Archive for August, 2008

What kind of summer has it been; Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson review

August 13, 2008 at 3:22 am · Filed under Music Reviews ·Tagged , , , , ,

With Helena’s arrival today, I will be marking the final phase of summer vacation, this last week in town.  This summer shot by like a bullet – a hot, thunderstormy, musical, bloggy bullet.  I didn’t get to hang out with my friends as much as I wanted because my schedule was the opposite of everyone else’s except Ben, who had the same schedule, and was just as drained as I was at the end of work, but we hung out a reasonable amount anyway.  He’s cool.  He’s a cool guy.  With everyone else, it feels like I missed an opportunity.  Sad face.  I don’t think it was this blog’s fault, because I wrote almost all of my entries after 2 AM, so it didn’t really take away from anything but sleep.

The reason I felt the need to sum up was because I think I’m going to take a break until I get to Oberlin, which is August 19th.  This next week’s going to be very crazy, and this blog would complicate things too much.  But I will check up every so often to see if anyone else wrote reviews to fill the void (hint, hint).  But once class restarts, I will be in a creative writing workshop, so get ready for creative writing pieces to start becoming a bigger part of this site.  I don’t know if they will take the place of reviews the day they post them; I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.

I knew Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson first when he opened for TV On The Radio at their free awesome concert at McCarren Park Pool last summer, and I thought he sounded a lot like Alec Ounsworth of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, but he seemed really cool and he was as good as any opener-for-an-opener I’ve seen.  So when I saw Pitchfork review his debut album, and I found it available online, I wanted to give it a try.  Wouldn’t you?

Well, having given the album a really good listen or two, I can say that my comparisons of MBAR to Ounsworth were not as accurate as I had thought, but not completely off.  His self-titled album (Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson, for those keeping score) is at once classic singer-songwriter fare and anything but.  Listeners can tell that his studio recordings are just beefed up versions of songs originally meant for one man and his guitar, and his songs are very personal (and fucking DARK); but his influences of Grizzly Bear and TV On The Radio (GB’s Chris Taylor produced the album, and TVOTR’s Kyp Malone contributed to it as well in ways that I’m not exactly sure about, but I’m guessing they at least included backup guitar) take the songs to a shambling, ethereal place reserved for the aforementioned bands that have such a clear idea of their own sound that they can do anything within it.  And speaking of shambling, ethereal places, I should mention that this album is entirely about drug use and depression, using personal experiences which are way more intense than I anticipated.

Well, not every song is chiefly about drug use, but it’s all at least inspired by it and tangentially having to deal with it.  Album opener “Buriedfed”, also the best track on the album (why does that always happen? Have some place to go, people!), is a story about a man who kicks open the casket at his own funeral and the crazy things that happen to him after.  But there’s also an aside about drugs, in which MBAR slurs, “Reckless ruin is killing high/A great, fine victory we’re still alive/My, my, what a surprise/I got home late, I don’t care/Better late than never, dear.”  It starts out contemplative and mournful, and turns into a rousing anthem (though I don’t want any anthems to exist for drug use or kicking open caskets) and campfire chant.  It’s also one of two songs whose lyrics I could get in their entirety; the only other one was second track “The Debtor,” which is more directly, and more poetically, about, ahem, drugs.

In it, Miles mumbles, “Tried to stop the bleeding/It’s a shame that you failed/The red fell so hard, it hailed/Tried to kick on Tuesday/But I didn’t succeed/The air was too thick to breathe.” I don’t want to imply that MBAR is unintelligible, he just acts like the druggie he portrays in his songs, and was before and after this album was recorded back in 2006, though he, if you read the article I linked to, is clean now, meaning he smokes a ton of weed, but nothing else.

After reading that article, I found that MBAR fascinates me.  If his success grows, he will have lived the rock star life to its fullest, in the best and worst ways.

As a whole, this album is very compelling, and musically interesting, but it lacks charisma after the first few songs, which means that even at a reasonable length, this album drags.  But then again, that’s the difference between MBAR and bands like Grizzly Bear and TV On The Radio: they’re more developed, more confident, so they know what to do with their sound.  So I can’t give this album a positive review, just a pretty good.  But that doesn’t mean I’m not looking forward to his next.  I think Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson can go places, especially if he finds something better to call himself.  Jeez.

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Magnolia review, don’t hate

August 12, 2008 at 3:48 am · Filed under Movie Reviews ·Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

So thanks again to Max for allowing me to extend my break.  I forgot to take my day off Friday, so I figured why not make up for it Saturday, and then Max gives us a cool music review and I get a two-day break.  So now, back we are with a review of Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1999 awesome epic Magnolia, which I did watch on Saturday, so forgive me if the memories aren’t as vivid as they normally are.  But then, I’m writing this part before the actual review with plans not to remove it, so maybe you won’t notice the difference.

Magnolia is incredibly dense, incredibly deep and on an incredibly wide scale.  Clocking in at just over 3 hours long, this movie screams epic.  It interweaves nine separate storylines, all taking place in the San Fernando Valley.  PTA said he wanted to make “the epic, the all-time great San Fernando Valley movie”, and I can’t help but think that he succeeded.  In fact, there’s so much to this movie that I’m going to have to resort to bullet points, and I don’t know how far that will take us:

  • I just read the Wikipedia article for this, and it really gives you a sense of the depth of this movie, what with all the storylines and the thematic elements and such.
  • John C. Reilly is a chameleon.  He can be as silly or as serious as he wants, he can be in fucking Step Brothers or he can be in an incredible string of Oscar bait movies like Boogie Nights (also PTA), Chicago, Gangs of New York, The Hours, and The Aviator.  I just want him to come back to serious roles again, so he can be remembered for not just being Will Ferrell’s sidekick.  Then again, an Oscar nominee who makes viral comedy videos is amazing.  Oh, well.  By the way, he’s incredible here as police officer Jim Kurring.  That was my original point.  He seems to be one of three purely good souls that are main characters here.  The other two are about to follow, but I just want to say that if you want to remake any movie that had Karl Malden in it, please please please cast John C. Reilly.  They seem like they’d be perfect for each other’s roles.
  • The second good guy is Philip Seymour Hoffman as Phil Parma, and word has finally gotten out that this could be the best actor in Hollywood.  He hadn’t yet come into his own here, and I personally liked his work from Boogie Nights better, but he does the “I know how serious this moment is” cry very well, and a lot.
  • The final good guy is child actor Jeremy Blackman as quizboy Stanley Spector.  He’s solidly in Haley Joel Osment territory here, with big eyes that are very serious and a way of carrying himself that gives away how intelligent he is, or his character at least.  His character is possibly the most interesting.
  • I really wish Tom Cruise wasn’t a fucking douchebag Scientologist.  The douchebag part is more important, because everyone still loved Isaac Hayes, even after he quit South Park over his beliefs.  RIP Chef.  I wish Tom Cruise wasn’t a douchebag because he’s a great actor, really really creepy and awesome here as Frank T.J. Mackey, a guy who teaches other guys how to, you guessed it (actually, I really hope you didn’t guess it), turn women into their sexual playthings.  He gets a great reveal.
  • I get to talk about Jason Robards again! He’s so amazing here as “Big” Earl Partridge, probably my second favorite performance, and he gives vitality to a character on his deathbed throughout the whole movie, while adding the authenticity to that very deathbed.  He’s one of those actors that’s always himself as the role, like George Clooney or Cary Grant, but he makes it work better than anyone I’ve seen.
  • My favorite performance goes to William H. Macy as former quizboy Donnie Smith, a man who was warped by the childhood that Stanley Spector is on his way to having – his dad took all his prize money, and as he says, “I really do have love to give! I just don’t know where to put it.”  He’s so great and twitchy, I just love his character even though he has such little inherent pathos.
  • 728 words and only talking about the actors so far.  Jeez.  Okay, so the writing is so good it’s beyond comprehension.  The way that unrelated stories come together without you even realizing it – I mean, it’s not your classic come-together story in that all the stories converge on one point, it’s that every story influences another story in the movie, whether at the beginning, middle or end, and these connections are what the preamble of the movie talk about, how interlocking circumstance is really what makes the world go round, and if enough circumstances come together, real shit goes down.  And it goes down.  In addition, the dialogue has that great combination of being real and being cinematic and dramatic that now seems to be PTA’s trademark.
  • Let me backtrack for a second.  Paul Thomas Anderson is an incredible young filmmaker.  His three biggies have been, in succession, Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and There Will Be Blood.  All of them are long, deeply interesting, engaging films that make you think, and hard.  He is on my shortlist of filmmakers to watch as I grow older.
  • He was the writer-director on all three of those films, and his directing here is also incredible, if a little Kubrickian in its mercilessness.  Its long closeups on the pained expressions of Cruise, Robards, Philip Baker Hall as game show host Jimmy Gator (also great here), and others are probably the trademark of this film.
  • Thematically, apart from the chance encounters thing that I talked about earlier, a lot of this is how familial relationships shape our interactions with the rest of the world, with Robards influencing Cruise, Stanley’s dad fucking him up, and others.  It’s a really tough theme, but PTA handles it well.
  • PTA’s director of photography for all of his movies, Robert Elswit, was great if not “oh my god look at that camerawork” great here.  Elswit did win the Oscar for TWBB, though I thought that Roger Deakins deserved it for the second best movie of last year, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.  Still, Elswit rules – he also did work for Michael Clayton, and surprisingly, Good Night and Good Luck, and anyone who’s seen that movie can tell you how much he did for that movie.

SPOILERS

  • If this film is remembered for one thing, it will be the frogs.  Oh my god, the frogs.  Why they fell from the sky, no one tells you when you’re watching the movie, except for Stanley when he says, “This happens” at his moment of childhood serenity that happens for most kids at the end of movies of depth (see the two good M. Night movies, Star Wars Ep. I, literally any teen movie that has a protagonist).  See the wikipedia article for its significance, I’m still not entirely sure about it, but what I do know is that it’s done so artfully and epically that I don’t need to know what it means.  It seems like it fit at the time when a beloved TV icon was about to kill himself after revealing that he may have molested his daughter, when the greatest misogynist the world has ever known cries at his father’s deathbed for abandoning his mother, and when a quizboy-turned-thief has a change of heart for the wrong reasons.
  • I didn’t know that kids say remarkably profound monologues when they pee their pants.  I want to see if that happens a lot.
  • The whole issue with Donnie Smith and the braces made me want to cry in the best way, because it’s such pure heartache and unadulterated, adolescent love in the craziest way that I have no idea how else to react.

Okay, nearly 1400 words is enough.  Hope you got through it all and don’t hate me for it.  I know you won’t, Kriti, I’m talking to everyone else.

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“His ideal six piece rock machine;” This Is My Suitcase review

August 11, 2008 at 2:22 am · Filed under Music Reviews ·Tagged , , , ,

this-is-my-suitcaseSo there’s this band called This Is My Suitcase, right? They’re from Ohio and they play homemade pop music with lots of acoustic guitar, piano, and references to cats. They’re a young band, but they’ve already put out an album (2006’s “Missent to Thailand”), a handful of EPs (“The C EP” and “The C.R.E. EP” from ’06 and ’07 respectively), and an album of assorted covers (If you do check out their myspace, most of the songs in the player are covers right now). I’ve decided rather than pick one thing in particular to review, I’ll just rave about it all. I don’t have the covers album, but I do have a couple of assorted songs from their myspace that they enabled downloading of, and the total adds up to about an hour anyway.

So okay. Joe Camerlengo (“boy vocals, acoustic guitar” as he credits himself on their myspace) has kind of a strange, effeminate singing voice (“He pretends he knows how to sing, but he knows he knows how to pretend to moonwalk.”) that might turn off listeners who prefer their frontmen manly (I’m pretty sure he’s studying to be a nurse), but it really is quite good and fits the songs perfectly. And these songs are just absurdly cute, witty, and uplifting.

I first heard their album “Missent To Thailand” in 2006, and at first I just didn’t know what to make of it. I kept thinking that it sounded so sloppy, but I couldn’t stop listening to it. It felt like a guilty pleasure, but then I just succumbed. Particularly to the song “L-O-V-E” which is so adorable and catchy and sort of inspiring. This is one of the 3 songs that was re-recorded in a studio by a professional producer Mike Green for free. The new version loses some of the DIY charm, but is probably more palatable to most. In any case, “Missent To Thailand” is a wonderful way to pass a half hour with pop songs that sound so warm that it’s a wonder so much other music of its ilk comes off sterile and crunchy (whoa, I just used the word “ilk.” What the hell?). Ultimately though, it was recorded with a “cheap computer mic” and now and then it does get a little in the way. But not often. Of it, they write, “it sounds different than we do now.”

And I am okay with that, because since then they’ve released a bunch of wonderful songs marked with higher production values, more diverse and accomplished instrumentation, and I haven’t thought of them as a guilty pleasure once since. In fact, I really appreciate those things most of all now which originally I wasn’t sure about. The band is kind of a great role model on the whole equality front, with two of the band members being girls, the frontman being uninhibitedly and unabashedly girly (one song is called “Obviously, doctor, you’ve never been a 13 year old girl”, another “Cute boys are for kissing.” Another has the lyrics “What’s a girl like me doing in a place like this? What’s a pretty girl like me doing in a place like this? I don’t know. I’ll have what he’s having.”) and making great, really positive music.

And when the song “L-O-V-E” builds to this moment, it’s kind of impossible to be a cynic or pessimist about life and love. You might need to hear it to believe it, and it’s not on their myspace or purevolume but there is a rendition of it on youtube, so check it out at the end of the post. This is kind of a weird review, but I’m not sure what else to say except maybe I’ll do a more proper one when “Keys to Cat Heaven” comes out.

I’m seeing stars
And cartoon birds circling my head
Like an anvil wrinkled me
So this is love

All I’ve got up my sleeve is love
And I know it’s good enough for you (for you for you)
For us

-Max Jacobson

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Other players are waiting for your turn in Scramble; Vertigo review

August 9, 2008 at 4:58 am · Filed under Movie Reviews ·Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,

What I don’t understand is that after Scrabulous got so unceremoniously dumped, people turned to Scramble, a far inferior word-forming game that’s all based on speed and small words, and doesn’t have the great reasoning skills that Scrabble does.  I mean, Wordscraper is the same game, made by the same developers, just with some changes in format that I bet were put in place to make it lest lawsuitable.  And yet, all but two of the games I started on Wordscraper have gone inactive.  What’s the deal? We all loved Scrabulous!

So I crossed another movie off of my IMDb top 250 list, and this one was a biggie, one of the real culturally important ones: Vertigo, the Hitchcock classic.  Having proclaimed myself a Hitchcock fan to those with whom I talk about movies, I’ve often received incredulous looks for this gap in my film catalogue.  I’ve now seen Vertigo, Strangers On A Train, North By Northwest, Psycho, and Rear Window, and I think those are the real biggies.  There are plenty more on the list – he’s the biggest director on it, which I guess means that IMDb users consider him the best director of all time.  Though that’s not exactly fair; he was extraordinarily prolific in comparison to almost every other filmmaker, so quantity is not exactly the best indicator.  Still, most of his titles are substantially up there.  But I digress.

No longer will I have to apologize, explain away, or shrug my shoulders, for I now know what all the fuss was about, and it was certainly about something.  What separates Vertigo from the other Hitchcock movies I’ve seen is that there isn’t much of an undercurrent of suspense.  Oh, sure, there are suspenseful scenes – Hitchcock is called “The Master of Suspense” after all – but we aren’t kept on the edge of our seats the whole time.  Most of the movie involves star James Stewart as John “Scotty” Ferguson either following or interacting with Kim Novak as Madeleine Elster, trying to decipher the mystery of her and Carlotta Valdes, whose spirit appears to have possessed her from beyond the grave.  Even after the semi-climactic scene about two thirds into the movie, the pacing is very naturalistic – the scenes are functional, the plot is structured in a very rational way, so every scene is necessary, but just a logical progression.  Scotty isn’t on the run from the law, isn’t trying to prevent his own death, he’s just doing his job at first, and trying to piece his life back together later.

SPOILERS

I absolutely loved the writing decision to have Judy actually write out the letter, then tear it up.  It’s one of those brave choices in a movie – that, coupled with the flashback, lets the audience know the real deal though the protagonist doesn’t, turning it into a different kind of movie than it was before, less about figuring out what’s really going on and more about Scotty’s increasingly disturbing attachment to Madeleine.

It’s such sick pleasure along the lines of the Henry Fonda scene in the movie that I just reviewed last week to watch Jimmy Stewart turn into a crazy person who tries to control someone’s life, just the kind of scumbag you would hate with every fiber of your being if you caught his story too late in its arc.  But you still kind of half-sympathize, especially with the knowledge that the person who drove him to it is now the victim.

END SPOILERS

Stewart is, of course, still a god here, like in every other damn movie he makes.  You just can’t find fault in his performances, especially under Hitchcock.  What’s interesting here is that he doesn’t do the same trick he does in lots of his other roles that I’ve seen, where he kind of tilts his head back and looks down the bridge of his nose when he’s confused or curious about something.  No, that move is too warm for this movie, and Stewart’s character, while pleasant, is not really a nice guy, and gets less and less so as the movie unfolds.  I love that both Stewart and Hitchcock recognize that this is not just another Jimmy Stewart movie – it’s not really about him, it’s about what happens to him.

I also love that the title of the movie as a theme isn’t beaten to death, it’s only selectively used at key points.  This makes the scenes where it is used more effective and anxious; because every time Scotty goes up stairs, we hold our collecive breath a little, so when the vertigo does kick in, we don’t exhale, and that’s how Hitchcock wants it.

Novak is serviceable here, but as far as I’ve seen, Hitchcock’s only great female role/performance was Janet Leigh as Marion Crane in Psycho.  All the other female leads have just been functional, exactly what they needed to be, but not eye-catching in anything but looks.

Yawn, just another fantastic movie to add to my ever-expanding list of favorite movies on facebook.  But I refuse to subscribe to the growing trend of people who want to distill by saying bullshit like “I like movies, all movies” or “movies that don’t suck”, or “Tarantino, Kubrick, Hitchcock, Bay…no, that can’t be right…” It’s okay to have a bunch of favorite movies.  I have a huge amount of favorite movies; that doesn’t make Fargo not a favorite movie just because it’s not on my top 10 list.  I love Fargo!

P.S. – It seems to be deadlocked 1-1 between those who want to stay out of the know, and those who want more detail.  I think I’ll just cordon off the spoilers until I get a definitive majority, like they do it over at AintItCoolNews.com.  Cheers all.

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Uncooked spaghetti…sandwich; Pineapple Express review

August 8, 2008 at 4:53 am · Filed under Movie Reviews ·Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

This is one way to describe what happens when you smoke weed.

Pineapple Express is another way.  Pineapple Express‘s way is to describe how you can accidentally witness a murder while getting high on the clock when you work as a process server, and suffer raging paranoia for hours which snowballs into getting hunted down by crooked cops and hitmen, and getting caught in the middle of a massive drug war.

Pineapple Express is another in the line of classic Apatow comedies, though this is another one that mixmaster Judd only produced; Superbad geniuses Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg wrote the script for this, and relatively unknown (but apparently hugely respected in the industry) director David Gordon Green helmed this stoner action comedy.  Because as far as genres go, once you have this movie labeled as such, it really is that straightforward.

First, let’s get the character actor handshakes out of the way.  Craig Robinson and Kevin Corrigan were amazing as the hitman combo Matheson and Budlofsky.  Robinson is better known for his roles as Darryl Philbin in The Office and as the bouncer in Knocked Up, and he’s never been anything but laugh out loud funny, mostly because his deadpan, while rivaling that of Chevy Chase or Bill Murray in its pure comedy, is more an “I’m gonna fuck you up if you say one more word” deadpan than a “What a hilariously awkward situation” deadpan.  Corrigan, best known to me as terrifingly sketchy party host Mark in Superbad and for his role in the show Grounded For Life, in which he played Kramer, if he was less physically weird, and just turned up the “I’m probably a wanted felon for a number of reasons” sketch-o-meter to 11, is also great, if only for the way he just shrugs his shoulders while disappointing or deceiving whomever he’s talking to.  But he’s not as funny as Robinson.

Or James Franco, who the big handshake goes to.  He’s so hilarious in this movie because he pulls off the “I’ve smoked so much weed that I am never not high” vibe so well it’s scary.  Check his face when he and screen-sharer Seth Rogen realize their car battery is dead.  Unbelievable.  Danny McBride as Red here is also incredible, more in the Craig Robinson school of daring you to laugh at his painfully straight face.  Rogen, writer and star if you haven’t been taking notes, lets other characters play off him for the most part, but he gets his fair share of laughs, mostly in his exchanges for his high-school girlfriend, Angie.  He’s 25 in the movie, by the way (26 in real life).

The real star of this movie is the writing, though.  It’s less like Knocked Up and Superbad because it’s not structured or reliant on one-liners for its comedy.  The comedy here is in entire exchanges or scenes; the way things are put together, like Rogen and Franco in their holding cell at the head dealer’s hideout, punctuated by, you guessed it, Robinson.

For my money, however, all the funniest scenes come from just watching how Rogen and Franco react to things when they’re high, most of all being their onset of paranoia in the woods, which I really can’t go into a lot of, because I already spoiled the surprise for Ben before he saw it with me (I had seen the film clip on Comedy Central the day before).  Oh well.

On that same token, I’ve been trying to go easy on the spoilers in my movie reviews.  Would any of my readers prefer that I go into more detail, or continue to save the movie for those who haven’t seen it?  Feel free to comment with your response – every time you comment, I get an email, and I love to get emails.  They make me feel like the world recognizes my existence.

P.S. – Hey, this is the 50th post on this blog! What a ways we’ve come, eh? Thanks to all of those who have prevented me from losing my faith in this site so far.  Keep up the readership, it means a lot!

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Sizable albino apes weaker than princesses; Los Campesinos! review

August 7, 2008 at 4:04 am · Filed under Music Reviews ·Tagged , , ,

So the reason there was no review last night was because I had a marathon session of Super Smash Brawl with Ben and Rebecca, my first time playing that game, and it is a quantum leap from the first two incarnations, but some of the levels are really annoying and distracting, but that’s really my only gripe with the game.

…and THAT WAS THE FIRST AND LAST VIDEO GAME REVIEW BY IAMDC!!!!! CONFETTI!!!!!!

Okay.

Los Campesinos! is the name of an enthusiastic young Welsh(!) band – so enthusiastic that they put an exclamation point in their band name, which is also each member’s stage name; hence, Gareth Campesinos! is the lead singer, Aleksandra Campesinos! plays keyboards and also sings, and so forth.  There are seven Campesinos!’s, meaning seven very young, very active Welsh kids jumping around and playing through popbescence, a term I just coined for music centered around youth and coming-of-age.  Man, that would have been useful for the intro to my Walkmen review.  Oh, well.

Los Campesinos!’ debut full-length, Hold On Now, Youngster… is what I imagine high school emo poets are really trying to say when they make poems about dead leaves and shit.  Los Campesinos! sing about sexual frustration, trying desperately to impress the opposite sex, and just…fucking growing up, dude, you know?  I’ve never heard music outside of Weird Al that relied so much on the lyrics to be appreciated fully.  When I hear lyrics like “You should have built a statue, and so I did of you/And you were ungrateful, and slightly offended at the dimensions of it/You said you looked less like the Venus de Milo, and more like your mother in a straitjacket” in the song “We Are All Accelerated Readers”, that makes me sit up and take notice, and google song lyrics like they want me to.  The main tragedy of this album for American listeners is Gareth’s intense Welsh accent which makes the lyrics kind of hard to understand if you a) aren’t watching him sing them (music videos help), or b) don’t look up the lyrics.  By the by, I found lyrics for it here.

This album fascinates me, to be honest.  I do sincerely regret not having listened to it a week earlier, so it could further put The Walkmen in perspective, but it mainly fascinates me because it seems so in the moment, so contemporary (two songs are titled “Knee Deep at ATP”, which is a series of music festivals, and “2007: The Year Punk Broke (My Heart)”), but feels like something that people are going to love for a long time, one of those albums that will be rediscovered and rediscovered with new mini-generations of young, awkward indie kids who can really connect with these lyrics on a visceral and intellectual level.  I guess I get a feeling of importance from this record.

That being said, I don’t think it’s one of my top albums of the year so far, because of the paradox of necessary-to-the-music words that are hard to understand, as well as an abrasiveness that goes beyond intended levels because let’s be honest, these guys can’t sing very well.  So that’s that for the review, but I want to post a few more snippets of song lyrics, because they’re really fun to read.

From “Knee Deep At ATP”

And though underexposed, i could see from the quality, his K Records t-shirt and you holding his hand
And I know he took you to the beach, I can tell from how you bite on your cheek, every time the sand falls from your insoles
And when our eyes meet, all that I can read, is “you’re the b-side”.

From “My Year In Lists”

You said “send me stationary to make me horny”
So I always write you letters in multicolours
Decorating envelopes for foreplay
Damn extended metaphors, I get carried away

From “This Is How You Spell ‘HAHAHA, I’ve Destroyed The Hopes And Dreams Of A Generation Of Faux-romantics'”

The trails on your skin spoke more to me than the reams and reams of half finished novels you’d leave lying all over the place
And every quotation that’d dribble from your mouth like a final, fatal livejournal entry
I know
I am wrong
I am sorry

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Blindingly fast Bonnie “Prince” Billy review

August 5, 2008 at 2:56 am · Filed under Music Reviews ·Tagged , , ,

Okay, I’m racing against my own closing eyes, so here goes.  Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s Lie Down In The Light.

  • This is the only album I’ve heard of Billy’s other than his classic I See A Darkness, which was around a decade ago.  It is said that Lie Down In The Light is the counterpart to that, what with the former being about darkness and despair, and the latter being all about the affirmation of life and such.  This one isn’t quite up to snuff, but it’s still very good in its own right.
  • Will Oldham, AKA Bonnie “Prince” Billy, has a voice that has so many quirks that I often wonder if he could possibly sing the way he does intentionally.  It just seems like he misses a lot of notes in really charming ways.
  • As much as I See A Darkness was a record that skewed the expectations of conventional folk music – when the lyrics were supposed to be heartbreaking, the backing music was warm and welcoming, and in a song called “Death to Everyone”, he sang, “Stars turn, balls burn/Coming kids are raging”, which sounds a lot like it’s about ejaculation, Lie Down In The Light is just plain straightforward folk.  There are fiddles, songs of love and companionship, and songs about faith.  Sounds about right.
  • I was about to say “this is musically unassuming and uncomplicated, but charming,” but then I remembered that I was really impressed by how subtly great the arrangements here are, only after a few listens.  If you listen to this album, really roll up your sleeves and listen to it multiple times, because you owe it to this record.

There, that’s it.  Sorry about the two hasty reviews in a row, I’ll try to be better tomorrow, but if this blog has taught me anything, it’s not to make promises about future content.  Later alligators.

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Once Upon A Time In The West review

August 4, 2008 at 3:42 am · Filed under Movie Reviews ·Tagged , , , , , , ,

I figure the name of the movie is too long to make it a subtitle, and I’m tired, so this will be a bullet-point review.  Sergio Leone wrote and directed Once Upon A Time In The West after his famed “Man With No Name” trilogy; hence we have a Clint Eastwood-less spaghetti Western, and with good reason.  I can’t imagine a single role he could have played in this movie.

  • Hey, I didn’t know a Geico caveman was in this movie! Oh, wait, that’s Charles Bronson as Harmonica.  I know every guy in this movie was made up to look leathery and sun-toasted, but God, he looks like the inside of a catcher’s mitt.  Oh well, it makes him look badass on the countless extreme close-ups on his face.
  • For any fan of 50’s-60’s movies, having Henry Fonda do what he does at the beginning of this movie as Frank is like having Barack Obama discovered as the guy in what everyone thought was R. Kelly’s sextape.  It’s twisted.
  • After this, I’ll move on from the acting: Fonda, Bronson, Jason Robards as Cheyenne, and Gabriele Ferzetti as Morton are all beyond words as far as their acting goes.  The latter three are the ones with ambiguous motivations, and all of them at times look more menacing or sinister than Fonda.  Classic Leone directing, and my dad would be proud of me for giving big ups to Robards, who I think is the best of all of them here.
  • Ennio Morricone is the most famous movie music maker other than John Williams, and he’s in top form, with his separate themes for all the main characters, giving each of the characters a bit more depth without anyone saying anything.  Brilliant.
  • Before Frank comes on screen for the first time and after he leaves for the last time, this movie slows to an almost unbearable crawl.  I don’t think it’s because of his acting, I think it’s because without him, there’s no conflict, but still some plot, so Leone is kind of unsure of himself.
  • I love the revealing of Harmonica’s motivation.
  • I don’t think I would be remotely alone if I were to say that this is overall Leone’s best work other than The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, despite what I said about the movie slowing down.  If it didn’t have those problems, I’d seriously consider it right along with GBU, seriously.

Maybe another movie review tomorrow, who knows; but I do have a general outline for my next few music reviews – I’ve done a bit of catching up with music released earlier this year that I hadn’t heard at first, so watch out for Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Los Campesinos!, Flight of the Conchords, and Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson.

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Doctor Who, Series 2 Review

August 3, 2008 at 2:58 pm · Filed under TV Reviews ·Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,

I finally re-watched the two-parter from Series 2 of Doctor Who that I hadn’t watched in over a year, so now I’m all set to review the whole series.

The series officially starts off with an untitled 7-minute special made to support Children in Need. Despite being so short, it’s a pretty important piece connecting the first series finale and the new season. The Doctor has just regenerated, and Rose, his companion, is confused and frightened of this new man. It’s David Tennant’s first appearance (aside from the brief cameo at the end of The Parting of the Ways), and he is instantly endearing, with his infectuous enthusiasm.

Next up is the 2005 Christmas Special, “The Christmas Invasion”. The Doctor is unconscious, recovering from regeneration, but Earth is being invaded. Rose is still apprehensive about this new Doctor, and her apprehensions only increase as he is too weak to do anything about the invasion. It makes for a really fun and well-written episode, and in true British fashion, tea saves the day. We also meet Harriet Jones, now Prime Minister (introduced in “Aliens of London / World War Three”) again. and Penelope Wilton does a fantastic job playing her. I could go on and on about it, but I’ll stop now.

“New Earth” kicks off the official second series with the Doctor returning to the year 5,000,000,000 in response to a message received on his psychic paper. A sisterhood of feline nuns is cloning humans to experiment on finding cures to fatal diseases, and an old enemy, Cassandra (from “The End of the World”) is also plotting to gain a new body. This is not one of my favourite episodes, it seemed contrived and very preachy. The kiss between Rose (possessed by Cassandra) and the Doctor seems to be shoehorned in, and the Doctor is incredibly moralistic about the cloning.

The Doctor meets Queen Victoria in the next episode, “Tooth and Claw”. This is a pretty good episode, the drama is absolutely perfect, and the twist at the end (I won’t spoil it) is completely unexpected. Queen Victoria is portrayed very well, but the giggly games that Rose plays with her get a little annoying. This episodes also seeds the spin-off show, Torchwood, pretty strongly.

“School Reunion” is one of my favourite Doctor Who episodes ever. Sarah Jane Smith and K-9, two of the best-loved Classic Doctor Who companions, return. The episode plays really well on the themes of, as Mickey puts it, “the missus and the ex”, Rose is startled to discover that the Doctor has always had companions, and Sarah Jane is saddened to discover that the Doctor hasn’t ever talked about her. It’s very poignantly written. Oh, and did I mention that all this happens while they save a school from its staff, who just happen to be huge bat creatures intending to conquer the universe? Elisabeth Sladen does an absolutely stellar job, and Sarah Jane now has her own spin-off, The Sarah Jane Adventures, which is a totally awesome show, too!

The Doctor has a new companion for “Girl in the Fireplace”, Rose’s boyfriend, Mickey Smith, who joined at the end of “School Reunion”. My favourite Doctor Who writer, Steven Moffat, writes this one. He handles the rather touchy subject of the Doctor having something akin to a romance very subtly and well, and the relationship between Reinette (Madame du Pompadour) and the Doctor is wonderfully portrayed. And clockwork robots in ridiculous 18th century French costumes? Priceless!

Next is a two parter set in an alternate Earth – “Rise of the Cybermen / The Age of Steel”. The Cybermen, one of the Doctor’s most famous classic enemies return, and are absolutely wonderful villains. Rose’s father is still alive in this universe, but Rose never existed, and Mickey also has a parallel persona, named Ricky – this adds quite some drama to the proceedings. Roger Lloyd Pack, who plays Barty Crouch Sr. in the Harry Potter movies is John Lumic, the creator of the Cyberman, which is really interesting to me as a HP fan, because David Tennant, the Doctor, plays Barty Crouch Jr. in them. Mickey has finally found a cause and a place where he is accepted, so he stays backon the alternate Earth to help rebuild, which I didn’t really like – Mickey made a very different companion, which is a good thing.

“The Idiot’s Lantern”, set during Queen Elizabeth’s coronation and the introduction of the television in Britain, is a pretty mediocre episode. An alien is “feeding” on people’s brains through the new invention of television. This episode is preachy again, which I really dislike – the Doctor and Rose humiliate a selfish father / husband, and we’re supposed to cheer. I really liked the portrayal of 1950s England, though.

Next up is a two-parter again, “The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit”. The Doctor and Rose arrive on a sanctuary base on an “impossible planet” – it is orbiting a black hole without falling into it, to find trouble, of course. The episodes were pretty good as a whole, but were spoiled (to me) because of all the Doctor/Rose shipping and corny lines like “If there’s one thing I believe in.. I believe in her! [Rose]” while talking about belief in gods and demons. The Doctor finding the “lost” TARDIS just in time also feels a little contrived, but is understandable.

“Love & Monsters” is one of the most divided episodes in fandom, but I really liked it. It’s proof that Doctor Who can make episodes of any genre, which is one of its strongest selling points. The episode centres around L.I.N.D.A, a Doctor fan group of five people that develops a strong friendship until a new member arrives. It’s a very human story, and it’s refreshing to see ordinary people portrayed on the show. It’s a huge departure from regular Doctor Who, but that’s what makes it unique.

“Fear Her”, set during the London 2012 Olympics, had a great plot, but not very good writing. Matthew Graham, who wrote this episode, also wrote for Life on Mars and does a very good job there. :/. I don’t really have very much to say about this episode – the idea had lots of potential (drawing people, and the people getting sucked into the drawing), but the execution was bad, and the whole “Olympic torch is a symbol of love, and love will save the world” plot resolution was absolutely horrible.

Finally, we get to the season finale, “Army of Ghosts / Doomsday”. I’m usually not the biggest fan of Doctor Who season finales – they always try to make them as BIG as possible, and lose the story along the way. The Cybermen and the Daleks return, and it was very amusing watching two sets of killer robot-y things advance on each other, yelling “DELETE!” and “EXTERMINATE!” respectively. Rose leaves (finally!) and I guess I was supposed to be sad, it was certainly written to evoke sadness, but I was just really excited – I’m not happy with her character devolving from a smart, sarcastic working class girl to a giggly, petulant teenager in LOVE with the Doctor. The series’ arc word (mentioned in every episode of the series), “Torchwood,” finally comes to a conclusion, as the finale takes place in Torchwood One in London (a very different place from Torchwood Three, in Cardiff, where Torchwood is set.)

Overall, it was a very inconsistent series, especially towards the end. As someone said, though, you’re only a true Doctor Who fan if you have things to complain about for every episode, but still keep watching the show :).

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Dropping acid under the hood; Walkmen review

August 3, 2008 at 2:07 am · Filed under Music Reviews ·Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

So when I originally planned to write the review, that title was what I first wrote, because I wanted my little “this is my life” paragraph to explain how when I got my car inspected, they found that my car battery was leaking acid inside the car, which sounds a lot worse than it is.  But that’s really all I had to say about it; that and thank God my car is okay, I love everything about the way it drives, I just want to take its CD player outside and viciously murder it.  But that’s that about that.

I’m overjoyed at how my contributors have stepped up their game of late.  Their reviews, probably as a result of being less frequent, are overall better than mine, which I love.  Feels like bringing in hired guns (and if you wish to see that analogy explored further, check out my own contributor bio over at BOTO).  And I also know that this is probably a punctuated equilibrium thing, and that these runs will be the exception, not the rule, and I’m perfectly cool with that (but I do dare my contributors to prove me wrong).  Still, if it gets me to step up my game, awesome.

This review was long-delayed, and I think it was because I wanted this review to be bigger than the album itself, because I think this jumped to my favorite album of the year basically the second time I listened to it all the way through and has only solidified itself as such since.  I was just looking for an angle, and thanks to previewing it with Ben and Kriti, I think it’s well-developed enough to finally write about here.

I think that this album is important in balancing out this year in music.  Up until this album’s release, the physical version of which will happen on August 19th (you can buy it digitally for 5 bucks that go to charity here! Do what I did and be a good person!), the great indie rock albums of the year, which in my opinion are: Devotion by Beach House, Red, Yellow & Blue by Born Ruffians, Visiter by The Dodo’s, Nouns by No Age, and Vampire Weekend’s self titled album, have all been youthful.  When I say youthful, that can be applied in different ways; Born Ruffians is about teenage awkwardness and the love that is borne and hampered by it, Vampire Weekend is so college it just switched majors from “Being like by all the cool kids” to “Being dismissed, but still secretly liked, by all the cool kids”, Nouns is an album that glories in being undeveloped, ragged, and teenaged, The Dodo’s are just generally bright-eyed, and Beach House implies in both theme and the name of their band what they stand for – a summer vacation.

The Walkmen stand for none of these things on their newest album, You & Me.  The one word that has stayed in my mind about it is mature.  All of the albums mentioned above were either the first or second full-length from their band; this is the Walkmen’s fourth LP, fifth if you include their note-by-note cover of Harry Nilsson’s 1974 Album Pussy Cats, titled Pussy Cats Starring The Walkmen, and you can really hear how confident they are in their sound.  In addition, all the above albums except for No Age were released in March or earlier, with Nouns coming out in May.  The music industry had taken its yearly break for summer tours and festivals, and those of us who can’t blow hundreds of dollars one weekend for a music festival have been without something fresh for a while.  So here comes You & Me, the perfect introduction to the second half of the music year, hopefully an indicator of things to come, in addition to showing us why child’s play is just that.

Beyond that, however, you can tell that this album is about adult love, not young love.  And this isn’t even the adult love I talked to Kriti about, where you go on a first date, a second date, and you begin a relationship with having a relationship as the stated intent (as opposed to young love, where you see a girl in your chemistry class and you Chem Is Try to get her to make out with you).  There’s both the “I’m still in love with you, after all these friggin’ long years” love (“On The Water”), the “we’re both older and without love, so what the hell” love (“Canadian Girl”), there’s the “I’ve spent so long being your friend that I’m fucking tired so I wish were in love” love (“Seven Years of Holidays”), and a different kind for every song.  None of these loves are physical, except in “Red Moon”, where the “you’re beatiful” line still feels more like an emotional thing than lust.

This album really could be considered a concept album, in that I can imagine that every song here can be sung on some old riverboat going gently down the Mississippi River, just with different characters with different histories on each song.  This goes beyond just maturity, it’s world-weariness that’s downright charming and enrapturing.  I mean, all of these lyrics (and this is a mark of incredibly well-developed songwriting) could be just read as a poem and still be understood and appreciated.  In “Postcards From Tiny Islands”, lead singer Hamilton Leithauser croons: “I’ll be drunk before too long/And I’ll keep up this sappy talk/This letter does it all/It’s too much to enclose/These postcards from tiny islands/do more than you know.”  Leithauser is best known for having the most Dylan-esque voice around, if a little raspier and higher, but throughout the album he takes the similarities a bit further, adding Dylanesque sentimentality to his bag of tricks, while keeping the songwriting a little less verbose, a little more “read-between-the-lines”.

On a purely musical level, this album doesn’t really have any flaws, and isn’t all that ostentatious.  The drums from Matt Barrick are totally solid, but not spectacular like on previous records, but that’s more than tolerable; this isn’t as drum-centric as 2004’s great Bows & Arrows was, but as Drowned in Sound, the only journalistic review I could find already published, says, “The musicianship is almost routine in its excellence; Matt Barrick’s drums in particular kick and roll throughout, propelling the songs with a sick-at-sea feel…”

The classic Walkmen sound is back, with lots of space in the music for echoes (not reverb) from the guitar and the cymbal crashes.  But the difference here is that unlike previous albums, either with the keyboard in their first two or the brass band in A Hundred Miles Off, the four key rock components (vocals, guitar, bass, drums) are the only primary sounds on the album.  A couple trumpet flourishes aside (most notably, and beautifully, in “Red Moon”), this is a self-contained effort, and I think the album benefits from it.  These songs don’t need a keyboard to make them better; they’re great as is.

Individual highlights, while hard to pick out since really, every song is great, are probably these: “Red Moon”‘s slow, slow waltz is absolutely sublime, and “Canadian Girl”, which follows it, shows Leithauser channeling Motown with his “ahh-ah-ahh’s”, and flexing a bit of versatility.  “On The Water” is the most aggressive song on the album, but it still manages to keep some benign influence to prevent it from being just another repeat of their breakthrough single “The Rat” from back in ’04.

Well, 2008, you don’t seem to be done cranking out the great music, but you’ve still got a lot of work to do if you want to surpass ’07.  If TV On The Radio matures like the Walkmen have in their third effort, that should make it a lot easier.

A movie review will probably come tomorrow.

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