Careful With That Blog, Eugene

The 11 Best Movies of 2009

2010-01-03T10:00:00.000-05:00

I haven't quite figured out when the decade ends, otherwise I'd probably be posting a best-of-the-decade-type list like everybody else. That list, like this one, won't be a top 10. This list isn't a top 10 because I've never done a top 10, and I don't really plan on doing one anytime soon. I'm also not going to list every movie I've seen this year like I did last year, because some movies are better left forgotten. So, in alphabetical order...

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
While I'm one of those people who often finds Nic Cage more of a nuisance than an actor worth paying any attention to, his unique quirks actually enhance Werner Herzog's film about an asshole cop who quickly becomes a monster after being diagnosed with moderate to severe back pain. Cage rapes, snorts coke, laughs at his own bad jokes, and stares at iguanas with reckless abandon, hardly noticing that his whole world is crashing down around him until everything suddenly, finally seems to be going right for him. A spectacularly shot, superbly acted film. And it's pretty damned funny, to boot.

District 9
Before Paranormal Activity went all viral and made a bunch of money on a small budget, District 9 did the same, building its hype through small glimpses into a world where aliens crash landed in, of all places, South Africa, and were quickly put behind huge fences, given cat food to eat and shacks to live in. The first half is apartheid-allegory-via-clever-concept. The second is one big chase scene. You know something? I'm a sucker for clever, well-executed concepts, awesome looking guns, and long, drawn out chase scenes. District 9 had that in spades, and, of all the movies on this list (with the exception of The Hurt Locker), was the movie that had me gripping the armrests the hardest.

Goodbye Solo
The most moving, personal movie I saw all year. A real shame that almost nobody else did. Goodbye Solo involved a relationship between an African cab driver and a 70-year-old white man who frequented a movie theater in Winston-Salem, N.C. The cabbie, who knows everybody, wants to chat. The old man, who wants to be driven out one-way to Blowing Rock National Park in a few weeks time, doesn't want any attachment to the world beyond his reason for going to the movies. Ramin Bahrani's third film is absolutely poetic, and is the kind of movie I hope benefits from the Academy increasing their nominee pool to ten features.

The Hangover
Three men wake up the morning in their palatial Las Vegas hotel suite the night after a bachelor party for their best friend, Doug. They find a chicken, a tiger, a mountain of empty cans and bottles, and a completely trashed room, but no Doug. This year's quote-bomb, The Hangover avoids a lot of lame Vegas pitfalls by focusing more on the characters than the city itself. Not only does that allow Bradley Cooper, long stuck in the asshole boyfriend role, to become a convincing lead, but it gives us Zach Galifianakis, who promises to be the anchor of many future comedies. There should be no holding him down.

The Hurt Locker
Should win the Academy Award for Best Picture, if there's any justice. A so-raw-it-bleeds film about a bomb disposal unit in Iraq, Kathryn Bigelow's near-flawless movie is not only the best of a small number of worthwhile films dealing with the War on Terror, it's also one of the best war movies I've ever seen. Bigelow does not give the viewer a sense of her opinion on the war. Instead, she examines why somebody whose job involves disarming complex bombs would crave working that highly dangerous position. The sad truth is in the title card: War is a drug.

Inglorious Basterds
Another war movie that's not really about the war it depicts, Quentin Tarantino throws out the history book to give us a World War II that's all jacked up on Mountain Dew. Anchored by some tremendous performances (Christoph Waltz's being the stuff of legend) and Tarantino's indomitable love of cinema, Inglorious Basterds proves that not every script that gestates in a dresser drawer for ten years is an idea best left in the drawer.

Moon
Cinematic hard sci-fi at its finest, Duncan Jones' Moon is the story of a man and his computer as they work together to mine the Moon. Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is the only man on the Moon. His only company is Gertie (Kevin Spacey), a computer that communicates through a disturbingly calm voice and a handful of emoticons. I don't want to spoil a thing when it comes to this movie, which was hardly seen, but it's far less 2001 than you'd think, given the nature of the computer, and leans more towards a question of ethics than of mankind's potential. Rockwell's performance is especially good given that he's working with little more than his set, which is more gorgeous than you'd suspect from a movie with such a tiny budget.

Observe and Report
Sorely overlooked because of a different mall cop movie, Jody Hill's incredibly misanthropic movie is this year's future cult hit. Seth Rogen plays against type as bi-polar anti-hero Ronnie Barnhardt, a Travis Bickle type who lusts after make-up counter clerk Brandi (Anna Ferris, who finally lives up to her hype). Everybody who saw it either loved it or wondered why it was made. I was left crying in my seat.

A Serious Man
Only the Coen Brothers could have made this movie, which takes place in a predominantly Jewish community in 1967 Minnesota, which seems blissfully untouched by the Beatles and the Summer of Love, though its influences are creeping in at the edges. Relentlessly Jewish and unflinchingly Midwestern, this modern day parable is the kind of movie that is lost on nobody. If you haven't had a run-in with the Columbia Record Club, maybe you've quested to get your headphones back from a teacher, or spent a semester avoiding a much larger, much meaner boy. Or maybe you just really like Jefferson Airplane. Or F-Troop. Or had a neighbor who sunbathed nude in her backyard. Or anything, really. This is life at its most cosmically tragic.

Up
It's an animated movie with an 80-year-old protagonist, a Disney movie where a character's death isn't the central, game changing moment, a Pixar film, which should say enough. Pete Doctor's Up is everything an animated movie should be--smart, sophisticated, and unafraid to defy the norms of the genre. In a decade full of Kung Fu Pandas, Bolts and Shrek sequels that shouldn't have been, Pixar has, with one notable exception, churned out nothing but animation that actually means something. Not quite as good as Wall-E, but what is?

Where the Wild Things Are
The more I think about this movie, the more I like it. Before I decided to rank alphabetically, this was almost at the top of the list. There are some movies that just capture a mood or a period in your life, and for me, no other movie captures what childhood felt like so effortlessly. All of the wonder, imagination, sadness, and rage. The times you scream, the times you run away, the times you run back home. It's all here, and it's all gorgeous, from the cinematography to the Wild Things to Karen O's soundtrack.

Close: (500) Days of Summer, Adventureland, Anvil: The Story of Anvil, Drag Me to Hell, An Education, Funny People, I Love You, Man, Zombieland
Unseen: Too Many to List

Movie Review: Avatar (2009)

2009-12-30T11:51:00.000-05:00

Avatar is the work of a man obsessed by detail. James Cameron spent years coming up with Pandora, the planet that our ancestors see as a violent little backwater good for nothing more than the rare fuel that can be found in abundance there, and it shows. This movie, the very definition of an event, is more a showcase for the incredibly impressive special effects than it is a proper blockbuster. After how huge Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen was, I’m surprised the country has the patience for two-and-a-half hours of 3D exploration.

The film begins with Earth, in the form of an energy company and the United States Marines, on the verge of war with the Na'vi, a group of indigenous, ten foot tall elves who, our ancestors assert, are highly primitive, as we’re the ones visiting them. Not content with destroying one planet, our bulldozers are set to raze the Na’vi’s forest to get at that precious metal. Lush forests? Exotic animals? They’re what happen to stand between the corporate bigwigs and their huge yearly bonus.
The corporation has made the vital mistake of bringing along a group of scientists. Being curious bastards, as all scientists are, they want to explore the land. Worse, they want to create a bond to the Na’vi. They’re able to do so by means of telepathically controlling bio-genetically engineered Na’vi/human hybrids—the Avatars. Corporal Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a paraplegic Marine, happens to be brothers with a scientist to whom one of the Avatars belonged. That brother dies unexpectedly, and the keys to the Avatar are tossed to him. He falls asleep in a tube, wakes up, and can walk again.

He is assigned to learn all he can about the Na’vi to bring about the terms of their surrender and relocation, unbeknownst to the team of scientists he is working with. So Jake goes out and explores Pandora, and we walk out into the world with him, and it is good. Really good. We observe the plants. We run from the animals. We meet the natives. Jake is as fascinated by this as any of us would be, his newfound ability to walk becoming secondary to his daily exploration of Pandora. One day, he is separated from the group. He tries to survive a night away from camp and is attacked by dogs (or dog-looking things), only to be rescued by the princess (Zoe Saldana). Though she considers Jake an idiot, he slowly wins her respect, not to mention her love, all while learning the way of the Na'vi.

The movie really is spectacular to behold, but there are times when the story struggles to be worth the effort put into the special effects. A variation on one of the oldest stories in the book, Cameron fails to flesh out the bulk of his characters enough to make the film stand out as a stellar story. The characters are pure stock. The scientists distrust the military, which is full of hardasses who say things like "You're not in Kansas anymore" to a group of fresh fish stepping off the spaceship. The face of the faceless corporation is a snarky, stupid jerk. The hero, disability aside, is good looking, driven, and stiff as a board. Michelle Rodriguez shoots guns and sounds tough, as Michelle Rodriguez is wont to do. The computer generated Na'vi are more convincing than the flesh-and-blood humans. It's no wonder the members of the Avatar program spend more time in a different body than their own.

While I am always impressed with the meticulous nature of James Cameron's work, I couldn't help but think that Avatar could have had a better script for the ten years Cameron spent on it. It's one thing to have a crew of stock characters. It's quite another when the whole movie feels like little more than a retread of every other fish out of water space opera. We're meant to be wowed by what's in front of us, and we are. At times, Avatar made me feel the way I did when I saw Star Wars for the first time--stunned by the details in the visual spectacle. At other times, Avatar made me feel the way I felt the first time I saw any of the Star Wars prequels--impressed, but empty. Jake's mission was to find out how the Na'vi lived, but he, and we, come away without really knowing who
they are and why they matter. There is so much detail at Avatar's surface, but it feels like Cameron just kind of stopped, like it was enough to show how the giant blue elves ran through trees and rode dragons. A real shame, too. Something this good looking really deserved to be more special.

Far Fucking Out

Movie Review: Inglorious Basterds (2009)

2009-12-28T19:11:00.002-05:00

Inglorious Basterds is a fairy tale, and says so from the opening title card. “Once Upon a Time, in Nazi-occupied France,” there was this group of eight Jewish-American soldiers deep behind enemy lines, whose only mission was to make themselves known to the enemy by killing, scalping, and carving swastikas into enemy foreheads. But that’s neither here nor there. While the movie was (and still is) sold on the basis of Brad Pitt’s performance as Lt. Aldo “The Apache” Raine, there’s a second, much more interesting feature playing at the same time, one that is connected to the movie’s narrative hook by an incredibly narrow strand: One character who happens to put the events of both narratives in motion.

That first feature is where the movie begins, on a dairy farm in rural France. A family is doing its chores when they are visited by an S.S. squad headed by Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), who has been given the nickname “Jew Hunter” for his exploits. The scene that plays out between the Nazi and the head of the household is maybe the most engrossing sequence in any movie this year, and it’s just two men talking and smoking their pipes. Of course, when it’s revealed that there are Jews hiding beneath the floorboards, the S.S. storms in and shoots the place up, but the gunfire only serves to transition the viewer from one scene to another—from rural the rural France where a few hiding Jews are casually slaughtered to the rural France where, years later, the Basterds casually slaughter Nazis.

Of course, by 1944, the war in Europe was starting to turn on Hitler, who spent much of his time trying to persuade himself and the citizens of Germany that their setbacks were only temporary, that they’d strike a crushing blow. The Hitler in Inglorious Basterds is frantic and child-like, demanding that his soldiers stop referring to one of the Basterds as the Bear Jew, then enjoying himself at the premiere of “Nation’s Pride,” a new propaganda film starring war hero Fredrick Zoller (Daniel Brühl), one of the Nazi’s few bright spots in a rather bleak year.

Zoller, as it turns out, is a cinephile. He adores the cinema belonging to Emmanuelle Mimieux, otherwise known as Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), who was the lone Jew to escape Landa in the opening scene. Zoller wants to have “Nation’s Pride” shown at Shosanna’s cinema. More than that, he wants to be with Shosanna, but he is a Nazi and she is a Jew and she doesn’t seem like the kind of woman who’d very much be interested in a uniformed man anyhow. After being interviewed by Joseph Goebbels and screened by Landa himself, the premiere is moved from a much larger theatre to Shosanna’s venue.

Of course, the Allies know this. On the verge of D-Day, they send British film-critic-turned-soldier Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender) to meet with the Basterds and rendezvous with Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger), a German actress-turned-double-agent. It is her job to get Hicox and the Basterds into the premiere of “Nation’s Pride” wearing bombs on their legs, as the whole German high command is scheduled to be in attendance, including Hitler. Meanwhile, Shosanna plans her own revenge, plotting to burn down the theatre with all the Nazis inside. She has a bunch of nitrate film, the means to burn it, and is willing to die to see the job through.

However, there are complications. The rendezvous with von Hammersmark is in a basement. The basement is full of drunken Nazis who are enthralled by the fact that they’re drinking with a famous actress. Zoller will not stop in his pursuit of Shosanna, regardless of how many times she insists that she is uninterested. Beyond that, Hans Landa may be the craftiest Nazi in the room. While he might let Shoshanna slip through his fingers, there’s no way he wouldn’t spot one of the infamous Basterds, were they to be in the same room.

The film is told in five chapters, and is framed around three of them. The opening twenty minutes, our introduction to Hans Landa, is chief among these scenes, and is one of the best I’ve seen this year and this decade. The scene with the Basterds, the Brit, von Hammersmark, and the Nazis in the basement is similarly fantastic, as is all of chapter five, “Revenge of the Giant Face,” where all of the plot points converge into one spectacular mess that leaves us with few survivors.

The movie took Tarrantino ten years to write, and looks every minute to be a labor of love. His dialog is as sharp as ever, and the action, macaroni combat that’s more frenzied than macaroni combat, comes in enough to satisfy anybody who was disappointed by the long wait between the car crashes in Death Proof. Hans Landa and Shosanna Dreyfus are among his very best characters, and Christoph Waltz and Mélanie Laurent are perfect as them. Waltz should walk away with any award he’s nominated for, and Laurent is being unfairly snubbed, though Diane Kruger is up for a Golden Globe for what is easily her best performance to date. This is a big movie, the kind that warrants multiple viewings. There’s so much going on here. Inglorious Basterds kills Hitler, and that's not even the best part.

The Dude Abides

"Giant Robot" - Buckethead (1994)

2009-12-12T23:08:00.003-05:00

Giant Robot
Buckethead
Sony Japan/CyberOctive, 1994
Produced By: Bill Laswell

I first became aware of Buckethead sometime around in 2000. An acquaintance of mine said that I needed to check this guy out because he “shreds.” “Shredding” is the lamest description of guitar playing ever invented. When you say that, it conjures images of The Shredder from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. And you know what? He's not in a band, because if he was, I'd have all of his albums and they'd probably be better than Yngwie Malmsteen's entire discography. I was apprehensive at first in purchasing a Buckethead album since up to this point he had released a total of five albums, all of which this obvious fanboy gushed over. I bought “Giant Robot.” I listened to a few tracks off and on for the first month. After that, it had found a permanent home in a dust covered CD binder I have named “That Which I Must Never Hear.”

Almost a decade later was I able to pull it from its darkened coffin and rip it to my hard drive, just waiting to unleash the massive guitar storm I was surely in for. Like a sailor, trying to survive a giant squall at midnight, I buckled myself in, ready to face whatever came my way. I made it through nineteen tracks of pure guitar amazingness that was unfairly ruined by skits, awkward conversations, and annoying dialog. It's a lot like being at a concert where the sound is amazing, but there's a group of girls in the background either singing along off-key in the background or killing your brain cells about Twilight.

Buckethead is the on stage persona of Brian Patrick Carroll, a legitimately awesome guitar player. He's done work with people like Bootsy Collins, Serj Tankian, and Les Claypool. He even toured with Guns N' Roses as a part of their official line-up proving that Axl Rose can make at least one good decision in his life. With the kind of talent Buckethead's been harnessing since he was twelve, it's no wonder that to date he has released twenty eight albums and performed on well over fifty. To put it mildly, he plays guitar like most people go to the bathroom; completely second nature. And it shows.

“Giant Robot” is a pretty good snapshot of what it looks like inside Buckethead's subconscious. A world where he is the main attraction at an amusement park, ingeniously titled “Bucketheadland.” In “Bucketheadland”, the rides are either as comforting and enjoyable as a lazy river with such tracks as “Binge and Purge”, “Aquabot”, and “Robot Transmission.” And then the floor falls out from under you with tracks that really do “shred” such as “Welcome To Bucketheadland” and “Want Some Slaw?” But the major gripe that I have about this album, is despite his technical ability, despite his flawless key changes, riffs, and power chords, almost every track is ruined by the aforementioned speeches and conversations.

Some tracks are just pure insanity and not in any pleasurable way whatsoever. “Buckethead's Chamber Of Horrors”, “Warweb”, and “Buckethead's TV Show” are examples of this. To show you just how stomach churning this last track I mentioned is, it contains a conversation between a full grown man and what I can only assume is his daughter, refusing to let her play with a toy unless they discuss last week's Buckethead show. The show in question is Buckethead walking around in blood before being ladled out of chicken soup. This merges into violins and electric guitars replicating what can only be described as the soundtrack to a Nazi Deathmarch. The creepiness monitor blows a gasket. It's official audio mathematical equation is “What The Hell” times a thousand, divided by “What Am I Hearing?!”, to the power of “I'm Going To Have A Daymare, Right Now.”

You have to wonder if Mister Carroll just bought a new vocoder and decided to screw around on it, throwing extra tracks on the album and making it look like a steal at 14.99. I can't explain these tracks as anything other than completely unnecessary and disturbing. If you can manage to ignore this flaw, then “Giant Robot” is a very good album. Even being released in '94, it still holds up as a virtuoso achievement in the study of several styles of jazz, funk, rock, and avant-garde.

The Bottom Line:

“Giant Robot” is an extremely well produced instrumental guitar album that simply suffers from Buckethead's over-inflated imagination. Feel free to listen to this on a long drive; just not with any friends in the car. It will save you looks, eye-rolls, and the story you'll have to tell in explaining who the hell “Buckethead” is. Only for the truly musically inclined.

And Here's the Running Man Home Version, Right Here

Movie Review: Ninja Assassin (2009)

2009-12-11T03:48:00.003-05:00

Ninja Assassin isn't so much a movie as it is a 99 minute assemblage of tired kung-fu cliches dolled-up to look like the kind of movie that's so bad it's good. Do not be fooled: This movie is so bad that it made me wish they had eye washing stations installed outside the theatre. The only thing I can think of that stops me from declaring this the worst movie of the year is that it is 51 minutes shorter than Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen.

Those 51 minutes are a small mercy. Moses led the Jews across the desert to Israel faster than it took this movie to get off the ground. And at least I can name five of the Transformers--other than Raizo, played by the robotic, incredibly cut Korean pop star Rain, I can't name a single character off of the top of my head. I can describe them all, more or less, having been plucked from a crate full of stock characters (The black one! The British one! The empathetic girlfriend! Ninjas! The Clan Boss Who Speaks Only in Proverbs!), but, for their actual names, I'm heavily abusing IMDb. Seriously, if you were a fan of James McTeigue's V for Vendetta, Ninja Assassin should do nothing but leave you thankful for good source material. This movie, apparently based on nothing more than the screenwriter's vague recollections of the Shaw Brothers films he'd seen as a kid, was so thin that the Wachowski Brothers, who produced, called for a full re-write. J. Michael Straczynski, comic book scribe and creator of Babylon 5 cranked it out in 53 hours!

This, honestly, needs to be the movie where the Wachowski brothers stop rehashing The Matrix. Mysterious hero with mysterious powers mysteriously saves an un-savable world. The law of diminishing returns was in full-effect the second the sugar rush from the car chase and the burly brawl in The Matrix Reloaded died down. V for Vendetta is decently stupid fun, which is an insult to the graphic novel, and I was incredibly kind to Speed Racer because I was spared the usual pseudo-philosophical rambling between the action pieces--it was big, dumb fun and knew it. There are times when Ninja Assassin doesn't even know its a movie. It is absolutely unforgivable in every conceivable way.

The movie begins in a Yakuza lair, where a bunch of young Yakuza punks stand around, yukking it up in English. Incredibly serious music plays while an older gentleman gives the supposed boss of the group ("Hollywood," according to IMDb) a tattoo that is surprisingly painful considering that the old man is only jabbing a needle into the kid's flesh. This leads to an extended story about how the old man once saw a whole crew of Yakuza get taken out by one shadowy figure...a ninja. He was left standing because the Ninja stabbed him where the heart should be, only wasn't, due to "an accident of birth." If you see this movie, check your watch and take a wild guess as to why one of our heroes is left alive at the end of the film. I don't want to spoil things, but when a movie goes out of its way to telegraph the ending in the first five, unbearable moments, well, some things deserve to be shared. In any case, a ninja swoops down and kills everybody in the room by slicing, dicing, and throwing ninja stars. The special effects, including lopped off halves of heads and CGI blood, are laughable. In fact, laughing at them was the only pleasure I derived from the whole, miserable experience.

From there, a terrible and stupid plot unfurls. Ninjas have been around for hundreds of years and will kill just about anybody for just about anybody as long as 100 pounds of gold is wired into a remarkably traceable bank account. How traceable? Two Europol agents find out about these shadowy figures by checking bank statements. Then Europol comes down hard on them. Then the ninja assassins get the idea to assassinate the pretty female Europol agent, Mika (Naomie Harris), because she, like every woman in every movie where a girl becomes the target of an assassination attempt, KNOWS TOO MUCH!

After a rather stupid scene where she goes into her apartment during a power outage after being told by the widow of somebody who was assassinated by ninjas that the lights went out and the poor bastard disappeared, she is saved by Raizo, who, until this point, had spent what felt like hours engaged in pointless training montages. He slices. He dices. He throws ninja stars. Oh, and he flashes back to the past, to when his cruel mentor beat him and to when he had touchingly sentimental dialog with Kiriko, who is an on again/off again pacifist. She has no problem with being a ninja until she is asked to leave a scar on some guy she's brutalized. She is eventually executed, which is very sad, I suppose.

To cut a long story short, Raizo wants revenge on the clan, who want to kill the Europol agent, who just wanted to be taken seriously when she suggested that ninjas existed. All of this results in a few poorly shot fight scenes that somehow manage to matter less the more gimmicks are added. They start running out of bad guys and give Raizo a penultimate boss! He learns the boss' methods! The worst part of this is that the previously un-killable ninjas become sitting ducks the minute a bunch of trucks burst through the gates of the ninja's mountain compound, which is literally shown on a cliff face that is particularly inaccessible to the kind of massive trucks that are used to transport military strike teams.

I can't explain why Rain is in this movie, but if this is how he figures upon penetrating the American market, he's in trouble. I spent the entire movie wondering when somebody would turn him on so he could exhibit some of the charisma that must be there for the Koreans to dig him so. Instead, he ate noodles, did laundry, and trained. He stumbled through the picture, and did not, at any point in time, command a scene...even when there was nobody competing with him. My bold prediction is that Rain's career in Hollywood will be as successful and well-regarded as Hulk Hogan's, which, let me tell you, SKYROCKETED after Santa With Muscles.

This is a bad movie. A bad movie. It feels as though at some point everybody involved threw their hands up and decided to say screw it before going back to the drawing board. Just remembering what happened in the movie is putting me to sleep, but I can't, in good conscience, recommend this to insomniacs. I can't recommend this to the blind, the deaf, or the dumb, either. I wouldn't wish this on my worst enemy. If there's anything good to say about this movie, it's that it'll give a lot of screenwriters hope. If this can make it, so can they. The question is, after a movie like Ninja Assassin, will anyone take you in?

The Goddamn Plane Has Crashed Into the Mountain

"The Bathroom Wall" - Jimmy Fallon (2002)

2009-12-10T21:53:00.005-05:00

The Bathroom Wall
Jimmy Fallon
Dreamworks Records, 2002
Produced By: The Soundhustlers

Everyone makes mistakes. It's human nature. But sometimes, there are a few moments in our lives where we must reflect on a decision and either justify it or accept it as a consequence of being incredibly bored. Sometime in 2002, I thought it was a good idea to buy “The Bathroom Wall” by SNL alum, Jimmy Fallon. Prior to this, the only exposure I had to this gentleman was watching him corpse in every single skit he was in. (For those of you uninitiated in the acting biz, “corpsing” is what happens when you break character and giggle like an idiot.) Before this, he pulled his unintentional Adam Sandler imitation and played parody songs on a guitar on Weekend Update, way back when Colin Quinn had an actual steady gig that didn't involve him panhandling outside Rockefeller Plaza or begging Opie and Anthony for a celebrity guest spot.

I was asked to review this album as my first real review. And I sit here, struggling to find a reason to keep playing it. I'll be honest. I'm listening to it in long intervals based solely on the fact that I become more and more irritated about how ham-fisted this production is. It's not a rock album. It's not a comedy album. So what is it? A bad idea come to fruition. At some point in his fledgling career; before NBC threw a dart at a board filled with B-list comedians to take over for Conan, someone greenlit this abomination. Someone sat down, talked to Jimmy Fallon and gave him thousands of dollars to go buckwild with. And through its conception and development, no one at Dreamworks Records decided to slam their godfist down on the stomach of the creative team and put this thing out of its hydrocephalic misery.

Idiot Boyfriend” came on the radio and I remember thinking that it was a pretty decent send up of early 80's love songs; you know, the ones that Prince still does but everyone thinks is new. It's the simple screw up of the “parody” that makes this album fall far short of what it should have been. Fallon's falsetto moaning over watching the Matrix and eating a Swanson's dinner is about as gut-bustingly hilarious as watching yourself urinate blood while passing a kidney stone. And if that didn't mangle your funny bone into several compound fractures, you are treated to four more songs that describe the zany perils of hunting, how white guys still can't play basketball, why chicks can't drive, and just how awesome a snowball fight really can be.

After you've made it through this roller coaster of mind blowing comedy, the album suddenly goes into a stand-up monologue recorded at what is most likely, his own high school. He spends twenty minutes doing his entire routine, dedicating a whopping eleven and a half to “Troll Doll Jingles” and “Troll Doll Impersonations”; other comedians pitching those stupid plastic neon-haired pieces of junk as a product and popular songs with troll dolls as the main theme.

I'll wait until you're not in stitches anymore. No, really I will.

Granted, his impressions are merely O.K.; his Cliff Clavin is almost dead on, but it's completely wasted on the demographic he's entertaining. He actually prefaces who he's about to impersonate as “The Mailman from Cheers.” Listen, bud. You said Cliff Clavin. I know who that is. Anyone older than twenty one knows who that is. You having to explain your jokes on stage usually means that you probably shouldn't be doing them. If these mouth breathers have to do some Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon Advanced Calculus to get to the punchline, please put the microphone down and go back to being the key grip at NBC Studios. On a side note, I also belong to that .0000000039 percentile that have to have complete albums on my iPod or I'll go completely nuts from OCD inadequacy. I can promise you, if my iPod lasts for more than four years, the entire Jimmy Fallon stand-up bits will be played at least four times—by accident.

Keep in mind, through all of what I have told you, this album was still nominated for a 2003 Grammy for Best Spoken Comedy Album. That's right. A Grammy. You want to know why I'm so jaded against the music industry? Because despite our dysfunctional symbiotic relationship, I still expect it to treat me with a modicum of intelligence. And nominating this “album” makes no sense at all. It's not rocking. It's not funny. It's simply just there. Staring at you like one of those kids from “Village of the Damned.” Only this time, you don't have the luxury of detonating yourself along with a bomb and a copy of this CD.

The Bottom Line:

Jimmy Fallon is a generally tolerable comedian who does fine at shooting the breeze with random celebrities and playing beginner's guitar. Anything above that, he's a waste. This album stole ten dollars from me that I probably would have blown on Burger King. And right now, after suffering through this, I'm going to feed my Fallon-comedy-induced-depression and get a Whopper.

Well I Hope You Have Enough Room For My Fist, Because I'm Going to Ram it into Your Stomach, and Break Your Goddamn Spine!

Introducing: The Killian Gradient of Winners

2009-12-10T20:33:00.014-05:00

Around this time last year, I shuttered the windows on Sublime Noises, an unsuccessful music blog that I started as a place for me and a few of my friends to ramble on about the pretentious indie rock and rap that we listened to. It was a sad day, but everything was moved over to here, and was done so because I thought that writing about music on a blog that already had an audience would, well, result in a bigger audience.

A year later, and there have hardly been any music posts. Less posts on music than the number of fingers on my hand. I could blame the lack of time I've had over this hectic semester, but instead, I'm going to blame the lack of a nifty rating system that was music-exclusive. Today, with the help of new writer Horatio Q., I have solved that problem.

Are you ready for pain? Are you ready for suffering? If you answered "Yes," then you're ready for...

THE KILLIAN GRADIENT OF WINNERS

Like the award-nominated Little Lebowski Scale of Urban Achievement, the Killian Gradient of Winners is on a four-star scale, as I never did understand why Rolling Stone used a four star system for movies and a five-star one for music. The only other difference is that this is based on the greatest dance craze/Schwarzenegger movie/Stephen King novel combination of all time...The Running Man. Without further adieu...

Who Loves You, And Who Do You Love?
**** (Excellent)

That Boy's One Mean Motherfucker
*** & 1/2* (Great)

Well, That Hit the Spot
*** (Good)

And Here's The Running Man Home Version, Right Here
** & 1/2 * (Fair)

One of Us Is In Deeeeeep Trouble
** (Average)

There's Nothing Funny About a Dickless Moron With a Battery Up His Ass
* & 1/2 * (Bad)

All I've Seen is a Bunch of Low Foreheads Who Think They Can Change the World With Dreams and Talk
* (Awful)

Well I Hope You Have Enough Room For My Fist, Because I'm Going to Ram it into Your Stomach, and Break Your Goddamn Spine!
1/2 * (Don't even bother)

Here is Subzero! Now Plain Zero!
zero stars (DOES NOT WANT)

A sidebar will be going up tonight, and all old album reviews will be retrofitted with these ratings over the weekend. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask.

Movie Review: Where the Wild Things Are (2009)

2009-11-22T00:41:00.000-05:00

Something that I noticed around halfway through director Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are, the adaptation of Maurice Sendak's classic 1963 children's book that has, thus far, drawn only modest praise: There really aren't that many divorced children floating around in Hollywood movies. Growing up, I saw almost every movie that was marketed to young boys, and I'm scratching my head trying to come up with somebody who I and countless others would have had to relate to. It wouldn't be the kids from Mrs. Doubtfire or Liar Liar, because the focus is on the father. It wouldn't be the kids from Kramer vs. Kramer or Jerry McGuire, because a 8-15 year old probably isn't very interested in those kind of films, Meryl Streep, Dustin Hoffman, and "Show me the money!" be damned. I think Clark "Mouth" Devereaux of The Goonies might be the product of divorce, which almost automatically would make him the hero of the bunch--brash, sarcastic, nothing gets to Mouth until he sees his money at the bottom of a wishing well--but I could very well be wrong.

Product of divorce. I remember this one time at church when a guest pastor spoke of the evils of the world: abortion, homosexuality, pre-marital sex, and divorce. He prayed for the "products of divorce," namely the children whose lives were presumably shattered by the separation of their parents. At breakfast, my mom told my sister and I that we were not the result of divorce, that we were not victims. I'm not a victim, but I think that a lot was determined by the path my mom and dad went down when I was three: If my parents were still together today or had gotten divorced later, I'd be an entirely different person, and, to tell the honest truth, I wouldn't want that. But looking back, I still wish there was a concrete example of a divorced kid who wasn't basically a prop for the older actors.

If this movie had come out 11 years ago, I believe I'd have found my hero in Max (Max Records), a young, imaginative kid who, in a fit of rage, runs away from home, finds a boat in a sewer canal, and sets sail for Parts Unknown. Max, like plenty of kids his age, is energetic, impulsive, and demanding, though not like the kids from Willy Wonka. He wants to play around. His older sister wants to hang out with older boys. He wants his mom (Catherine Keener) to pay attention to him, but she is entertaining a date in the living room. Getting used to the notion that you are not the center of the universe is a central aspect of growing up, especially when your mom works and wants a social life of her own. Until that sinks in though, there are outbursts. As a kid, I slammed doors, stomped on floors, chased my dog around, sulked in my room with the best of them, and "ran away" more than a few times to think about things, as I'm sure most kids do. I've never seen any of that reflected in movies though, which is why I was so enamored with Jonze's film.

Yes, enamored. I mean, the plot is thin and ambiguous at best, but there's a subtle charm there, too. The Wild Things, the island they live there, and the journey there and back again are the stuff of Max's dreams. Max is a 10-year-old boy directing a cast of six--is he supposed to know why the Wild Things are unhappy? And who wants to figure out that boring stuff when you can make yourself feel better by smashing through forests, throwing dirt clots, building tree forts, and running around like a lunatic? Max finds out that emotions can't simply be left behind, and that's what's really important.

Everything looks great, as should be expected. Jonze is one of those guys to whom the word "visionary" is often applied, and its easy to see why. The film is gorgeous and the Wild Things are cool, but, more than cool, they're there. Large-scale muppetry kind of had its last hurrah in 1999, when Yoda returned to the big screen before being digitized for the purpose of fan-servicing lightsaber battles, but here it's obvious that muppets aren't dead. Combined with CGI, the creatures here are far more realistic than most live-action movie monsters, and look far more realistic and pleasing than the plasticine abominations wandering around Robert Zemeckis' performance capture films. I probably don't need to mention the voice actors, who are all well-known and do great stuff, lending each character a unique personality to go along with their appearance. In a world where big name actors and actresses are hired to blandly portray the boring, sameish creatures in most kids fare, it's nice to see a group that works so well together as a unit.

Something really clicked for me in this movie, though I imagine there are and will be plenty who won't get it. I'll admit that my theory about why the plot is thin is only a theory at best and an excuse at worst, especially considering that screenwriter David Eggers' last film, Away We Go, also tended to cut out the connective tissue to get at the muscle behind the story. We never really know how much his parents divorce effects Max, why the Wild Things are unhappy, or what the purpose of those weird owl things are, and I'm sure those things will come back to bug me when this hits DVD and I see it again. For now, I'm content. This is a big step forward.

I Like Your Style, Dude

Movie Review: A Serious Man (2009)

2009-11-15T00:19:00.003-05:00

A Serious Man begins strangely, if you consider where it spends the majority of its run time. Sometime in the 1800's, a man comes home in the dead of night to his wife, who is busy cracking ice in a bucket. He bears strange news: On the way home, his cart broke, but a friend passed by and helped him fix it. He's on his way over for soup. What's strange about that? The friend has been dead for three years. He knocks on the door, sits down by the fire, and decides that he doesn't want soup afterall. This, according to the man's wife, is because the man sitting in the chair is a dybbuk, a kind of spirit that inhabits a dead person for whatever reason, here because of a family member's failure to sit shiva. The man apologizes for his wife, telling his guest that he's a rational man and doesn't believe in fairy tales, but eventually he comes to realize, and I won't tell you how, that his family's been cursed.

Flash forward 100 years, to a Minneapolis suburb that's almost blissfully unaware that there's a cultural revolution going on out there. Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), happily married and on the verge of securing tenure at a university where he teaches physics, is cursed. A student tries to bribe him over a failed test while setting out to blackmail him for accepting bribes. Anonymous letters are being sent to the tenure committee strongly urging that Larry be denied. Larry's brother is sleeping on the couch and is always in the bathroom. His son is more interested in Jefferson Airplane than Hebrew School. Oh, and his wife (Sari Lennick) wants to leave him for Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed), an erudite fellow with a taste for wine and an unsettling remorse for Larry's loss.

Larry, as he is fond of telling everybody, hasn't done anything, so why is he cursed? It could be that he is descended from the two with the dybbuk problem, but the Cohens don't say. Don't count it out. After all, God told Abraham that the number of his descendants would rival the stars...without ever telling Abraham when to expect such a contract to be fulfilled. Or not--maybe the explanation is that there is no explanation, that fate has a way around reason, regardless of how reasonable men consider fairy tales.

After all, that's what the Book of Job is, right? Job's a nice guy, he's got wealth and a good family, honors God and all that. But Satan, who apparently gets to shoot the shit with God regardless of their longstanding feud, has a theory: Job is only pious because he's doing so well. So God gives Satan permission to destroy Job's life, and Satan gives Job the works. He loses his kids, his possessions, Satan afflicts him with boils, his friends come to visit and come to the conclusion that Job has done something to deserve all of this--they berate him so harshly that he curses the day he was born. Eventually God pays a visit and tells Job that it's a problem of perspective--Job can't understand why God allowed him to suffer, because Job hasn't seen the world through God's eyes, which is a rather mild way of telling somebody that you've allowed Satan to screw with you just because he had a hunch. However, Job gets a sweet reward for not cursing God: seven new sons, three new daughters (the most beautiful ones in the land), and double his original wealth.

Shame that nobody told Larry Gopnik what Job's lot in life was, post-smiting. As he is told at a family picnic, he's lucky that he's got thousands of years of tradition to draw upon, but the rabbis that he's referred to seem to miss the most obvious paralell--maybe because Larry isn't covered in boils. A junior rabbi tells Larry that he needs a fresh perspective, that he needs to look on things with wonder. But that's before he knows that Larry's wife is leaving for Sy Ableman. Still, "Consider the parking lot!" is his cry. Rabbi Marshak (Alan Mandell) tells Larry the story of a Jewish dentist who finds the words "Help me" in perfect Hebrew on the back of a gentile's teeth. The dentist, like Larry, frets over the meaning of his message. He asks Marshak, whose two word response puts him at ease. Not so with Larry, who demands an answer. He tries to meet with Rabbi Nachtner (George Wyner), but he rarely does pastoral work outside of speaking with the bar mitsvah boy and is perpetually busy thinking. Meanwhile, things continue to spiral out of control. His brother (Richard Kind) is a suspected gambler and might not be going to singles mixers after all. F-Troop is coming in fuzzy on the TV. One of his neighbors might be anti-semetic. The other sunbathes nude in her backyard and wonders if he's explored the freedoms of divorce. He owes the Columbia Record Club for Santana's Abraxas and, unless he acts quickly, will soon owe them for Credence Clearwater Revival's Cosmo's Factory. That's Larry's problem though--he can't act quickly. He can only watch as everything come crashing down around him.

I greatly admire the Coens, and after the veritable orgy of stars that appeared in Burn After Reading, they turn in a smaller, more focused film with no A-listers in sight. I really dug Burn After Reading, more than most people, I'd imagine, and if told that I could only watch 15 movies for the rest of my life, three of theirs would make the cut, with three or four more earning honorable mention. This movie is is so rich and multi-faceted, and while it might not kick Fargo, The Big Lebowski, or Barton Fink off of my island, it might be the one I'd try hardest to sneak past customs. If you don't live around one of the 262 theaters it's been released to, here's a tip: This is the sort of movie Netflix was invented for. A must see.

The Dude Abides

And this is just awesome...

2009-11-07T19:45:00.000-05:00

Is it just me, or is it somewhat ironic that Robocop starred in so many commercials?

2009-11-07T01:10:00.002-05:00

If you're anything like me, then Paul Verhoven's 1987 classic Robocop is embarrassingly high on a hypothetical "Best Movies Ever!" list. Say, top 25 or so. Maybe 26, depending on the last time you saw Total Recall.

If you've seen Robocop, you're probably keenly aware of Verhoven's scorn towards the world of consumerism. I mean, it's probably more apparent in the much maligned sequel (Robocop 2, which was cleverly named for the movie's antagonist), but those news broadcasts? The fake commercials? The fact that Detroit is owned by a slightly evil company that plans on leveling the place and putting up a luxury high rise? The "I'd buy that for a dollar!" guy? For a movie about a massive, robotic cop who prowls the mean streets of Detroit, there's an awful lot of jabs at society's greed.

With that in mind, can somebody explain any of the following YouTube videos?

I really want those Robochopsticks.

Amazon.com's description of Sarah Palin's "Going Rogue" is as hilarious as it is wrong...

2009-11-05T13:55:00.004-05:00

You probably don't need me to figure this one out, but Sarah Palin's autobiography is going to be huge. The same crowd of people who buy those Wal-Mart exclusive albums from bands who peaked in the mid 1970's are going to eat this book up like hotcakes put in front of a drunk frat boy at IHOP. And Mrs. Palin will not go away. Not now, not ever, and especially not if she manages to snag the G.O.P.'s nomination in 2012, especially if she comes out with another book about policy, lies, deceit, and the evilness of the left. Going Rogue, which comes out in two weeks, should prove to be the ideal launching point, if the product description is anything to go by:

One year ago, Sarah Palin burst onto the national political stage like a comet. Yet even now, few Americans know who this remarkable woman really is.

On September 3, 2008 Alaska Governor and vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin delivered a speech at the Republican National Convention that electrified the nation and instantly made her one of the most recognizable women in the world.

As chief executive of America's largest state, she had built a record as a reformer who cast aside politics-as-usual and pushed through changes other politicians only talked about: Energy independence. Ethics reform. And the biggest private sector infrastructure project in U.S. history. And while revitalizing public school funding and ensuring the state met its responsibilities to seniors and Alaska Native populations, Palin also beat the political "good ol' boys club" at their own game and brought Big Oil to heel.

Like her GOP running mate, John McCain, Palin wasn't a packaged and over-produced candidate. She was a Main Street American woman: a working mom, wife of a blue collar union man, and mother of five children, the eldest of whom was serving his country in a yearlong deployment in Iraq and the youngest, an infant with special needs. Palin's hometown story touched a populist nerve, rallying hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans to the GOP ticket.

But as the campaign unfolded, Palin became a lightning rod for both praise and criticism. Supporters called her "refreshing" and "honest," a kitchen-table public servant they felt would fight for their interests. Opponents derided her as a wide-eyed Pollyanna unprepared for national leadership. But none of them knew the real Sarah Palin.

In this eagerly anticipated memoir, Palin paints an intimate portrait of growing up in the wilds of Alaska; meeting her lifelong love; her decision to enter politics; the importance of faith and family; and the unique joys and trials of life as a high-profile working mother. She also opens up for the first time about the 2008 presidential race, providing a rare, mom's-eye view of high-stakes national politics—from patriots dedicated to "Country First" to slick politicos bent on winning at any cost.

Going Rogue traces one ordinary citizen's extraordinary journey and imparts Palin's vision of a way forward for America and her unfailing hope in the greatest nation on earth.

It's not even worth picking apart paragraph by paragraph, but just take a look at that mess. I love how Alaska is referred to as "the nation's largest state," which it is, but not in any meaningful way. I love how, in less than 250 words, there are at least 150 different ways of describing Palin as "normal," "down to earth," and "like you, the common man." I also love the reprisal of McCain's awful slogan ("Country First"), and that the words "refreshing" and "honest" appear in quotation marks somewhat ironically.

Going Rogue is only $9 on Amazon, which is a low enough price point that I might just buy it because it’s about the same price as most of the awful horror movies I pay money to see in January for the laughs and frustration. Beyond that, I’ve been looking for the perfect book to pair with The God Delusion, just in case there’s a human in a closet at an Amazon building whose job it is to read receipts. I want to blow minds.

Ric Flair can't control his hands!

2009-11-02T02:08:00.003-05:00

I love Ric Flair as much as any other wrestling fan, but part of me is glad that the trainwreck that will be Hogan/Flair is happening in Australia. However, this Hulkamania thing is awesome for one reason: Bringing back the old school "Guy talks in front of logo for two minutes" segments that are sorely missing from today's television. In fact, Flair seems to be channeling The Ultimate Warrior:

And Hogan?

He sure seems excited to face the self pork claimed greatest wrestler in the world. More excited by the possibility that Flair will submit to his will.

Woo.

Movie Review: Cold Souls (2009)

2009-10-28T11:22:00.000-04:00

Half of me wants to admit that Cold Souls was an impulse decision--that I went to it because the French guy sleeping on the top bunk at the hostel in Philadelphia was snoring much too loudly at ten in the morning and that once my eyes were open with the sun shining in them, I had no choice but to shower, eat, and amble around Philly until my friend got off of work and seeing a movie at the prestigious Ritz East, where I'd previously seen The Hurt Locker seemed more worthwhile than the ultimate touristy endeavor, the guided tour.

However, that's not the entire truth, as the other half of me wants to believe that I went and saw Cold Souls because I was ashamed at having missed Charlie Kaufman's directing debut, last year's Synecdoche, New York. I know that Kaufman has absolutely nothing to do with the film, but watch the trailer for this high concept movie and tell me that it doesn't draw inspiration from Kaufman's work. The giant soul-ripping machine, the emphasis on the eclectic actors-as-artistes set, or what happens when a person's soul is snatched and put into a different body; all of these feel somewhat fimiliar, heck, even if you've only seen one of Kaufman's films.

Even though Kauffman's fingerprints are smudging the lens a bit, director Sophie Barthes' debut dances away from any direct accusations of copycating. It's a different movie alright, for better and for worse. This is an extremely straight forward movie with a clear narrative arc. Paul Giamatti, playing himself, finds that he is unable to get into the body of a character in one of Chekov's plays. He reads an article in the New Yorker about soul storage, goes to check it out for himself, climbs into the giant CT Scan looking machine and, presto!, out comes the soul, looking for all the world like a chickpea.

If you, like me, thought that what would follow would be a deep, meaningful excursion into one of life's bigger questions, the actual events the movie depicts after Giamatti consents may be a little disappointing. There are the usual platitudes about beautiful souls, albeit that they come with a nice poetic flourish, but, for the most part, the movie becomes a limp-wristed dramedy about Paul's attempt to get his soul back from a Russian mobster who has stolen it to give to his wife, who wants the soul of a great actor because she wants to do well in her role on a Russian sitcom.

This is what they call a "missed opportunity." Take away all of the comparisons between Sophie Barthes' debut film and the work of Kaufman, and you've still got a high concept that can go places and do things. While soulless Paul Giamatti can't act, can't get it up, and is somewhat lecherous, that's as far as the movie goes in examining the consequences of extracting your soul, looking at the damn thing, and putting it on ice. Paul is so unhappy that he requests a new soul, and, when that doesn't work, his soul, and when that doesn't work out because his soul's in Russia, we're so far away from the meat of the story that one wonders if there was any meat there at all. The high concept is trivial in the face of the movie's fetish for dry humor. Considering that I spent more of my time wondering if the soul storage procedure, which produces a change so minuscule that it probably wouldn't be noticed were it not for the script's pointing it out, was a sham played on poor Paul Giamatti and other like-minded readers of The New Yorker than I did laughing at any of the jokes, that's a crying shame.

Still, I wanted to like Cold Souls, even after I left the theater and walked back to the hostel, wondering why I still wanted to like it. It's the damned concept. Looking at my DVD collection, there are tons of films where quirky protagonists are forced to stand outside of themselves in order to get a better understanding of who they are and how they operate. This seems to be a favorite theme of indie film-making, the disaffected loner rising above whatever inner turmoil is stopping them from living life. It's something I've seen done much better before. And considering that Synecdoche, New York is the next thing in my Netflix queue, I'm sure it's something that I'll see done much better in the future.

Yeah, Well, That's Just Your Opinion, Man

Glitter/Doom

2009-10-21T19:56:00.003-04:00

Tom Waits is going on tour to promote his new, live album, Glitter and Doom. You can download the first 8 songs from the new album here. Its surly worth a listen.

Of particular delight to me was the live version of 'Get Behind the Mule' (previously on Mule Variations, 1999). I was less impressed by the re-working 'Singapore' but if you are familiar with the original (Rain Dogs, 1985) you can understand how it is a difficult song to improve on. But easily the most enjoyable track on the preview comes just before the end with 'Circus.' Its classic Tom Waits- five minutes of his alcoholic pirate drawl describing the big top for the down and out.

cml

Ladies and Gentlemen...Lego David Bowie

2009-10-16T11:51:00.004-04:00

If Lego Rockband includes Lego Aladin Sane Bowie, Lego Ziggy Stardust Bowie, and Lego Labyrinth David Bowie, it'll get my vote for the greatest video game ever made.

Edit: I just found out that T. Rex's "Ride a White Swan" is being included in the game. Weird choice, considering that most people in the States probably haven't heard a T. Rex song not titled "Bang a Gong (Get it On)," but if that means LEGO Marc Bolan, I'll buy my X-Box 360 immediately.

TONIGHT: St. Vincent (and Andrew Bird) @ Bogart's

2009-10-14T01:19:00.002-04:00

The wonderful Annie Clark, otherwise known as St. Vincent, is playing a gig tonight in Cincinnati in support of Actor, which will likely wind up topping my likely terrible year-end album list, should one miraculously appear. St. Vincent preformed at Bonnaroo this year, so I know what to expect, but I have a sneaking suspicion that her music is better appreciated in a concert hall, as opposed to an open stage amongst the shirtless, sweaty masses.

Andrew Bird, who also preformed at Bonnaroo, is technically the main event of the night, but I've seen Bird in the past, and, while I'm a fan of his stuff, he's never managed to catch me live. I haven't really listened to anything of his since 2008's Soldier On EP, but this has been somewhat of a banner year for Bird, as his Noble Beasts is one of the latest indie releases to chart high, hitting #12 on the Billboard album charts way back in January.

I'm pretty terrible when it comes to writing up my experiences at concerts, so if you're one of the few people out there who might care to read about what I thought about the show, I'd advise you to not hold your breath. I just figured I'd use this time to demonstrate how cool, hip, and bleeding edge I am, and to post a few St. Vincent videos.

"These Days" (Nico cover)

"Actor Out of Work"

"Dig A Pony" (The Beatles cover, obviously)

"Marrow"

"Jesus Saves, I Spend"

And, for the hell of it, the best Andrew Bird clip ever...

Dr. Stringz

Movie Review: Zombieland (2009)

2009-10-11T18:12:00.001-04:00

There are rules to living in a place like Zombieland, and lucky for us, one of the few humans left standing at the end of the world, a neurotic young college kid named Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) has them written all down. Those of us who are particularly doomed once there's no more room in Hell: The fat, the emotional, the heroic, and the ones who don't buckle up. If you can't bear to launch your grandmother through the windsheild of your stolen Cadillac Escalade, what good are you as humanity's last hope?

As it turns out, there are some people in Zombieland who don't obsessively keep a list of rules, and they've been doing just fine for themselves. Columbus first runs across Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), whose only rule in life is to enjoy the little things. Little things include raging on zombies, destroying formerly private property, and Twinkies, which are in stunningly short supply in this brave new world. Columbus and Tallahassee happen upon Wichita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin), two sisters who've made their living by pulling jobs on gullible guys like poor, hapless Columbus.

After the tension between the four subsides, our heroes head West to California, where Wichita and Little Rock hope to capture the innocence of a time before zombies by going to Pacific Playland. Going to a place with a lot of lights and noise and movement doesn't sound like the smartest thing to do in the midst of zombie Armageddon, and it isn't, but a carnival sounds like one heck of a place to kill a bunch of zombies, and it is.

But Pacific Playland isn't really the point of the movie, as Columbus, at various points in time, takes us away from the road trip and the zombie killing to give us little bits and pieces about who these people were before America became Zombieland. All four of them have trust issues: Columbus spent most of his life as a loner and only realized how valuable other people were once they started trying to eat him, Wichita and Little Rock have gotten by on lying, and Tallahassee doesn't have a reason for living outside of Twinkies and the elusive Zombie Kill of the Week award, and while it might seem obvious to somebody sitting in the theater that sticking together is the smart thing to do, one of Columbus' rules is to not get attached to anybody, and those rules are the only thing keeping him alive.

This is a very funny movie, maybe even the funniest of the year. The comparison to Shaun of the Dead is about as easy as it is incorrect, as the combination of zombies and comedy are about all they have in common. It's not even this movie's American sensibilities. Shaun of the Dead involved family and friends sticking together, about the unassuming sap at the center of the film finding his purpose. Zombieland is maybe a bit nihilistic in comparison. Four strangers come together, and all four of them have their reasons for living, but what happens when Tallahassee gets his Twinkie? The humans in this movie go on living just because it's better than the alternative.

And that's a nice change of pace. There is no false weightiness to any of the characters, and nobody ever mentions that they may be humanity's last hope. Everybody is too worried about their own skin to bother with saving humanity. There is no good or bad military force concerned with salvation or turning a profit, no dubious scientists who "accidentally" released a deadly bio-weapon into the air, and no half-witted attempt at social-mindedness. Zombie movies, for the most part, lost their capacity to reflect on society's ills the minute that biker gang started throwing pies at the undead in George Romero's unsurpassed Dawn of the Dead. It's nice that this movie, at least on the surface, wants nothing more than to make you laugh and gross you out a little, and surprising when, at the end of the movie, all of the characters involved seem plausible and well-rounded.

Maybe the third act, where a horde of the undead are killed in various gruesome, amusement park themed ways is a little disappointing in comparison to the spectacular middle section, but that's a small complaint. I probably wouldn't have even noticed the slight drop in comedy had it not been for the film's special guest, who steals the show without being the only thing worth talking about when the credits roll. Though it's probably public knowledge at this point, I won't spoil who the guest is like I did with the people I saw the movie with. It's something that's funnier if you go in unspoiled, but those bastards made fun of me for seeing Twilight, and thus earned my wrath.

I Really Like Your Style, Dude

Words cannot express this commercial...

2009-09-27T16:34:00.003-04:00

Ric Flair may be older than the woman who wants to ride Space Mountain.

Also, the Lions finally snapped their 19 game losing streak. I won't bore you with a big long ramble about how happy I am, so take my word for it: This is a great day.

How could you be so heartless?

2009-09-15T16:38:00.004-04:00

I wish I'd have thought of these first:

All of them come from here. None of Kanye interrupting ODB yet, which I'd rectify, but I just got a new computer and haven't yet gotten Photoshop.

And yes, I enjoyed my impromptu break very much.

The Worst Thing I've Heard All Day: Ghostface Killah (ft. Raheem DeVaughn) - Baby

2009-08-28T19:19:00.004-04:00

So I'm finally out of my post-Bonnaroo funk, where literally the only thing that could make me feel was Bruce Springsteen and excerpts from St. Vincent's Actor, and I find out that Ghostface Killah, without question one of the greatest rappers walking the planet today, has a new album coming out towards the end of September. It's called Wizard of Poetry, which, I guess, explains the Wu-Tang-meets-Wizard-of-Oz album cover:

And then, once I'm done clicking around the internet, I find that the first single, "Baby," has already leaked. Color me excited, right? I click the YouTube link...and then am smacked in the face by 100 tons of overwrought Auto-Tune. I don't know if anybody has put a finger on my musical tastes yet, what with the zero music-related posts this year, but I hate Auto-Tune. Not only does it smack of laziness, but it seems like a tool that's hell bent in obscuring the fact that whoever wrote the song didn't do a very good job of it. Point in fact: This song is an absolute trainwreck; hardly worth being appended to an album as bonus material, let alone as a lead single.

I get that this is Ghostface's attempt at R&B, and his hazy, half-baked come-ons are effective, as they usually are. I guess I don't mind the sample, but it smacks of mid-1990's commercial stuff. It doesn't dig at you and it doesn't go anywhere. A sweet nothing. It and Ghostface just don't go together. The chorus is where things really fall apart, Auto-Tune working overtime to obscure that DeVaughn isn't saying anything. I imagine that a woman, when faced with a line like "What a joy we've made/from the love we made. Yeah. Yeah." wouldn't know whether to smile politely and move the conversation along or roll her eyes full stop. There was more romance when Ghostface rhymed that he wasn't looking for love in "We Celebrate." At least then he was being honest.

I wouldn't quite compare it to Republicans trying to co-opt Born in the USA...

2009-08-20T14:25:00.004-04:00

But Mastercard's new "Break in Your Jeans" commercials are somewhat brazen in their ability to, well, miss the freaking point.

In the span of 30 seconds, you see Marlon Brando, John Wayne, the Ramones, Maralyn Monroe, and, if I'm not mistaken, some clip from Woodstock, along with some rebelous text about how any article of clothing that aren't jeans are for big, rich douchebags, narrated by the familiar Mastercard narrator, who may as well be the voice of my generation (sorry, Kanye).

I understand that business is business, and that making yourselves look cool is often a way of ensuring business with my crowd, but at least three of the five clips used in this commercial, to speak nothing of David Bowie and his iconic 70's material, spoke against conformity. Mastercard: You are a credit card company. I hate to point that out, but it's the truth, plain and simple. You are the man you're so keen on rebelling against. Instead, you should have gone with this:

Jimmy Clanton - Venus in Blue Jeans

The Blue Collar Comedy Guys

Nickleback

This douche.

With that being said, I will now present myself as an awful hypocrite:

This Levi's ad, directed by Cary Fukunaga (Sin Nombre), is stunning, combining hipsters with two enduring figures of Americana: Jeans, and Walt Whitman. For one minute and two seconds, I was not annoyed that movie theaters have taken to playing unescapable, often terrible ads before their movies--I was overtaken by this most excelent reading of Walt Whitman's "Pioneers! O Pioneers!," a poem that is somewhat overlooked because we take Whitman for granted, especially if the poem isn't "Song of Myself" or about Lincoln.

The reading is from a 1957 album of recordings from Whitman's seminal Leaves of Grass, by a group called The University Players. It would be long out of print were it not for Smithsonian Folkways, a non-profit record label opporated by the Smithsonian Institute. It is, for my money, one of the unhearalded aspects of our government; that somewhere, someone is preserving our history of recorded sound. They do this with movies too, via the National Film Registry. Films as diverse as All About Eve and The Terminator will be around as long as there is a United States, ready to be chopped up and regurgitated into Levi's ads at a moment's notice. If they're as good as this one, and don't shill as hard as the Mastercard one, I'll allow it. Hell, I might even like it enough to not mind that it's standing between me and my movie.

Pioneers! O Pioneers!
by Walt Whitman

Come my tan-faced children,
Follow well in order, get your weapons ready,
Have you your pistols? have you your sharp-edged axes?
Pioneers! O pioneers!

For we cannot tarry here,
We must march my darlings, we must bear the brunt of danger,
We the youthful sinewy races, all the rest on us depend,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

O you youths, Western youths,
So impatient, full of action, full of manly pride and friendship,
Plain I see you Western youths, see you tramping with the foremost,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Have the elder races halted?
Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied over there beyond the seas?
We take up the task eternal, and the burden and the lesson,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

All the past we leave behind,
We debouch upon a newer mightier world, varied world,
Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of labor and the march,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

We detachments steady throwing,
Down the edges, through the passes, up the mountains steep,
Conquering, holding, daring, venturing as we go the unknown ways,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

We primeval forests felling,
We the rivers stemming, vexing we and piercing deep the mines within,
We the surface broad surveying, we the virgin soil upheaving,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Colorado men are we,
From the peaks gigantic, from the great sierras and the high plateaus,
From the mine and from the gully, from the hunting trail we come,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

From Nebraska, from Arkansas,
Central inland race are we, from Missouri, with the continental
blood intervein'd,
All the hands of comrades clasping, all the Southern, all the Northern,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

O resistless restless race!
O beloved race in all! O my breast aches with tender love for all!
O I mourn and yet exult, I am rapt with love for all,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Raise the mighty mother mistress,
Waving high the delicate mistress, over all the starry mistress,
(bend your heads all,)
Raise the fang'd and warlike mistress, stern, impassive, weapon'd mistress,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

See my children, resolute children,
By those swarms upon our rear we must never yield or falter,
Ages back in ghostly millions frowning there behind us urging,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

On and on the compact ranks,
With accessions ever waiting, with the places of the dead quickly fill'd,
Through the battle, through defeat, moving yet and never stopping,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

O to die advancing on!
Are there some of us to droop and die? has the hour come?
Then upon the march we fittest die, soon and sure the gap is fill'd.
Pioneers! O pioneers!

All the pulses of the world,
Falling in they beat for us, with the Western movement beat,
Holding single or together, steady moving to the front, all for us,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Life's involv'd and varied pageants,
All the forms and shows, all the workmen at their work,
All the seamen and the landsmen, all the masters with their slaves,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

All the hapless silent lovers,
All the prisoners in the prisons, all the righteous and the wicked,
All the joyous, all the sorrowing, all the living, all the dying,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

I too with my soul and body,
We, a curious trio, picking, wandering on our way,
Through these shores amid the shadows, with the apparitions pressing,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Lo, the darting bowling orb!
Lo, the brother orbs around, all the clustering suns and planets,
All the dazzling days, all the mystic nights with dreams,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

These are of us, they are with us,
All for primal needed work, while the followers there in embryo wait behind,
We to-day's procession heading, we the route for travel clearing,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

O you daughters of the West!
O you young and elder daughters! O you mothers and you wives!
Never must you be divided, in our ranks you move united,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Minstrels latent on the prairies!
(Shrouded bards of other lands, you may rest, you have done your work,)
Soon I hear you coming warbling, soon you rise and tramp amid us,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Not for delectations sweet,
Not the cushion and the slipper, not the peaceful and the studious,
Not the riches safe and palling, not for us the tame enjoyment,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Do the feasters gluttonous feast?
Do the corpulent sleepers sleep? have they lock'd and bolted doors?
Still be ours the diet hard, and the blanket on the ground,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Has the night descended?
Was the road of late so toilsome? did we stop discouraged nodding
on our way?
Yet a passing hour I yield you in your tracks to pause oblivious,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Till with sound of trumpet,
Far, far off the daybreak call--hark! how loud and clear I hear it wind,
Swift! to the head of the army!--swift! spring to your places,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Movie Review: District 9 (2009)

2009-08-19T17:31:00.003-04:00

Neill Blomkamp's District 9 is a minor miracle: At $30 million, it proves that you can make a visually exciting, tense, action-packed science fiction movie that looks good, sounds good, is well acted, and blows things up without resorting to product tie-ins, ADHD editing, liberal amounts of slo-mo, or camera tricks that smack of television commercials. District 9 is the anti-Transformers: Popcorn space opera with a smart, hard sci-fi shell.

I'll be frank and say that the hard sci-fi aspects come to a screeching halt around midway through the movie, but until that point, what we have is fascinating. An alien craft comes to hover above Johannesburg, South Africa, eschewing the usual landing spots of Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles, London, Paris, and Moscow. After much deliberation, humans bore into the mothership and make a shocking discovery: A horde of writhing, malnourished extraterrestrials who look a bit like Abe from the awesome-but-somewhat-forgotten Oddworld video games, if Abe had tentacles and mandibles.

Or maybe not, but I wanted to be clever and obscure. Clever obscura?

Having had no experience with aliens who don't look like us, look like angels, look like stuffed animals, speak our language, blow up our landmarks, or come preaching peace (...or else!), humanity decides to do what it can: Temporarily house them in District 9. Temporary becomes 20 years, long enough for D9 to become a shanty town whose inhabitants pick at garbage heaps for scrap and treat cat food like a five star delicacy. Humanity, expecting more from a race of beings who have mastered interstellar travel, want the aliens out. Multinational United, an organization dedicated to philanthropy, private security, and weapons manufacturing, are ready, willing, and able to make this happen - the Prawns will be evicted and moved to District 10.

There's a lot of corporate whitewash and "what can you do?" all over this, like the guys at the top of the multimillion dollar corporation really wanted to help but just couldn't for whatever reason, which just so happens to be a haul of alien weaponry that blows the doors off of human tech but requires the bio-signature of a Prawn to work. MNU can confiscate all the weapons it wants from District 9, but confiscation is about all they can do.

Which isn't to say that they're not on the lookout for some sort of skeleton key, which is likely why they're keen on serving eviction notices. The man in charge of this operation, Wikus van de Merwe (an awesome, previously unknown Sharlto Copley), videotapes the grisly proceedings, like a soldier at Abu Garib who assumes that the film will never fall out of his hands. Caught on tape, van de Merwe's condescending behavior towards Prawns, eviction notices signed at shotgun-point, violence, a mafia element, souvenir-taking, and abortion. Wikus has a grin on his face through all of it, unless he's made to look like a fool, which happens quite often, like when he inspects a strange canister that crackles like a Geiger counter and it sprays out a viscus black liquid that was previously seen being cooked on a home chemistry set. Is this some sort of alien meth? Hardly, but poor Van De Merwe reacts poorly to it, throwing up. Later, his arm is broken. Then he has a sort of odd nosebleed. He goes home to his wife after this awful day, only to stumble into a surprise party celebrating his promotion. He throws up all over the cake. He heads to the hospital. He becomes an extremely valuable medical experiment; Gregor Samsa with a bounty on his head.

This, basically, is where the movie stops being an allegory and starts being a chase thriller. Blomkamp could very well have stuck with the docudrama feel, giving us glimpses into Wikus metamorphosis and a treatise on human nature, and I still would have liked it. Instead, he creates an incredibly paced, tightly narrated chase through the slums, where van de Merwe is targeted by both MNU and a Nigerian gang that wants to eat his arm, believing that it will grant them the ability to wield their stockpile of alien weaponry that is otherwise scrap. Acting as van de Merwe's accomplices are two Prawns, Christopher Joseph and his son, who has cute, big, wet googly eyes that had one of the girls I went to see the movie with cooing about how adorable the little guy was, like Wall-E with tentacles.

As it turns out, Christopher Joseph is not a scrounger. He and his son are two of maybe three intelligent Prawns who are seen in the movie, and it is he who cooks up the black fluid, which isn't a virus but a fuel of some kind. He also says that he can cure Wikus. "I knew you Prawns were intelligent!" he says, more relieved that he won't have to become one than pleasantly surprised at his "discovery."

I have a theory about Christopher Joseph: He isn't the only smart Prawn in District 9. Sure, what we see of the Prawns before he becomes the central one isn't a pretty picture. They riot, they pick garbage, they enjoy catfood, and they're apparently stupid, completely failing to meet our expectations as to what a visiting species would be, looks aside. But where do all of our images of Prawns come from before Wikus unknowingly stumbles into Christopher Joseph's shack? The documentary footage of Wikus' journey into the camp, and news footage. Consider the state of the news media, then ask what the sexier headline is: "Are Aliens Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?" or "Aliens Land; Ask for Directions to Alpha Centauri." We see what we want to see, and after 20 years of seeing an alien craft hovering and rusting above a major metropolis, many of us would stop seeing an intelligent race with the ability to travel throughout the galaxy, preferring instead to think that, back home, the Prawns pick through garbage heaps for food, hoping for a scrap that tastes like Fancy Feast. This is why people who go to Sea World don't see dolphins as incredibly smart creatures, but as constantly smiling dopes who are happy to do back flips for minnows. In the D9 time line, Earth has been given 20 years to think that the Prawns are dumb, violent, bumbling creatures. We create stereotypes, then give their subjects no choice but to live within it. I don't know what that's worth coming from a white college kid, so take it for what you will.

On the other hand, the Nigerian gang who are shown selling cat food, other meat, and sex to Prawns for guns and money are one dimensional, meant to intimidate, rather than educate. They eat Prawn parts to gain their power, adhere to voodoo, and do little more than leer, yell, and shoot things. There aren't many positive black figures in the movie (the only one I can really think of has an extremely minor part), but it wasn't exactly like Blomkamp went out of his way to make Wikus the world's most likable white man, either. I don't want to accuse anybody of nitpicking, but what does it say when we complain that the secondary villains, who are there basically as deus ex machina/cannon fodder, aren't well developed? Not every white man acting as VP of some division in a weapons manufacturing company is an ethics-skirting asshole in a power suit, but I don't see too many people coming out of the woodwork to suggest that Blomkamp's portrayal of the 21st century business man was less than fair to the 21st century business man. Suggesting that this is how the movie sees all Africans (Nigerians, at least) as violent, ill-tempered, voodoo warriors is like suggesting that Silence of the Lambs sees all MTF transsexuals as knife-wielding, dungeon-digging, skin care obsessed psychopaths, and Silence didn't even give the courtesy of having a nice transsexual somewhere in the background.

If anything, the film's fatal flaw was its third act, a shootout that was exciting but that added nothing in terms of message. I won't go so far as to call it a cop-out, but the film leaves things very much up in the air, not wanting to answer any of its own questions or follow up with the Prawns, who are moved into District 10, described by Wikus as being like concentration camps, via title card. I was glad for the shootout, not wanting to be lectured after a breathless second act, but yeah, it was a wee bit thin, and leaves us with enough uncertainty that a follow-up would be awfully convenient for all involved; which I actually wouldn't mind, providing that it focused on the slums and the Prawns more than MNU and weapons. There's room enough for an effective political statement, but 33 years after apartheid, a lecture smacks of apology, which, as an Irishman, I didn't want from Gangs of New York, either. This isn't a movie about racism, but it doesn't use the allegory as a mere prop, either.

Probably the best movie of it's kind since Total Recall. If you know anything about me, you know that's extremely high praise.

The Dude Abides

No wonder Asia stands to dominate us...

2009-08-16T12:27:00.003-04:00

Their kids hit puberty and start talking like clean versions of Notorious B.I.G. albums from the tender age of eight. We're lucky if kids ever escape that phase.

Movie Review: Funny People (2009)

2009-08-13T17:43:00.000-04:00

Judd Apatow’s Funny People is not so much a comedy about funny people as it is an aggressive war against stereotypes. The two most prominently attacked: That comedians are funny in “real” life, all the time, 24/7; and that everybody who survives cancer has this miraculous, dramatic, It’s a Wonderful Life/A Christmas Carol mid-life turnaround, wherein the misanthropic hero’s heart grows three sizes, the Christmas bird is put on the table, and he’s going to live a better life, dammit.

George Simmons (Adam Sandler) is not a good person. You could, if you wanted to, draw a comparison between him and C.F. Kane. Both live alone in their huge houses, interacting mainly with staff. Both have many acquaintances and business associates, but no friends. Both have gained an incredible amount of wealth, material and monetary. Both seem destined to die alone and misunderstood. Simmons, unlike Kane, is woken up from his long nightmare by a sudden revelation: He has cancer. Worse: It’s a cancer that only eight percent of people survive.

George is distraught, as most people who are told that they have an eight percent chance of coming out of treatment alive. He decides to go back to stand-up comedy, an odd choice for a superstar comic with piles of movie offers on his kitchen counter, and winds up playing to silenced crowds at the Improv, who don’t get that his “How will you go on without me?” act isn’t really an act—he wants to know how America will go on without one of its icons. “Why me?” mixed with “You poor bastards.”

Meanwhile, Ira Wright (Seth Rogen, who lost weight) is an aspiring comedian who works at a grocery store and sleeps on his friend’s couch. His roommates, a more successful comic (Jonah Hill, who didn’t lose weight), and the star of an awful, teen-orientated sitcom (Jason Schwartzman, perpetually skinny), and his co-worker at the deli (RZA) all point out his fatal flaw: He isn’t funny. It’s sad, and perhaps lucky, that he has to go on after George, who just bombed. When his original material doesn’t go over so well, he starts ragging on George, who is looking on in the back sullenly.

George hires Ira to write jokes for him and eventually become his assistant. For Ira, it's a dream job. He gets to open for George, hang out in a massive house, and get paid to write material for stand-up comedy. For George, it's a necessity. Ira is the first person in some time he has let into his life, the first person to realize how crushing his lonely existance is, and the first person to find out that he has cancer.

From there, the movie changes gears. It becomes less about funny people and more about the process of finding oneself. George has a lot of soul-searching to do, and, unlike 99% of movie characters who go through his situation, he isn't very good at it. Sure, things seem to be moving along while he's sick, but what's to stop George Simmons from going back to being a jerk when he's healthy?

Nothing, which is why he becomes a celebrimonster as soon as the doctor (Torsten Voges) tells him to go out and make another movie. Rather than do that, George wants to pursue Laura (Leslie Mann), the woman he would have married had not he cheated on her. The problem with that plan of action is that Laura is married to Clark (Eric Bana) and has two kids. He has a choice: Make himself happy and destroy a family, or look for happiness elsewhere.

If that's what you expected to see going in, more power to you. You were clearly paying attention during Knocked Up, The 40 Year Old Virgin, Superbad, Forgetting Sarah Marshal, or his TV shows. If you were expecting an Adam McKay-like parade of dick, fart, and masturbation jokes with nothing else, you might walk out a little nonplussed. "Funny People?" you might ask. "Was I supposed to laugh when Sarah Silverman made her face look like a vagina, or was Judd just fucking with me?"

Well no, probably not. The people making the trailers are likely to blame, not that the Comedy Central stand-up special helped any. Any time two comedians are in the same room in this movie, there is some kind of awkwardness, an invisible competition running between the two, and an odd, mutual loathing. The jokes they crack offstage are often not funny, they don't look happy shaking hands and taking pictures with people they don't know, and, you may be shocked, the big guys hire open mic night people to write jokes for them. Only Eminem seems to get it, but if he believes what he's saying, every new release is the highest form of cowardice. It's all an act, even when it isn't.

I, like most people, I imagine, liked the first half of Funny People more than the second. While I won't go out on a limb and call Apatow indulgent for putting his wife and kids front and center, I do wonder at why two radically different movies were smashed together, pushing an extremely likable Seth Rogen so far into the background that, at one point, he is told to go watch a movie with the kids...which he does without protest.

Stand-up comedy is a heavily veiled world that few ever get a peek at, and Apatow went with a brilliant set-up to give the audience a chance to see where our favorite stand-ups got their start. It's unique. It's fresh. Marital drama, no matter how well it's executed, seems a bit dull by comparison. The tacked-on ending helps neither half of the movie.

That doesn't mean that Funny People isn't a movie without a lot to say. If anything, it has too much to say and spends too much time finding the words. While it might go unappreciated now because August is the month usually dedicated to Sandler fare like You Don't Mess With the Zohan, this is a challenging, sometimes brilliant movie waiting to be picked up and appreciated by people who want something beyond the dick and fart jokes. This is no minor entry in Apatow's canon.

Far Fucking Out