My Beautiful Dark Twisted Media

There's good, and there's bad.

In some cases there's good and bad in the same medium this time.

First, the straight up bad...

9 - This is the cartoon movie that came out at about the same time as Nine, the musical that I still haven't seen.  I've heard good things about Nine, and was impressed with the very moody, atmospheric trailer for 9.  I had really high hopes that this would be an animated film that explored what it meant to be alive as artificial lifeforms - presented here as tiny burlap bags zipped up and with mechanical eyes, hands, and feet.

Instead, what we got was a film that used a heavy musical score to try to add emotional weight to the characters' struggles, emotional weight that has no background to it as we are supposed to be emotionally invested in the characters with absolutely no background given or experience provided to draw us in.  Instead, the movie opens and the has major, dramatic music and action not five minutes later.  It's not the action movie kind of dramatic action - that should start early in a film - but has absolutely nothing leading up to it and doesn't seem to have earned the dramatic weight that it's trying to carry.

From there, we're introduced to a number of other burlap creatures and told that their numbers have been winnowing due to their hunting by a mechanical dog creature left over from some sort of machine-mankind war that left the planet lifeless save for the burlap creatures and the machine dog.  The burlap creatures accidentally re-awaken the machine god who threatens to wipe even their tiny lives from the face of the Earth.

Dramatic sequences follow, lessons are learned, planet is saved.

The movie never gave its main creatures any sort of emotional hook, nothing in which I could invest any caring.

The Girl and I were both terrifically bored throughout the film's eighty minute running time.

Skip it.

The Spirit - You know how one of the old ways to look thinner was to hang out with fat friends?

When put up beside The Spirit, 9 looks like a Best Picture nominee.

The Spirit is overly stylized, amateurishly directed, poorly acted, badly written, horribly paced, stupidly narrated.

Avoid this movie like the plague.

Read Darwyn Cooke's The Spirit instead.

Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows, Part 1 - First off, there are some big differences between the movie and the first half (or so) of the book.  Let's get that right out of the way.

And, you should be warned, this is a scary downer of a film.  There's very little joy here.

The Nazis Death Eaters have taken over England - or at least the magical part of England.  Hogwarts is under the leadership of the traitorous Professor/Headmaster Snape.  Harry, Ron, & Hermione are AWOL from school and on the hunt for horcruxes after departing the Burrow when Bill & Fleur's wedding is ever so slightly disrupted.

This is a film about the relationships between Harry, Ron, & Hermione.  They carry the vast bulk of the film, often as the only two or three people on screen, and the three actors have really come into their own over the course of the series of films.  Their pathos, their struggles in the face of an evil that is easily larger than all of them comes through brilliantly and is the film.

The film is a brilliant adaptation of the final - and easily darkest - book in the series.  I don't know that I need to recommend the film because those of you who've been on board with the series for a decade now wouldn't even think to miss it, let's be honest.

The absolute highlight of the film is, however, the animated "Tale of the Three Brothers" as read by Hermione in the Lovegood home.  The animation is on YouTube but only is low-quality, bootlegged videos, so I won't be linking to or embedding them, but I will say that I sat mouth agape throughout the entirety of the animated sequence in which the origin of the Deathly Hallows is explained.  Had that been released individually, the short would easily be a choice for finest short film of the year.  It's an absolute knock out.

And the best for last...

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy - Kanye West's newest album is phenomenal.

I wish it weren't because I can't stand what I know about Kanye himself.  He seems egotistical, full of himself, prone to stupid drunken outbursts, willing to do anything and everything stupid to voice his opinions in the belief that he somehow matters in our world - that his political views somehow have more importance because he makes records and is rich.  He is a product of our reality-television world in which fame is achieved as a goal rather than as a byproduct of a person's great work.  I wish that Kanye the Celebrity would disappear from public view forever.

Kanye the producer/the artist/the writer/the rapper/the guy who made this masterpiece, however, I hope never, ever leaves us, because this is an outstanding album.

The music is lush and rich and marvelous, filling every bit of space and making for an album that is best experienced at high volumes on good speakers (thanks, Forrest) as there is so much going on that it's easy to miss much of it on the first listen through or on an inferior sound system.  The vocals come in from all angles and from dozens of sources - Kanye, Jay-Z, the RZA, Rihanna, Kid Kudi, John Legend, Alicia Keys, and lots more vocalists.

Now, about those vocals...

My initial reaction to the lyrics were that they were offensive.  F-bombs are dropped continuously, boasts of sexual conquests (often violent or debasing of women) are frequent, and so many of the lyrics are so offensive that I will be impressed to hear that the tracks have been eventually sanitized for radio airplay.  I know that I'm not exactly the target audience of hard-core, gangster rap, but I these lyrics bothered me...at first.  As I have listened more and more to the album - probably thirty times through since I checked the album out from the library late last week - the lyrics have grown on me, coming together as a whole to describe a writer - assumedly Kanye himself - who is unhappy with the trappings of fame as well as the actions that he has taken in acquiring those trappings, a man who is willing to explore his titular Dark Twisted Fantas[ies] in public rather than keeping them hidden.

Wikipedia's entry on the album addresses the lyrics thusly:

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy features lyrical themes concerning decadence, grandiosity, escapism, sex, wealth, romance, self-aggrandizement, and self-doubt. The A.V. Club's Nathan Rabin described it as "darkly funny, boldly introspective, and characteristically fame-obsessed", noting "manic highs and depressive lows emotionally" in West's lyrics. Alex Denney of NME characterized West as "by turns sickeningly egocentric, contrite, wise, stupid and self-mocking" on the album. Music writer Ann Powers interpreted West's predominant theme on the album to be "the crisis of the jet-lagged cosmopolitan [...] the exhausted cry of one who's always new in town, chasing whatever goal or girl is in the room, fueled by consumer culture's relentless buzz, but finally left unsatisfied". Powers found the album's songs to work "as pornographic boasts, romantic disaster stories, devil-haunted dark nights of the soul" and perceived West's "uncertainty about his own place in the world" to be connected to the subject of race, stating "The rootlessness West celebrates and despairs of on 'Fantasy'belongs to someone who feels unwelcome everywhere. This isn't just a personal problem. It's the curse of what the theorist Michael Eric Dyson has called 'the exceptional black man', embraced for his talents but singled out for the color of his skin". Music essayist Robert Christgau found the themes of insecurity and uncertainty on the album to be West's "heart, his message, the reason he's so major", noting the tracks "Hell of a Life" and "Runaway" as example.

Because of the lyrics this is a rough album to get through at times - particularly on "Monster" and "Hell of a Life" - but the payoff of the album when taken as a whole is infinitely more valuable and enjoyable and engrossing and challenging than anything that those hiccups could provide, and this is most definitely an album rather than a collection of singles.  Kanye has crafted a concept album without needing to force a the songs into any form of rock opera framework.  These are songs of a theme if not of a single story.

This is an album that must be listened to to be believed.

It's amazingly good.

If you are giving the album a try, let me say that my favorite tracks are "Lost in The World/Who Will Survive in America", "All of the Lights", "Dark Fantasy", "Power, and "Runaway" with "Gorgeous" and "Hell of a Life" close on their heels.  I don't particularly enjoy "Monster" or "So Appalled", but they are of this album and are important parts at that.

PS - I did find a site that will allow you to listen through the entirety of the album online.  You can also watch the extended video (34 minutes) for the album which includes a decent sampling of the album.  My advice would be to ignore all the visuals and just pretend like the audio album is streaming.  The video is available in clean and not so much so versions.