WALL-E, Pavement, Muxtape, & Whedon

Hey, WALL-E, way to be the best movie I've seen so far this year.

Wow, guys, I have nothing to say about the film that hasn't already been said better elsewhere, but, yeah. It's amazing. I kind of can't believe it actually got made. I was blown away by how deeply cynical it was (kittens, contra Kung Fu Panda, this is how you deal with obesity in a cartoon!) and thought the use of Hello, Dolly! throughout was inspired. There is no other praise but to urge everyone who hasn't seen it yet to do so posthaste.

OK, I give up, I guess I like Pavement now. I don't know if it's just a function of having been listening to (and loving) Real Emotional Trash all spring, but something clicked a couple weeks ago and I started to feel actively compelled to listen to Slanted and Enchanted and Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. Maybe I've been trying too hard to like them all along instead of, y'know, just liking them? First relenting with Wilco, now Pavement; can the Fiery Furnaces be far behind? (Erm, don't count on it.)

I realize I've been talking a lot about specific songs lately, so I took the opportunity to update my Muxtape with 11 songs I've mentioned directly or indirectly in the past two months and one song I haven't: King Khan and the Shrines' "Took My Lady to Dinner." The only reason it hasn't been mentioned yet is that I just downloaded it this weekend, and it's killing me right now. This song could have gone so wrong in so many ways, but his vocal performance sells the hell out of it. There's an itchy, exuberant franticness to it that doesn't make me doubt for an instant that he loves her! He loves her! He really, really loves her!

Also, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog (via)?! Why am I just learning about this today? Think of all the idle moments I could have been wasting anticipating this if I'd known about it sooner!

Things That Make Me Happy

The line in "My Favorite Year" on Trouble in Dreams when Dan Bejar sings "in some small way we're all traitors to our own cause." ::shivers:: I love this line. Both because it's, um, true, and also because it's such an honest and meta-fantastic description of Bejar's own working methods, especially on this album--he's so pessimistic about rock music and yet can craft a rock song that, while not completely undermining that pessimism, still has the kind of really good, gushy feeling you get from a classic, sturdy, solid song you've been listening to all your life. I look forward to hearing him spit that line the way I always look forward to hearing Ben Gibbard sing "I wish the world was flat like the old days / then I could travel just by holding a map / no more airplanes or speed-trains or freeway / there'd be no distance that could hold us back" at the beginning of Transatlanticism.

And speaking of Death Cab--I love that little tic in Gibbard's songwriting technique where his melody lines and lyrics run so long that they almost tip off the end of the bar. I'm thinking specifically here of "I Will Possess Your Heart" and its opening lines "How I wish you could see the potential / the potential of you and me / it's like a book elegantly bound but in a language that you can't read just yet." It's that little "just yet" spillover that kills me, the same way his "it varies from season to season, kid" in "Why You'd Want to Live Here" does. I dunno what it is. It's kind of like, in the same way that CTLA and I have theorized that the reason why Colin Meloy's diction is so chewed is because he loves language so much that he's trying to sing all vowels simultaneously at all times, Gibbard's so enamored of his own talent for effortlessly elegant melody that he can't help trying to cram as much into every song as he possibly can.

Deadwood fans, sometimes I'll just quietly think to myself "Hang dai, fuckin' Wu--hang dai" and grin like a complete idiot for the next hour and a half.

Important Things I Learned Today

In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream (But That's Only Because the Earth Itself Is Screaming Louder than You Could Possibly Ever Scream, Like That One Baby in the Grocery Store, OMG, It's Burning My Ears).

Montgomery, Alabama's, minor league baseball team is called the Montgomery Biscuits.

The Long Winters are going to appear on that Huey Lewis comp Are You Still with Me?! when/if it ever sees the light of day. (In the meantime, check out Throw Me the Statue's superb take on "If This Is It.") This whole ball of wax makes me happy x one million.

Musical Thoughts

I've been listening to a shitload of new music lately, kittens. So much so I can barely keep it all straight in my head.

I only brought one mix CD along with me to my long weekend in Santa Fe for use in the rental car, so, wary of growing bored with it too quickly, I picked up a copy of Death Cab's new one, Narrow Stairs. Honestly, I can't even tell if they're a good band anymore--I'm going to tend to like what they do because I tend to like the sonic palette they use and they tend to keep using it. Simple as that. It's definitely more of a piece with Plans than it is any of their pre-major label stuff in that the production's exceedingly glossy (without being soulless) and any angst it contains isn't congealing so obviously on the surface anymore. There are no real clunkers--except maybe "Talking Bird"--the band is tight as ever (Jason McGerr: MVP), and Gibbard's tenor is starting to acquire some butteriness where it used to be all citrus. Whatever the album's charms may be, though, they were magnified exponentially for me through the concentrated repetition, nearly subliminal absorption, and heightened emotional receptivity peculiar to being in a car for several hours at a stretch, listening to the same thing on repeat--a pleasure I haven't enjoyed for a very long time. I really don't think I would have given the album that much of a chance to grow on me if it hadn't been for those circumstances. At least two of my all-time top-five favorite albums ascended to that ranking the same way, so...draw what conclusions from that you will.

Apropos of bands whose sonic palettes I tend to like, I'm slightly shocked by how much I'm actually not liking Shearwater's Rook. Maybe I just need to live with it some more, but, based on the way everybody talks and blogs about this band, I thought it would be an instant love affair--the sweeping emotion, the big dramatic swells, all the bird imagery. And yet...not so much. I'm tremendously bugged by Meiburg's falsetto, which he uses to signify importance way too often, when it's his full-on chest voice I find most affecting.

The new Raconteurs album has been a pleasant surprise after just a few spins. (Thanks, Chanesaw.) These guys could've just crapped out another album on par with Broken Boy Soldiers (which is to say, pleasant enough but ultimately unremarkable and unmemorable), but you can hear the sound of honest-to-God ambition on Consolers of the Lonely. The song forms and instrumentation are adventurous (horns!!) and the album qua album hangs together better than it would've needed to. Plus, I always forget how much I like Brendon Benson. (Though, he or whoever else had a hand in writing the otherwise stunning "The Switch and the Spur" owe former collaborator Jason Falkner some cash for lifting that opening chord progression from "The Plan" on Can You Still Feel.)

Because the CTA likes to fuck with me personally, I missed the starting times for two different movies I was trying to see on Saturday, so by the time I finally got to the theater, the only thing starting that I was even halfway interested in was, yes, Kung Fu Panda. I love a good animated romp, and this was generally amusing, lovely to look at, well voiced, etc. But, in my post-Buffy brain, I have a really hard time swallowing "chosen one" story lines that aren't exceptionally well done, not to mention that, ultimately, this film is a valorization of incompetence and gluttony so long as they're accompanied by ebullience and joie de vivre. Um, no. Obviously, I'm all for spreading the message that bodies of all shapes and sizes are acceptable, etc., but a kids' movie promoting itself with McDonald's happy meals featuring a character who both overeats when he's nervous and uses food as the only tool that will get him motivated while not being particularly skilled in anything other than enthusiasm and non sequiturs is, um, pretty frustratingly early-twenty-first-century American. Not cool.

Also, of course, RIP to the good Mr. Carlin.

Musical Musings

Sometimes, for me, listening to a Wilco song with, like, half an ear open is akin to catching a glimpse of yourself in the mirror and being surprised by how good you look. I put "Hate It Here" on a mix I made this weekend and have been totally blown away by its, and the band's, greatness. I don't know if Tweedy's voice has ever sounded as cool to my ears as it does here. Remind me again why I don't listen to this band (or at least Sky Blue Sky) all the time?

Americans, why do we generally refuse to have anything to do with the Arctic Monkeys? I was listening to Favourite Worst Nightmare yesterday and was bowled over anew with how good they are. I kind of can't believe some of those melodies were written by a contemporary kid in his early 20s; they're so sweetly twisty, they sound like they could've come straight out of the early days of rock 'n' roll. Not to mention Turner's facility with both writing lyrics and delivering them. Even when he's spitting sarcasm and bile, there's such ease there.

Grizzly Bear's "While You Wait for the Others" is really, really fucking good. I know the song and the video have been floating around out there for a few months already, but it always takes me a while to warm up to Grizzly Bear's stuff in general, so the full weight of its greatness is finally just hitting me now. But srsly, it's like this wonderful, warm, lavender-scented bath for your ears.

Jamie Lidell, Live at the Abbey Pub

It was a good show. Not a great show--but a good show that I'm happy I attended. Lidell and his band have only been on the road touring behind Jim for just over a week now, so I think there's hope that by the time they swing back around ("when I! come back around!") for Lollapalooza in August their set will have some more cohesion. But last night felt a little all over the place. I think part of the problem is that his band is...well, not much of a band yet. You could tell that Jamie wanted to blast out on stage and light the place on fire like old school James Brown, but the four guys behind him were nowhere near musically robust enough to support that attempt. They were clearly having fun, and their oddball stage antics and costumes were certainly of a piece with Lidell's sensibility, but until these guys can actually match his chops as well as his silliness--or, y'know, until he can afford to bring the Dap-Kings out on the road--I'd much rather see him just do the solo knob-twiddling freak-out thing. Which he did for a nice extended segment in the middle of the set. (A girl in my peripheral vision kept turning her back to the stage so she could flirt possessively with the guy she'd come to the show with, and I just wanted to shake her by the shoulders and say, "do you realize what you're missing every time you do that?!") He was also, thankfully, in fine vocal form throughout the night; his croon on the first verse of "Green Light"--easily one of my favorite songs on the new album--was just ridiculously pristine. I also have to give credit to the extremely amped audience. Even if the show wasn't quite as mind-bendingly in-the-pocket as I would have liked, the crowd was having a blast. Lots of dancing, clapping, and call and response--in fact, during the obligatory break between the fake end of the show and the encore, we all politely clapped and hollered for a few seconds until some brilliant person got the entire crowd singing the "I been waitin' / I been waitin' / I been waitin' / yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah" bit from Jim's "Wait for Me" until the band started trickling back out on stage. It was an incredibly sweet and heartfelt gesture.

Right, so...Sex and the City. I don't even know what I can say about the movie, much less the entire juggernaut, at this point. I've been tying myself in knots all week trying to come up with something interesting to say about it here, but I don't know if any attempt to untangle would do much of a service to my thoughts or to the film. Was I offended by the prerelease backlash? Yeah. My standard line has been, "it's The Baby-Sitters Club for sexually active adult women. No more, no less. Get over it." But do I understand the fatigue and annoyance that comes of all that hysterical media saturation, especially if you're not a fan? Of course. Harry Potter's similar omnipresence last summer drove me batty. Did the backlash start to get to me a little bit, in spite of myself? It did, during the few days when I was meekly referring to my plans to see "that movie with the ladies." I pretty quickly realized, though, that that shit ain't right and just started outright discussing the fact that I was going to see it during opening weekend with, yes, three of my good city girlfriends. Was there a certain thrill in being in a theater full of women who were reminding the muckety mucks in Hollywood WITH THE VERY LOUD NOISE OF OUR DOLLARS that we're still a demographic to be reckoned with? Sure, while at the same time wanting to scold everyone for gasping with delight at that hideous walk-in closet reveal and for laughing at all the lamest jokes.

I think the only aspect of the movie I haven't seen widely addressed yet is Samantha's incredibly offensive food-instead-of-sex subplot. Far from being a genuinely affecting corollary to Carrie and Miranda's story lines wherein they're also separated from the things that matter most to them, hers is played slapstick. I guess Samantha's inherent wink-wink, nudge-nudginess kind of resists overwrought emotional histrionics in general, but her loss was really not treated with much respect at all. I think it's sort of barely coincidental that she's the oldest actress of the bunch, and thus beginning to slip into the realm of "it's so funny when grandma says 'penis'!" I mean, for a character who's known for her notoriously prurient appetites, her "sex scenes" actually become scenes of creepy-old-lady voyeurism as a bunch of plastic-looking porno people bounce and gyrate in front of the open windows next door to her. Oh, and of course she also buys a dog (retail therapy + being associated with the animalistic impulses of fucking and feeding--ugh), which then allows for the convenient "pooch" pun when she arrives back in New York and everyone's horrified by how much weight she's gained. About halfway through the scene, Carrie tosses off some line like "it's not about the pounds, you'd look beautiful at any weight"--and you can practically smell the graphite, the line feels so penciled in during eleventh hour script revisions. Obviously, I'm pretty angry about all that. But, I liked the rest of it enough on the whole, I guess. Best line? When they first get to the hotel in Mexico and Miranda barks, "you got wireless here? Thanks."

I also saw a bit of French piffle, Roman de gare, last weekend. It kind of pointlessly folds back on itself in that "you've just been watching the story that the character is writing!" way, but the performances are very warm and the preposterousness of many of the plot twists yields its own pleasure. Longtime Wrestling Entropy readers know of my love for Dominique Pinon, so it was definitely a treat for me to get to see him carry a film like this. Extra bonus points for all the wonderful French crooner stuff on the soundtrack.

Hey, how much fun is that Spoon Don't You Evah EP? I finally got around to putting it on my iPod and couldn't believe how easy it was to listen, not counting the one from Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, to six different versions of the song in a row. A lot of it is certainly just the endless amount of richness in Britt's voice, but if the tracks had just been standard issue variations on the boring thumpa-thumpa remixes I always find myself regretting having downloaded, even the samples of him wouldn't have floated the middle five all on their own. I'm glad, though, that Spoon's tastefulness extends even to DJs and other remix artists on their interstitial releases.

Local friends, if you find yourself venturing out for the Printers Row Book Fair this weekend, be sure to stop by booths 331 and 333 to say hi to the CRP worker bees. A few local authors will be signing their recently released books and we'll be featuring plenty of other local interest titles. Should be fun!

Iron Man, Redbelt, Sarah Marshall, Dirty Projectors, Scott Pilgrim

Iron Man was entertaining enough, I guess, and the principal actors were all certainly very fine, but it left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth nonetheless. Trying to make a rock-em, sock-em comic book movie relevant or timely or whatever by setting a major portion of the plot in Afghanistan seems, rather than allowing the one to enrich the other, kind of an insult to both. In his Chicago Reader review, J.R. Jones bemoans the fact that Favreau as director makes no direct commentary on the fact that the Tony Stark character acts as a metaphor for the U.S., but I think Jones is slightly off the mark. I think using Stark's single-minded mission to destroy the weapons he's sold to the 'bad guys' as such a driving force of the plot and such a hinge for his character arc implicitly acknowledges that everybody knows this is how arms get distributed to questionable people with questionable motives, and everybody knows this is the same charade of self-righteousness we've been watching on TV every day since 9/11. It's so obvious that it needn't be remarked on. But, the fact that it needn't be remarked on doesn't take away from the reality that it's a pretty despicable thing to build a supposedly escapist summer blockbuster around, a blockbuster where we're supposed to cheer for these virtuosic displays of ballistic might.

Redbelt was likewise a bit of a snooze-fest and letdown. Over the course of his career, Mamet has perhaps done his job too well--by continually railing against seedy, amoral Hollywood wheeling and dealing, he's made it impossible to believe that anyone would be as starry-eyed and gullible when confronted with the kind of too-good-to-be-true offer from a solicitous actor/producer team that Chiwetel Ejiofor's Mike Terry character is handed. (Esp. a character with the avowed integrity and honor issues that he has.) Though the plot strained credibility in many places, I'm always happy to watch Ejiofor do anything, and I thought the casting of Tim Allen was inspired.

I suppose I should have had problems with Forgetting Sarah Marshall, but it won me over in spite of myself. Sure, the female characters were fairly one-dimensional and disproportionately hot in comparison to their more schlubby male counterparts, but I felt like, on the whole, it had a pretty good sense for all the different kinds of stuff that hangs in the air, unspoken, between people--between old lovers, new lovers, friends that aren't really friends, and people you feel threatened by. Plus, when is Paul Rudd going to step away from these disposable comedic walk-on roles and start carrying movies on his own again? He's a demonstrably better actor than most of the guys in Apatow's stable and shines with a ridiculous amount of on-screen charisma. When he breaks into a smile in that scene when he's trying to figure out how old he actually is, I felt like my retinas were being seared. Damn.

I've been listening to Dirty Projectors' Rise Above a lot lately and liking it a ton. Since I have absolutely no familiarity with the Black Flag album it's re-creating/reenvisioning, though, I find myself listening to Rise Above in much the same way that I used to listen to original cast recordings for musicals I'd never actually seen performed. There's something enjoyably elliptical about just jumping in blind and assembling the plot, such as it is, to the best of my abilities with the clues left behind by the music and lyrics. This way of listening has also helped smooth over some of the songs' sudden crazy tempo shifts and jarring vocal affectations--they're easier for my ears to acclimate to if I hear them as out-of-context scene changes and moments of character development.

Speaking of character development, I've spent the last three evenings immersed in the Scott Pilgrim books (and plan to finish the fourth today)--holy crap, I'm just completely in love with this series now. It's so smart and funny and delightful. And Canadian. I don't think I've grown so attached, so quickly, to a group of characters like this since I first started getting into Deadwood. I just want to give them space to continue to rattle around in my brain like a catchy power pop melody. So good!

Concerts and Camera

Kittens! How've you been? I've missed you.

First and foremost, I have to let you know that I got a new camera. So far, I'm extremely pleased with it and its flexibility. Many thanks to JH, who recently bought the same one and let me fondle it for a while, which helped me make the decision to purchase one of my very own.

Had the pleasure of seeing Jim White live for the first time last Friday at the Old Town School of Folk Music. (Jim White the Southern Gothic troubadour who records for Luaka Bop, not Jim White the drummer for the Dirty Three.) Setting aside for a moment the fact that the well-to-do yuppies in the crowd probably bugged me more than the garden variety rude, unkempt hipsters I usually encounter when I'm out at a show, it was an enjoyable night. He talks incessantly between songs, unspooling these long, insane monologues about these insane (and often quite poignant) experiences he's been through (watching with panic, fear, and fascination as waterspouts writhed and twisted on the beach in Florida, talking heretical smack to Jesus-lovin' Sleepy LaBeef at a Canadian bluegrass festival) and though there's obviously a bit of polish and raconteurishness to these stories, I get the sense that if you just ran into him in a coffee shop somewhere, he'd probably talk your ear off in a similar way. I bet it's somewhat exhausting, but ultimately quite rewarding, to know him personally. It's the same sense I get about Quentin Tarantino whenever I see or read interviews with him. In fact, White's music and persona exist for me at this funny intersection of a whole collection of other artists, in addition to Tarantino, I have particular fondness for, which, even though I'm not an avid fan of his, really just makes me inherently sympathetic to and curious about what he's doing. There's the Tarantino talkiness, but also the dark, lyrical Americana of Denis Johnson, the joie de vivre informed but unbowed by life's more unforgiving realities of John Darnielle, the childlike silliness and deceptive simplicity of Jonathan Richman, the quirky country parables of Lyle Lovett. (I'm sure there's probably some others in there that I'm forgetting at the moment.) I wasn't familiar with the majority of the material he played, much of which comes from his most recent album Transnormal Skiperoo, but that's OK because he started the show with "A Perfect Day to Chase Tornados," as heartbreaking, tender, and transfixing a song as I know.

Oh my god, Son of Rambow is absolutely the movie that Be Kind Rewind wanted to be. I don't know what I could possibly say that would convince you that you need to see this film at your earliest convenience, but please pretend that I've just said it. Wonderful, wonderful stuff. The British whimsy, the ways that little boys can be such beautiful idiots, the emotional intelligence about the trickle-down economics of bullying--Garth Jennings is just firing on all cylinders here. I was in a total state of suspended delight through the whole thing. Highly recommended.

Also caught the Laura Veirs solo show at Schubas this week. I try to catch her whenever she's in town just because...well, just because. It's like, what else am I supposed to do when it comes to someone who's written and recorded so much music that's insinuated itself into my life so thoroughly in such a relatively short period of time? I show the fuck up at the shows and clap like my life depended on it and buy the merch, that's what. Though I missed Tucker Martine and Karl Blau's contributions, when she plays without her backing band, the songs can reveal their impressively sturdy roots in old-timey country, folk, and bluegrass idioms (an impression which was definitely helped by her playing "Freight Train," which appears on the Two Beers Veirs tour EP, and by then pulling out her banjo to play "Cluck Old Hen," complete with audience participation) and her skill as a guitar player really shines. Liam Finn--New Zealander, son of Crowded House's Neil Finn, with a likeness of Johnny Burns from Deadwood--opened, with a little vocal help from the sumptuously lovely EJ Barnes, and fucking owned the room. Pics here.

Even though it's ostensibly just two guys playing music on a mostly dark stage, I'm tempted to tag this video (via) of the Dodos playing "Fools" as NSFW because, um, holy crap, it's kinda sexy. (Also, WTF, is Casey Affleck playing drums for them now?) Yes, darlings, I'm just using my twenty-ninth year to get some good cougaring practice in before I hit 30...

Jamie Lidell fans, please be sure not to miss this shit-hot remix of "Little Bit of Feel Good." Not only does the track itself knock me out, I was fucking pleased as all hell to discover that remixer Son Lux is actually an old pal from college whom I've obviously lost touch with in the intervening years. Looks like he's making quite a name for himself among the tastiest of the tastemakers in New York. An awesome discovery for the week.

In Which AMF Once Again Must Contend with the Disillusionment Wrought by Becoming Overly Enthusiastic About Certain Movie Previews

Gak. So, The Forbidden Kingdom was awful, awful, awful. So disappointing. It totally felt like it was made by committee, which is to say it felt utterly bland and almost messianically bent on being as inoffensive as possible. The preview fails to intimate that the whole reason white boy Michael Angarano is in the movie in the first place is because of a ridiculous Wizard of Oz-esque framing device wherein he's transported from his seemingly sad life in present-day Boston (why Boston?) to the vaguely mythical China that finds him teamed up with the Jackie Chan and Jet Li characters so he can return some mystical staff to its rightful owner and, in so doing, restore peace to the kingdom, etc., etc. Ugh. It started out promisingly enough, with a kicky, self-aware, pseudo-70s credit sequence inspired by the vintage Hong Kong action movie posters that decorated the Angarano character's bedroom walls, and I hoped that maybe the movie was going to do some interesting stuff with the way that young white dudes so fetishize HK action movies, but...no dice. You know me, I like to try to come out of a movie with at least one nice moment that I can remember about it, but I'm hard pressed to be able to point at anything here. Jet Li when he's in character as the Monkey King, perhaps? At least there's some life on screen then. Aside from that, not much else. I never felt emotionally involved with any of the characters, and even the fight sequences weren't that interesting. A shame.

The Music Box hit us this weekend with the first of a series of Jimmy Stewart flicks, beginning with Call Northside 777. What a treat--set in Chicago (where the skyline shots were all just, like, the Tribune Tower, the Merchandise Mart, and the river), revolving around a whole bunch of Polish characters and their attendant crazy last names and cozy Polish neighborhoods, featuring a textbook (which is to say charming, engaging, and sharp) performance from Stewart as a hard-nosed newspaper journalist. I loved that, even though the movie has the happy/expected ending, the narrative never explains why the crime went down the way it did or why Wanda Skutnik altered her testimony to indict the wrong guy. I also loved Stewart's few all-too-brief scenes with Helen Walker as his wife; they had great chemistry and she was feisty as all get-out. I'd need a grad student to do the research for me, but I'd love to know where this film falls in the continuum of "cutting edge technology saves the day" movies. I'm bad with remembering plot in much detail, but somehow the climax revolves around Stewart's character needing to prove that Wanda Skutnik saw the fall guy a day before she claims she did, and they do this by enlarging a photograph 200x or more in order to read the date on a newspaper being held by a paper boy hovering somewhere in the background. So, not only are they zooming in on the photo, but then they have to transmit these enlargements over the wire from Chicago to a newspaper office in the state capital. It's tempting to chuckle at how wowed the characters are by this great new technology, but shit--I'm just impressed that they were doing this kind of stuff in the late '40s at all. Indistinguishable from magic, indeed.

John Darnielle at LPTJ on Jamie Lidell's new album: "…one thing pop music is good for is remembering that somewhere inside us is the potential for unvanquishable joy: clearing a space for that remembering, broadening that space. Jamie Lidell’s present project seems to be focused on illuminating that joy-containing space, hanging signs that point toward it." OMG, bring it. After his set at the Pitchfork fest last summer, I've decided that, if I can possibly help it, I just can't miss his live show whenever he tours through Chicago. I'm counting the days until June 4. Abbey Pub. See you there, bitches.

Also, a great big happy birthday to my boy Michael, captain of the Geeks, today. Be sure to celebrate your Cinco de Mikow in style!

My Blueberry Nights and Beyond

Movies? I like movies.

Dude, I thought I heard/read that My Blueberry Nights was supposed to be not very good? Well, I'm happy to report that it's actually a great little flick. Sure, it's not as emotionally gutting as In the Mood for Love or as intricate and perplexing as 2046, but as a reminder of the whimsical, romantic melancholy of the rightly beloved-by-all Chungking Express, it's totally satisfying. Norah Jones is an utter blank, but that's clearly part of the point. The three vignettes that she travels through center around a series of losses that escalate in intensity as they simultaneously diminish in personal importance to her character, a tantalizing conceptual framework that helps make up for the way iffy beginning when Jude Law's cafe-owner character explains how he doesn't remember people by their names as much as he remembers them by the food they eat (eye roll) and Ms. Jones does the most 'acting' she's required to do in the whole piece after she discovers that her boyfriend has been cheating on her and she smashes a glass bottle on the sidewalk (big eye roll). As the movie travels across the country from New York to Memphis to Reno and opens up geographically, it also starts to shimmer a little bit, in that lovely Wong Kar-wai way, where the edges of the characters bleed and drip into each other (much like the sexy macro photography of the blueberry pie a la mode behind the opening credit sequence), as odd traits and circumstances and even physical resemblances echo and rhyme from one storyline to the next, and the next. (The bleed even goes meta when Chan Marshall, another husky voiced singer-turned-actress with a great head of hair, shows up as Jude Law's pined-for ex. They've got such great chemistry in their brief scene together, I would without a doubt pay cash money to see the prequel version of that love affair.) David Strathairn gives a typically incredible performance, and Natalie Portman proves once again that she can pretty much do anything as she nails her blowsy Western cardsharp character, complete with a ton of bad turquoise jewelry and even worse frosted hair. The movie's not going to change your life or anything, but it feels really good.

Caught up with The Long Goodbye for the first time in about nine years (thank you, Music Box weekend matinee series!), and while the anti-Altman bias I subconsciously inherited from my favorite college film professor way back when has mostly waned by now, I still do have to take issue with the final "Hooray for Hollywood" musical tag here. The film's formal snarkiness about the noir genre makes its point well, especially given where it falls in the context of both the American New Wave and Altman's emergence as one of the defining directors of that era, but that little twist of the knife at the end strikes me as just a bit too too. That being said, though, I absolutely enjoyed the hell out of the movie this time around. Elliott Gould could not have been more wonderful as the anti-Philip Marlowe, and the casting of Sterling Hayden just gives me chills it's so perfect.

The Visitor was definitely enjoyable, if a bit maudlin. I suppose I'm being kind of harsh, and I suppose, politically, I'm not exactly part of the demographic that needs to have the U.S.'s insane and draconian immigration laws dramatized for me. But I also feel like, anytime you're going to make a movie that revolves around some gorgeous Syrian man who just wants to play his djembe, his gorgeous girlfriend who just wants to sell her hand-beaded jewelry, and his gorgeous mother who just wants to know her gorgeous son is safe and happy in his adopted homeland, there's going to necessarily be a bit of deck-stacking involved in making sure that we, the audience, feel rilly bad about the unpleasant stuff that happens to these attractive and artsy people who are filled to the brim with a lusty embrace of life and all its sensual pleasures that the uptight white people are too square or too repressed to experience. Seriously, I grant that I'm being too harsh here. The movie is filled with a lot of fine and subtle acting and doesn't at all scream this subtext like the sort of issue-of-the-week TV movie that I'm making it out to be, and the story doesn't necessarily need, or could even have sustained, a more complex version of the Tarek character. But...I just get the nagging feeling that there's a way of reading the message here, however well intentioned, that the only "foreigners" worth caring about are the ones who are attractive and emotionally useful in some way to the lives of the white Americans they encounter, while eliding the more complex and perhaps boring truth that the system is deeply fucked, regardless of the personal charisma of the people it has imprisoned and deported. I dunno; how would one make an emotionally affecting film about deportation without (unintentionally?) sainting its racially profiled characters? I think it's also illustrative of how incredibly broken, and wide-ranging in its brokenness, the system is that I can't even get behind a film as generally well-made and enjoyable as this without twisting myself into knots over it.

I also weirdly, and almost accidentally, saw Enchanted this weekend. I laughed out loud a bunch of times--both at stuff like the intentionally funny "Happy Working Song" and the unintentionally funny nuevo-Disney ethos that all happily-ever-afters must now also come certified with a successful transition into entrepreneurship for at least one of the main characters. I'm not a Grey's Anatomy watcher, so I don't really get the whole Patrick Dempsey thing, but he does a completely serviceable job here, no real complaints. But, there's the part of me that thinks that, until further notice, in these kinds of romantic comedies that are primarily vehicles for their lead actresses, these otherwise bland leading men roles should perpetually be played by Mark Ruffalo, just to see how much seething rage and illicit, up-against-the-wall sex appeal he can sneak into the mainstream.

Do yourself a favor and be sure to check out the recent White Denim Daytrotter session. I'm just totally enamored of this young band and have been consistently thrilled by everything I've heard from them so far.

There's a fantastic Q&A with Dan Bejar up on eMusic right now. I pity any of these poor bastards who were honestly expecting straightforwards As to their Qs. The "'Summer Babe.' Just kidding. No, 'Summer Babe'" one liner got one of those rolling thunderclap laughs out of me, where the humor didn't hit me for a few seconds, then I sort of chuckled curtly, then really started cackling out loud, sitting alone at my desk. Big love.

Deadwood, Destroyer, Record Store Day

Finally finished watching the third season of Deadwood this weekend. Holy hell. That show absolutely makes me quiver with glee. It's an incredible work of art, surely one of the best things on television ever (and you all know what a huge Buffy fan I am). I'm seriously going to be mourning the loss of these characters from my life for a little while. Highly, highly, highly recommended for those of you who haven't indulged yet. I guess it's finally time for me to get into The Wire now.

The Destroyer show on Thursday night at the Logan Square Auditorium was much fun. I just stood there grinning the entire time. Dan Bejar is one crazy bastard, and the drummer is a monster. Seriously. This guy was doing some of the most sensitively aggro shit I've heard in recent memory. (Mr. Perpetua has already geeked out about the drums on "The State," and, as usual, he's right on the money.) I'm sure part of it was the very muddy sound mix in the room, but the beats were just exploding all over the place, but tightly, precisely, each one a little prison yard with spider's web barbed wire wrapped around it. Incredible. They played a good chunk of songs from the wonderful new Trouble in Dreams and generally kept riding that tension that I so adore about them that leaves me constantly wondering, "wait, are they for real about this?" Plus, on the train platform on the way home, I had the pleasure of running into the inimitable Jeff Harms, who shared with me a copy of his second CD, The Myth of Heroics, which drops soon. It's got kind of a Willy Mason thing going on, or maybe Matt Berninger fronting a less ecstatic Okkervil River. The songs are sweet, smart, and quirky and convey an abundance of warmth and gentleness. Be sure to put May 26 on your calendar, Chicago kittens, and get yourself to Rainbo for his CD release party.

Speaking of CDs, did anyone make the effort to observe the Record Store Day holiday on Saturday? I was running errands anyway so it was relatively convenient for me to stop into Laurie's Planet of Sound and pick up a copy of the new Man Man album. I would've grabbed a copy of the new Cadence Weapon too, but they didn't have it currently in stock. (Say what you will about iTunes and its DRM, but it does allow me to legally get my instant gratification rocks off when I decide I need some specific music at that very moment, especially when eMusic doesn't carry the album I want.) I usually try not to let record store snobbery bother me too much, and Laurie's usually isn't as bad about it as some, but as one of the clerks was running my credit card, I heard another clerk ask the dude in line behind me if he owned a turntable and then mentioned the stack of Record Store Day 7"s they had available. Now, admittedly, I don't happen to have a turntable right now, but I totally resented the somewhat sexist assumption that I wouldn't. I mean, maybe the clerk and the guy were friends or casual social acquaintances already, but still, not cool. Gripe, gripe--support your local record store anyway.

Compare Your Genitals to Musicians! (My faves are Frank Zappa and Leonard Cohen, though Television has a certain foul charm to it as well.)

"PETA declares truce with Beyonce: Under the terms of the agreement, PETA will admit she was 'pretty good' in Dreamgirls and Beyonce will stop whaling." --Entertainment Weekly "Hit List" for April 25/May 2, 2008.

Caribou, Live at the Empty Bottle

The Caribou/Fuck Buttons show at the Empty Bottle last night was roundly excellent. Totally one of those "I was meant to be here and nowhere else but here at this very time and place" shows. There was a lot of extraneous bullshit swirling around my attempt to get myself there--a severely annoying combination of the fact that I'd gotten a ticket for the 10 pm show when my crabby-old-lady-ness has pretty much been dictating an early bedtime most nights recently and the fact that, between waiting for the bus and then riding on the bus, it took me a bloody hour to go those four miles south on Western to Division--but as soon as I got there and heard the bleary-eyed ecstatic noise of the Fuck Buttons rumbling through the wall, all my stress completely melted away.

I've totally been loving Street Horrrsing. Seemingly contrary to everything I think I know about my musical tastes, listening habits, and preferences, I've come to realize that every so often I get in the mood to submerge myself in some high quality, well-made noise. I got semi-obsessed with Tim Hecker's Harmony in Ultraviolet early last winter and was delighted to surprise the crap out of RTW a little while back by mentioning how much I like Oval. And it seems Street Horrrsing has come to me at a time when its loud, gorgeous, monotonous chaos is perfectly mirroring the current state of my own inner life: a simultaneous combination of anger and peace and frustration and confusion and brattiness and stripped-down urgency and all-consuming focus and spaced-out expansiveness and constantly recurring, seemingly unresolvable motifs. Plus, those adorable, skinny Brit boys work the whole "yeah, we're just standing here on stage fiddling with knobs" thing with a vigor that never tips over into trying too hard. Even though I missed more of their set than I would have liked (see above re: public transportation can suck on it), I was thrilled with what I did manage to catch.

And Caribou just completely blew my mind. Going in, I had no idea what to expect but knew I was in for something special based on the discerning Kirstiecat's assertion from last fall that their set at the Metro with Born Ruffians was the best show she saw all year. (Kirstie was taking more lovely pics at both shows last night, too, and afterward said the band was every bit as good as last time, even if Dan's vocals seemed a little tired/rough from so much touring.) I really (regrettably) only know Andorra, but based on the sweetness of that album's melodies, I kind of wasn't expecting so much ferocity in performance. I guess I knew to expect some fierce drumming, which their pinch hitter certainly provided, but I lamely and stupidly didn't expect the epically dorky Dan Snaith to bring so much intensity. (Srsly, I love this video [via] to bits, but it probably unfairly skewed my initial impressions on this matter.) But, when in the space of the first song and a half, he'd already sang (with that lovely, lilty voice of his that somehow evokes both Elliott Smith and Ben Folds), played guitar, recorder, and keyboards, and then sat down at a second drum kit for a mind-blowing simultaneous rhythm attack with the other drummer, there was just no doubt in my mind that this guy is made of music. Not in any kind of grandiose, personal-mission-to-the-masses, Prince-esque kind of way (he's entirely too Canadian for that) but with a calm, reasonable confidence that he's most himself when his edges are blurring a bit as he dissolves into a vehicle for these gorgeous sonic layer cakes he so painstakingly assembles, which, paradoxically, then allows him to shine almost violently brightly with a nearly beatific fire on stage. No wonder he doesn't wear his glasses while he's performing; he'd start burning holes into shit all over the place. So yes. It was a fantastic and much-needed night of music.

The Bank Job, The Dodos, and Stuff

Caught up with The Bank Job on Friday night. Ah, how I do love a good little British heist film. The stakes got a bit higher at the end than I was expecting, which was oddly disconcerting for such a bit of piffle, but I think that's just my own filter at work and no fault of the film's for being manipulative or anything. Plus, the five-o'clock shadow on Jason Statham ("possibly the greatest B-movie leading man of this era") is worth the price of admission in itself. The thing's perpetually like half an hour away from just being a full-on beard.

So, not only did the little boy in me get a bang out of the caper flick, he also started getting majorly jonesed, after a second viewing of the preview, for The Forbidden Kingdom, aka "Jackie Chan & Jet Li: Finally Together: Before One of Us Gets Too Old and Breaks Something." Ohhhh kittens, you have no idea the glee that the idea of this film brings me. It might even be worth cramming myself into a theater on opening night to see this with a crowd, just to be part of the adrenaline of the assembled mob. That can occasionally make for such a satisfying movie experience. Also, wtf, my new favorite young actor, Michael Angarano, looks to be playing one of the main characters. Good for him. Let's hope he steers his career the way of Ryan Gosling and not so much Hayden Christensen.

RIP Charlton Heston. This is probably disrespectful, but here's a link (fast forward to about 2:27) to Eddie Izzard's Circle bit wherein he proposes giving a gun to a monkey and locking it in Mr. Heston's house to test the viability of his proposed NRA slogan "guns don't kill people, people kill people, and monkeys do too (if they've got a gun)."

I promise I'm not getting blogger payola or whatever to keep linking to Saturday Night Live sketches, but this is just such genius character comedy, I can't even handle how funny it is. Viva Fred Armisen.

The Dodos' new album Visiter (yeahyeahyeah, best new music, whatevs) was the perfect soundtrack to the two long walks I took this weekend in the first of Chicago's springtime warmth and sunshine. All sort of melancholy and hopeful and dreamy and earthy. It didn't quite pull me out of my own skin the way a similar walking-and-listening experience with Animal Collective's Sung Tongs did a couple years ago--an experience that rearranged my molecules so thoroughly I didn't even feel like I was in my own city anymore--but it kept me good company, as I hope it might continue to do as the season progresses.

I Feel Good!

I think everyone needs to take a moment to enjoy this wonderful piece of Post-It art I found at work today. Happy Friday, my kittens!

This Week's Reader

Hey, Chicagoans. If you happen to pick up a copy of the Chicago Reader this week, be sure to check out the cover story, "As Del Lay Dying." It's actually a huge excerpt from one of our books, The Funniest One in the Room, which is the first full-length biography of improv comedy guru Del Close. We're all super, super proud of it.

Snow Angels

A new David Gordon Green movie is just such a gift. He's so good and his work is so vital; I hope everyone is giving him his due now as one of the defining filmmakers of the aughts rather than waiting to fawn in retrospect. Anyway, as this might lead one to believe, I saw Snow Angels this weekend, and, yes, it's remarkable. Sad and funny and terrifying and thoughtful and lyrical. Everything you'd expect. Based as it is on a novel (about which I know nothing), it has a bit more of an internal engine to it than his three previous features (which is a retarded way of my saying that it's ever so slightly less meandering and more explicitly plot-based and narrative-driven; in different hands, it could have ended up as one of those middle-class, middlebrow prestige pieces Kate Winslet does from time to time when she's keen to rack up another Oscar nomination).

It's shocking, but also quite nice, to see a film in which a bunch of characters are genuinely angry. Not just filled with self-righteousness or vengeance or generalized bile of the "fuck me? no, fuck you" variety like characters in most of the loud, ugly movies Hollywood attempts to feed us on a regular basis, but real, everyday, bone-deep anger. That band director's monologue about having a sledgehammer in his heart was a fucking brilliant way to open the film and set that tone. (When's the last time you've seen a high school teacher yell at a bunch of students in a movie in a way that's not just "ooh, what a jerk" or "ah, it's inspirational tough love that will lead them to victory in the end"? Many of us denizens of Wrestling Entropy know from being yelled at by high school teachers, especially in the context of extracurricular activities, and it was usually fueled by plain old unreflective anger, with maybe the merest shell of motivation painted on if we were lucky.) And, what's even more beautiful and shocking and almost exciting in its truthfulness is the way that the eruptions of anger don't serve as any sort of cue to judgment here, especially when it comes to the Kate Beckinsale character. Her flashes of rage made my stomach churn, but only because I recognized how they were such dead-on accurate manifestations of the frustration and impotence and regret and selfishness that I've felt in myself on many occasions--but we were never supposed to judge her harshly for these rages the way so many of the other characters (incl., often her own mother) did.

And though we were never being baited into judging her, I think the movie is asking us to consider how and when anger becomes unproductive and, therefore, its own prison, rather than, as it's intended to be, a tool to air out wrongs and resentments that otherwise would have festered internally, in an effort to achieve greater compassion for oneself and better relationships with loved ones. I think that scene when the main kid (the wonderful, wonderful, wonderful Michael Angarano) yells at his dad about abandoning their family is one of the most important ones in the movie. Both because we get to see that kid--who is absolutely the film's moral center--practice using an additional set of adult emotions (on the heels of his mother's gentle imperative that he let himself live and breathe through his feelings instead of bottling them up like most people do, including, she freely admits, herself) and because the dad closes the door to the college lecture hall they've been sitting in. It's a subtle, but absolutely necessary, cue, that family business should stay private, not go exploding into front lawns and other public spaces like the rage and violence we constantly see around the Sam Rockwell character especially (which implicitly includes Nicky Katt as well, not to mention the way the entire high school gets enlisted in the search for the missing child). Angarano's character, at his core, clearly has a pretty solid sense of self, and he's being equipped, however fumblingly and imperfectly, by his parents with the tools he's going to need to become a more complete and self-actualized adult, the kind of adult that's clearly in short supply in the small town they all live in. This--this is a heroic, subtle, mature, uncommodifiable message, my kittens: that despite growing up in a dead-end town with separated parents and (the horror!) occasionally indulging in some clandestine beer and weed consumption, it is still entirely possible to become a good person. Life may try to guide you to fall into formation like the marching band does, but a willingness to be open to your emotions makes a part of your soul inviolable. Not to mention that he willingly goes down on his high school girlfriend when they spend a lazy morning in bed together, which is one of the very few instances of female-directed heterosexual tenderness in the entire movie.

Also, this is exactly the kind of role I didn't even know I was referring to when I mentioned last fall that I didn't know what kind of a career Sam Rockwell was supposed to be having. He's similar enough here to the kind of charming, nervous fuck-up he was as Chuck Barris in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind that I hope he doesn't get typecast in that sort of role, but, that all being said, he's really, really perfect in this movie. Nicky Katt likewise has been somewhat pigeonholed as the clueless, butch guy who fancies himself sort of sensitive and enlightened, but he's just so hilariously good at it that I can't complain. And Amy Sedaris, who usually kind of bugs me, could not have been used better here, her off-kilter sensibility not coming off as an end in itself but as an arresting bundle of legitimate personality traits in a truly fundamentally decent character.

This film is highly recommended, my kittens. A strong early(ish) start to the '08 movie year.

All the cool kids are doing it: I made you a Muxtape. I know you're probably so over such a January 2008 tracklist by this point. What can I say; I'm just not that hip. I mean, I put the fucking uncool as all get-out Kings of Leon on there, fer cryin' out loud. Um, but enjoy? Oh, and because it's apparently mandatory to link to now when referencing Muxtape: Catbird's list. It's kind of the same joke as the "Top Ten Best Ever" I linked here, but it's still worth it for the scroll-down punchline laugh.

DS makes a girl (that girl = me) blush over at the recently un-hiatus'd Overthrown Device. Being respectfully disagreed with by the likes of him is one of the highest compliments I can conceive of. Not to mention that he's also turned me around on some stuff (like The Life Aquatic and Michael Haneke) that I otherwise would have remained contentedly stick-in-the-mud about if left to my own devices. (Ha ha, y'like that pun?) Go, read, poke around for a bit, and be enlightened while you're there.

I haven't seen it in a number of years, but I'm glad to read Scott Tobias speaking out over at the Onion AV Club on behalf of the deeply, gorgeously weird Babe: Pig in the City, which I love unreservedly.

"Your momma ain't name you no damn Barack."

Kick-ass collection of pictures of knuckle tattoos and the stories behind them (via).

Malkmus, Miss Pettigrew

So, you know those accidentally perfect, Virginia Woolf-esque dinner parties that you have once or twice a year, if you're lucky, with good friends? The kind where all the planning comes together effortlessly, everyone looks fantastic and says wonderfully astute and witty things, the food is tasty and satisfying, and everybody goes home a little bit drunk, if not on alcohol then on the joy of companionship? That's how the Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks show at the Vic felt to me on Friday night. It didn't rock my face off or blow my mind the way shows from young, hungry bands sometimes do. It just felt warm and full and good. Malkmus was occasionally (slightly) physically demonstrative as a guitar player, but I kind of liked it best when he just turned in profile and played his solos like he was standing there brushing his teeth. He's also, I needn't remind you, an astonishingly beautiful human being. Joanna Bolme has this cute little shuffle-back-and-forth walk that she does when she's really getting into her bass lines. She's also funny as hell with the audience banter. Mike Clark wore a gold lame track jacket, which was slightly disconcerting, but I have mad respect for anyone who plays both keyboards and guitar with equal facility. And Janet Weiss...holy hell. I was never into Sleater-Kinney when they probably would have meant most to me in my early/mid-twenties, so shame on me for that, but that just means I get to discover her now with fresh ears and eyes. She's phenomenal. So foxy and so fierce. I feel like she could play the part of the lady pilot in Neko Case's song "Lady Pilot." Or, perhaps she could be the den mother for a troop of cub scouts composed of actual bear cubs.

NI and I caught an early evening showing of Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day tonight and both agreed on the way out that it felt basically equivalent to a frothy bit of piffle we could have done as a play in high school. The editing was a bit lax, and it got weirdly slow in some parts (as if waiting, as NI said, for Boss to call "bllllllllllllackout!"), but it picked up enormously whenever Shirley Henderson was on screen. She's such an interesting actress, with so many shades of mournfulness that she's capable of portraying so economically, though I wish Hollywood would learn how to use her the way the Brits do, which is to say as more than just the bitchy, sniping friend. Amy Adams--charming, gorgeous, etc., etc. She oversells the part a leeetle bit, esp. at the beginning, but I guess that can also be chalked up to character decisions. Though I love Frances McDormand to bits, she felt oddly miscast in this. I think it was a bit of a waste to cast an actress with sooo much joie de vivre as such a repressed character. I guess it was all gesturing toward the end when she eventually learns (yawn) to live and love again, but some of her full-faced smiles in the final minutes of the movie felt so brain-smashingly beautiful that I wished she hadn't been just tottering about politely for the preceding ninety minutes or whatever. Though, because I am apparently a basket case who will cry at everything, if given the opportunity, these days, I have to say that I forgive anything questionable in this film for the moment when she's telling the Amy Adams character about a man she'd loved who died in WWI and she says, "But he smiled every time he saw me, and we could have built a life on that." ::quietly weeping:: Though Indian-born director Bharat Nalluri has mostly English-language films to his credit on the IMDB, I sensed a bit of Bollywood splendor in his direction, esp. when he started using those vertigo-inducing swirling camera shots in the party and musical sequences toward the end. Those shots, weirdly, helped contextualize the movie for me a little better, as far as reframing it as, basically, an elaborate dance between camps of female and male characters as they eventually find a way to merge in matrimony.

Did everybody read that amusing article in Esquire where they get George Clooney to Google himself? It's nothing earth-shattering, of course, I just felt like it was kind of a clever conceit.

"As he struggled to edit his story down to just *three* words, Hemingway's frustration grew. '"For Sale: Baby Shoes...." FUCK!'" --Merlin Mann

From Malkmus to the Bee Gees in Two Paragraphs

So, Malkmus and his Jicks made an entire album full of songs that sound like Face the Truth stand-out "No More Shoes," and I am head over heels in love with it. Oh brother, do these jams sound good to my ears right now. Though, in typical contrarian fashion, on an album full of relatively stretched out running times, it's tiny little "Gardenia" that rules the roost for me. Brilliant song. I have a ticket to Friday night's show at the Vic and am quite looking forward to seeing him rock out with a full band.

Speaking of full bands, you know who I always forget that I really, really like in between times I put their stuff on my iPod? TV on the Radio. Hot damn those guys are good. Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes album-closer "Wear You Out" came up on shuffle during my morning commute late last week and it was another one of those "holy shit, what the fuck is this sexy, gorgeous racket?" moments. It took everything I had not to start pole-dancing right there on the train. Hot-hot-hot-hot-hot stuff.

You know who else rules? The fucking Bee Gees, motherfuckers. I downloaded, like, five of their bigger hits last weekend, thinking I'd listen to them once through for nostalgic kicks, but guess what: now I can't stop listening to them. They sound freaking fantastic. The Bee Gees, honkies, I'm tellin' ya: the motherfucking Bee Gees.

Which, of course, makes me think of Jimmy Fallon's amusing but also weirdly hostile Barry Gibb Show sketch from Saturday Night Live, which in turn leads me, somewhat incredulously, to ask, rhetorically, hasn't SNL been really quite surprisingly good since the show came back post-strike? Even this weekend's Jonah Hill-hosted episode had me genuinely laughing out loud several times, especially with the "I'm Fancy" musical number monologue. I love musical number monologues (and not just when it's hot guys in dresses).

Oh, and, continuing with the video links, Britt Daniel plays "I Summon You" for the Black Cab Sessions. Britt may demur that he's "just a dude," but I defy just any dude to sit in the back seat of a car, and, using nothing but his voice and an acoustic guitar, make a sound as full and as huge as a freight train headed straight...for your heart.

UPDATE: RIP, Anthony Minghella. Whenever those cheesy online personals sites ask me to fill out lame questions like "what's your favorite movie sex scene?" I invariably will answer "the dirty wall sex in The English Patient," because that scene is both hilariously over-the-top in ways that never fail to make me crack up, and, well, because it's pretty genuinely sexy too.

Movie-wise, Music-wise, RIP-wise

Movie-wise: I cried like an idiot through a large chunk of The Savages. In a good way! I really heartily enjoyed it. Performances are great, it deals with race in a lot of subtle and interesting ways I wasn't expecting at all, and, yes, it totally nails the swirling vortex of emotional hysteria one feels when one is forced to care for an infirm, belligerent parent.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly was extraordinarily aesthetically pleasing. I don't really care how accurate it