Empty Bookshelf Reviews

Is it possible to make a movie that is at once pretentious, derivative, completely incomprehensible, insanely long, outrageous just for the sake of it, tonally off-balance, with tons of distractingly recognizeable actors, and somehow surprisingly engrossing? Honestly, Southland Tales lives up to its negative hype. It is a car wreck of epic proportions. You sit there completely sucked in, but with your jaw hanging open wondering how a movie this completely off-the-wall bad can take itself so seriously, or even how it got funding in the first place.

The movie, Richard Kelly's follow-up epic mess to cult hit Donnie Darko leaps from place to place like a kid on a playground after too much candy and juice, and usually leaves you wondering who these characters are and why are they doing whatever it is they're doing, that is, if you can figure out what they are doing.

Full disclosure: I like Donnie Darko. I'm a little bit bitter towards it, but I like it. I think it's a fantastic collection of scenes and ideas that fit together tonally, but don't really make a coherent story. And I've tried to figure out the story. I was on the Donnie Darko bandwagon before the movie had even come out. I found the website, which at the time was something to behold, via a small article in EW magazine. Watched a bootleg copy of it while it was still in theatres. Had no idea what I just saw. I watched it over and over again, showing new people every time. I couldn't figure out the master plan of what was going on. Things were so disjointed, and there was never any exposition to give any clue as to what happened at the end. I bought the DVD, and when I listened to the commentary track, I was surprised to find out that the director also seemed not to know. There was no explanation. He was just putting stuff in that he thought would be weird. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me again... uhh.... you don't get fooled again.

I really can't imagine that there was any plan going into this movie. Something about an extremist future, with big-brother republicans selling out for some kind of perpetual motion machine, and "neo-Marxists" (his word, not mine) bent on destroying everything for some reason. The media is a hyper-conglomerate of entertainment, commercials (most notably a car commercial, featuring two Hummers [the car] having sex with each other), propaganda, and news. And for some reason, every show is taped on a beach. The guy who created this energy machine (which looks exactly like the gyroscope in Contact) is somehow trying to take over the world by cutting off people's hands or something. Some people are trying to blackmail The Rock, whose father-in-law is running for Vice President (i think?). Drugs are involved, needless to say. Whatever satire Kelly's attempting, it's either already been done, or it's too broad to be saying anything, really.

Justin Timberlake is a "Revelations"-reciting narrator who sits on a machine-gun pedestal on the beach, looking to shoot God knows what, and really serving no purpose other than lip-synching to a song by "The Killers" in some sort of arcade, about halfway through. Sarah Michelle Gellar is a porn-star/talk show host who is either trying to blackmail The Rock or wants to be with him. I couldn't tell. I don't think she could. Sean William Scott plays twins. Cheri Oteri and Nora Dunn are crazy "neo Marxists", as well as Amy Poehler. And if three SNL alumni aren't enough, Jon Lovitz plays a racist cop. And if "SNL" isn't the only Saturday late night sketch comedy show on your radar, "Mad TV"'s Will Sasso is also there. Thow in the motley crew of John Larroquette (who's actually pretty good), Mandy Moore, an unrecognizable Kevin Smith, the Highlander as an ice-cream-truck-driving arms rocket launcher salesman, Wallace Shawn in a dress and makeup, Bai Ling, and Janeane Garofalo in two seconds of screen time that amount to her being an extra (granted i think her part was entirely cut out), and you've got a cast that is seriously going to distract, even if you had the most engrossing material.



Not that the material couldn't be interesting. It's got all the elements that could make it completely engaging: blackmail, WW3, cutting off people's fingers, perpetual motion machines, The Rock, fake murder plots, a giant blimp, memory loss, drugs, public beach mounted gun stations, and, yes, time travel. The problem is that there's way too much of it, and a lot of it for no reason. That someone saw this script and said "let's fund that" is remarkable. I really can't understand how someone didn't tell this guy to pare the story down to something that had actual character motivations you could follow. You know when you start a movie and the first title says "Part 4" (the first three parts were released as comics and one wonders how much more coherent they were), that things are going to be confusing. Even more remarkable is the amount of on-camera talent in it. How any of the actors could play these scenes is baffling to me, because I was constantly asking "Who's that? Why is he doing that? What's his purpose in this movie? For what reason is he so important that he's the narrator?", and if I was while I was watching, I guarantee that the actors were asking ten times as many questions. I'd like to have heard Kelly's explanation as to why The Rock always put his fingertips together melodramatically when he was confused. EVERY TIME! And I wonder if The Rock could tell me that. Yes, there's something to be said of making the audience think and figure something out, but like I said before, "I'm not getting fooled again".

There is also something to be said for style over substance, but while it looks good (especially the blu-ray-quality version), and has some strangely unique things to it, most of it just felt like a rip-off of something else. There were multiple David Lynch moments, including a random group of recurring background little people; a strange old asian lady talking some kind of prophetic nonsense; and a recontextualized version of a highly-recognizable song, sung in a foreign language by a woman on a stage. The extremely ensemble and spread-out nature was taken right from P.T. Anderson's Magnolia (as, it seemed, was the strange pacing of a lot of it), which in turn (at least i hear) was supposed to be a Robert Altman homage. Lastly, and most importantly of all, he's completely ripped off of himself. Incomprehensible time travel/ Dimensional rifts; someone getting shot in the left eye; large aircraft falling out of the air; the end of the world; wormholes (the effects work even looks the same). It's all there. It's not that the style is bad; it's just incredibly unique while at the same time, paradoxically all been seen before. (figure that one out).

The theatrical cut is two and a half hours, one half-hour less than the widely-derided Cannes cut of the film, which you can see in parts, in low-quality video on the YouTubes, if you're a masochist. I'd like to think that the missing half-hour explained some of the things I didn't get, but judging from those reviews, I'd be wrong. (Though, from the few seconds of these clips I've seen, at least the narration is different and makes more sense). The movie cost between fifteen and sixteen million dollars to make, and was released in only 67 theatres (even limited releases usually get about 300), for a whopping $270,000 domestic gross. Yes, that's "thousand". After seeing it, one can easily see why. Not that I wouldn't watch it again, mind you, but only with people who have no reservations and are willing to sit through the whole thing. I'd like to see the confusion and anger on their faces, and at the same time their desire to keep going because it can't get any more outrageous. Oh yes. It can. Just for the sake of being outrageous.


Southland Tales takes all the faults of Donnie Darko and magnifies them tenfold. It's not a failure of style, as the film's got that in spades, but it is a complete failure of storytelling. Characters completely do major things for no reason, the order the scenes are in leaves you even more confused, and finally when a strange cabal of characters sits The Rock down to explain the whole story (for no other reason than to explain it to the audience), it makes no logical sense whatsoever. I guess there's at least an attempted explanation.

One star for allowing my friends and I to complain about how none of the story worked, and half a star for the cool scene where Sean William Scott was messing around with a mirror that took about half a second to mimic his action.

So back in 1998, I had an English oral presentation to do in which I'd be selling a made-up product. After racking my brain for hours, my thought process went as follows: "What do teenage girls want? Answer: Guys. Then what do teenage guys want? Answer: Meat. So the way for a girl to get a guy would be by smelling like meat." The presentation went fantasticly. I had charts and prototypes (sort of... bottles of cologne and body-wash with crudely designed logos). For the women who didn't want to have to smell the Bar-B-Fume, I invented the "Scent Remover 5000", which was just a clothespin to put on your nose. I demonstrated how to use the body wash (which for my purposes was just barbecue sauce in a soap dispenser) by smearing it all over my face. And I finished with the tagline, "Ladies, truly the way to a man's heart is now through his stomach."

Two years later, the product was revived as an info-mercial for a TV studio production class I was taking, but this time with way better logo design and a killer intro. I can't attest to the quality of the rest of it. I haven't watched it in years. You see, I can't find the tape with that semester's projects on it. To make matters worse, I can't even find the tape that has the original speech on it. I have most other semesters' projects, and I have the other speech we had to give that year in high school, but as it stands, right now the only tangible evidence of Bar-B-Fume existing is the logo I saved.

What makes this important is that Burger King just started marketing a meat-scented fragrance called "Flame". Here's the website. Granted, it smells like the Whopper and not like barbecue sauce, but it's still enough to have me shouting "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO". I guess I just need to follow through more.



I'm pretty angry.

Going back and finding posts I never finished, I saw that this one was completed, but never posted... maybe I just didn't have a picture to go with it.



Allow me to list the numerous things that made this game completely awesome for me to have seen in person.

1. Shane Victorino Hula Figurine- As part of the larger "Hula Day", celebrating Shane Victorino, for fans under 14 they were giving out Dashboard Hula Figurinesof the Hawaiian outfielder. We put a baseball hat on my 21-year-old sister, she passed as 14 I guess, because the old guy at the gate totally gave her one. Later, when I commented on the fact that she passed for 14, she punched me in the stomach.

2. It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia's Rob McElhenney and Danny DeVito threw out the first and second pitch, to a hula-skirt-wearing Phanatic. DeVito's only made it halfway.

3. Bizarrely terrible plays. Ironically, it was anything but sunny as there was a constant rain, which caused Pat Burrell to throw a ball about 15 feet, and Mike Zagurski to throw a ball directly into the ground. It didn't, however cause Freddy Garcia to not run out a ground ball to second, with deserved "Boo"s from the crowd.

4. Five-run comeback, punctuated by Ryan Howard's three-run homerun, with two outs, to give them the lead, which was eventually relinquished when the Giants tied the game.

5. Watching Danny DeVito Hula Dance during the 7th inning stretch.

6. Booing Barry. Barry Bonds came up with a chance to give his team the lead. He was greated by bigger BOOs than Freddy Garcia, and grounded into a double play.

7. Walk-Off. After letting the Giants tie the game in the 9th, the day's focus, Shane Victorino becomes the hero with a walk-off home run in the 10th. Though the stands in that video are empty, I don't think that many people left. It had been raining constantly for about an hour and most people were hiding wherever they could find cover.



This game just goes to show why you never leave a baseball game until it's over, even if it's raining.

Yet another Ben Folds-related review. I'm probably not going to write anything about his new album that's coming out this fall, and since this is much more interesting, I'd rather substitute it anyway.

I found this article on RollingStone.com that discusses how this fake album came about, with bits about each song. Basically, he and his bassist and drummer got some studio time in Dublin and wrote six fake tracks, added three songs that are going to be on the album, and gave it to some guys to leak.

Obviously the songs aren't all going to be great, but for a free download that's basically been sanctioned it's not a half bad idea. There's the free media attention that you get from the music magazine, and the rest of the internet music community (google search for "fake album leaks" and you'll almost exclusively get pages about this specific one), which is always good for someone who could possibly be deemed irrelevant and past his prime.

It gets his fan base excited and talking, though that could be a good thing or a bad thing. Not coming out immediately and saying that it's fake leads to discussion about the new sound (judging from the Rolling Stone samples, he's got yet another new sound he's going for. Kudos for changing it up, but like the last time, it's going to take some getting used to). The risk here is that while it does drum up interest in the new album, the fanbase is most unanimously going to be buying the new album anyway, and by putting out sub-par songs you can only hurt your chances that some of these people will be willing to pay for the album when they can just download it (of course, thereby missing the meaning of releasing a fake pirated version in the first place).

This isn't to say that this fake album is all that bad, it's just a little bit below full-album standards. It's about on-par with the EPs that he put out between "Rockin the Suburbs" and "Songs for Silverman". A few of these songs (Brainwascht, Dr. Yang) actually sound like they could be on that first Ben Folds Five album from way back when, which is probably the first time in ages that you could say something like that (whether it's a good thing or a bad thing depends on the person I think).


"Bitch Went Nuts" will probably be a concert staple in the future.



"Cologne" is great, though it's going to be on the album in a modified version.


"Way to Normal" is just strange, not that the bulk of it isn't a perfectly normal song, but it's three distinctly different sections. I especially love the "Flash Gordon"-inspired opening. The other ones besides "Hiroshima" are pretty much forgettable, but it was free so I'm not complaining.

Putting (at least similar versions of) three of the actual songs that are going to be on the album is a smart move as well, tempering the cries of "I downloaded this for nothing", and serving as an actual preview of what's coming. It's basically the same as releasing a free three-song single.... with six bonus tracks.


Releasing a fake version of your album on the internet (with actual fake songs) gets four stars, as it can get you free media attention, the fan base, and maybe even some others, talking about the upcoming album, and serve as a preview of what the album is actually going to be like. The only negative is that since he didn't come out right away and say it was fake, there may have been some negative early reviews. Providing full-disclosure, which he eventually did, mitigates this a bit though. In the end, I think that no matter how mediocre, fans appreciate what is basically a free EP.

Quick (hopefully) post about last night's ben folds concert at lafayette college in easton, PA. I've been to six Ben Folds concerts now (since 2001 and most of them were relatively close to where i was at the time, but yes, it's still a lot), and I'd probably rank this as the second best of them all, with last year's Muhlenberg show taking the top spot. Reasoning for this is that the drumer and bassist add so much more to the sound, both instrumentally and vocally, and both of these past two shows didn't require me to sit through rufus wainwright sucking the energy out of the crowd.

Granted, we had to sit through an equally ill-picked opening act (the same as muhlenberg), a solo guitar player/"singer" whose songs consisted of mostly playing the same chord over and over again arhythmically, droning on and on about there being "evil in the world" until the words had no meaning, all while basically looking like Sam Rockwell doing his best Crispin Glover impression. He also seemed to be drunk?

Mr. Folds (as the New York Times would say), put on his normal, energetic show for about an hour and forty five minutes, adding new bits to established songs, and going back to the beginning of the catalogue, including seven Ben Folds Five songs, and playing four new songs. Apparently, they just finished recording the new album; didn't say anything about release dates. Overall, just a fast-paced, awesome show. Also of note, t-shirts being sold read "I [Heart]ed Ben Folds... before he sucked".

Setlist (I felt like a nerd writing the song titles down, and I probably was right in feeling that way) below.

New Song- Didn't hear the title or any of the words really. Possibly "Brainwashed"
Gone
Hiroshima- New song about falling off a stage in Japan and doing the show with a concussion.
Bastard- That vocal part in the middle (adjusted from the album to suit three people, still sounding like more) is ridiculous
Still Fighting It
Free Coffee- New song. Played with a cake pan inside the piano, and a distortion pedal on some of the keys. Really interesting sound.
You to Thank- Went to the 70s sounding keyboard to the side of the piano for part of the solo, and was actually playing tough parts on both at the same time, angled ninety degrees apart, for a bit.
Landed- Cameo by some tambourine player got major cheerage.
Annie Waits
B*tches aint Sh*t
Lullabye (rest of the band stepped down for this and luckiest)
Luckiest
Narcolepsy- Maybe the best version of this I've heard. Especially effective after the quiet sap-fest "Luckiest" (not that it's bad, it's just quiet and sappy). Narcolepsy was long, loud, and with a good bit of jamming in the middle.
Army- Didn't teach the audience the horn parts, but just kinda pointed, expecting them.
Kate
Rockin' The Suburbs- Claimed it was originally going to be about Bob Seger beating someone up with tire chains for robbing an old lady.
Underground
Zak and Sara
One Angry Dwarf- These last two are the normal, fast paced closers, amping up the energy until he throws the stool at the piano.

Encore
Effington- New Song. Nice three-part a cappella opening. Something about "If there's a god, he's laughing at us and our football team". Kinda sounded like a school fight song. Tambourine player reappeared to applause.
Philosophy- with the normal stuff added at the end.
Not the Same- w/ audience vocals.


Four and a half stars. Minus half for the draining opening act, the smallest crowd, and possibly least interested (though that's not to say they didn't bring the applause, maybe just didn't feel like singing) I've seen for a show, and opening his set with a new song that nobody knew.

It's been a while since we've posted... I know.


To put it simply, Cloverfield is effin' scary. I would venture as far as to say that it was the most viscerally affecting movie I've seen since Children of Men. This isn't just a monster movie; it's a movie, that, like The Mist and I Am Legend before it, plays on our greatest unthought-of fear, that something so disastrous could happen that all manner of government protection would be rendered moot. Mass chaos with no way out, and nothing to keep you alive but your own strength of will in circumstances that you'd never imagine yourself in. Cloverfield is so effective at what it sets out to do, reminding us that our modern "civilized" society is one catastrophic event away from being reduced to nothing more than bickering people who've been taken over by primitive "fight or flight" survival instincts.

The way the reviewers have talked about it, I'm sure you've all heard complaints ad nauseum about the "lack of story", the "unlikeablility" of characters, the illogical choices made by certain people, and that it didn't make sense for someone to keep recording through the whole thing. Honestly, I didn't care about any of those things at all, and it's a testament to how involving the movie is that I only once stopped to think about the fact that a camera battery wouldn't last as long it does, and only one other time to think about how long it would take them to walk in a subway tunnel the distance that they said they did. Despite the rich, hipster vibe that the characters exuded, I didn't really find them all that grating, even though it was basically as if Godzilla interrupted an episode of Felicity (with good reason; both the executive producer and the director were co-creators of that show). If they indeed go ahead with a sequel to be shot in the same style, telling a different story from the same night, I would love to see people from the opposite end of the spectrum and how they managed, how different their priorities were, and just how they would differ in their actions in general.

More often than not though, I found myself sitting in my chair, with my mouth wide open, totally enraptured by what was going on. Would I too be able to climb across a roof of a forty-story building that was leaning at a sixty degree angle from the ground, only being held up by the building next to it? Would I have gone back to save someone from a giant killer spider-crab in a pitch black subway tunnel? Why was this monster movie the first one that ever made me question the lengths I would go to survive? As intense as it was, The Mist, never made me feel this way, despite the fact that the subject material was quite similar. In my opinion, it goes to media theorist Marshall McLuhan's statement from his book "Understanding Media:Extensions of Man", that "The Medium is the Message". To put a very long and convoluted series of the oftentimes contradictory thoughts by a raving Canadian lunatic into a simplistic summary, the method by which a message is sent from one person to another is oftentimes more important to the delivery than the message itself. The best example of this is the famed Nixon-Kennedy debate where the majority of radio listeners seemed to think that Nixon had won, while the television viewers, able to see Nixon's body language, sweating, and poor make-up job, were convinced that Kennedy won. On a side note, I always wondered if the people who did that study took into account the differences in politics between the people who listened and people who watched, and if that played into their answers to the question.

How this idea of medium applies to Cloverfield is that we've been programmed with the language of film over the past one-hundred years. Even if we aren't aware of it, we've come to expect a certain syntax. We don't notice it though, until a reverse angle of a shot doesn't match, or an edit isn't smooth. The Mist lives by these rules, and the whole time it tries to invoke this question of "what happens when the world goes to hell?", while also playing it like a 1950s B-horror movie creature feature. Issues with the unfocused nature of the plot set aside, it's the fact that the movie's presented in the language of Film that makes you step back and realize how preposterous the story really is.

Ironically, it's the movie inspired by the crude and incredibly repetitive Godzilla series that has effectively transcended this medium and broken out of the box, leaving genuine lasting emotion. The same way that we've been trained to understand that movies aren't real and that we shouldn't feel anguish when Jason Vorhees, "an unstoppable killing machine", hacks someone up with a machete, we've been trained to recognize video as infallible. Which affects you more: watching an alien pop out of someone's chest killing them in a movie, or watching a video of a skateboarder falling fifty feet to a hard wooden surface and seeing his shoes explode, but then being able to walk off, relatively unharmed? We haven't yet learned to apply the same reality filters to video that we currently do to film, and this is what Cloverfield exploits.

No matter how many times you try to tell yourself this movie isn't real, the medium that the message is delivered in contradicts your thoughts and plays to your instincts. What would happen if you took this movie over to undeveloped parts of Africa (as McLuhan puts it, a place where people have not been "immunized" to this medium) or if someone years down the line saw this without the context to put it in? It's very likely that they might think it actually happened, especially if they've seen the 2001 attack footage. Critics (used literally, not film critics) of the movie have been saying that it exploits September 11th imagery, but I would argue that it successfully uses those scenes we have committed to memory to scare us in a very real way, much more than any slasher flick or monster movie has done before. Maybe it's the fact that I've been spending a large amount of time in the area that was directly affected in the movie. It's more likely that I was less able to discern the difference between the two because when the twin towers fell I was watching it on a movie screen in a film auditorium. Watching Cloverfield, it was hard not to think back to this moment and relate the two, drawing all that emotion out.

One of the most harrowing scenes in the whole thing is the destruction of the Brooklyn Bridge, which I've walked over a few times. It may very well be the most frightening destruction of a major landmark ever to be created in a movie, far scarier than anything in the modern classic Independence Day or its red-headed step-brother The Day After Tomorrow, completely because of its realism and the point of view of the person delivering the message.

Here's where the debate rages though. Should a movie be judged on how effective it is at making you feel a certain way, or on the quality of story and characters? If it uses the story and characters as well as technically impressive work to achieve this emotional effect (such as in I Am Legend), then it's obvious that it's a good movie. What happens though, when the two aren't mutually exclusive, when character development and a tight story take second chair to exceptional method and incredibly well-realized scenes? Is it still a good movie? This isn't to say that Cloverfield offered no cohesive story or successful characterizations (the realism in the actors' portrayals " not so much film acting, but moreso being in the situation with a natural intensity that you would expect of someone living out this unthinkable scenario""certainly drives the moments and carries the film as much as the technique), but it's a chase movie in the most basic sense. Something's attacking, nobody knows what it is, but we're running from it. There's really nothing more to it than that, and I would be hard-pressed to say the movie had an effective story to tell, instead opting to give you a few character dynamics and letting them provide the motivation for an hour's worth of recorded events. I've heard completely mixed reviews from friends and film critics in regards to this movie, and it seems as though this question of how to judge is where the basic disagreement lies. For me, the movie was incredibly effective at what it set out to do, and was plenty enjoyable from start to finish (and I loved the epic "Cloverfield Theme" that scored the credits) and that's all I can ask for in a threatrical experience.

One last thing. If in my diatribe about the presentation of the movie I left out the success of The Blair Witch Project, which this movie couldn't have come about without, it was because that was not a successful movie. Where the difference between the two films lies is that while The Blair Witch created a very real found-footage aura, it was overly-long and for the most part, boring and whiny. Think about it. The bulk of the movie was about kids wandering around the woods and arguing with each other. It took on the found-footage medium and while it succeeded at creating a realistic portrayal of what one might look like (as in "normal people are generally boring and spend a lot of time fighting and talking about nothing at all"), it completely failed as entertainment for all but about 15 minutes. It had a few interesting story elements, but needed to pad out its runtime with lame characterizations and nothing really happening. It was also completely visually uninteresting, giving you nothing to fall back on when you got tired of all the complaining going on onscreen. Cloverfield takes a look at the mistakes of this film and basically imports action movie beats into the style in order to fix its problems, never stopping to let us take a breath or think about all the implausibilities. The people behind this movie have brilliantly created a hybrid "found-footage/blockbuster action movie" medium, and by doing this, it skews our perception of its events, leaving our common sense to duke it out with our basic media instincts, and that is why it truly succeeds.



Cloverfield is not only a genre-redefining movie, but a medium redefining movie that uses the language of video and film together to confuse our perception of events. You know it isn't real, but once it wraps you up in its swift pace, that notion leaves your mind, making the horror of the scenario all the more genuine. The entire group of people involved were committed to making you believe that this had really happened, and they succeeded admirably at doing it. Now next time, give us some better characters and a more plausible story arc for them.

While I'm at it....

The Mist

I really wanted to love it, but it completely tears itself in two directions, trying to be a giant killer insect horror movie, and a bold statement on how far our civility falls when we're presented with dire circumstances. Not only that but characters are either underused (Andre Braugher) or completely over-the-top crazy (Marcia Gay Harden), and though Tom Jane gives a strong performance (before he brings it on a little too strong at the end) he can't keep down all my hatred for the main antagonist, the crazy religious nut-job who wants everyone to repent or die. If it's supposed to be allegory, it takes a very ham-fisted approach that really turned me off. Subtlety isn't this movie's strong point. Visually, it's spectacular, but unfortunately a great premise is undermined by story issues, probably stemming from the source material. Much like most of the movie, the end sort of rips off of "Night of the Living Dead" in its painful irony, though it may have one of the best "downer" endings I've seen in a long time.

I Am Legend

Visually, the most realistically drastic transformation of any actual location that I've ever seen put to film, I Am Legend decides to "show" us, and not "tell" us about the collapse of humanity, unlike The Mist . By that I mean that while the previous movie spends its time preaching to you about how everyone will turn on one another to survive, this movie shows the result of that, in a devastatingly real fashion. You are left to create your own account of how it all went down, only giving us brief glimpses into society's fall in flashbacks that serve more to develop Will Smith's character's personal story. It was completely refreshing to see a movie that doesn't give you every detail and leaves some things open to the imagination. Will Smith's character and portrayal are perfectly subtle in the ways that his past, his loneliness, and his obsession with curing the sick have taken its toll on his sanity, but the critics are correct that unfortunately all of this strong set-up seems to devolve with about twenty-five minutes left into some more action-oriented, less suspenseful version of Signs, right down to the "oh, it all makes sense now, God has a plan for me" revelation. I Am Legend is a completely haunting vision of what life would be like if you were the last person on earth, Zombie storylines aside.

Every Tuesday, I'll be blogging about the show "Heroes", for the TV site Magnetic Media Fed. Here's my review of last week's season premiere.



For as weak and underwhelming as last year's finale was, this episode was everything a season premiere should be. It took nearly all of the incredibly good-looking characters from last year and put them into new and intriguing storylines, with mostly success, and it introduced a bunch of new faces into the mix as well. It effectively created plenty of new mysteries and raised lots of questions, but as we've learned in the past, how well they pay off is anyone's guess.

The main problem with this show (besides cramming an insane amount of story into one season) is that it relies too much on setup. Everything is plot setup for a future payoff. Think back to last season. You had about a thousand characters, with the unspoken promise that all these characters would come together in some sort of pre-determined climax, and a battle of immense proportions would ensue. Interestingly enough, the real climax of the season didn't come in the season finale, but in an episode three weeks before it, with events that technically aren't even going to actually happen since the present was changed to fix the future (GREAT SCOTT!). This is not to say that tremendous amounts of setup aren't worth it. Personally, I don't have a problem with being strung along, even if the end is weak, because I enjoy the ride, the guessing at where the plot is going to go, or what the answers all are. You look at LOST, and even though they didn't really start giving much payoff to any storylines until halfway through this past season, I enjoy being thrown all these curveballs, all these mysteries to ponder.

That being said, I do and have always thought that this show throws way too many at one time, and therefore has a hard time hitting a home run with any of them (how's that for a baseball metaphor?). This episode alone had eight storylines running "" nine if you count the Dr. Manhattan-like reformation of previously exploded Peter Petrelli "" and we still haven't even seen the Sanderses, Sylar, and newbies Veronica Mars and Dana Davis yet, not to mention this Bogeyman guy. That's possibly fourteen different ongoing plots running at the same time. In addition, there were also a ton of small mysteries and such that were briefly touched upon that are presumably going to become bigger as they go along. Is it safe to assume that all of these mysteries will get solved in a neat and orderly fashion? Now that all the Heroes, at least the ones from season one, have each other on speed-dial, is it safe to assume that they'll all congregate at the Hall of Justice and figure it all out? As Kensei would probably say, "Not bloody likely". Does it mean that a bit of a letdown at the payoff isn't worth the months of awesome exposition? We'll have to wait and see how it plays out.

For now, I liked more about this episode than I disliked. To clarify, the only thing I didn't really care for at all was the Honduras duo, but I'll get to that later. Even with my criticisms, I think that overall, they've done a great job in moving the characters on from last season, and organically segued them into new storylines with some growth. The only one that didn't really feel natural was the Parkman divorce thing, because of where the two characters were at the end of last year, but I can see how his sense of duty to this girl might be more important. With that in mind, onto what I liked and didn't like.

I really enjoyed the Parkman/Molly stuff. The two are good together onscreen, and are given some of the best material from the episode to work with, especially their dinner scene. In a show as plot-driven as this is, it's good to see some character moments, and I could watch Greg Grunberg all day. His fellow Alias alum, and the second best part of that show, NPH-lookalike David Anders is going to be great in Hiro's "TMNT3"-meets-"The Last Samurai" storyline, even though it's very tough to tell why this story is even being told in the first place and why Hiro can use his powers in old Japan, but can't teleport out of there, or back to when he got in the middle of that fight. Maybe it was because of the eclipse, which lasted all of one minute and served no purpose besides looking cool. It's no big deal, though, because I think this dynamic between the characters/actors could work, and I'm willing to see where it goes, even if it's just some character growth for Hiro. The best "little thing" about the episode was when Hiro took his glasses off when Kensei asked if he was a scientist and then put them back on to make sure he wasn't seeing things when the mask came off. I think I might like the Mohinder storyline this year, as he's basically playing go-between for HRG and Stephen "Werner Brandis. My voice is my passport; verify me." Tobolowsky. It really is a perfect fit for where he should be, and a natural progression from what happened at the end of last season, not to mention that the two more interesting characters/actors will be driving the story. I liked the mystery of the deaths of the elder heroes, even though I question how George Takei knew who hoodie-guy was, even though we never saw who he was. Although, we never knew what Takei's superpower was anyway (seems like a waste), so maybe it was some sort of people identification power. It'll be interesting to see whether this plotline is a tie-in to the Bogeyman story, the Sylar story (probably not), or the "Company" story.

What didn't I like? Claire's re-introduction to high school/HRG's Office Depot job. I get that they're trying to start a new life and be boring and low-key, but could they do it with some more realistic characterizations? I understand that I'm saying this about a superhero show, but it always seems like the normal people who are always the side characters, are the most unrealistic, ironically. Take HRG's porn-star-mustachioed boss; I can't imagine a guy working at a place like that taking his job so seriously. Not only that, but the whole story was kinda a waste of time, really, other than to have something for HRG to do for the episode. There's no reason why it couldn't just be casually mentioned that he has a job somewhere, if that's even necessary. I didn't buy Claire at school either. Maybe it's just because I've always hated the completely unrealistic Hollywood portrayal of high school as this place where there's only 40 people, and the cheerleaders always wear their uniforms to school for some reason and have practice during their gym class that only has one guy in it. Actually, was there more than one guy at the school in total? The only one I saw was the ridiculously-named "West" whose superpowers seem to be showing up at exactly the most convenient time, plot-wise, and super-stalking. I liked the robot vs. alien convo the first time, but thought the call-back was unnecessary. Also, while I'm at it, my high school was on the state "empowerment" (read:worst of the worst, academically) list, and even we knew who Darwin was. The kids at this school must not have watched season one of Heroes, because that's all the narration ever talks about. Another issue about this show is that I can't remember one side character, who has been focused on, even minorly, and who doesn't have a power of some sort. It's getting incredibly easy to guess that someone is going to be superpowered, and that totally blows the reveal, in this case, when he flew at the end. Maybe the twist is that he actually is an alien, and those questions were totally literal. Lastly, that dinner scene was probably the most bizarre, out-of-place segment I've ever seen on the show. It was like someone hired Terry Gilliam to do it, what with the strange tension, weird close-ups, and the mom bringing the dog to the table and talking to it.

The Honduras story I found to be kinda boring and one-note, and considering I just saw that superpower on The 4400 last week, it didn't shock me as much as it was probably supposed to. This is another wait-and-see story.

Nathan's story wasn't really fleshed (HA! I KILL ME) out at all, but one presumes that his perpetual drunkenness, and playoff/get-over-my-breakup beard, along with the Man Without a Face vision will play into future episodes, so I don't really have any opinion on this.

Lastly, the little things that are going to be important in the future: I think they're overextending themselves with this symbology. That insignia is in every freaking shot now, it seems like. Even when Peter shows up at the end, he's wearing a necklace with it on for some reason. It's in Japan; it's on Molly's papers; it's on the pictures of the Elders. This is the sort of plot point (much like Hurley's numbers on LOST) which has never been given a specific meaning, and can just be thrown in in random places to make things seem mysterious, and in doing that, they run the risk never being able to answer it, leaving the audience completely unfulfilled. I already mentioned the Nathan's mirror/scarring shot. Obviously, they keep mentioning this Bogeyman, and it, along with Mohinder's taking down The Company, the Elders' murder mystery, and the Virus story seem to be what will comprise the main drive of the season, much like last year's was to stop someone setting us up the bomb. Hopefully, much like Teri Bauer, Peter's amnesia will go away after three hours time.



Despite all of these criticisms, the show is still easily one of the easiest to watch on TV, as it's generally well-shot, well-paced, well-acted, and has a host of diverse and mostly likeable characters. And thankfully, they gave time to the interesting ones this week and left Nikki and that "My Wife and Kids" kid off. We'll see how long they can walk the fourteen-plotline tightrope for.

One of the great features of NetFlix is the ability to look at a list of Academy Award-Winners, or AFI lists, or even Razzie award-winners, and then with one click add them to your list. The biggest problem with Netflix is that when you have a ton of movies in your queue, it's gonna take months to get it, and what you might want to watch one day isn't necessarily what you want to watch some other time. Months and months ago, I'd made an effort to add all the movies from AFI's 100 comedies list that I hadn't seen... even the black and white movies that Dan generally dispises. Surprisingly, "Bringing Up Baby" was pretty awesome farce, if you can get past the fact that Katherine Hepburn is way too obnoxious in this movie for anyone today to even consider this character a plausible love interest. "Some Like it Hot" is pretty fantastic, despite the fact that the more sympathetic of the two guys doesn't get the girl in the end. "It Happened One Night" and "The Apartment" kinda dragged a bit, even though "The Apartment" was shot really well.

In any case, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the funniest of these that I ended up with were actually some silent movies from the 20s. Remembering the AFI special showing this silent movie with a guy, Harold LLoyd, hanging from a clock on a building, and them saying he was actually hanging from such and such heights, I was pretty interested in finding what this title was. Unfortunately, I think that Netflix has the wrong disc on it, or "The Freshman" somehow was on the AFI list instead, and I ended up with one that had some of his other stuff on it, which was actually very interesting, especially with the Leonard Maltin commentaries on. I didn't end up getting the disc with the film I'd been looking for, "Safety Last", until this weekend, and I got through two features and one short yesterday.

The short, "An Eastern Westerner", was perfectly serviceable, with some great gags but not too much of a story. Somehow a big-city guy ends up in a corrupt western town, and they don't take too kindly to him. It ends with a decent-length chase scene in which Harold outwits the entire village (the people are all dressed in robes resembling the KKK), but really isn't anything more than a few minutes distraction.

The feature length (about an hour and twenty minutes I think), "Girl Shy" is exceptional. Harold plays a small-town taylor who's writing a pretty terrible book about dozens of love affairs he's supposedly had, even though he's incredibly inept around women. On a train to take the book to the publisher, he meets and falls in love with a rich city-girl. Their love story develops after the train ride, but when he doesn't get the book deal, he rejects her, knowing that she couldn't very well marry a poor taylor. She ends up engaged, and when some details come out about the guy she's marrying, Harold races to the city by any means necessary, in (considering when this was shot), one of the greatest chase scenes ever filmed. "By any means possible" probably describes it better; He unsuccessfully tries to hitchhike three times, then steals a car belonging to bootleggers, another car, a horse, a motorcycle, a cable car, and a horse-drawn carriage. The choreography and detail of this extended chase is remarkable, and what makes you invest in it all the more is the time given to explain the motivations for the actions, and to the akward-yet-sweet love story.

Not as remarkable from a story standpoint (but close) is "Safety Last", usually considered Lloyd's masterpiece. "Safety Last" concerns a poor department store worker trying to woo a girl and make ends meet. When his boss offers $1000 (in 1923 money) to anyone who can bring a large amount of people to the store, he decides that he'll have his friend, an expert building climber, scale the building in a much publicized event. What he's not counting on, is a police officer with a vendetta against the friend, who's come out in search of the human fly. When the cop spots the friend, the plans changes so that Harold will climb up one floor and meet the friend inside. The friend will put on Harolds clothes and finish the climb. Unfortunately the real climber is unable to ditch the cop on his tail, and Harold is forced to go the whole way himself. What follows is a harrowing and hilarious series of perils and obstacles, many shot more than 15 stories up, without proper safety equipment.

I watched it with the Leonard Maltin/"Some guy from Lloyd's estate" commentary track on, as there's not much to lose by not hearing a silent movie, and it was insightful and interesting. Having watched some of these movies without commentary, I would think it safe to say that you miss a lot without them. There are so many small, throwaway gags that completely fly under the radar without people saying "I love this little thing coming up here", and I think it has to do with just not being used to watching silent movies. Plus you would never know that he was actually missing his thumb and half of his index finger on his right hand, and wore some sort of prosthetic glove, or that they shot the building he was climbing on a few 18 foot tall facades they built next to the edge of a real building to get the vista shots, and that they only had some mattresses on the roof, in case he fell.

But there are a lot of little bits that you would miss, and I think it has to do with the nature of the medium today. You can put something on in the background and listen and do something else and half pay attention. These silent films were meant to be watched in a dark theatre and have the audience hang on every action. There's something alienating about watching silent movies, usually because you're sitting around silently watching something with just music, and you have to actively participate in the viewing, but for some reason, after the first twenty minutes of "Girl Shy" I found myself reeled into the characters, even if the action was sparse. Once that chase scene started, though, I was glued to the set.



The Harold Lloyd Comedy Collection, Volume 1, Disc 1 (or what I've seen of it at least) gets 4.5 stars for the amount of content (Two features, Three 20 minute or so shorts, for about four hours of movies), the quality of the content itself (both the great video quality, and the actual quality of the movies themselves), and the very insightful commentary on "Safety Last"

When you read a review, you expect certain things. You want to hear some insightful positives and negatives regarding the thing being reviewed. You don't want to be talked down to. You hope to have an overall idea of whether said object is worth seeing/listening to/buying/reading/visiting/eating/doing/throwing things at. And after you've done any of those things, you want to come back and read that review again to determine whether you agree or think the reviewer is out of his mind. Basically, you expect reviews like this and this. Then you go to a website whose supposed specialty is reviews, and you see something like this. This "review" only manages to fit one of those criteria, that being the last one" that this reviewer is totally out of his mind.

A long time ago, when the second Franklin movie was being planned, our discussion took a long detour, with us arguing over the definition of the phrase "cop out". There were numerous e-mails sent back and forth trying to determine if an idea that I came up with was something that constituted this. You can read highlights here. This argument was never really solved, but I stand here today telling you once and for all, that this "review" is the definition of "cop out".

I can gather by the video clip shown here that the "reviewer" doesn't like Shine On, but I was interested in hearing some actual insight into what makes it good or bad. Granted, the CD wasn't that great (there were three songs on it that I thought were really good, but the rest was kinda mediocre), but it doesn't deserve to have its review have nothing interesting or meaningful to say at all. I don't know how a high-fallutin' website like pitchforkmedia decided that that was representative of their organization, but recently, they even put up a similar video, claiming it was a JET music video. Obviously, the pretentious music-lovers have a thing against the Aussies rockers, but I really can't figure out what it is.

The review of their first album, Get Born, gives us a little more understanding, but I use the word "little" literally. It's presented in the form of a discussion between the band and the owner of a venue where they're supposed to be putting on a concert. Things go wrong at the concert and the fans turn on the band. Sure there are opinions presented about the band, but I'm sure they're all completely over-the-top exaggerations from someone who's never seen them live or met them. I can't imagine a band (aside from the Flaming Lips or Ozzy Osbourne) actually demanding [thirty f%$&in' angry alligators with top hats on, Iggy Pop shooting out of that cannon, and midway through sending in the kid from the iPod commercial.] It may work as a review of the band, but as a review of the album it fails miserably.

It only mentions three songs from the CD (very briefly) and it only has two points that I gleaned from the whole thing. The first is that all their songs sound like other bands (citing AC/DC, Iggy Pop, Wallflowers, Oasis, Bon Jovi and the Rolling Stones). The second is that they have "insipid love songs that sound like wedding band covers" and "insipid lyrics, we say 'Come On!' and 'Oh Yeah!' every five seconds". So basically the guy only knows one insulting adjective. You know, there's a thesaurus feature in MS word, and I'd assume there's also one on the trendy Mac you also probably use. Insipid: dull, bland, wishy-washy, characterless, colorless, trite, tame, unexciting, uninteresting, boring. Maybe none of those words sounded smart/insulting to readers enough, though I'm partial to the word "trite"

Here's the thing that the review is missing. The music is fun. It's not meant to be high art. It's not meant to be genre-pushing. It's meant to be music with easy-to-learn lyrics and melodies that you can put in your car CD player, turn the volume way up on, roll down your windows and shout at the top of your lungs and have a good time. And it completely succeeds at that, something that this reviewer was competent enough to pick up on. There's a good mix of fast and slow songs (so the whole CD doesn't sound the same, a huge pet peeve of mine), and I like most of the slower songs. I understand that a lot of the faster songs sound similar, but they're catchy enough that it doesn't bother me (a problem that the second CD had), much like with critically lauded Franz Ferdinand. As far as the words go, I'm not expecting poetic lyrics, so why should I complain that they're not there? Did people who went to see Pirates of the Caribbean complain that there wasn't a deeper meaning in the dialogue, or that it wasn't a British period piece about some queen from the 17th century? I would hope not. They should be expecting to have fun. That's all I expect out of it. That's not to say that I shouldn't hold the band accountable for bad music, I just don't think that criticizing lyrics for this kind of music is really the way to go. Do critics complain about the lyrics to "SHOUT" or "MONY MONY"? Some of the songs on that Fountains of Wayne CD, Welcome Interstate Managers had TERRIBLE lyrics, but critics dismissed them because of how fun the melodies were.

Now some of you who are familiar with Aaron Copland's book, "What to Listen for in Music", would say that I'm only listening to this album on a "sensuous", or maybe an "expressive" level, and that to fully understand why music is good or bad, I have to be listening to it on a "sheerly musical" level as well, combining the three. Well, in response to that I would claim that there isn't too much to it on a musical level, but my musical knowledge is limited. I'm learning to increase what I hear when I listen, but I want to understand what makes this a musically good or bad album. That's why I went to a site where I knew I would find a harsh but intelligent criticism of the CD. But there was none of that there. Instead, all I got was a poorly-written, profanity-laced diatribe against the band for mimicking other bands. Personally, since there really isn't any truly popular band playing right now that sounds like them, I don't have too much of a problem with it, but I'm reviewing the review, and not the band or CD, so that doesn't really matter.


Zero stars for the cop-out Shine On so-called review.


½ star for the creativity to write a review for Get Born as a dialogue. Minus four and a half for not having any substance to it at all, not talking about the songs, and basically complaining because Jet has songs that sound like bands that lots of people like.

The best way to make a video game accessible to lots of people is this: make the first few levels pretty simple, and then have them get exponentially harder. Sure, you say, most video games follow this pattern. Mario, Tetris. Sonic the Hedgehog" Ducktales is pretty easy throughout, but that's mostly because the levels are built more as challenging mazes, and you can choose the order in which you want to play them. Don't get me started on Legacy of the Wizard... I've already written 2000 words about that.

I can't think of a better example of this than the little-known game, BigNose the caveman, which came as a gold-colored cartridge. The main focus of the game was to walk from left to right on the screen and beat up dinosaurs. I really can't remember if there was a story or not, mostly because I never got very far. I mean, the first two levels are exceptionally easy, to lure you in. They were actually pretty similar to the Mario model, with bad guys coming at you that you had to hit as you walked on the horizon line and jumped over random cliffs. That was something I always wondered about in the Mario world. How can there be so many cliffs on a piece of developed land that don't have bridges built over them? The Princess' father must not have been doing a good job in the public works sector. As far as BigNose, well, they barely had the technology to build a wheel, so I'm going to assume that bridges are way out of their league. ( And for all you cavemen out there, I'm not trying to insult you" the last thing I need are commercials disparaging our fine little rarely-updated enterprise)



Strangely enough, though, most of the dinosaurs BigNose encounters are pygmy dinos, with stegosauruseses and triceratopseses no bigger than the eponymous caveman himself. Sure there are giant dinos that appear at the end of major levels, as bosses, but most of them, from as far as I got, were usually seen as just two legs or something. They were way too big. Someone obviously didn't consult the AMNH before designing this stuff.
If you think about it even more, you realize that there's no reason for a stegosaur to attack a caveman anyway, unless he was intruding on its nest. Maybe it's different with mini-stegosaurs though.

The simple attack was using your club to hit the bad guy, and if you picked up some stones you could use them like the fireflower power in Mario, only lamer, cause the stones don't bounce, and if you miss, they kinda just magically fell through the ground. The hard part is getting the timing right. If you swing too soon, you miss, and too late, you're hit by the dinosaur, which is why stones are the best option, especially since there are some dinos that need to be hit twice. Jumping over them is always an option, but you can't jump very high, so sometimes you'll miss. There are also potions you can buy at some stores that you can use to regain life or kill everything in the frame, making it easy to beat a boss.

Really though, the biggest challenge to this game was actually getting it to work. Maybe it was my system, or just the cheapness of the people who made the cartridge, but it never worked right. I had to do the blowing on the game, then blowing in the Nintendo thing that every kid my age was quite accomplished at. You'd think we'd all be harmonica players. At some point, even that began to not work, and the game would only work if I used the game genie as a buffer.

The music was actually really catchy, even though I can't remember any of it now.

Overall, the first few levels are moderately enjoyable. The next few are too frustrating. And there's no continue or save option, so once you lose, you start all over again. I'd say the same thing about Mario, except there's plenty of opportunity for extra lives and level-skipping in that game. That, and you had some sort of goal to achieve in Mario. If you really want to play a game about cavemen, I'd settle for a Turbo Graphx-16, or an emulator for its games, and Bonk's Adventure.



One and a half stars for making me feel like I was good at video games, and then tearing that dream away from me. Relatively good music, but a premise that was pretty much just a terrible rip-off of Bonk's Adventure.