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.