What I’m Listening To (3/2/14)

    Though I still find myself listening to M.I.A. while riding the bus, I’ve been listening to a bunch of other stuff while at home.  Due in part to starting up a Call of Cthulhu game, and because I like it, I’ve been cycling through a lot of 20s music, from some Jelly Roll Morton to Eddie Cantor to Josephine Baker.  I knew I had a good deal of music from the time, but I was surprised how easy it was to assemble a 4 hour playlist, especially considering many of the songs are rather short.  Along with the 20s music (some of it 30s), I raided my soundtrack collection, pulling tunes from Cloud Atlas, The Cell, and even Once Upon a Time in the West.  And I’ve been on YouTube listening to some weird electronica in the vein of the sadly unavailable Beyond the Black Rainbow soundtrack.  Black Mountain and Sinoia Caves both share musicians in some complicated Canadian way I don’t understand.  But there are traces of the Black Rainbow sound in there.  More investigation is needed.

    So, here are some of the things I’m listening to this week.

Artist: Die Antwoord
Album: $O$
    Somehow, I stumbled across this group in my net crawling, and found something about them challenging and appealing.  Their Zef style is so off-putting, yet taps into that 80s Cyberpunk spirit I love so much.  "The Street finds its own uses for things."  And the dirty, in your face, middle finger waving music kept me listening.  Are they good?  I don’t think so.  But darn it if some of their tunes aren’t aggressively catchy.  In Your Face, Enter the Ninja, Rich Bitch, and Doos Dronk are all infectious.  And the others keep you going from track to track.  Ninja is actually a pretty good rapper, and Yo-Landi’s weirdass singing works well with the whole package.  This isn’t going to be for everyone.  Even for fans of rap (I’m generally not among them), this stuff is pretty crazy.  This is music I could imagine being performed in a Bartertown bar, with Master-Blaster rocking out in the corner.

Artist: St. Vincent
Album: St. Vincent
    I first found St. Vincent a few years back as a blind buy, and I really enjoyed the album I picked up (Actor).  It reminded me a bit of Laurie Anderson, but there was certainly a unique quality.  Over the last couple years, I’ve picked up more albums (Marry Me, Strange Mercy, and the David Byrne collaboration Love the Giant).  As I listened to more and more of her music, I began to put her in with Devo and well, David Byrne and Talking Heads.  Her music is more experimental and challenging than a simple singer/songwriter.  This is Nerd Rock.  So last week, she put out a new album, the self titled St. Vincent.  Listening to it, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the recent Devo album Something for Everybody.  She even deals with the kinds of emotional dissonance of the digital age Devo touches on.  I’ve listened to the album a couple times through so far, and I’m certainly liking it.  As with the best Nerd Rock, I doubt I ‘get’ half of it.  The music feels smarter than me, if you catch my drift.  It’s not like hearing Celine Dion, where you can guess all the lyrics of the song from the first few lines, or Fergie, where you feel yourself getting dumber while you listen.  I’m going to need more time with it to feel my way through each track.  But my overall feeling is that this is a another winner from a very interesting contemporary musician.

Artist: H.P. Lovecraft
Album: H.P. Lovecraft I
    I always had a taste for the psychedelic music of the 60s and 70s, and the wild imagery they conjure when you let yourself drift off with headphones on.  I’m two steps from Straight Edge and I’ve never dabbled in recreational drugs, but this music still hits a chord with me.  And in the case of the semi-obscure band H.P. Lovecraft, there’s also the added bonus of their tenuous connection to the works of…well, H.P. Lovecraft.  They draw on Lovecraft’s work in much the same way, and with a similar frequency, as Led Zeppelin with J.R.R. Tolkien.  I love the dreamy organ playing, the duel vocals, and the messy guitars.  Wayfaring Stranger and The White Ship are my two favorite tracks.  The White Ship is their epic masterpiece.  It’s a dreamy trip through astral space.  Really listening to it is like meditation, and by the time it ends, I feel more mentally clear than when I started.

    So, that’s some of what’s on my rotation right now.  St. Vincent’s new album has got me in the mood for something a bit different than the harsh, messy rap-beat stuff I’ve been consuming a lot since the beginning of the year.  Maybe, with Spring allegedly on its way, I’ll slide over into the more nostalgic, mellow music I have a tendency to play around this time of year.  I think pulling up H.P. Lovecraft might have been the beginning of that.  Until next time…

-Matt

Matt’s Week in Dork! (10/20/13-10/26/13)

    I’ve been trying to get a lot of reading done, and I have.  But I’m not finishing a lot.  Too many things going at once.  Still, when it comes to geeky stuff, this was a pretty good week for this Dork.  And as I've given it more of a listen, I've been really digging that new Devo CD I picked up.  Which is handy, as it plays right into some of the reading I'm doing about AI and robotics.

In the Mouth of Madness:  “God’s not supposed to be a hack horror writer.”  The last great John Carpenter movie, this Lovecraft inspired journey into madness is fantastic.  It’s just the right mix of creepy, weird, and pulpy, with a great Lovecraftian hero in insurance investigator John Trent.  Nobody pulls his strings.  And he’s on the trail of Stephen King type bestselling horror writer Sutter Cane.  Cane’s writing seems to be having an effect on his readers, and that effect is becoming more pronounced and more violent.  Can Trent find him, find his last manuscript, and get back to civilization?  Or is the Door about to open, letting the Old Ones spill back into our world?

Niagara:  Joseph Cotton and Marilyn Monroe play a horribly dysfunctional couple who seem to be falling apart in their hotel room by the famous titular falls.  When a happy young couple shows up, their worlds collide.  I can see why this movie isn’t necessarily talked about a lot, but it’s pretty good.  It’s got a kind of second rate (and I don’t mean that in a bad way) Hitchcock vibe to it.  Not up to snuff with Hitch’s best, but in that spirit.

The Wall (Die Wand):  Oh, my gosh.  This is a danged sad, danged depressing, and danged fine film.  There are elements of those ‘man alone’ films like Jeremiah Johnson or Omega Man.  But it goes so, so much further.  A grim meditation on profound loneliness, it’s also a sort of love letter to the natural setting of rural Europe.  A woman wakes up to find herself the only living human, locked within a mysterious invisible bubble.  Her only companion is a skittish dog.  It’s a heck of a fascinating movie, and worth seeking out.  Beautifully shot, well acted, and fascinating to see.  And brutally, emotionally devastating.

Gun Crazy:  Two young people go on a bullet flinging crime spree.  A guy with a love of guns and a dame with a taste for money are a match made in Noir heaven.  I really like the way this film is shot.  The sequences where the camera sits in the back seat and just lets them talk as they head into or flee a crime scene are quite good.

    Read volume 1 of the New 52 series Shazam!  I definitely did not find myself as into it as co-Dork Brad.  I think something in the air or water has simply soured me to DC and Marvel.  Could it be the high frequency of terrible stuff they seem to put out?  I’m not sure.  But I’m feeling less forgiving toward them.  If I’d read it a year ago, I’d probably have enjoyed it.  Right now, however, they’d have to be writing some mighty fine stuff for me to give two shakes, and this isn’t it.  I also read (or skimmed, anyway) volume 2 of Aquaman, which saw a drastic drop in quality from The Trench.  It became scattered, confusing, and ultimately, boring.  Sad, as volume 1 was one of the big surprises from the New 52.

Neither the Sea Nor the Sand:  There’s some lovely footage of the UK coast.  Otherwise, it’s a bunch of unlikable, unrelatable characters in weird relationships.  It feels like a student film that got a big budget for reasons I don’t understand.  While well made, it’s quite grating.

    On Thursday night, Robert hosted Triple Horror Movie Night, an annual celebration of October.  Each year, he, Brad and I choose a movie each; one fabulous (Robert), one classic (me), and one scary (Brad).  This year, we changed it up a bit, and I brought the scary (or sleazy) movie, while Brad brought the classic.  A few others joined us, and while I think everyone enjoyed the social aspect, I don’t know if everyone was prepared for just what it is that we were going to be watching.

Brad’s Pick

Macabre:  The plot for this film is just too danged complicated, with too many characters, too many previously dead people, and too many cooks in the kitchen.  It’s also not very scary, even looking at it from the 50s horror movie perspective.  There are flashbacks where you’re not quite sure it’s a flashback, cuts to other scenes where it seems like it might be a flashback…but isn’t.  It’s weird.  Not great.  But worth a watch if you like William Castle movies.

Robert’s Pick

Vampire Boys 2:  If you thought Vampire Boys was poorly made and featured lots of bad acting, you haven’t seen anything yet.  This crappy sequel looks like it was 'filmed' in someone’s basement.  And that’s probably the best thing about it.  Everyone is shot in close-up and nobody has the face for it.  When anyone tries to act, it’s hammy.  And the story is dumb, dumb, dumb.

Matt’s Pick

Cat People:  I absolutely love this movie.  The longer I live with it, the more I enjoy it.  I love the cast and all the characters they play.  I love the kinky love story and the even kinkier obsession story.  New Orleans has never looked better or more like somewhere I’d actually think about visiting.  The slow build takes it to some powerfully strange places.  And the ending is so crazy.

    Then Friday night was the latest meeting of the graphic novel club.  We read the New 52 Aquaman (first two volumes) this month.  The reactions were mixed.  I liked the first volume, but not the second.  Lisa didn’t like the 4th wall break in the first volume (blogger talking about how much Aquaman sucks).  Many found the second volume needlessly complicated and scattered.  But many also came away with a new appreciation of the character.

    After an extremely stressful week (and last couple months), I decided to do a sort of Horror movie day.  I sat on my couch, ate Boo Barry cereal (thanks to Robert), had some snacks, grabbed a Firehouse sub while I was out for a walk in the middle of the day, and enjoyed a day of watching various horror films.  A nice way to spend a Saturday.

Taste the Blood of Dracula:  Three bored rich guys looking for kicks get way more than they bargained for in this Hammer Dracula film.  Overall, it’s not bad, though not especially interesting.  I like that the tale has an unusual plot progression, though the atmosphere is still mainline Hammer.  Fans of the studio’s Gothic thrillers should certainly watch it, but it’s not one of those ‘rush right out and get it’ titles.

Doctor Who: The Talons of Weng-Chiang:  Victorian London is the scene of some sinister goings-on involving a shadowy Chinese cult and a horrible little thing.  It’s a cool story, rooted in Sherlock Holmes tales and that sort of thing, but with plenty of the usual Doctor Who madness.  You would not be wrong to say that there is some outright racism on display.  In part this is reflective of the time the story is set within, but of course, Li H’sen Chang being portrayed by a guy in ‘yellow face’ makes things pretty awkward.  Still, this is the kind of ‘historic’ story that worked best on Doctor Who.  I usually prefer the more out-there science fictiony tales, but the horror themed histories work fairly well.

The Fly:  A reclusive scientist falls for a plucky reporter, then has dirty, unsafe sex with his own genes, getting pumped through of inhuman DNA.  Jeff Goldblum is do danged awkward, and things get really nasty pretty quick.  Watching it, I was struck by how danged weird it was, and how a lot of pretty out-there stuff was made for mainstream audiences in the 80s that would likely not fly today.

Godzilla VS Destroyah:  “What radioactivity!”  Every time I watch one of these later films in the series, I can’t help but pine for the older ones.  There’s some really cool stuff, but the production feels shoddy, the ‘science’ is so extremely stupid, and the human stories are totally uninteresting.  I feel like a lot of the creature sequences would never have flown in the original run.  I like the introduction of a hoard of little creatures, more human sized problems in this one.  Of course, by the end, it’s a giant monster that has to go up against Godzilla.  But it makes me want to see a better Godzilla film that features little things for people to deal with, too.  There have been hints of that before, with radiated parasites left behind my the big guy, but it hasn’t been very well explored.  The Godfather-like assassination of Godzilla is weird, too.

Hellraiser III:  I stalled on my attempted re-watch of the Hellraiser series a while back, in part because I knew this was the next on the list, and I remember really disliking it.  Well, things haven’t changed.  The script for this one, as well as the acting and production design all feel very made for Canadian TV.  The creepy, mysterious, and weird are replaced with awkward cheese.  Totally lacking in any kind of passion or imagination, everything feels so bland and by the numbers that at no point do I care what happens to anyone.  Lifeless.  That’s the word for this movie.  And as a side note, why the hell did Doc get turned into a Cenobite?  There was no indication that this was a path he was on.  It doesn’t just happen to random victims of Pinhead.  It happens to those who seek it out.  F’ing stupid.

Rodan:  Rodan has what I’m looking for in a Kaiju film.  It takes its time, develops a bunch of human characters and follows them through their investigation of strange events.  Then, quite a way into the film, it brings out the big guns and starts the mass destruction.  But the ‘ground level’ story is still a major part.  Rodan is a giant bird, and some kind of master of the wind.  So this movie features lots and lots of stuff getting blown to pieces, which is strange, but kind of cool.  It’s also steeped in the post-Hiroshima fears of fallout and poisoned earth.  Giant mutant grubs are the first thing that tips people off to the problem, and they’re disgusting and creepy.

     I read the first issue of The Star Wars, which is right up my ally.  It's an attempt to adapt George Lucas's original Star Wars script into comic form.  You can see a lot of similarities, but there are also some pretty big differences.  I don't know if it would have worked as well, and maybe some of those changes were needed.  But I like some of the characters more, especially Luke, who isn't a child.

-Matt

Matt’s Week in Dork! (10/13/13-10/19/13)

    Got an early, early start to this Week in Dork with a trip to see Gravity.  Glad that movie is doing well, because that’s the kind of science fiction we should be seeing more of, even if it wasn’t great.

Gravity:  Sadly, this is one of the better films to come out of 2013.  It’s a fair science fiction adventure, if not amazing.  Lots of long takes and some beautiful imagery, along with pretty good performances make it watchable.  However, there are a few annoying little quibbles that stuck in my craw, particularly the forced religiosity.  And though Bullock does a pretty good job, and looks the part, her character is simply not that interesting, and her back-story is lame.  But all in all, it’s not bad.  And I really love the last couple of minutes, even if they were detached from the rest of the film.  The imagery and music work very well together, creating a shot that I’ve seen in my head many times, but that I don’t think I’ve ever seen in a film ‘til now.

    On Sunday night, I watched some more Space 1999.  That show has some excellent episodes, some really creepy stories.  One where they found a parallel Earth that still had it’s moon, and a woman died from having an extra brain appear in her head…that was just weird, man.

Brigadoon:  “You don’t have to explain anything to me.  I don’t care.”  I just could not get into this one at all.  It’s basically Lost Horizon, but annoying, with no interesting characters and lots of singing.  None of the songs are particularly memorable.  And the fantasy element makes little sense.  Everyone in Brigadoon acts as thought they’ve lived hundreds of years, but for them, it’s only been two days.  What gives?  This modern fairy tale could absolutely have worked (as it has several times in several other films), but not here.  Maybe this works better on stage.  On film, it’s not that good.

The Expendables 2:  A bunch of meatheads spout semi-literate one-liners at each other while everything (including wave after wave of Eastern European fodder) explodes.  This is the obvious descendant of all those muscle bound action movies of the 80s, and not just because it stars all kinds of the retirees of that golden age of stupid.  It doesn’t come a lot more low brown and silly than this, but it’s a heck of a lot more fun than a dozen more serious films.  You have to go in to these films with a certain mindset.  If you’re looking for good dialog that isn’t awkwardly delivered, and a complex plot, well, look somewhere else.

Wings:  Sadly, it doesn’t take much to achieve this status, but Wings is one of the best World War I films I’ve seen.  Amazing air combat sequences, brutal trench fighting, some pretty good actors, and a solid, if not amazing story.  It’s got plenty of heroics, but also does get into some of the grit and grime of war.  Some of the violence is disturbing, even to this jaded modern viewer.  When the camera holds on a pilot as he’s shot to death and his plane plunges to the ground, it’s quite gruesome and effective.

Godzilla VS SpaceGodzilla:  I’m not gonna lie.  This era (90s) of Godzilla kind of sucks.  The stories aren’t good, the effects look cheap, and they’re just sort of goofy.  And that’s without adding Godzilla’s kid (which, sadly, this film does).  I like some of the SpaceGodzilla stuff, like his weird use of crystals.  I wish there had been better stuff with the humans, that maybe would have involved trying to figure out what that was all about, and how they might do something about it to help Godzilla.  Frankly, the film felt slapped together.

Frankenstein’s Army:  I don’t generally like found footage films and this movie doesn‘t change my mind.  The story is fun, and the characters OK for this kind of film.  But the film looks too new, too modern.  Even the tricks and effects to make it seem ‘primitive’ look too slick and polished.  That said, it feels like watching someone play a really good video game, like Bioshock or something.  There’s an almost rollercoaster aspect to parts near the end, that were making me laugh (with, not at) out loud.  The retro-tech is very cool.  And it has moments that really shine.  I’d rather the film been more traditional, with steady-cam and tripod, told completely (or even mostly) in the third person.  But I enjoyed the content of the film enough to overcome the technique.  Worth checking out for those who enjoy very weird, genre-mixing horror.  Russians, Nazis, and Frankenstein’s monsters.  OK.  Why not.

Lifeforce:  “Well, here I go.”  Every time I watch this film, I like it a little more.  The sprawling story, the cast of characters, the actors, the weird effects, the crazy plot progression…and Mathilda May.  I can’t overstate how much Mathilda May does for the film.  But beyond a stunningly beautiful woman walking around naked, there’s a pretty weird and cool Lovecraftian tale of alien energy vampires, plague, and mass hysteria.  Not to everyone’s taste, to be sure, horror fans, sci-fi fans, and especially fans of the old Hammer sci-fi horror films (like the Quatermass series) need to see it.

Machete Kills:  “Machete loves everyone.”  Where does one start?  Well, I’ll start with the good.  1) Danny Trejo was really good.  That is all.  The bad…everything else.  The dialog is bad, until the women start talking.  Then the dialog is offensively bad.  The story wanders around so much that at around the halfway point, I couldn’t believe the movie wasn’t over yet.  It fails on epic levels.  For a pseudo-grindhouse movie, it lacks all the things that make a grindhouse film, except for shoddy technical production.  Bad, bad, bad CGI used instead of even the most rudimentary (and effective) practical effects (fake blood isn’t even expensive; catsup would have looked better).  Where’s the nudity?  Not here, that’s for sure.  The very beginning is so bugnuts that it got my hopes up.  The rest of the movie soundly destroyed my hopes, then peed all over their remains.  If you enjoyed the first film, skip this one.  If you enjoy things that suck and are really boring, check it out.  So much potential for something good.  So must disappointment.

Wish it was more like this.

    I finished reading Sean Faircloth’s book Attack of the Theocrats.  It’s at once infuriating and energizing.  Seeing just how religious factions in this country have done more to erode human rights, scientific literacy, and the Constitution is disturbing.

Black Widow:  Kind of an incorrectly titled film, the movie is not at all about a black widow, but about a straight-shooting guy who gets the legal bum’s rush from an aspiring writer.  When the young woman writer shows up dead in his apartment, things get dicey fast.  The nasty human behavior and double dose of crazy makes the film more watchable.  It’s not great; not at all.  But it’s worth a watch for the performances.

    On Saturday morning, I watched the first few episodes of Vikings, the new TV series from the History Channel.  It has much, much higher production values than I expected, and has some pretty good characters.  But it also has some pretty bad ones, and as much as I like Gabriel Byrne he’s top of the list.  His character is so pointlessly vile, and suffering from almost every villain cliché, that the whole thing becomes silly when he’s there.  Of course, his woman is a monster who drives him to do evil, he his own people left and right, he disgraces and dishonors everyone who shows a bit of confidence, and the list goes on.  Without his character (like Danny Huston in Magic City) the show would be noticeably better.  It could deal with a bit more sex and violence, but it doesn’t feel totally off on that count.

    Saturday night, we went out to Warrenton (the sticks) to see Dork-Wife Lisa in a production of Fiddler on the Roof.  It was quite good, with several excellent actors.  The guy who played Tevye was especially good.  And Lisa was really, really excellent.  You could kind of tell that she’s a professional singer.  I’d never seen the movie, or any other live production, so it was all a surprise to me.  And I ended up enjoying it quite a bit.

    I also picked up the new Goldfrapp album, Tales of Us.  It’s pretty good.  More dreamy than dancy.  In fact, I would say her dance roots aren’t even showing here.  And I grabbed Devo’s recent album Something for Everybody.  Some of the tunes are catchy, and they still sound good.  But the thing with Devo is that I feel like their revolutionary spirit turned to bitterness, and while I need to give the songs a more careful listen, the bitterness seems to be showing.

-Matt