

June 22, 2008 at 2:50 am · Filed under Music Reviews ·Tagged , , , ,

So I’ve been trying to watch Lawrence of Arabia lately, and I’ve discovered that I’ve lost a lot of my attention span for movies.  I’m always pausing and walking away to do things, and I’m beginning to frustrate myself.  I used to be really good about watching movies – I wanted to just watch it, and I could get engrossed really easily.  I don’t know what’s changed – maybe it’s the environment, and I’ll be better about it when I get back to school.  I hope so.

Anyway, Wolf Parade is another in a long list of bands about which I don’t know the full story.  This is what I know.  Their two frontmen are Dan Boeckner and Spencer Krug.  Dan Boeckner is also the frontman for a band called the Handsome Furs; Spencer Krug is also the frontman for a band called Sunset Rubdown.  Both of them sing in kind of gruesome, wobbly tones that you either can tolerate or not.  I tend to tolerate it; the only annoying-voiced frontman I can’t get over is Colin Meloy of the Decemberists – don’t ask me why.  Maybe it’s because of that weird micro-vibrato? I really just don’t know.  But anyway, it’s hard enough to keep a band together with two lead singers and songwriters, and it’s even harder to keep it together when they have their own separate bands.  After their great debut, Apologies to the Queen Mary, they separated to pursue other projects, and had a really tough time reconciling the directions they had since taken.  There’s more to the story, I’m sure, but I just don’t know it.

The first thing that jumps out to me about this album is how conflicted it is.  I don’t think there’s a single song of these 9 that stays in minor or major keys the whole time, and often the switches go back and forth rapidly; sometimes you can’t even tell what key the song is in.  The tempos also are very fluid – lots of breakdowns, give-and-take with fast verses and slow choruses, and of course, two different singers that each take their own songs, until the 10-minute, 52-second closer, “Kissing the Beehive”, in which they trade in the middle.

Reading iTunes’ album notes, I discovered that most of this album was gleaned from improv sessions.  That doesn’t surprise me much – it has that kind of feel, that of searching for something great in the song, thinking that you found it, and trying to hold onto it for as long as possible when in truth, those kinds of great moments are almost instantaneous and always fleeting.  Take opener “Soldier’s Grin” for example.  The song is solid most of the way through, but it sounds undecided.  However, there are these two moments that are absolutely sublime, and they happen in close range of each other.  When Dan Boeckner sings, “Horse shapin’ fire dragging stereo wire” (I have no idea what it means either), his voice does a really cool trick on the word “stereo” that I just fall for.  Shortly after, as the verse gets more insistent and the guitar gets angrier (at about 3:10 in the song), the guitar finally breaks to the front of the mix to rip this fucking badass figure, going way down on the strings where only power chords dare to tread.  Thank god they don’t try to repeat that over and over – even the second and final time they do it, it lacks much of the same impact.

The album is a really good listen, especially for songs like “California Dreamer” – the title of which I do not condone and which doesn’t really represent the aesthetic of the song – and aforementioned closer “Kissing the Beehive”, which has a Pink Floyd-like patience about it that may turn some off, but not people like me who dig that kind of patience in putting a song like that together.

However, the constant conflict does get grating sometimes, and most of their choruses’ lyrics seem meaningless to me.  The in-verse lyrics are tolerable in a read-between-the-lines kind of way, but jeez.  Give some more effort on the lines you repeat.  Still, those two drawback don’t prevent me from liking the album on the whole, but I can definitely see this album getting lost in iTunes, only to be rediscovered down the line in a Party Shuffle session – sorry, but that sems to happen for everybody below TV On The Radio in the alphabet (especially sorry about you, Wilco).  Give it a try, though.  Tell me what you think.

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What? Me write an entry? Absurd! Into the Wild Review

June 20, 2008 at 4:04 am · Filed under Movie Reviews ·Tagged , , , ,

I’m really elated that people are getting on board with this idea of a collective review blog.  It just makes me happy to see that people are expressing their opinions, and it makes me even happier that I was able to facilitate it.  Now the next step to legitimacy is a sustained blog – one that keeps going into the foreseeable future, instead of just a flash in the pan.  That’s been a challenge for me in the past; I often begin great undertakings and never get around to finishing them (read: IMDb Top 250 project).  But anyway, let’s get into the review, since I anticipate it being a long one.

Into the Wild was written and directed by Sean Penn, who has really had to work hard for my respect, since he just seems like such an ass.  However, he has proven himself as a great actor, and now a great filmmaker.  Into the Wild has vaulted itself into the second tier of my favorite movies – not all time best, but really really great.

Disgusted with the materialism of the world around him and scarred by a broken family life, Christopher McCandless left everything behind to pursue a life on the road, stopping to meet and get to know people on the way, and eventually deciding to live off the land in Alaska in an attempt to find purity and happiness in solitude, which is the way he saw that man was meant to be.

McCandless, who took the name Alexander Supertramp for his travels, leaves an indelible mark on all who cross his path, and the movie gives us the impression that all of his companions are better people when he left them from when he found them.  However, it’s hard to ignore the sadness and tragedy that each person felt when he moved on, and each time he does, I really wanted him to stay, because it seemed like he was happy where he was.

When he gets to Alaska, McCandless has an up-and-down existence, reading and making discoveries about himself that I won’t spoil for those who haven’t seen it.

There’s a real profound quality about the movie, in what Christopher McCandless, played by Emile Hirsch, says, in what the people he meets say, in the voice-over narration by McCandless and his sister, and in the actions of McCandless – whether reinspiring romance, showing an aging man a new outlook on life, or fighting for survival in the Alaskan wilderness.

It’s a credit to Penn as a writer and Hirsch as an actor that the character of McCandless was portrayed so believably, despite how outlandish he was.  At no point did I think, “No way could he have done that.”  He just seems like a once-in-a-lifetime person you meet, a person who makes you smile and frown at the same time when you remember him, because as Red put it in the Shawshank Redemption, “I have to remind myself that some birds aren’t meant to be caged. Their feathers are just too bright. And when they fly away, the part of you that knows it was a sin to lock them up DOES rejoice. Still, the place you live in is that much more drab and empty that they’re gone. I guess I just miss my friend.” That line makes me choke up every time, and it couldn’t apply more to this movie.

It’s very tough to have this strong a message in a movie (that of finding happiness your own way, either through people, nature, what-have-you, outside of materialism, so it’s a real happiness) without getting preachy, but Penn pulls it off, mainly because the film never speaks to the audience about these things – it either speaks to the characters or to itself, which seems to make it all the more powerful.

And if the first half (or two-thirds) of the movie is uplifting with the spirit of freedom and independence, the latter part is just as heartbreaking with the sadness McCandless leaves in his wake – the old man (played for an Oscar nomination by Hal Holbrook) who loved him so much in a short period that he asked to adopt Chris, the young girl in Slab City, and most of all, his family.

In the movie, McCandless only interacts with his family once, after his graduation.  His parents are horrifying materialists, played by William Hurt and Marcia Gay Harden (film buffs are beginning to realize now in this review how well-cast this movie is), but his sister is the deepest tragedy of them all, and it’s where I lost sympathy for Chris.  He left without so much as a letter or phone call to the one person he said understood him.  Her voice-overs are poignant, and progress from wistful to hurt and lonely over the course of the film.  However, all we get of the parents after he leaves are mute expressions of strangled guilt at the knowledge that they drove him away.

I really wish I could write more, because this review feels unfinished, but it took a lot out of me.  Looking back, I feel that the main strength of this movie was in its ability to get the audience really invested in the characters and the story.  I started to get bleary-eyed just while writing about McCandless’ sister.  I may come back tomorrow and flesh it out some more, but I’ll leave you with one thing for now:  this is a great, great movie, but it’s a real tough watch.  Its tragedy, unlike the darkest moments of romantic comedies or other cheap tear-jerker moments, is real and earned and doesn’t pull any punches or exaggerate.  The total palpability of the grief of everyone involved will weigh on you – don’t plan on doing anything fun right after seeing this movie.  But see it anyway.

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The Evil Dead review

June 20, 2008 at 12:54 am · Filed under Movie Reviews ·Tagged , , ,

NOTE FROM MATT: Hey everybody – the IAMDC army is growing! Here’s a fabulous review from who I hope will become a regular contributor, Max Jacobson! I’ll be on later tonight with a review of 2007 travelogue Into the Wild, and now I have to really step up my game to follow this! Enjoy!

The Evil DeadThis is the beginning of the body of text that will constitute my review of the 1981 horror film The Evil Dead. By the end of this body of text, you will feel a ravenous hunger for seeing this movie. Is that the point? I don’t feel driven to share my opinion with you. Should I? Sometimes I do. If I adore the shit out of a movie, I become missionary-like, spreading the good word of whatever to the tragically out of the loop. But that’s not really the case with The Evil Dead.

Because I’m a complete junkie when it comes to reviews, I’d heard it name dropped a couple times, and I had a vague notion that The Evil Dead trilogy was supposed to be hilarious and badass and so I was planning to watch it someday, way off in the future, but the impetus came the other day when I was chatting with some friends about rotten tomatoes. Someone said they didn’t think Wall-E looked that good. As it happens, I’m really looking forward to it, so I playfully offered a ten dollar bet that it’s going to be a masterpiece, and have at the very least a 95% score on rotten tomatoes. I thought for sure they’d take the bet; only 22 movies got a score that good last year. That’s good odds. Anything above 80% or so colors me impressed. But rather than accept the loaded bet, they steered the conversation toward this philosophical discourse on the worth of reviews, and the validity of a review aggregator like RT.

So here’s how it ties in to the subject of the review: The Evil Dead has a 100% on RT. What that means is that of all 40 reviews the RT could find of the movie, not a one of them was, essentially, thumbs down. It’s extremely likely that some if not many of them held small gripes, but overall they enjoyed it. My friend said it was so bad that he couldn’t sit through it. He’d tried watching it on 3 different occasions to no avail. He looked up some of his favorite movies and found scores in the high 80’s and was disappointed. One of his favorites, Boondock Saints, has a score of 18%. At first I tried to bring the conversation back to Wall-E, and how good it’s gonna be… but then I decided that if no one was going to accept my bet, I’d accept his challenge. I was to watch The Evil Dead and report back. And if I had any audacity at all, I was to enjoy it.
I watched it that night. I signed up for Netflix and was able to stream it straightaway. So picture me sitting in the dark with my laptop, headphones plugged in because everyone else is sleeping, staring transfixed as the titular evil dead possess anything and everything they can with the simply evil motivation of being really scary and really gross (The full title? The Evil Dead: The Ultimate Experience in Grueling Terror). White liquids come spewing out of wounds, eyeballs are pressed in, pencils are burrowed into ankles, and soon enough everyone’s covered in blood. Oh, and a forest rapes a woman. (“Did someone in the woods do this to you?” “The woods themselves did this to me!”)

And I did not enjoy it.

Because I was watching by myself, I kept pausing when I was worried that something particularly gross was about to happen. When Ash, the hero of the flick played by Bruce Campbell, sticks his thumbs into the eyes of one of the demons, I was mortified that they were about to pop with a squelch and that anonymous white goo was going to get loose. So I went and got a snack.

It’s worth mentioning that Bruce Campbell, then an unknown actor, is a really good sport. First of all, his character is named Ashley, which is actually kind of hilarious considering how badass a name Ash is (one of the few instances of humor in the otherwise strictly gross-out horror movie), but he also gets a lot of blood and guts sprayed on his face. In one nearly poetic moment, his possessed girlfriend is lunging for him and he swiftly decapitates her with a shovel, she lands on him… and just as I’m contemplating how if she still had a head, they would be kissing… squirt. A surge of neck-blood gushes onto his face.

What I love the most though, is that the writer/director of this repulsive indie horror movie would go on, some 20 years later, to direct the three hit Spider-Man movies. Seriously think about it. The same imagination that had Spider-Man and Mary-Jane Watson sharing a romantic date laying together on a web under the stars… that same guy compelled a woman to get branched. Oh, and the “assistant film editor”, Joel Coen, would go on to make some pretty great movies with his brother Ethan.

And so here I am at the crossroads between having every reason to like it other than the fact that I saw it and it was, in a word, unpleasant. Well, what did I expect?

I’m mixed. I’m irresolute. Then this ain’t a review, this is me blogsturbating!

Here’s a quote from Dustin Putman, a film critic who I half-seriously refer to as “my trusted reviewer.” On a day like today when I was worrying that if reviews are actually as destructive as I feared (read: causing people to dislike things they could have liked– what’s the point of that? Unless it in turn increases how much they like other more esoteric works and so it balances out? Even then?), then I definitely read far too many reviews, I sent him an email asking for some thoughts on the issue. I’ll just end on this excerpt from his reply:

The use of my review, I think, is the same as any review–to express a personal opinion, and maybe give the reader an idea of why something may or may not have worked. As long as I do this, and clearly describe the pros and cons of X movie, I feel I have done my job. And if, for example, I feel “There Will Be Blood” and “Atonement” are overrated, albeit ambitious failures, and yet actually enjoy “The Hottie and the Nottie” or “I Know Who Killed Me” for what they are, so be it. A critic should never apologize for how they feel, just as long as they’re honest and do not conform to the majority opinion for the sake of it. There’s no dignity in that.

That dignity is a big part of why I respect him as a critic, but now upon attempting a review, I’m realizing something else worth respecting: sure, he just honestly tells how he feels, but he has to know how he feels. Here’s what I know about how I felt about The Evil Dead: I did not have a fun time watching it; now and then the camera work really impressed me; despite the really bad effects I jumped at each and every one of the dozens of jump scares (seriously, I wish I had counted them. It feels like 50); I think it’s kind of rad that critics are on board with this out-there of a movie; and I’m actually pretty psyched to watch the sequel.

And that concludes the body of text that constitutes this review.

-Max Jacobson

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