Only one other commenter mentioned the latest Dodos album?!? I don't understand the lukewarm reaction to that album at all -- the musicianship is phenomenal, and the vocal melodies are some of the best I've heard in years. Neko Case is great on it, too. I think that it blows Visiter away, which in comparison to No Color sounds meandering and demo-ish (except for "Ashley," which is unbeatable).
Best of the year, and certainly the most listenable, especially when its blasting while you're driving with the windows down on a gorgeous day.
Nosferatu Wong Fu Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmars Attacks ... As Tears Go Bicentennial Man Who Fell to Battlefield Earth Angels With Dirty Faces of Death Wish Upon a Starsky and Hutch ... Walkabout a Boy ... The CIder House Rules of the Game ... The Man Who Would Be King Ralph ... All About Eve of Destruction ... Those Who Love Me Can Take the Trainspotting ... The Networking Girl 6 Days, Seven Nights in Rodanthe Music Lovers on the Bridge to Terabithia Clockwork Orange County General's Daughters of Darkness Falls ... The Man in the Iron Masked & Anonymous ... Regarding Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer Klowns from Outer Spacecamp Nowhere Man on Firewall-E.T.
Johnny B. Goodburgerfellas ... Remember the Titanics ... The Curious Case of Private Benjamin Button ... Assault and Flatteries Not Included ... Cop Land of the Lost in Space Jam ... August Rushmore the Merrier ... The Passion of the Antichrist ... 8 1/2 Women Under the Influence ... Big Trouble in Little Chinatown ... Knife in the Waterworld ... Kiss Me Deadly Friend ... The Legend of Billy Jeanne Dielman ... Once Upon a Time in the Westworld ... Timecode Unknown Pleasures ... Fat Girl, Interrupted ... Trouble Every Daytrippers ... The House Bunny Lake Is Missing ... Give My Regards to Broadway Danny the Rose ... The Unbearable Lightness of Being John Malkovich ... The Asphalt Jungle Fever ... Barfly Me to the Moon ... McCabe and Mrs. Miller's Crossing Over ... French Cancan I Get a Witness?
Bad Boys on the Sideways of the Flesh Gordon... Inland Empire of the Sun Strikes Backdraft ... The Eraserhead ... Citizen Ruth Kane ... The King and I, Robot Jox ... Spidermandroid ... Meet Harry Black and the Tiger Widow of St. Pierre ... Big Top Gun Pee Wee ... 24 Hour Party People Under the Stairs ... They Live and Let Die Hard Day's Night on Earth Girls Are Five Easy Pieces of April ... ShamPootietang ... Even Cowgirls Get the Blue Velvets ... St. Elmo's Fire Walk With Me, Myself, and Irene
I am not at all a fan of Quentin Tarantino, and I didn't expect to find much of anything redeeming in this movie. I haven't been that pleasantly surprised by a film in a long time. Before I say anything, though, I should get it out of the way that I was *not* one of the insane people who have proliferated and ruined not only this but just about every movie-going experience I've had in the past 10 years or so who laugh nervously and/or inappropriately throughout an entire film.
With that said, I thought that Inglourious Basterds was fucking phenomenal, and deserving of the admittedly garish final line. I don't even know how to really begin covering everything I loved about it -- the bizarre but exhilarating juxtaposition of tension-inducing, highly controlled scenes with blasts of horrific violence; the motif of private versus public versus professional identities and where you fall on this spectrum when it comes to making choices to save yourself and your family or to honor your/your group's morals/duty (not to mention language as a barrier and betrayer); the desire for celebrity and individual recognition versus the desire to obliterate identity to hide (and, relatedly, the fascinating theme of nicknames, their origins, and their applicability); the rich, meta-filmic layering of actors playing characters playing actors (hence, I think, the intentionally distracting use of super-well-knowns such as Pitt and Myers, along the lines of Cruise and Kidman appearing in Eyes Wide Shut); the idea of fate versus chance versus planning; the sheer love of cinema its just so steeped in; the breathtaking Cat People scene; the lush reds of Nazi flags, British drapery, and freshly carved scalps ... I could go on and on.
Since I'm not Jewish, I don't feel terribly comfortable commenting on the overall morality of turning the tables and taking brutal revenge on the Nazis; however, I personally found that -- in spite of the sociopaths laughing and cheering at every opportunity, however frighteningly wrong-headed -- the violence and vengeance was not meant to be "fun," or even if it was, it miraculously didn't turn out that way. I think that too much time and care was taken to give most of the Nazi characters personality and even charisma for us to simply cheer the gory attacks unleashed upon them. It seems to me that this alternate history is meant to be deplorable, if of course not equally deplorable to what actually occurred. If you're cheering for violence *that* brutal, then I think the problem's with you, not Tarantino. Any victories in this movie are Pyrrhic.
It is by no means the best movie ever. It is, however, one of the most thematically layered and interesting big-budget Hollywood spectacles in probably decades, far exceeding most films in terms of ambition, and I'd also say execution. I can't wait to see it again.
Spot on assessment. If this hyper-emo caterwauling passes for singing, then I feel bad for the state of singing. The positive? It makes me appreciate Division Day about eleventy billion times more than I previously did (which was a lot), because this is what happens when a bunch of hacks try for a similar sound. Cheers!
In a sea of "Fuck you for liking the Hold Steady!" and "No, fuck YOU for disliking them!" inanity, I would like to make a few points:
1. It's a specious argument -- and a ridiculous blanket statement -- to say that there's any correlation whatsoever between one's level of culture/education and his or her liking of THS's music.
2. It's entirely baffling to see how many people accuse hipsters of disliking THS based on the fact that the band has built a sizable fan base and is therefore too popular to be cool. This is completely counterintuitive, because THS totally panders to the hipster demographic in their lyrics. A significant degree of my utter revulsion for the band stems from the fact that this asshole, Finn, is 36 years old and yet somehow singing lyrics about "the scene" and 17-year-olds and all manner of related pathetic, creepy, and pedophiliac topics that he should've outgrown years ago. I'm five years younger than the guy, and I'll be good god damned if I've given the slightest shit about scenes or hipsters for a decade. It would be fun to write THS-style songs about the Hannah Montana demographic, just to point out just how disturbing and absurd it is for these borderline-middle-aged men to be singing about college/high-school-aged kids; "She said she got a chocolate milk sugar buzz/ just because/ her mom won't let her stay up late/she's spastic in oversized plastic sunglasses/she said, 'yeah, I put off my homework'/'my teacher's a real jerk' ..."
3. Finn's *delivery* is obnoxious as hell; the only thing more ponderous than the pseudo-profundity of his fake-catch-phrase-y one-liner lyrics is his smug, arrogant "I'm a poet of the people" nasal shout-singing. You can hear the "I'm a genius, and this is why" in every line, not unlike Anthony Hopkins's post-Silence of the Lambs scenery-chewing, Oscar-grubbing hamminess.
4. That Finn throws together a bunch of details and dropping random scene/hipster-esque vernacular in his lyrics does not even _begin_ to warrant comparisons to Springsteen, let alone Beat writers.
5. Many seem to praise THS's "refreshing honesty" and "belief in what they're doing" or whatever, but their little contrived narratives and straight-faced bar rock feel juuuuuust a bit forced.
All of the above are just my opinions, of course; I just wanted to throw something out there about *why* I think the Hold Steady are terrible and insufferable, not just that they *are* terrible and insufferable.
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