So, I started my Saturday morning with a lovely, 11:20AM showing of No Country For Old Men, which is as bleak a movie as you may see this year. It’s about mythology, or at least how bullshit most mythology really is. It’s about romancing a past that doesn’t exist. It’s about fate, or at least its cousin dumb luck. It’s a movie about a guy who finds money, but it’s really just about a bunch of shit that happens. It’s about random violence, and horrible, horrible planned violence.
And it has Javier Bardem giving the year’s most chilling performance. And Tommy Lee Jones giving a profoundly sad one. And Josh Brolin giving a surprisingly subtle and fantastic one. And Kelly Macdonald doing an amazing job hiding her Scottish accent behind a thick Texas drawl, and breaking your heart in the process.
I’ve read the book (by Cormac McCarthy), and it’s a pretty faithful adaptation by those lovable pranksters the Coen brothers. But it’s by far their most straightforward movie in years. It’s not clever, it’s not snarky. It has black humor, and it looks gorgeous. It moves slowly, lingering over every pool of blood. And it has almost no music, just a lot of ambient sounds, like someone unscrewing a lightbulb. It’s full of tension, but has little action.
Thank god someone’s still doing big, dumb, and a fun muzak. Here’s “Tick Tick Boom” by The Hives.
(We’ll see how long this embeddable video lasts; for some inexplicable reason, Universal Music doesn’t let you embed “official” versions of its videos. Weenies.)
Also, I’m buying as much music as possible from amazon.com’s MP3 service. If emusic didn’t require a monthly subscription, I’d be buying it there. Support non-iTunes (or non-DRM) music stores.
Like everyone else in gamelandville, I’ve played through Bioshock. And it’s good. Very good. “Game of the Year” good. It’ll probably lose out to that “Halo” thing or Rock Band, but in the case of the latter, comparing it to a game with its own custom controller isn’t fair. If Bioshock came with its own $200 “Big Daddy” helmet interface, it’d be a 1-to-1 comparison. (It’ll be interesting to see how Halo 3 feels after blasting through Rapture. Consider the bar raised. A lot.)
But I’m not just here to praise Bioshock and admit my crazy man-crush on Ken Levine. I’m here to rip it to shreds. So, without further ado, I’ll break this down Adrenaline Vault-style, with individual ratings. Because that’s how I roll. (I’m fairly certain there are no spoilers here.) (more…)
Somewhere in that blackness is Spoon playing at the Capitol Hill Block Party in Seattle on Saturday the 28th. I attended with the lovely and talented Ms. Sizzle Says. (Whom, as you can see in the accompanying photo, is like three feet shorter than I am.) It was an all-day event, but I wasn’t really familiar with any of the other bands. We caught a bit of John Vanderslice, who was… fine and OK and whatever.
Ms. Sizzle is a fan of Against Me!, the band that preceded Spoon. They were also OK. They sure did shout enthusiastically. It was your basic angry punk music, sounding like a less Irish Dropkick Murphys. (Which isn’t a criticism; both bands shout a lot.) There were a lot of political messages buried in the mix a bit, ones which the crowd surfing furries (don’t ask) surely grokked.
The crowd got pretty big for Spoon, and they certainly didn’t disappoint. They rolled through a nearly 90-minute set, mixing in most of the tunes from their current CD “Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga” with some of the “greatest hits” from the past (”Everything Hits at Once, ” “The Fitted Shirt,” “Take a Walk,” “Me and the Bean,” “The Way We Get By,” and a killer version of “Jonathon Fisk“).
In other news, The Simpsons Movie. It’s worth seeing more for all the throwaway gags in the periphery, which is generally true of all great Simpsons episodes. My favorite line? The always quotable Ralph Wiggum, upon seeing a naked Bart Simpson riding through the streets of Springfield after a dare from Homer: “I like men.”
At the risk of this becoming, “Steve’s Music Blog,” I just picked up tickets to see these guys in a couple of weeks. This isn’t my favorite track off their new CD, “Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga,” but all of their songs just sound… cool. I just dig Britt Daniel’s voice for some reason.
This is where I was last night. It was an evening full of happy sounds and confetti flying all about the room. (This video really takes off around the 3-minute mark.) It was… inspiring.
There’s something hotwired into the male strand of DNA that makes us like to blow shit up, and to see shit blown up. Since we spend the fourth of July celebrating the birth of our fine nation by blowing shit up, I figured it made sense to see Transformers, a movie made by a director (Michael Bay) who likes to blow shit up and based on a toy that is designed for boys who want to pretend to blow shit up.
I suppose I should confess that, as with most treasured geek things, Transformers means nothing to me. I’m a wee-bit too old to have played with the toys or cared about the cartoon; I’ve never even seen the show before, though I know the tagline “More Than Meets the Eye” from commercials. I know that some people my own age watched the cartoon but dudes, that was college… why weren’t you all getting all angsty watching The Seventh Seal. Philistines.
But I wanted to see big robots doing battle and that’s what I got. What I didn’t expect was a John Hughes 80s movie grafted onto it, but the humor actually made it more bearable. The film looks amazing, and the digital compositing is terrific. The robots really blend into the environments. But the fact everyone was goofing off around them made it all one extended joke, which thank god it was. I mean, it’s a movie based on a toy. And as Pirates of the Caribbean—the first, non-crappy one—proved, you can take the worst premise and turn it into humorous fluff.
Which isn’t to say Transformers is as good as Pirates of the Caribbean. There’s no central, “WTF” performance like Johnny Depp, though it appears John Turturro gave it his best effort. (He’s horrible.) And Anthony Anderson, who proved himself with his killer role on The Shield, reverts back to screaming all the time for humor. But Shia LaBeouf is a star, the generic girlfriend was hot, the plot was funny, and lots of shit blew up. It’s a good time for the entire family, assuming you’re OK with an extended masturbation joke. (Where’s Long Duk Dong to bring it all home for the Hughes fan?)
It would make a good double header with Live Free or Die Hard, which I saw over the weekend. If anything, Die Hard 4 is an even more over-the-top action film. And it’s less Michael Bay-esque, which is to say it’s not edited and shot solely for over caffeinated 11-year olds. The worst thing about it is that it’s turned John McClane—so memorably vulnerable in the first movie, particularly when it came to his foot problems—into generic action superhero man.
But it’s even more balls-out action than Transformers. It’s basically an extended sequence of action scenes with little bits tying them all together. While everything it’s all well and good, the last one involving the world’s most mobile fighter jet pegs the stupid meter at 11. And I can’t hate on Justin Long too much for his “I’m playing a teenager in this movie even though I’m nearly 30″ role, despite those horrible “I’m a Mac” ads. I signed an agreement to let CGM be used in a movie he was in called Accepted, though I’ve never looked closely enough at the movie to see if it actually appears anywhere in the final movie.
The Polyphonic Spree is a 23-member band of hippie hipsters from Texas who dress alike—the first CD, it was white robes; the second colored robes; today, it’s black jumpsuits—and clearly are very, very happy. As someone somewhere said, they’re like “Up With People” for hipsters.
And man, it’s refreshing.
Their new CD, “The Fragile Army” couldn’t be more sonically different than the White Stripes “Icky Thump,” but both are sunny and optimistic and fun and funny. And brilliant. (And I have tickets to see the Spree in July, and the Stripes in September.)
Where the Stripes are all about minimalism and tight arrangements, the Spree operate on an epic scale. It’s hard not to sound enormous when you have flutes, French horns, violins, pianos, drums, bass, and guitars supporting sunny people yelling lyrics like, “It’s like running away with the wind in our face, it’s like flying/And you and I are open wide.”
On their last two CDs, it all got a wee-bit tiresome and was best digested in small pieces. But “The Fragile Army” is a better complete work, with more variety to the themes, both music and lyrical. The first single, the jubilant “Running Away” is one of the sunnier, more traditional tracks. Others, like the title song and “Mental Cabaret,” are somewhat darker. But it’s all pretty wonderful. Go buy it. Now.
As for the Stripes, “Icky Thump” is definitely a return to the more conventional garage/blues/pop versus the rather weird “Get Behind Me Satan.” There’s more guitar, lots of blistering Jack White soloing, Meg’s drums are amped at mad-loud levels, a truly funny call and response between Jack and Meg playing junk collectors (or something) on “Rag and Bone.”
(To those who criticize the Stripes because of Meg’s simplistic stomp, sheesh, talk about not getting it. They’re all about simplicity. The lyrical themes, the music… it’s all back to basics, off-the-cuff stuff. With a “normal” drummer, it wouldn’t be the same at all… and you’d probably notice Jack’s sloppy playing too.)
There’s a couple of weak tracks on “Icky Thump”—the weird Irish ditties in the middle are just, well, weird in a less good way than the Flamenco-horned Conquest—but it’s another dozen awesome Stripes songs for your $15. Go buy it. Now.
The White Stripes new CD comes out tomorrow, and the first single “Icky Thump,” has grown on me over the last month. And I bought tickets this weekend to see them at the Paramount Theater in September.
I’m pretty sure I have a small man-crush on Jack White, and a real crush on Meg.
It’s pretty funny to think that one of the most groundbreaking shows in TV history ended not with a bang but with some Journey.
Some people say the ending resolved nothing, but it resolved everything: Tony remains a sociopath, Carmela an enabler in denial, Meadow is daddy’s daughter, AJ is an idiot who can be manipulated by anyone, blah blah blah. Tony will probably end up in jail, he might end up dead, or both. Life goes on, but it’ll never be the same. The FBI guy was excited that Tony was going to win, yet the big Soprano is even more miserable. Life goes on for Tony, but life sorta sucks.
I suppose I should confess that, as with most treasured geek things, Transformers means nothing to me. I’m a wee-bit too old to have played with the toys or cared about the cartoon; I’ve never even seen the show before, though I know the tagline “More Than Meets the Eye” from commercials. I know that some people my own age watched the cartoon but dudes, that was college… why weren’t you all getting all angsty watching 
As for the Stripes, “Icky Thump” is definitely a return to the more conventional garage/blues/pop versus the rather weird “Get Behind Me Satan.” There’s more guitar, lots of blistering Jack White soloing, Meg’s drums are amped at mad-loud levels, a truly funny call and response between Jack and Meg playing junk collectors (or something) on “Rag and Bone.”