Dropping it like it's cold

Loads of media that's been building up for a while... just sort of a catch-all... enjoy

Now there's something I didn't expect. I'd been looking forawrd to seeing Brick since the spring when I first saw the trailer, and it finally got around to Cincy in early August with the DVD coming out the next week - such is life in the Midwest, I guess.

Luckily, I wasn't disappointed. As I said, I was a little surprised, however, at what an outstanding job the film did in aping the old, hard-boiled detective style of the Phillip Marlowe / Dashiell Hammett films. Everything from the at-first-hard-to-understand quick patter of the dialogue, full of the sort of slang that - in years past - would have seen two jakes gabbering about dames with gams, hard cases packing heaters, all while tipping back whiskey in highballs while keeping their fedoras just slightly askew. Here, however, the entire noir world has been transported almost perfectly intact into the world of California high school students who are much more worldly wise than any real high school students I've known, been, or taught.

The characters involved - from the main character whose ex- turns up dead in a culvert in scene one to the femme fatale who just might not be as bad as she's presented, or who just might be the death of our lead - do an outstanding job of keeping the mood note perfect throughout, clearly combing the second-hand stores for vintage clothing and managing a massive under-culture that operates on levels that only barely pay any attention to the adults who are almost entirely absent from this film - except for one hilarious scene with one of the character's mom offering apple juice to his guest.

The only sour note is rung by a scene late in the film where our lead character shows a fair bit more vulnerablitity and humanity than his older echoes would ever have considered. This scene doesn't in any way ruin the film, however, as we're not exactly sure of which side everybody falls on until the denouement.
The film is outstanding, and the acting of Joseph Gordon-Levitt is excellent. Throughout the film, I kept trying to figure out if he was or wasn't Tommy from 3rd Rock, and it is a compliment to him that he so nearly changed himself that he was nearly unrecognizable.

Reviews of Brick have been mixed but on the positive side of things and tended to focus on whether the transfer of the older ideas into the modern setting was pastiche or homage and how successful that transfer was.

I enjoyed the film but do warn that attention will have to be paid as the writer does not make things easy and clear, and the character's dialogue is clearly that of insiders who have no shame in shortening things up so as to make their language impenetrable for anyone who isn't an initiate in their culture.

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The Island, on the total otherhand is about as deep a a kiddie pool. It's pure explosions, chases, and pretty people running a lot.

There's some sort of plot, but it's nothing you wouldn't be able to understand from the first ten minutes of the film: bad people make clones - keep clones stupid - kill clones to harvest organs - oh, no - clones escape and become aware.

Ooh.

Luckily, it did have Scarlett Johansson who is really pretty.

Seriously, if you thought Speed was too confusing and had too much character development, then The Island is for you.

In all honesty, it doesn't pretend to be anything more than a popcorn flick and it does at least deliver some nice explosions and chase scenes, but it'd thoroughly and totally disposable.

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Love among the old folks tends to make me a little icked out. I'll admit that.

It might be a things that's been trained into me by the media or something, but it doesn't really matter, because the thoughts of Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton bumping uglies - especially Jack, for some reason - just icks me out.

Luckily, Something's Gotta Give has a lot more to recommend it other than just that nasty thought.

The film is somewhat predictable with a protagonist whose schtick is that he's an old man dating nothing but beautiful young women (and Amanda Peet who has more than a passing resemblance to Julia Roberts). Then, along comes a woman his age (or ten years his junior, really). Amazingly, something clicks with Jack, and he starts to maybe appreciate a model with a few more miles under the hood.

Shocking.

Luckily, the entire cast - even Keanu Reeves - are solid enough performers that they turn what could be a rather pedestrian flick into an enjoyable little journey. The lead gets his comeupance and changes his stripes. The female lead comes out of her shell and gets to turn the tables a bit. But they end up together.

Not bad.

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Enough with the flicks, might as well read something. This trip to the library brought me into a couple of decent trades (and two crappy ones - yes, I'm talking about you, Nightwing - it really is a crime that DC keeps putting out such crappy product for such a great character. They might as well have gone ahead and killed him in the recent Infinite Crisis).

The first good was is pictured to the right and is Teen Titans: The Future is Now and just left me drooling to get my hands on an Infinite Crisis trade - even though I know that trying to catch everything in order is going to be nearly impossible. In this volume, we get two storylines - the first has the Titans headed into the future to help the Legion of Super Heroes in a battle againt the Fatal Five. They then jump back into the "present" but find themselves battling a future version of themselves - a team that has split in half and divided the nation because of something disastrous that came about in "The Crisis" - which isn't explained here.

DC has done a masterful job leading everything up to the Crisis, truly masterful. The distrust from Identity Crisis and then all of the hints at a coming Crisis. Serious drool dropping on the keybord now, I tell you.

The Titans return to the present, of course, but with a number of warning from their future selves. They then get a new member - Speedy - and face a murderous and renewed foe in Dr. Light who lets loose the secret that the Justice League had engaged in a few mind games, referencing Identity Crisis again and sewing serious seeds of doubt in the Titans long-ongoing hero worship of the JLA.

The artwork is consistently solid throughout the volume, and the feeling of the Titans as a family - their most important and consistent trait - is played up brilliantly, particularly in light of the dissolution of the Justice League that is playing out at the same time.

This is an absolute must read for any DC fan, but I do warn everybody that there are spoilers galore here (and probably in my review), so check the guide to the Infinite Crisis trade paperbacks before reading this.

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More Infinite Crisis ground work is laid in the trade Power Girl which collects the various origins of Power Girl - Superman's cousin, Atlantean daughter, exhibitionist . And then comes the meat of the trade in the collection of JSA: Classified, the Power Trip arc.

Power Girl is going bonkers. She's seeing people that nobody else sees, having her powers fade in and out, and fearing a breakdown. Different visions continue to haunt her, each presenting a different possible origin for her - villians pop in and claim to be her parents while long dead heroes appear, claiming to be her sisters.

And then the Psycho Pirate shows up and throws down the Crisis on Infinite Earths refresher. Drool all over the keyboard at this point as, again, DC has nailed - absolutely nailed - characterization of a brilliant character whose entire history was rocked in that decade-old cross-over. Again, it's a gotta read (well, I'll admit that I skipped the first couple of issues and went straight to the Power Trip arc) but in order.

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Music has popped across my media radar of late, as well, including two retries from Jewel. I caught Bill Maher's Amazon Fishbowl with Jewel performing and remembered how much I like her as an artist (please ignore any fanboy leanings). Karlen and I saw her live about ten years ago when she'd first hit big, and she was hilarious and personable on stage. Any time I hear her perform solo, I'm impressed. She's got a great voice and writes some entertaining, intelligent songs.

And then she puts out crappy albums time and time again, none of which sound even remotely like her solo performances that I enjoy. Allmusic.com suggests that her last two albums have been her best albums (4.5 of 5 stars each), but I just can't stand them. Both 0304 - with its synthetic beats, totally unlike anything that Jewel has done before - and Goodbye Alice in Wonderland are over-produced and don't let the simplicity of Jewel's voice and writing come through.

I don't know if she just isn't worried about putting out things that are pure to what I expect her to be or if she thinks that the higher production values flatter her music, but I don't care for her albums. It's her busines. It does mean that I won't be buying any of her music anytime soon.

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Alan Moore's pretty much a pantheon graphic novel guy. He's put out pretty much the finest portfolio of any graphic novel artist of modern times.

His stuff is so spectacular that I was willing to wade through Promethea Book 3 in hopes of another revelation like the final issue of Book 2. Sadly, such a revelation just didn't come through in this one.

Weirdly, exactly four years ago to the day, Weasel Words summed it up pretty well:

Rather than a story with characters and plot, Promethea is now a tutorial on the occult, thinly veiled behind the merest facade of story. I kept paging through this volume, hoping that this bizarre digression would end soon, but it never did.

The story is becoming wordy and meandering as Barbara and Sophie drift along some sort of Kaballic (sp?) path looking to find Barbara's dead husband. All sorts of things happen along the way, but most aren't vlearly real or metaphor or education or, well, much of anything.

There's some neat visual storytelling along the way - gods made of mercury, a mobius strip path (which kind of reminds me of something my work neighbor showed me recently), and an issue entirely in red and black - but it just seems like neat visuals for the sake of neat visuals. There'e no revelation to make up for the wandering.

I will keep working through, however, as I'm desperate to read issue #32.

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A few years ago, I checked out a couple of compilations from the LA radio show Sounds Eclectic - (review here). For some reasons, I went ahead and grabbed them again and gave them another listen.

The first cd - Sounds Eclectic (review here) - is a nice collection of live performances from the radio show, and the collection makes for a pleasent enough listen, but it's without any real excitement. It's a nice, decent album to listen to, and it's not much more than that. The versions of most of the songs (the ones that I know, at least) are barely different from their original album versions, but those minor differences make for a little cleaner listens - "Babylon", in particular, is a really nice live version. The Supreme Beings of Leisure song "Never the Same" is also a nice one. Nothing really special here - luckily the local library had it so I could grab the David Gray song and a couple others.

The second volume - Sounds Eclectic Too (review here) - is more of the same: good but nonessential live performances from a wide spread of artists. On this second volume, I didn't have as many artists that I really enjoyed, so I didn't get quite the same highlights, but that didn't diminish the feeling of the album being a "nice album", not much more.

An adendum - apparently the Sounds Eclectic release series was apparently preceeded by a series called Rare on Air from the same radio station.

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Ah, more Stephen King. Weirdly, this book was published by King under the pseudonym Richard Bachman - one that he used for a few years back and which he has apparently abandoned for a decade or so before publishing The Regulators as Bachman and its companion novel Desperation as King.

I came to The Regulators by way of the TheDarkTower.net which suggested that the book fit in with the Dark Tower series, but I didn't see the connections in my read. That didn't mean, however, that it wasn't an enjoyable read (or listen, in my case, honestly).

The basics of the setup are pretty familiar for long-time readers of King's books: a mysterious force latches on to a psychically powerful youngster in an anonymous small town (weirdly in Ohio instead of Maine). That mysterious force then sets about transforming its new home block into a mixture of the youngster's dreams (which come via television westerns and cartoons) and the neighbor's hells. In the end, it's one of those neighbors that has to step forward to hopefully save his friends and his world.

The journey from first glimpses of the weirdness to the final resolution are very much reminiscent of King's earlier Bachman books, tales that tended toward the more violent side of things than his main books did. In retrospect, it is hard to believe that King's writing would have been anything less than abviously his - even when published under another moniker. The standard King techniques are here - introductions for all the characters, even the most minor ones; a scenario that takes place without much explanation as to how it came into being; and a resolution that leaves hints that it might not be an entirely final resolution.

It wasn't until after listening to The Regulators that I found out there was a companion novel. Sadly, my library only has the abridged version of Desperation so my enjoyement of that one might have to wait a bit since school's back in session now, but I'll get to it eventually.

Oh, and since this post was so stinkin' long, enjoy something a little more mindless if you've gotten this far.