See, the moment I realized that I have two devices with front-facing cameras you just know what came next…
This is the sort of thing which guarantees that I will never be one of the cool kids. Oh well.
Category: Media
This is a container category for media reviews and related drivel.
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ABC – Beauty Stab
I don’t share musical sensibilities with very many people. It’s not that I’m a hipster with ridiculously obscure tastes, mind you. My library contains mostly recognizable names, though sometimes it’s a case of “a leading artist in their narrow niche.” Taken as a whole, however, you’re unlikely to find any single person who would agree about much more than half of my four-or-five-star selections.
With that said, over the last couple of years Wonderduck and I have found considerable congruity in what kind of music makes us sit up and take notice. I sent him a USB-stick sampler as a Yule present a few months ago, and he occasionally links me something via email that he thinks I might get a kick out of. It’s not always spot-on, but I trust his tastes enough that I’m always willing to at least give it a listen.
A while ago he commented on a Quacked Panes comic about artists who went in a different direction from their norm and how that tends to earn the ire of their fanbase. His example was ABC’s second album, “Beauty Stab.”
ABC made their mark with the kind of early-80s synthpop that I grew up on, so I was already somewhat familiar with the band. What I’d not been aware of was that for their sophomore record they chose to go in a more rock-n-roll, guitar-and-bass direction. They were, of course, both pilloried and ignored for this choice. From then on they went back to making electronic pop music like everyone wanted them to.
And with that one might be tempted to pass up “Beauty Stab” because, hey, it’s clear that this wasn’t what they were good at, so why bother? This is a temptation one should resist. Turns out, ABC actually did a good job posing as a straight-up rock band.
Okay, so it’s not like they made a Black Sabbath record all of a sudden. It’s still pop-rock, there are still synths, and it’s all very bright and upbeat with a couple of notable exceptions. As a style experiment, however, it really does work. Standout tracks include the lead-off “That Was Then But This Is Now,” “The Power of Persuasion,” “King Money” and the groovy, naughty “Unzip.” I love how “That Was Then…” leads off with gentle synths as if you were about to get an electronica record, then the guitar and drums kick in. Gotcha!
Never mind that this is another lead-off track with a certain amount of “meta” built in. “I guess you’ve changed / you’ve changed but how.” It reminds me a bit of the new Soundgarden album’s lead track which basically says, “Yes, we’re back, whatever, deal with it.”
One big surprise for me on this record is a very quiet track that I just can’t get enough of, “By Default By Design.” It’s absolutely gorgeous and almost justifies the album price all by itself. Your mileage may vary, but alongside four four-star tracks this one’s the five-star selection for me.
Those are just the standouts to me; there’s not a bad track on the album, just songs that don’t grab me quite as much as the others. By all means, if you have a few dollars to throw at your preferred music vendor, you could do worse that to pick up this little gem from the early 1980s, a bygone time that shaped so much about who I am and what I like. I wonder what I would’ve thought of this album had anyone played it for me back then…
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Dervish D.
If I keep this up, January 2013 will see more posts here than any two months in 2012 put together…
At any rate. The last song to come up in Poweramp on my tablet last night (why pay for a separate MP3 player when I have LG Tone headphones and a nice big tablet?) was… this:
[audio:Vangelis-DervishD.mp3]And that got me thinking about how my musical tastes went from mostly-classic-rock to include so much electronica like Pet Shop Boys and BT. I have my great-granddad to thank, in this case.
Great-Grandpa George was a tinkerer, a packrat, a storyteller, and a very strange sort of audiophile. Like many such folk in the early 1980s he believed that the LP was far superior to any new-fangled digital compact disc nonsense. Unlike anyone else I’ve ever met, however, he believed that cassette tapes were also superior to CDs. (He was also an Edgar Cayce fan. Ah, well.) Either way, he had multiple turntables and racks of tape decks and several open-reel rigs in the house, most of them in the upstairs living space of the house.
Luckily, when I had to sleep over at their place, I got to sleep upstairs with all the cool toys. (This explains so much, doesn’t it…?)
This being the early 80s, and me being around 10 years old, my musical knowledge was limited to Top 40 radio, whatever my parents listened to, and… Grandpa’s tape and record collection. Not much of his available material stuck with me for very long, but man, I loved the Vangelis tapes like “Opera Sauvage,” “Mask,” and especially “Spiral,” from which the above track is pulled. Much like the Genesis stuff I’d get into a few years later, this was rich and complex imagination fuel for my little brain, and I ate it up.
My father remains unamused by Vangelis, by the way: The notion of one man looping instruments and samples in a studio is what he describes as “musical masturbation.” I see his point, but I also sort of don’t care. (Love you, Dad!)
There’s a direct, if unusual, path from that Dervish D song to the Jan Hammer and Tony Banks and Pet Shop Boys and KOTOKO and BT and Venus Hum pieces which form one of the pillars of my musical collection today. So, thank you, Grandpa George, for all those tapes we made all those years ago.
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Ten Films I Love Best As Of This Writing
Inspired by a Twitter discussion, here’s a list of 10 favorite films, not necessarily in order of importance or quality, as of right now, subject to revision when someone jogs my memory of something even better that I’d forgotten seeing but somehow actually loved even more than anything already here, and this sentence may have run on long enough, and carries too many commas, don’t you think?
- Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind – Miyazaki has made “better” movies, but I don’t love any of them the way I love this. No, not even Spirited Away. This is the movie that made me fall in love with anime.
- The Princess Bride – Put aside for a moment that this is a painfully over-quoted cult favorite. (Guilty as charged, m’lud.) It’s still one of the great action comedy satire romances of all time.
- Die Hard – I’m less enthusiastic about the franchise it turned into, but that first out-of-nowhere movie is utterly brilliant. There are zero missteps, and almost every action movie since owes this film a huge debt. It’s silly, it’s clever, it’s over-the-top where it should be yet subtle at just the right places.
- The Incredibles – It’s not that this is one of the most fun, clever, family-friendly, exciting, and funny animated features ever made. It’s that this is one of the most fun, clever, family-friendly, exciting, and funny features of any kind ever made.
- The Bourne Identity – I’m not putting the whole “trilogy” in here but I do really like the three Damon-led movies quite a lot. (I have Thoughts regarding the fourth movie which I’ll have to post soon, come to think on it.) This first movie is a revelation, though. Very little bumbling going on, lots of smart people versus smarter people, and for once the trend toward “gritty realism” (well, such as it is) doesn’t drag down a story and make it too grim & depressing.
- The Hunt For Red October – Still the only Tom Clancy “Jack Ryan” movie I actually like, this one is chock full of great character actors chewing marvelous scenery marvelously. And Alec Baldwin is a genuine hoot, too. “Some things in here don’t react well to bullets…”
- The Castle of Cagliostro – Look, it’s no less absurd than any number of other caper flicks out there. Lupin III as seen through the lens of Miyazaki, this movie’s a charmer through and through.
- The Fugitive (1993) – We’ve grown used to Tommy Lee Jones’ schtick in the years since, and the “henhouse, outhouse and doghouse” riff spawned some parodies indeed, but you have to admit he absolutely steals this movie. Also notable for Andreas Katsulas, otherwise known as Babylon 5’s Ambassador G’Kar, as the one-armed man. Oh, I guess Harrison Ford’s in it, too. Shrug.
- Iron Man – Remember back before the whole multi-picture pyramid leading up to The Avengers was a “thing”, and this was pretty much just one of the best superhero movies ever made? Simpler times, simpler times indeed.
- Chicken Run – “We’ll either die free chickens, or die trying!” “Are those the only choices?” While the rest of the Aardman run of feature films is a bit hit-or-miss (I wanted to like the full length Wallace & Gromit movie, but those characters just don’t seem to work in anything beyond short films), there’s almost nothing wrong with this movie. The peril, the heart, the cleverness, the references to other movies, the madcap contraptions… it’s all there.
And there we have it. You have opinions, I have comment threads. Fire away!
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Skyfall Thoughts: The Spoilers Edition
In that last post I tried to avoid spoilers, in case folks didn’t want to run out and watch the movie on opening weekend, dealing with the crowds, and so forth.
This time I’m going to positively wallow in them, after the break. You’ve been warned.
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James Bond: Skyfall
After a refresher course consisting of watching “Casino Royale” on DVD the night before, the delightful Kylanath and I took in “Skyfall” at the theater on Sunday afternoon. I found myself with so many thoughts that it actually nudged me out of my writerly doldrums enough to craft a journal post to contain them.
First up, the verdict: I liked it, much better than “Quantum of Solace” (and I don’t dislike that movie as much as most other folks, but still) and as much as “Casino Royale” but in a very different way.
Now for the bullet points, appropriate for a Bond movie, yes?
- This movie is full of reveals, some of which work better than others. The really, really big one (I’m trying to stay spoiler-free, mind you) is telegraphed in several big and small ways throughout the movie. I saw it coming, is what I’m telling you, and I’m not actually the sort of person who sees things coming in a movie all that often. Another reveal got a smirk and a deep sigh at the same time. It’s that kind of film.
- What kind of film is it, you ask? Well, think of all the dead seriousness you’ve become used to with the previous two films, then interleave it with smirking throwbacks to the cheesier days of pre-Craig outings. Yet in most cases the movie doesn’t jostle your elbow too badly when it changes tone, which is a neat trick. Your mileage, of course, may vary.
- People have raved about the title song. It didn’t do anything special for me. It serves its purpose very well, but that purpose is “kick off a Bond movie,” so there you have it.
- The main villain, for all that he doesn’t show up until halfway through, absolutely steals every scene he’s in. Javier Bardem is a hoot and a half, spending a few amusing moments at several points through the film wearing an expression I usually associate with one of the regulars on the TV show Leverage, as if to say: “Seriously?” Exasperated menace is an unusual combination, and it amused me greatly.
- In this post-“Bourne” action film world, we’ve become far too used to fight scenes made up of hundreds of quick cuts. Imagine my joy, then, at the artsy little glass-room backlit silhouetted locked-off one-shot fight scene. It’s the little things which can make me love a movie. Brilliant touch, that one.
- For all that I read a lot of snark online about the product placements and the in-jokes, none of them really jarred me out of the movie. I mean, I utterly despise the Sony Vaio, but what were they going to do? Make up a computer brand? Meh, whatever. And two of the in-jokes absolutely slayed the audience at our screening, so hooray for well-chosen quips.
- At one point partway through we’re introduced to the movie title in a way which makes us wonder what deep, sinister meaning it might have. Is it a code word for something big & scary? Does it indicate that someone is compromised, that bad things are afoot? Turns out, all of my guesses were wrong, but the true meaning actually does make sense within the movie. Just, not to what you’d call the “A” plot. Interesting touch, interesting choice.
- Every actor did a good job in this movie, and some were excellent. Yes, even the new Q. As much as I love John Cleese, I’m glad they didn’t try to shoehorn him into this. It wouldn’t have worked.
- I would watch a movie in which Judi Dench and Daniel Craig solve grisly murders in the highlands of Scotland, complete with wry commentary and in-jokes and bickering. C’mon, so would you.
- On the topic of reveals, the really-big reveal depends on another… event. Suffice to say that I was unhappy about it, even as I saw it coming, even as I realized that it was time to make that change. I’ll have to discuss my thoughts on that in a later, post-spoilers entry…
- I have one quibble with the timeline of the three Craig movies, and that’s the implication here that his Bond has been at this a really long time. Which is odd, because “Casino Royale” is a movie about a brand-new double-oh earning his moniker. I mean, yes, you can work around that quibble easily enough with some mental gymnastics, but if this caught my attention then it probably bothered other viewers as well and it might bother you. Also: If this is an old, washed-up, out-of-shape guy… I wish I was in that crappy of a condition. Oy.
- In the end, what we have is the conclusion to what I consider a reboot trilogy not entirely unlike Nolan’s Batman films. Get everyone’s attention, dig in deep, then drive home the deal. Whatever you may think of Nolan’s level of success, that seems to have at least been the plan, and it’s the same here. When the credits roll, you know for certain that Bond is back and it’s time for what could be considered “business as usual.” Which remains to be seen, but you know what? I don’t care how well or how badly they make the movies to follow. They did their job here, which is all I wanted from this outing.
- “Skyfall” is a very, very pretty movie. There’s some scenery porn on display which is nearly up to the gold standard, by which I mean the Lord of the Rings films. The setting for the film’s grand bang-up finale? I want to go there.
So, if you like smart & entertaining action movies, go see “Skyfall.” If you enjoyed “Casino Royale” and want to see the promise of the reboot plotline redeemed, go see “Skyfall.” If you watched the last two movies and couldn’t stop griping about how it wasn’t a real Bond movie… well, you and I don’t have a lot to discuss, but you should probably go see “Skyfall” so you can gripe about it from a position of firsthand knowledge, at least.
Whew. Enough words for you?