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  • Calling All Stations

    I’d say that this is known as the post-Phil Collins album by Genesis, except for the fact that it’s barely known at all. This is the album that landed with a resounding, if curiously muffled, thud on Amercia’s shores.

    Poor Ray Wilson. He didn’t deserve to only get signed on for one shaky, uncertain, occasionally brilliant album and then have the band dissolve out from underneath of him. How does a guy follow in the footsteps of not one but two household-name frontmen?

    “Calling All Stations” is, like most post-Abacab Genesis albums, something of a progressive/pop hybrid. There are smart hooks and power chords interspersed with delicate keyboard work and occasionally clunky lyrics, just like we’d come to expect from the band’s last half-dozen releases. The only radio-friendly track, “Congo,” is a decent piece of pop-rock in its own right, as is the title track, “Calling All Stations.” “Alien Afternoon” is whimsical Genesis in the mid-70’s mode with modern technology behind it. Romantic ballads, a Genesis staple thanks in large part to the departed Mr. Collins, are here aplenty in the form of “If That’s What You Need,” “Shipwrecked” and especially “Not About Us.” The album is capped with the social-consciousness epic, “One Man’s Fool,” which isn’t nearly as clunky as you’d expect from a song just this side of being something U2 might have produced if they went for baroque prog-rock stylings.

    All in all, it’s not the best album they made but it shows considerable promise for what might have been. Ray’s singing and the songs he contributed to in other ways were certainly getting my hopes up for the next album… which, of course, we’ll never hear. Ah well.

    Today’s promo consists of “The Dividing Line,” “Congo,” “Not About Us” and a brief bit of “One Man’s Fool.” I had the damnedest time fitting four clips into this one, folks… though maybe I could’ve used less of the “Dividing” bass riff. Hmm.

    Genesis – CAS Promo

  • Movement In Still Life

    I bought this album because of a music video. A creator of AMVs whose work I admired greatly, Justin Emerson (aka the now-retired ErMaC), used a track from BT’s “Movement In Still Life” album for a video that I didn’t enjoy as much as some of his other work but I kept watching it anyway… so I could listen to the song.

    The album is very much in the party-mix category, with a variety of dance beats, barnburners (“Never Gonna Come Back Down”) and hip-hop influences (“Smartbomb” and “Mic-Chekka”), but there are also beautiful bits like “Satellite” (used in the music video) and the dancier “Dreaming” (which, oddly enough, I want to use in my next AMV).

    For the promo, I pulled “Satellite,” “Dreaming,” “Smartbomb” and “Running Down The Way Up.” I don’t think this one works quite as smoothly as the Dada promo, but it’s not really all that shabby either.

    Oh, and in order to get “Sam” to speak his part correctly, I had to tell him the artist’s name is “Bee Tea.” Heh.

    BT – Movement promo

  • Puzzle

    In 1992, KGON still played new music by newer bands, and I was a board-op on the weekends. In among the Nirvana and Pearl Jam tracks was a snarky, upbeat little piece by a band you probably haven’t heard of. The band is Dada, and the song “Dizz Knee Land” is from their debut album, “Puzzle.” When KGON went all-classic-rock, the other board-op and I (whatever happened to Loren, anyway, I wonder?) raided the music library (with permission, mind you) for stuff they weren’t going to play anymore, and I picked up one of the copies of the album.

    I can’t really explain why I like this one so much. It’s not really my normal style, being a sort of laid back California sound, mostly low-key, and not exactly the cheeriest record ever made. There’s a haunting beauty to tracks like “Surround,” “Dorina” and “Here Today Gone Tomorrow,” as well as a quirky sense of humor that shows up in the lyrics of the aforementioned single as well as the sexy romp “Posters” and odd fare like “Dog” and “Timothy,” one of my favorite tracks.

    I’ve uploaded and linked the promo I made, so you can hear bits of four tracks: “Dizz Knee Land,” “Mary Sunshine Rain,” “Surround,” and “Who You Are.” And if you decide to pick up “Puzzle” and wonder what other albums to buy, I heartily recommend their self-titled 1998 album. The only other one of their I own is “American Highway Flower,” which I’m not completely sold on. Don’t let that stop you from trying it out yourself, mind you.

    (Say, what do you know? I got the entire review done in time for the 9:30 posting. Go, me!)

    Dada – Puzzle promo

  • Batman Begins

    I’ll try to make this brief, ‘cause there’s not much point covering too many of the same bases that a bazillion other reviewers will already have covered. In short, Batman Begins is among the best comics-to-celluloid conversions I’ve seen. It’s surprisingly realistic, well-paced, and rarely disappointing.

    What interests me most about the movie, looking back on it, is that on one level it’s the story of a man’s search for a replacement father-figure or mentor. Bruce finds what he needs halfway around the world… or does he? He learns many valuable lessons, but “Ducard” isn’t really the right fit. No, that would be Alfred, the man he actually rejects any number of times previously. Maybe I’m reading too much into this aspect, but hey, I’m just amazed that the movie manages to have this thread without it being obnoxious or blatant.

    So, the cast. I liked seeing Gary Oldman in a fairly low-key role, and he does solid work here. His Jim Gordon is sensitive, somewhat harried, but unerringly devoted to the way things should be.

    Morgan Freeman, for all that it looks like he’s mostly gliding his way through his part, is so damned enjoyable that I really didn’t care that he wasn’t trying all that hard. It’s not like he had a lot to do, and he did get a couple of sly, understated moments. “Oh, you wouldn’t be interested in that,” he says with a twinkle in his eye…

    Michael Caine is a joy to watch, and while his Alfred isn’t quite the cooly composed and dry-witted butler we’ve seen in other renditions, he brings a heart to the role that works perfectly given the structure of this particular plot. He serves as the true mentor to Bruce, even after being rejected any number of times, and he is believable as the able and brilliant collaborator.

    As for Bruce’s first mentor, the false one, Liam Neeson dips into his Qui-Gon Jinn bag of tricks pretty heavily, but manages to be dark and menacing in the right ways at the right time, and he’s never over-the-top.

    Kat(i)e Holmes? She has very little to do besides look pretty and be Bruce’s other conscience from time to time, whcih she does passing well, but not that well. And while I’m here, can I just take a moment to say that “TomKat” had better damned well be the last of the “celebrity couple monikers” we have to suffer hearing about every single day? “Bennifer” was bad enough, but “TomKat” is just silly. What next? Oh, wait, I don’t want to know.

    Anyway. The last actor I want to talk about before I wrap this up is Christian Bale. Is he a good Batman, and is he a good Bruce Wayne? That’s always been the problem, of course, the fact that there are two roles to play. Superman’s a goodie-two-shoes no matter whether he’s in costume or in disguise, but Batman is practically schizophrenic. Previous attempts have been hit-or-miss, with some actors doing the playboy billionaire part well but failing to convince as the Dark Knight, and others wearing the cape-and-cowl fairly well but faceplanting in a tuxedo. I think Mr. Bale does… okay. I’m not the first and won’t be the last to think that his “Batman Rasp” is a bit silly, but in all other respects his Bat-work is fairly decent. I’m not sure he’s the best Bruce Wayne we could’ve gotten, but he’s actually quite good enough to do the job. My biggest complaint with his work was a tendency towards a deer-in-the-headlights stare when surprised by events. That may have been the directing, but there you go.

    So what about the story, the plot, the much-touted realism? The grounding in a kind of reality this film gives you is superb. You believe in this world and these characters. Sure, at the end there’s a kind of models-and-set-pieces action-flick feel to things, but until that point the movie is unrelentingly glitz-free. That’s not to say it isn’t stylish and flashy at times, but it doesn’t feel fake. This is the kind of genuinely dramatic, grounded-in-its-world movie that The Hulk tried so hard and failed so completely to be.

    I’ll end with an observation that I didn’t make, myself, until the end of the movie. There is no opening credits sequence. The movie just… begins. Only when I saw the end credits roll did I realize this, and it made me love the movie that much more. I’m not knocking what Marvel’s done with its franchises, but having this movie just thrust you into the story from the moment the theater lights go down adds something immeasurable to the realism of the overall picture.

    Batman Begins. If all goes well, it will continue with as good of quality as it’s started with. I hope.

  • Steamboy

    What’s the difference between a mad scientist and a genius inventor? This question would, under other circumstances, be at the heart of Katsuhiro Otomo’s new feature-length anime, “Steamboy.” Unfortunately, there are a few major things about the film that completely detract from such philosophical ponderings.

    For starters, the family Steam (Lloyd, Edward and Ray) are all as nutty as fruitcakes. Okay, so Ray’s a mostly-harmless kind of nutty, but still, you can tell that the nut doesn’t fall far from the tree. When you’ve got Dad and Granddad gesticulating wildly and spouting off about the proper course of scientific progress, well, all that bombast sort of gets in the way of serious thinking. The only other characters who get serious screen time are either shifty or outright annoying (that would be “Miss Scarlett,” the shrill, stupid and annoying supposed-love-interest. Gah.)

    Then you have the visuals. Oh, wow, are they pretty! “Steamboy” follows closely on the heels of the also-gorgeous “Metropolis” as a highly detailed, wonderfully lit, lovingly animated piece of art. There are even a few brief tone-poem-style moments reminiscent of that earlier work, but for the most part this film’s about action. Tanks, trains, dirigibles, armor, guns, flying machines, giant articulated appendages and steam valves of all sizes fill the screen. Unfortunately, much of the action seems to be for the sake of giving the audience action sequences to “ooh” and “aah” over. That’s okay, though, ‘cause when you get right down to it, there’s no plot for the action to get in the way of.

    There’s also what could be considered a rather nitpicky complaint, though I consider it a highly relevant one considering the tone and direction of the film’s dialog. You see, there’s a lot of blathering about “science” and what it’s supposed to mean for mankind. There’s only one problem: They’re confusing science and technology. What you see on the screen is lots and lots of technology. It’s engineering and applied physics, sure, but is it actually science? Not so much, really.

    Maybe I’ve just read too much James Burke. Who knows?

    Oh, you want to know about the plot? Let’s see… there’s this bauble. I mean, steamball. Okay, it turns out there are three of them, but you only ever see the one. Ray’s father and grandfather are competing for possession of it, the reasons for which are pontificated upon at length in between chase and mechanical-fight sequences of considerable energy and detail. Things explode, other things fly around, and… no, that’s pretty much it. Two hours of machinery and bombast.

    It’s awfully pretty to look at. Some of the sequences will take your breath away if you have any enjoyment of animation whatsoever. But it’s all just so much empty visualization, because you can’t really care about the characters and there’s nothing resembling a compelling plot. Who will end up with the steamball? Who cares? Everyone we meet is nutty, greedy or both. It’s sort of hard to root for anybody, which is odd as well as a damned shame, considering this movie’s obvious attempts to be a good old-fashioned rollicking actioner.

    Oh, and there are some interesting nods to other works, both Otomo’s own and that of others. “Akira” comes to mind, as well as the bookending sequences of “Robot Carnival.” You’ll also get a strong “Rocketeer” vibe from Ray’s flight sequences (the costume alone gives it away, really).

    I should mention the dub job. It’s… well, it could’ve been worse. Patrick Stewart does his usual sterling work, but he’s horribly miscast as the cranky, crazy grandfather. Alfred Molina does a spot-on job as Ray’s father, even managing to salvage some dignity from the bombastic lines he has to spout on occasion. I don’t know who Kari Wahlgren’s supposed to be, but I guess all they needed was someone to be shrill, annoying and to scream appropriately during her damsel-in-distress moments. Anna Paquin? Well… I don’t understand the thinking behind that choice. I like her well enough, but I couldn’t shake the sense that it’s a much harder sell having an actress voice a male part for English roles than it is in Japanese (where it’s not only normal but just about the norm). She didn’t do a bad job, really, though she also had almost nothing interesting to do with the role. Ray’s just a kid who goes along with the flow of things, really. And that’s probably the last, most fatal flaw in the movie: The hero isn’t really all that heroic, when you get right down to it.

    Steamboy. See it for the pretty pictures. Do it with the sound off, if you wind up with it on DVD. It’ll be better that way, believe me.

    IMDB: Steamboy

  • Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind

    If you came here expecting an unbiased review, forget about it. I have the manga, I have a battered old VHS copy of “Warriors of the Wind,” and I’ve been waiting for a DVD release of this movie for ages. I love this old movie, and for the most part the DVD provides a valuable and rewarding experience.

    Let’s back up a bit, shall we? Cut to the mid-80s, and picture me holed up in a neat old house along a back-country road well outside of a tiny little town in Washington state. I was, oh, 16 or 17, and we had cable. Back then, “cable” consisted of about thirteen channels in all… USA, HBO, TNN, Cinemax, CNN, your local affiliates and probably WGN for some bizarre reason I’ve never fully understood. HBO and Cinemax, back then, were all about rotating rapidly through a small roster of films every month. This is the same way I ended up seeing stuff like “The Pirate Movie,” “Megaforce” and “Superfuzz” over and over and over again. (Shut up. I know. Just, shut up.)

    Now, I’d gotten hooked on Robotech and had all three of the “Art” books. (Come to think on it, I still do. Heh.) I knew what “anime” was, in general terms, but I didn’t think much more of it than simply, “Anime is where Robotech came from. Cool.” Then HBO put into rotation a movie called “Warriors of the Wind.” I watched it. Then I watched it again. In fact, during one particular two-week stretch of summer break when my stepdad left me to my own devices while he was back east doing job training, I watched that movie almost every time it came on. Somewhere in all of that, I taped it (on his clunky, two-piece VHS deck). (I still had that tape up until just a few years ago, when I picked up my retail copy of the movie.) Suffice to say that I got to a point where I didn’t necessarily need the sound on to follow all of the dialog.

    (A possibly-amusing side note: To this day, I still expect to experience a tape-glitch artifact during the scene where the Ohmu is watching Nausicaa from a distance after she’s herded the Giant Gadfly most of the way back to the Toxic Jungle. One of these days I suspect I’ll get used to not seeing and hearing it, since it’s been years since I watched that old HBO-spawned tape. Even during my DVD viewing last night, knowing full well it wouldn’t be there, I found myself surprised at its absence. Weird, huh?)

    I tell you all of this partly because I like reminiscing and partly so you understand that I have a strong attachment to this bit of film. This works in the DVD’s favor in almost every way, but actually detracts from it in one surprising area.

    Here’s the nutshell-synopsis: Young Princess Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind comes into conflict with various other tribes of what’s left of humanity, in a time set 1000 years after some kind of holocaust has covered the globe with destruction and unleashed a “toxic jungle” that houses poisonous plants and giant insects that will attack humans at the slightest provocation. It’s her belief that the jungle can be lived with in relative harmony, if people would simply stop trying to annihilate it and treat it as nothing but an enemy force. Plot ensues, shots are fired, hostages are taken, bugs run (and fly) rampant, and so on. If you’ve seen “Princess Mononoke,” think of this as the early draft, with somewhat clearer battle lines and more straightforward plot threads.

    For a twenty-year-old piece of anime filmmaking, it looks surprisingly good on DVD. Sure, you can see evidence of age from time to time, and it’s certainly not the sort of spit-and-polish computer-aided anime we’ve grown used to in the last few years. It is, however, undisputably a masterwork of its craft.

    In case you didn’t know, the previous English dub version, the aforementioned “Warriors of the Wind,” is generally regarded as a travesty of epic proportions. Part of that is because of the amount of material cut (more on that in a minute), and the other part is because of the dub work. (Okay, there’s also the incredibly misleading cover art. Hoo boy. Incredibly misleading, I say.) Because of the general opinion about the previous dub, I decided that my first viewing, or more accurately my first listening, had to be of the new English dub. It sports an all-star cast, blah blah blah. For the most part, they do well, but I have some quibbles.

    “Ohm”? The only explanation I can imagine for that is that someone told someone else somewhere along the line that trailing “u” sounds tend to be nigh-silent in Japanese, or something. It’s supposed to be “Ohmu,” dammit. I gave a little twitch every time I heard “Ohm.” I also had a problem with “peh-jyte,” where in my mind it’s been “peh-jee-tay” all along. (Okay, smarty pants, how would you pronounce “Pejite”?) Name pronunciations, I suppose, I’ll eventually get used to, but really now. Then again, at least they didn’t actually change 90% of the nomenclature like the previous dub is oh-so-guilty of doing.

    No, that’s not the really surprising part of the new dub. What gets to me is how much less character comes through in the voice acting compared to the “Warriors” dub. Keep in mind that “Warriors” is generally considered to be a poorly-acted, poorly-scripted mess… and there were times when I found myself missing the verve and wit put into that other dub. Lines that were moderately clever in “Warriors” come off as lifeless, if more faithful, scraps of dialog in this new “Nausicaa.” The new voice work is servicable, but rarely inspired. This is rather sad because there are some very good-sounding voices at work here. I’ll give Patrick Stewart credit for making a very good Yupa, and Uma Thurman as Princess Kushana turned out to be a great choice, but nobody else really distinguishes themselves. Not that anybody does a bad job. In some ways, it’s a compliment to generally-recognizable folks like Mark Hamill and Edward James Olmos that you aren’t pulled out of the movie by thinking, “Hey, I know that voice!” But… I don’t know. The dub lacks something, and that’s a shame considering how little it had to work to have been truly better than what came before.

    How does the movie sound otherwise? Generally, it’s quite marvelous. The musical score is certainly “very 80s,” which lends a kind of quaint atmosphere to things for a viewer nowadays. It’s still perfectly enjoyable, though, and the more so because now we have the whole movie to see and hear.

    This segues nicely into talking about all of that restored footage. During the scene of Nausicaa’s boarding the Torumekian airship as a hostage, in the “Warriors” version it goes from her walking up to the plane, and then with a sudden piano chord she’s waving from the doorway. That always seemed a bit jarring and odd to me, and now I know why. In the real movie, there’s a touching little scene involving three little girls who don’t want Nausicaa to go, and she promises that she’ll return soon. During that scene, there’s piano music… and the chord at the end flows naturally from that scene. Ah! This makes much more sense!

    That phrase, “This makes much more sense,” came to mind so many times last night that I lost count. It’s amazing to notice just how much of the movie was cut for the “Warriors” release. Big scenes, little scenes, tiny bits out of the middle of otherwise-servicable scenes… wow. Chop, chop, chop went the editors of the previous release. I won’t bother trying to cover even half of what’s “back in” this release, because I could be here for another hour just bringing them back to mind. Suffice to say that this movie makes a whole lot more sense than what you may have seen before. And if you’ve not seen “Warriors of the Wind,” well, spare yourself. Really.

    I’ve been rambling for a while now, and I think it’s time to wrap up. So, what do I think of Disney’s treatment of “Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind”? Overall, I give them high marks for a good-looking release, with a workable-if-underwhelming dub but (of course) the original Japanese track for those of us who tend to prefer that sort of thing. There aren’t any genuinely interesting extras, but I’m one of those weirdos who doesn’t care much about that. What I want is the movie, in as good a form as I can get it. This DVD delivers that, at least.

    If you are into animation at all, you owe it to yourself to try this disc out. If you’re an anime fan and haven’t already seen it, well, why the hell haven’t you? It’s Miyazaki, for heaven’s sake! If you like a nice little man-versus-nature ecological-disaster tale, you should enjoy this movie. In fact, the only people I can’t wholeheartedly recommend this movie to are those who dislike animation in its entirety. (It’s okay, we can still be friends, I suppose. Heh.)

    Again, in case you had any doubts: I love this movie.

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