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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Category: Media

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  • 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.

  • Van Helsing

    I won’t go into tedious detail. I’m really only writing this because the movie was so utterly atrocious that I couldn’t not write about it. The short-short version is: This movie hates you. Every one of you.

    It’s corny. It’s overblown. It relentlessly offends the viewer’s intelligence. It makes up bits of monster-mythology out of whole cloth whenever the plot needs there to be a convenient bit of such. The music is an assault on good taste. The Brides are just plain badly done, especially when in “harpy” mode, which is what we’re treated (and I use that word very loosely) to more often than any other effect in the movie. Bits of utterly redundant exposition are thrown at us willy-nilly throughout. Bits of painfully anachronistic dialog are dropped hither an yon like so much smelly guano. Tropes from a dozen different movies are grafted together, much like Frankenstein’s monster was grafted together out of so many corpses of what used to be fully functional people. (Spotted: Aliens, Indiana Jones, any given James Bond flick, LXG, and that’s just what I can think of off the top of my head, many hours later.)

    The acting is hard to gauge, mainly because the plot and dialog are so execrable that the actors aren’t really given anything to work with. I feel sorry for Hugh Jackman, pity for Kate Beckinsale, and mild chagrin for the rest of the players sucked into this sorry mess. One gets the feeling they thought they were involved in the making of a rollicking-good action flick, but… no, instead their names are forever attached to such a godsforsaken disaster.

    What takes this movie from the level of just being a trite popcorn flick and directly into the realm of actual badness? Here’s an example, and I have no reason to avoid spoiling you on this bit: The Creepy Undertaker tries to cold-cock Van Helsing with a shovel from behind. V.H. spins and blocks the attack, then ducks aside as, get this, the werewolf V.H. was chasing leaps at him and instead catches the Undertaker right in the chest, knocking him partway across the cemetary, into an open grave. The shovel spins through the air and lands business-end down atop the Undertaker… and then the Undertaker’s hat flutters down atop the shovel handle, and spins there a few times, as if it was the icing atop some wonderful cinematic slice of cake.

    A swallow of cinematic ipecac, is more like it. It’s way, way too trite, too overdone, too “look at me that was cool wasn’t it cool damn you know that was so, so cool.” The whole damned movie is like that.

    Hateful. There’s no other way to describe it. I’m so very glad I paid no money at all to see this movie. I can’t even recommend it for a MST3K-style treatment, because any fun to be derived from making fun of it is vastly overshadowed by how much pain is involved in actually watching it. Again: Hateful.

    IMDB: Van Helsing

  • The Elder Gods

    I’ll give The Eddings this much: “The Elder Gods” is an improvement over the disaster named “The Redemption of Althalus.” As you can imagine, though, I don’t think that’s saying very much.

    What does this new book get right? Oddly enough, one of the improvements is that it doesn’t try so hard to be clever. Oh, you’ll recognize almost all of the catchphrases from earlier Eddings characters, but we’re not smothered in smirking repartee to nearly the level that “Althalus” reaches.

    Another improvement is a step away from The Eddings Archetypes. That’s right, folks, there is no instantly-recognizable Polgara/Sephrenia-type character in the book! Now, I like Aunt Pol well enough, but seeing her casually reworked for each new story gets a bit tiring.

    The last bit of good in this new series is the occasional hint of potential conflict between real characters some time down the road. This isn’t to say these hints will pay off, but it’s nice to think that this series may grow some actual fangs… eventually.

    That brings us to the disappointing aspects of the book.

    What we have here is a slightly better story told not entirely unlike that of “Althalus.” The chief differences are that there are more characters, and there’s no time travel involved. Oh, and the enemy’s even easier to hate. In fact, that’s among my biggest problems with this book. The baddies? Bug-snake-men. A giant swarming hive of ‘em. That’s right, folks, The Eddings are picking on a nice safe target instead of taking the risk that there may be actual moral qualms on the part of our intrepid heroes. This is a disturbing trend I’ve seen among a lot of recent genre works, this unwillingness to make actual people the antagonists. The only crisis is “the nasties are invading, we must stop them.”

    Well, okay, there is a minor crisis of conscience late in the book… and it’s resolved within a chapter or so. Right. Remember when it took several books in the series for Garion to finally come to grips with his treatment of Asharak the Murgo? Yeah, there’s nothing like that here.

    There’s another annoyance that you might not ordinarily think of as such. You see, everyone gets along. Very well. Extraordinarily well. Does this sound familiar to anyone? A diverse group of clever, intelligent, and overwhelmingly reasonable people who may find one another occasionally amusing but they all have “grudging” mutual respect? Have we been down this road a few times already? But this time it’s even better, because there’s multiples of everyone! We have two clever young lads who’d rather be doing something else but are forced by circumstances to take a larger role in things. We have two reluctant, moderately gifted, loyalty-inspiring leaders-of-men who are thrust into a campaign alongside what are normally mortal enemies but are so damned reasonable that they think almost nothing of it. We have four godlings, and four “dreamers” (of which the Aphrael-clone is one).

    Okay, I take it back, what I said earlier about there not being a Polgara-type: Mother Sea (yes, the Earth and the Sea are characters, as is the Moon) comes off as very much cut from that mold. Ah, well. At least she doesn’t show up very often. That’s got to count for something, right?

    We only have one exceptionally talented archer with uncommon perceptive skills and a knack for politics, military campaigns and espionage, but one of him is more than enough.

    What really irks me about this book, I suppose, is one of the things that irked me about “Althalus.” (Yes, I’m sure you’re shocked and amazed.) While the characterization in “The Elder Gods” is a huge improvement, the characters don’t generally have any meaningful flaws. Everyone’s just so damned likeable, and for some reason that makes me want to not like the whole bunch of them that much more.

    Again we contrast to the earlier, vastly superior Belgariad. Silk’s mouth got him in actual trouble from time to time. Garion’s youthful indecision and impulsiveness got everyone into trouble on occasion. Hettar was a classic obsessive type and had to be reined in fairly regularly. Mandorallen could be both impossibly dense and rudely overbearing at times. These characteristics were smoothed away a bit over the course of the series, but at least they didn’t start out in a state of near-perfection.

    Speaking of contrasts, how about those bad guys? A maimed, unloved god? An apostate former friend and ally? Various characters of significant magical or political power whose alliances tended to shift back and forth as need dictated? All of that made for interesting conflicts. And none of that is in this book. “Kill those bug-snake-men,” that’s the whole of it. They even manage to turn a decent mid-book all-human naval confrontation into just another skirmish against the hive critters, by grafting a wholly-unsurprising new motivation onto the antagonists of the moment.

    I think it boils down to the fact that The Eddings, much like Anne McCaffrey has done, have reached a point where they can’t stand hurting any of their characters, nor can they stand having lead characters that somebody out there may dislike in some way for any reason at all. But mostly it’s about the not-hurting. The problem is, if your characters aren’t getting hurt, where’s the conflict that drives the story?

    My all-time favorite fantasy-ish series is Raymond E. Feist’s “Riftwar” books, and most of the books that come after. (And by “most” I mean “everything but those forgettable ‘Krondor the Whatever’ books. Oh well, nobody’s perfect.) One thing Mr. Feist has done that impresses me is that he’s actually become tougher on his characters as time goes by. The first book of the “Serpentwar” series startled me with how gritty and harsh the depictions of war became. People died all over the place. Those who survived were scarred in some fashion, and the meaningful scars were psychological.

    One doesn’t go into an Eddings novel expecting that sort of gritty realism, but it’s hard to invest oneself in a story that’s so bland as to barely impose itself upon your psyche.

    That’s not the worst of it, though. Oh, no. There’s one last thing that really annoyed me, and that’s the climax of the military campaign (such as it was). It’s spoileriffic, however, so you may just want to stop reading here. Really.

    I’m about to spoil a big part of the ending. You can, if you want, stop reading this entry right here and get the gist of how I feel about the book.

    Don’t say I didn’t warn you…

    See, it was starting to get interesting there towards the end. The good guys get outsmarted, and then outmaneuvered, and then ambushed. Hey, the bad guys are getting in a good beating, this is pretty cool! Action, drama! Wait, what’s that? The good guys are cut off, surrounded, and running out of oh-so-clever ideas? Well now, let’s see what kind of heroic sacrifice or effort will be involved in getting out of this mess—

    ZOT! BOOM! And one of the gods makes the whole damned problem go away.

    Wait wait wait WAIT! Are you kidding me? We gave up on the “ex machina” and went for pure “deus”? No muss, no fuss, nobody gets hurt? ARGH! This is almost as bad of a cheat as the time-travel ourobourus ending to “Althalus,” and that’s saying something.

    Okay, the spoilers are done. It’s safe to read below this point.

    Was I entertained by this book? Oh, sure. Was I disappointed? Yes, that too. Is it an improvement over the author’s previous work? Mostly. Should you rush out and buy a copy? Used, paperback, maybe. If you liked “Althalus,” you’ll totally dig this. If you think the Eddings’ material started going downhill during or after the first Sparhawk series, you should probably steer clear of this unless you’re a sucker for their style of clever banter. (In case you hadn’t already figured it out: Unfortunately, I am.) If you’ve never read an Eddings book… go grab the Belgariad books, which are far and away the best material bearing the author’s name.

    Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to dive into the other book I picked up at Powell’s the other day…

  • Astronaut

    The lead-off single, Sunrise, from the new Duran Duran album has been kicking around the airwaves for quite some time now. Now that the album’s out (and my workplace was kind enough to kick me over a copy), I’ve had a chance to see if the rest of the album lives up to such a peppy, catchy selling track.

    I’m not sure how best to put this, but how about I just say that as a pop record, it succeeds on its own merits.

    I should explain. I generally listen to two types of music, much to my dear father’s chagrin: Rock, and Pop. The line between the two is often muddied, and I tend not to really care one way or the other which is which. The only real distinction between the two in my mind is that of Safe versus Risky. I don’t care how many guitars are playing, if the song is crafted so as to appeal precisely to a core demographic, it’s Pop. (Insert diatribe about so-called edgy “alternative rock” bands here.) Rock, admittedly, usually involves electric guitars. The Pet Shop Boys don’t exactly write what most people would consider “rock music.”

    Like I said, the line is often muddied. But bear with me, here.

    Astronaut is a very good pop record. It’s neatly, almost lovingly produced. There are nice variations in tone and tempo and effect. However, there’s not a risk taken anywhere. This thing is instantly recognizable as a Duran Duran record, and at no point is there a surprise track. Maybe your experience was different, but I was pleasantly surprised by some of the tracks on The Wedding Album. I’m thinking both of the two hit singles (Come Undone and Ordinary World) and some of the unaired tracks (Love Voodoo and Too Much Information). They sounded, of course, like Duran Duran… but they were just different enough to make me think, “Hey. Not bad. Way to do something unexpected, guys.”

    I listened to this new album all the way through and while at no point did I think that a particular song sucked (oddly enough, this too is unlike my experience with The Wedding Album), none of the songs stuck in my mind either. Are the lead-off tracks good? Sure, they’re catchy and peppy and all that, but a year from now nobody’s going to be listening to them.

    The closest thing to “something different” comes at the end of the album in the form of Still Breathing, a dark-ish piece that includes the idea of burning down one’s hometown. Now if only it was a more memorable song, I’d be more excited about this.

    By comparison, the Franz Ferdinand album is also a very carefully crafted pop record, but it works in a way Astronaut entirely fails to. If I was a more knowledgeable sort, I suppose, I could put my finger on exactly why, but there you have it. This is why I don’t write for Rolling Stone, Pulse, or that neighborhood rag you see at the store but never bother picking up.

    I’ll say it again: This is a very good pop record. If you like Duran Duran at all, this is not a bad purchase. I actually suspect that a few of these tracks would make outstanding remixes. But… I wanted something I could really get stuck in my head and enjoy the hell out of, and this ain’t it.

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