SONGS IN MY "2007 HITS" IPOD PLAYLIST III


T-Pain feat. Akon, "Bartender"

First, he was in love with a stripper, then he was buying you a drank, and now he likes the bartender. On the bright side, this means that T-Panda is realizing he wants a sympathetic ear more than intense fucking. It also means that he's probably a lonely alcoholic looking for an excuse to stay til last call. Akon's verse underlines this by announcing his sobriety before asking T-Pain for the car keys so he can leave the club and bang someone. T-Panda can describe the car Akon's leaving lovestains in and say "T-Pain + 3" all he wants (like Akon and his wives aren't already on the list), but the pathetic subtext helps makes this his cutest auto-tune yet.

Oooo she made us drinks, to drink
We drunk 'em, Got drunk
And now I know she thinks I'm cool

Movies I watched last week, from favorite to least.


I don't normally put movies I've rented before on this list, but I'll make an exception here, as I COMPLETELY FORGOT that I already had (a first). I was inspired to rent it last week after seeing the wtf artwork, and was smacked by intense deja vu from the PRE-credit opening song (you heard me) on. Stacy Keach plays an intense, slow-speaking therapist in a castle-turned-military-insane-asylum who's crazier than the character actors shrieking gibberish around him. The movie's fucked up enough without trying to remember where and when you saw it before and how the hell you ever forgot.


I get that Will Ferrell doesn't want to do that cross-eyed insanity in every movie, but did he have to go without it here? Still, his less inspired performances are more enjoyable than Jon Heder at his best. The mood is pro forma compared to Talladega Nights, and Jenna Fischer is wasted as saintly proof of Heder's heterosexuality. Only Will Arnett's murderous skate chase of Ferrell across ice and off truly scores, but it'd be hard to make comedians on ice unfunny.


I assumed that the plot - folks trapped in the Alaskan wilderness - would keep John Sayles from indulging in his usual didacticism, but somehow the guy fit a movie's worth of preaching and politics in the first third. Was it really necessary for a laid-off cannery worker to take it out on two lesbians in order to get a laid-off pulp mill worker haunted by the past out on a boat? But if you want a movie where David Strathairn is the lead, this is the shit you have to put up with.


First sequence features David Caruso and Helen Hunt. Second features Caruso, Nicolas Cage and Michael Rappaport. Cage later lifts Hope Davis for 40 reps. Samuel L. Jackson, Ving Rhames and the bartender who said "our man in Amsterdam!" all have smaller, notably less juicy roles than they did in Pulp Fiction, which came out the year before. Perhaps in response to Cage and Caruso's refusal to keep kosher, director Barbet Schroeder seems determined to stay as calm as possible.


Stars none of the actors that made Malibu's Most Wanted enjoyable.

"Come on, comics aren't just for kids! It's a viable artistic medium! I'll let you borrow my copy of Watchmen! Just try it!"

If the first season of Heroes accomplishes only one thing, it's that it gives folks who never bothered reading about superheroes the chance to experience the kind of grand dizziness you get from a great comic book story arc without ever wondering what inspired that guy to put his underwear on over his tights. It lifts its mix of earthly emotion and surreal imagery from Joss Whedon and the better Marvel films, but unlike on Buffy, all the padding and one-off stories clearly connect to the season-long narrative. Watching it all over a day and a half was not unlike burning through a classic compendium - a bombastic cliffhanger hitting you every twenty-plus pages - except you couldn't take it into the bathroom with you.

I'm a sucker for "real people discovering great power comes with great responsibility" jazz and Heroes plays it out on such an epic scale (without any costumes!) that, despite some pat TV dramatics (and the rather trashy choice in guest stars - Malcolm McDowell? Eric Roberts??), the show feels like an unprecedented success. There are a lot of traps future seasons could fall into: stock adventures, contradictory details burdening the core mystery and requiring inscrutable exposition, increasingly uninteresting new characters, basically all the shit that happened to X-Files. Thankfully, the first season has enough closure that, if necessary, it could be appreciated on its own.

There may be other examples I'm unaware of, but the decision to have subtitles not only appear at the bottom of the screen but also beside or above the speaker was truly inspired. It allows for more striking compositions, hinting at comic book art without using actual word balloons, which would have been a painful contrivance (Ang Lee didn't even try that one in The Hulk). While it's not really an option for films where the language spoken is the language of the country that made it, American films incorporating foreign language sequences would be wise to rip this off.

P.S. the show is scored by Wendy And Lisa! More shows need to provide me with that kind of heartwarming opening credit.

I came across this godawful video on MTV2 this morning, and couldn't figure out why the hell it was getting played. Mediocre post-Coldplay is one thing, but twats leading mediocre post-Coldplay acts don't usually look like the dude from Stereo MCs or Justin Timberlake trying out for the Scissor Sisters. Why would they foist this assmunch on us when he's not a snap assmunch or an emo assmunch or any other currently fashionable form of assmunch? I assumed they were named Young Modern Station, the only words present in the clip, but I guess that's where they're performing (the album is also named Young Modern, it seems). When the closing credits came, the REAL identity of this band was a total shock. Can you guess who it is? Here are some clues.

1. They've been around for over a decade.
2. They've always sucked.
3. They were really young when they started sucking.
4. If you've read anything about them over the last seven years, you've heard that they're ambitious and always evolving.
5. They've been consistently popular in the country that wrought them.

Figured out who it is? Doubleclick the youtube to find out! Take your shoes off beforehand, lest your socks get blown right through them!

DVDs I watched last week, from favorite to least.


This minor film about a convict who discovers a passion for gardening is so whimsical and formulaic (at least two musical montages) that it would float off the screen if it wasn't anchored by Clive Owen, who's so hot right now. So hot.


Tony Jaa doesn't show much in the way of charisma (his character is a pouty, clueless innocent), so I assume his distinguishing characteristic in martial arts films is either that he's the only Thai one around or that he lands most of his blows to the head, which really seems like more work for his opponents than him. But at one point he kicks someone in the face with flaming feet, so fuck it.


All the shots come from the POV of troubled Colin Hanks' many spy cameras, as he stalks Ana Claudia Talancon, who doesn't seem unworthy of his obsession. It inherently lacks dimension, but its so monomaniacal a formal exercise that it's bound to gain a cult.


"One of the most satisfying Berry films ever made!" - San Francisco Chronicle. "Bruce Willis' most entertaining sex thriller since Color Of Night!" - Anthony Is Right.


A ridiculous Irish mob melodrama (the bloody climax is intercut with a Paddy's day parade) that benefits from the presence of Gary Oldman, Ed Harris and John C. Reilly, each exuding a different kind of magnetism. Sean Penn must have brought Reilly with him from Casualties Of War, which shows an intelligence not evident in his seeming on-screen belief that this is his On The Waterfront. He and future wife Robin Wright also fail to make this their Cleopatra.


Eternal Sunshine has more engaging performances, The Work Of Director Michel Gondry has more fascinating visuals. Which isn't to say this is without engaging performances or fascinating visuals.


There's enough jokes for at least two ten minute episodes here, most of them showing up in the first twenty minutes. And had I been laughing, I probably wouldn't have found the rest of the film's sexual politics so embarassing.

I am so not linking to the stream.

What started as a fascinating, ambitious extension of R. Kelly's vocal inspiration, crackpot wit and gift for narrative is now sluggish shuck'n'jive introduced by an IFC nebbish who seems utterly charmed to be sitting next to a real live crazy black person. All energy is lost over three chapters of nonmusical prattle in a diner (with only a shot of a helicopter and one of the narrator enjoying a meal to pass for inspired entertainment), but its the argument between a cartoon pimp and a cartoon priest (both played by Kelly) in Chapter 19 that truly signifies Trapped's jumping the shark. Remember, "jumping the shark" isn't when a show is no longer of high quality, or when an artist becomes a parody of themselves. "Jumping the shark," if it's to mean anything, is a term that should be saved for when the audience is presented with something that has absolutely nothing to do with what originally had us paying attention. I'm sure there was plenty of mediocrity on Happy Days before this legendary moment, but I assume it still involved nostalgiac humor about '50s small town teenage life. This doesn't:



So that it doesn't get confused with worthwhile evolution (like, I dunno, Revolver), it's also key that a "shark jump" moment sucks. Hard. I'd be disappointed if anyone said the new Trapped chapters didn't qualify.

Four songs from I Shall Exterminate Everything Around Me That Restricts Me From Being The Master, Electric Six's upcoming fourth album, are up on their Myspace page. I'm already a fan of "Randy's Hot Tonight," and I'll have a better grasp on the other tracks once I parse all the falsetto.

None of the sexy adventures in the sexy video for Maroon 5's "Wake Up Call" match the sexiness of sexy Adam Levine getting a sexy patdown from sexy security guards in a sexy airport (while his sexy shoes go through the sexy metal detector!), but the presence of sexy Jeremy Sisto as The Other Man in sexy Adam Levine's sexy sex life is pretty sexy and Adam's shattering of a sexy mirror with a sexy bat while shirtless (so sexy!) is very sexy. The words "Maroon 5" flying towards the screen as a car explodes is more hot than sexy, and the attempt to include the other Marooned 4 is too little sexy too late, but Adam's sexy interrogation by the sexy cops is more than sexy enough to compensate. I don't like the electrocution, though. The idea of all that sexy coming to an unsexy end is heartbreaking. Adam Levine should be hung.

DVDs I watched last week, from favorite to least.


Until the final reel's slo-mo violence, Robert Altman and his cast create a mood so conversational and unhurried that you don't even think about how much Bonnie & Clyde must have had to do with it getting made. It's sad that a film's worst ten minutes tend to be its last, as it can overshadow the first hour and a half.


Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Jeff Daniels are so effective at detailing the lives of two disabled individuals at different levels of acceptance that it's a disappointment when the plot begins to incorporate generic heist and double-crossing motifs, even if they're done with more nuance than usual.


It's possible that I wouldn't have been bothered that this film didn't subvert its "enigmatic serial killer" plot elements if I hadn't already seen The Host, in which the same director and lead actor reach higher with even more hackneyed material, and Zodiac, which had "true crime" status to keep the details from feeling contrived. Host fans who want to see more of Bong Joon-Ho's work will find it rewarding anyway.


Rather than try to make your "love interest realizes hero is too busy trying to save the world to be a good partner" subplot as subtle as possible and hide your cinematic tragedy cliches behind docu-style shakey-cam, it might be a better idea to just not include them. They aren't what gives the horrific climax so much power.


A cavalcade of horny '60s celebrities put on funny outfits and try to fuck a Swedish model posing as the All-American girl. One of those desperate attempts at hip that are infinitely more fucked up than any actual counter-cultural effort.


Had I known the the extra half-hour on the director's cut was 100% pedo fantasy, I would have stuck with the Hollywood cut for Frenchified gunplay and batty Gary Oldman. Or maybe I would have rewatched The Fifth Element.


A two-hour concept video for a 30 Seconds To Mars cover of Skid Row's "Wasted Time," featuring Marlon Wayans' finest dramatic turn. Ellen Burstyn really doesn't need your help to chew the scenery, Darren.


Anthony Hopkins once again uses his murderous brain and awkward accents to harass a southern orphan working for the public good. The deleted scene featuring doggy-style set to opera is reminiscent of Ridley Scott's hilarious Hannibal but the incessant luridness is usually more Adrian Lyne. Ryan Gosling entertains himself by trying to pass for a southern orphan.

Here's where I admit that I didn't recognize that the riff on Timbaland and the Hives' "Throw It On Me," one of my favorite singles this year, is the same one from the Elastik Band's "Spazz," one of my favorite songs from the Nuggets box. According to allmusic and wikipedia, the song is credited solely to Timbaland, Randy Fitzsimmons (the Hives' songwriting alias) and Timothy Clayton a.k.a. rapper Attitude. Has anyone seen the liners for Shock Value? Is it credited? Despite this lift, it's probably my favorite rap-rock collabo track since Mike Shinoda and the X-ecutioners "brought the seperation of styles to a stop" with "It's Goin' Down" back in '02.



Hell YEAH, Mike! Putting rap and rock together was a "logical progression on the time line"...in 1985! And yet I'm forever grateful for his enthusiasm.

From Glen Boyd's blogcritics.org review of Marooned*:
"As is, many of the choices here are, at least on the surface, somewhat curious ones. This is a book where both Dionne Warwick and Ronnie James Dio are warranted the critical consideration of John Darnielle and Anthony Miccio respectively. Manassas, the long since forgotten band fronted at one time by Stephen Stills is the unlikely recipient of critical props here by Kandia Crazy Horse, the editor of Charlotte's Creative Loafing."

I doubt this was intended, but it reads as if one should not only already know who I am, but be surprised by the fact that Dio warrants MY critical consideration. I've decided to find this flattering. If you buy a copy and send it to me, I promise to sign it, sprinkle sparkle dust all over it, and send it back to you free of charge.

==
*You already know this if you've been watching E! lately, but Marooned is a collection of desert island disc essays, including one written by yours truly. It's currently at #7 on Amazon's Discographies & Buyer Guides chart, behind The Billy Joel Keyboard Book.

Movies watched last week, from favorite to least.


Yeah, it's hammy and the supporting cast is cliche, but where recent films about addicts use camera effects to suggest the sensual experience of their drug of choice, Billy Wilder focuses solely on the vicious circle, with Ray Milland's desperate and equally vicious drunk almost always on screen. If Milland wasn't so acidic, it's doubtful Wilder would have any sympathy for him.


Man, even if I hadn't read Michael Moriarty's wikipedia page, his performance would be proof enough that D.A. Ben Stone is long gone. But if there's a reason Fairuza Balk hasn't gotten more work, it's not evident here.


Chris Rock has joked that when he and Spike Lee are at the same restaurant, attractive black women stop by Spike's table and white families stop by his. The ambitiousness (Steve Buscemi as the best friend rather than Jay Mohr) and acknowledgement of marital life here is a healthy reaction to that experience, but when Charles Stone III, director of the underrated Mr. 3000, dropped out, Rock should have thought about letting Spike run the camera.


It's depressing to watch old punks indulge in the same self-satisfied nostalgia they hated hippies for, especially when David Crosby at least knows that sex is preferable to violence.


The Devil And Daniel Johnston remains the only indie-rock doc I've seen that doesn't require the viewer to already know why they should give a shit, let alone enjoy listening to the oddballs in question.


Has some observations about the difference between Christians and Christianity, but the pace is too flaccid for it to become memorable observational humor, let alone the kind of slapstick Peter Sellers thrived in.


Pauline Kael called this "one of the most sheerly pleasurable physical comedies ever made," and, rollycoaster sequences aside, I have to assume that she's such a Gunga Din fan that she didn't mind what a ham-fisted rehash this was. Recommended to Kate Capshaw fans and people who wish they could say "me so solly!" in public.

Top Ten Of 2007


LCD Soundsystem, Sound Of Silver
Post-techno Eno-rock (including a single one co-worker called "the best Cake song ever"), with James Murphy foregoing music-today gripes to focus on what's really bothering him, mortality.


White Stripes, Icky Thump
It's possible that the Raconteurs helped Jack White get out of himself (as much as I think Brendan Benson is never a good idea, it was probably good to get Jack away from self-conscious minimalism), but I'm guessing it's marriage that's turned him into such a happy ham. It's nice to see an artist I assigned to "some better, some worse" consistency release some serious better.


Arcade Fire, Neon Bible
The least pompous practitioners of "The Big Music" ever (I even watched some youtubes of The Dream Academy just to check) and possibly the hookiest full-length in the genre (I promise I'll listen to a Waterboys' LP someday). Perfect for folks who get off on ridiculous rock grandeur despite themselves.


Queens Of The Stone Age, Era Vulgaris
At first I thought the pop-metal songcraft was considerably sloppier than on Lullabies To Paralyze, but it turns out they just hid it under the sickest riffola I've heard in ages. Some Hall & Oates meets White Light/White Heat with BOC offstage saying "DAMN" shit.


Modest Mouse, We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank
Credit the seafaring theme or the presence of a Smith, but this is the first Modest Mouse album that maintains its flow throughout, never getting stuck in a lurchy rut for a couple tracks. Samey and sweeter for it.


!!!, Myth Takes
We Will, We Will Remain In Light You!


Marnie Stern, In Advance Of The Broken Arm
More energy than Mary Timony, less oppressive than any XY-chromosomed indie-metal, a hoot if you can get used to chirping over hammer-ons.


Low, Drums And Guns
Refining their melodramatic minimalism as if they knew soundtrack compilers were watching or something. They're getting wryer with time, too, which is impressively healthy for melodramatic minimalists.


R. Kelly, Double Up
A re-hash of TP.3 Reloaded with welcome production assistance on the club tracks. Alone, he focuses on what FourFour calls "metaphor killers," something I am so not sick of.


The Stooges, The Weirdness
How the hell could Half Japanese exist today? Kids now are totally too self-conscious - as soon as they hit Youtube, VH1 is gonna hit them. To make some A+ naive-rock, you'd probably have to be a shameless (you said clueless, I didn't) has-been punk backed by unreformed acid rockers and captured by an engineer who fetishizes "warts and all." If I had a car, I'd roll my windows and blast this. I like to think Lester Bangs would too - it's a "rock'n'roll grandpa" Pepsi ad from hell.

1. Higher joke-per-minute ratio than Wet Hot American Summer.
2. Equal success rate (around 99%, I reckon).

If I see this in the theaters again, which I'm seriously considering, it will be the first time I've gone to a film twice since Battlefield Earth. I couldn't give it a higher compliment.

Movies I watched this week, from favorite to least.


When this movie came out in 2000, Laura Linney might have qualified as my least favorite actress of all time: humorless, shrill, miserable, no fun at all. But after seeing this, The Squid And The Whale and Breach, it's pretty clear that the problem with Congo, Absolute Power and Primal Fear wasn't her so much as Congo, Absolute Power and Primal Fear. Turns out Mark Ruffalo deserves my respect as well. I already knew Matthew Broderick does great passive-aggressive.


Humor-wise, time has shown you can relent even less than they do here. But I can't imagine anyone pulling off the surreal structure and matter-of-fact religious irreverence today with the same craft or inspiration (seeing The Ten on Wednesday, though!).


Teen outcast chic is sadly traded for junkie chic, and wolfsbane-as-methadone is a less gripping metaphor than lycanthropy-as-adulthood. Everything else is as awesome as it was the first time.


It's possible that if I lived in England I might have enough hostility towards countryside demagogues to appreciate the tonal shift that occurs in the last third, but my current stance on mass murderers got in the way of the ha-ha a lot more than my stance on zombies did in Shaun Of The Dead.


As great as Dean Stockwell's Leopold is, Orson Welles' Clarence Darrow is such a platitudinous bore that I might prefer Murder By Numbers for Ryan Gosling's Loeb (Sandra Bullock gives fewer speeches, too).


For a cheap, poorly directed, chemistry-free film shelved for a year and dumped on DVD, this sure has a lot of celebrity cameos.


Proof that Lukas Haas is not ready to play a dad, convey a mental breakdown or carry a movie.

Shaun Brady's Transformers review for the Philadelphia City Paper noted "if you had 'just under six years' in the office pool regarding when an airplane slamming into the side of a heavily populated high-rise office building would go from chilling reminder to nifty action scene, collect your winnings." You can also cash in if you gave the same answer for when a poster featuring a destroyed NYC monument, burning skyscrapers and a date would go from disturbing memorial to appetite-whetting teaser for an eagerly anticipated future blockbuster.

Seriously, what the fuck? Was the problem with War Of The Worlds that Spielberg didn't incorporate the horrors of 9/11 into a monster movie effectively enough? Now we have to make a Godzilla movie with POV digicams, so we can really capture what it's like to watch large groups of people run from unthinkable destruction? How is this less tacky and disgusting than if they just used terrorists? If you're going for real-life chaos and agony, use a real-life threat! It's really hard to make Uwe Boll look mature, but at least the manic nihilism promised by the trailers for Postal is an adolescent response to the tragedies of the last decade. I guess I just prefer my exploitive trash honest.

Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band: Unconditionally Guaranteed [Mercury, 1974]
I've always suspected that underneath the naive surrealism the Captain might be a dumbbell, and now that he's really (really really) trying to go commercial he's providing proof. This time he really (really) does it--writes dumb little songs with dumb little lyrics and dumb little hooks. Maybe all the dumb dumb parts can be blamed on svengali and cocomposer Andy DiMartino. And I admit that a lot of these are passable ("Magic Be") to wonderful ("Sugar Bowl") dumb little songs. But they're still dumb. Really. B- Robert Christgau

Essential reading: Rescue Dawn - The Truth

Movies I watched last week (plus a few I forgot from the week before that), from favorite to least.


While watching the film, I was slightly disappointed by the lack of "holy shit" moments equal to the monster's first appearance on land, and the mix of uncompromising wit and sentimentality made me slightly uneasy (I cared about everyone and nothing could be predicted). In hindsight, knowing the film never devolves into arbitrary cruelty, I'm impressed by how John-Hoo Bong pulled off the co-existence. The family, maudlin when they're not cranky and almost pathetically bound together, makes the stream of metaphors and social commentary emotionally resonant whether or not you know anything about Korean history. And as Joshua Clover notes, the movie makes you want to know more. It's a rare film I like more after watching it, and a rare film I want to see more than once.


Peter Segal and Elliott Gould are compulsive gamblers on a bender, Robert Altman directs. A must-see for fans of the above, though if you're already a fan the pleasures are almost too predictable.


Outcast teenage girls deal with burgeoning womanhood and lycanthropy. In high school, I would have been crushing big time.


Roger Corman obviously felt that Bonnie & Clyde lacked titty, and while I prefer the original, I'm sympathetic to his corrective endeavor.


The references to incest and scatology lose their effectiveness fast, and I'm not sure why Gilbert Gottfried's performance was so outstanding to anyone other than Rob Schneider, but you get a lot of funny from a lot of funny people here, including some comedians who haven't had an act worth a damn in years.


While I enjoyed the comic asides and constant ironies enough to ignore Jeanne Moreau's allegedly passionate wandering, the last scene really annoyed me: how the hell did the scheming lovers take such magazine-worthy photos of themselves traipsing through the woods with a tiny spy-camera? Was there a third person taking the shots and telling them when to pose? Louis Malle wouldn't have made this kind of mistake later in his career.


David Fincher keeps his fetishistic indulgences in relative check (I guess you have to forgive him one slo-mo murder set to "Hurdy Gurdy Man"), but he doesn't replace them with anything other than accomplished digital. His infamous endless takes and re-shoots effectively make the cast look tired, and no one acts below their well-established game (Chloe Sevigny even tries to make the frustrated wife of the obsessive hero less shrill than usual). Still, the emotional toll on the characters is neither as engaging nor as effectively expressed as the true-crime details. 70 takes isn't just a sign of a perfectionist, but of a director who doesn't know how to get what he wants.


It has a genuinely intriguing concept and images that still marvel ten years deeper into CGIety, so its status as a cult sci-fi classic is more than deserved. It also stars Keifer Sutherland as a genius scientist, so the word "cult" isn't going anywhere.


Pretty dry even for a '70s Walter Matthau comedy, but it picks up steam once it focuses on the former company man's sneaky getaways. Both this and The Host feature a character putting a paper clip on the end of a plug to cause a blackout and evade capture, and I swear I've never seen that in a film before this week.


The story's problems are pretty standard Stephen King: corny childhood camraderie continued through adulthood, promising scares that devolve into a cosmically boring battle between good and evil. What makes the film exceptionally batty is that the screenwriter preserved all of King's most ridiculous details, while the director filmed them in the most matter-of-fact manner possible. Oddly, they're both Lawrence Kasdan. Donnie Wahlberg plays a sickly, retarded alien made of pure love, Morgan Freeman has magical eyebrows and Jason Lee tries to reach for a toothpick while keeping a murderous alien worm trapped under his toilet seat.


This trailer features kicking and Paul Rudd's bottle blond mane. They're the two reasons I rented this, and the two things worth seeing it for.


Freddy Rodriguez will someday have a very popular TV detective show and Christian Bale needs to stop trying out American accents, or at least stick to one per movie.


I love Jim Carrey for deciding to make a Joel Schumacher sex thriller at this point in his career (most of his breed just stick to comedies and Oscar bait), especially one in which he plays both a sociopathic dogcatcher and a tatooed saxophonist detective named Fingerling who fucks to She Wants Revenge. Sadly, the twist requires so much exposition that both sex and thrills get lost in the shuffle.


The only theatrical movie Peter Bogdanovich has done over the last decade, and if it wasn't for the celebrities in the wasted cast, you'd never guess it wasn't made for TV.