Superbowl ads are coming out. Avatar is cute, and I think I remember reading about that Sobe ad in Revelations. I do wonder why they’re still trying so hard, though: the form’s already been perfected.
This has been kicking around as a draft for a while. I figure that January 31 is the statute of limitations on 2008 retrospectives, so I’m throwing illuminating unifying theses out the window and going with the time-honored “alphabetical” fallback option. Also, I didn’t find as much music I liked as last year, and it’s hard to draw sweeping conclusions from such a small sample size. Too much interminable French house – there’s no good reason a song should ever be longer than November Rain – and as I noted to my friend John, “echoey reverb is the indie Auto-Tune.”
I did not include anything by Santogold, Cut Copy, or M83 because you already have those albums… right? I also added some singles I liked that Pitchfork left off, because this year was just that anemic.
Beyoncé, Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It), #23
I suppose it says something about how culturally sheltered from the mainstream I am that Pitchfork’s Top 100 was the first time I heard this monster single. It’s an amazing piece of anti-music; outside of the bridge, it’s barely even a song, just assorted squawks, chirps, and drones. Beyoncé’s voice is the only thing holding it together; amazingly, it does. (Aside: Chris of The Invincible Super Blog describes Beyoncé’s alter ego Sasha Fierce as “the Chris Gaines of R&B,” and that’s a meme needs spreading.)
Frightened Rabbit, The Twist, N/A
What happens when a Scottish indie band sings over LCD Soundsystem’s All My Friends? It’s pretty good, actually.
The Hold Steady, Constructive Summer, #25
A great solid rock song in the vein of The Replacements, with a strong and positive message about getting off your ass and doing something. Unsurprising, considering their album is called Stay Positive.
Ida Maria, Oh My God, #79
A Norwegian rock singer who rocks, hard and often. There’s not much to say about this song except that it completely, unapologetically, remorselessly rocks. Also: in previous years, I was a leading indicator for both Feist and Lykke Li, so if you want to hear the female songstress everyone will be talking about come August 2009 – here you go.
Keane, Spiralling, N/A
The chorus contains my favorite hook of 2008 – the way the rising staircase of notes are played against the plummeting vocals (and lyrical subject matter) is simply divine. A great video feels like the song could not exist without it.
Max Tundra, Which Song, #65
A full-frontal assault of chiptune chipperness. 8-bit is boringly ubiquitous these days, but Tundra shows us why we all fell in love with square, triangle, saw and noise in the first place. Apparently, if you string enough 6502s together, you can fly to the moon.
Sigur Rós, Gobbledigook, #70
Sigur Rós has always performed in the invented language of Hopelandic. But this song is the first time I believed there might actually be a Hopeland, somewhere, too.
T.I. (feat. Rihanna), Live Your Life, #40
Who says there are no second acts in American lives? Here’s Dragostea din tei, a song long ground into a post-parodic pulp, given new life as a Rihanna-driven hook. If this song works, then nothing is beyond redemption.
WHY?, Fatalist Palmistry, #94
My single favorite track from the Top 100 and, with the possible exception of L.E.S. Artistes, the best song I heard in 2008, period. Synaesthetic lyrics with a density I never thought I’d hear again after In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. I can’t think of a more beautiful description of love’s tension than the second verse. The vocals and music are perfectly counterbalanced, building and releasing tension as the song soars higher and higher… I can’t say enough good things about this song.
I love time travel stories, from The End of Eternity to The Time-Traveler’s Wife. But my favorite is Philip K. Dick’s A Little Something for Us Tempunauts. The U.S. government’s first group of time travelers know that their upcoming mission will prove fatal – due to the untimely reentry of their corpses a few days before the launch. Do they proceed with the mission? Do they try to change the outcome? Is trying to change the outcome what caused the disaster in the first place? Dick’s story goes over and over those few days, postulating a closed time loop than may have happened a dozen (or 1200) times before. The characters intuit that they may be trapped inside this loop, but they can’t prove anything, and they can’t escape. The “vast weariness” Dick hoped to portray burdens every word.
Los Cronocrímenes (Timecrimes) is not as good as that short story. But this Spanish sci-fi drama is cut from the same cloth – how the repetition of time travel engenders weariness, and how unlimited chances to “put things right” only tends to compound what’s already wrong. It’s a low budget film with a bare minimum of characters and sets, so I’d rather not say too much about the plot – there are only so many jigsaw pieces on the table, and anyone familiar with genre conventions will snap them together rather quickly. That statement is meant as neutral; the movie’s strengths are in its tone and the precision with which it is executed, not its originality. David Cronenberg is attached to the U.S. remake and a very good fit.
This three-day weekend I watched five previously-unseen movies.
My brother got me Pictures at a Revolution for Christmas, a book whose thesis is built around 1967’s five Best Picture nominees: In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, and Doctor Doolittle. Yes, that Doctor Doolittle. Two racially-charged dramas, two New Wave-inspired character studies, and a big-budget family musical disaster. Schitzophrenic, yes, but also indicative of the times, and thus a ripe foundation for a book.
I’m (re)watching the films before diving into the book; this weekend’s remedial film class was Bonnie and Clyde. It was surprising to see Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway as young heartthrobs, not the respectable middle-age actors I knew them as. The movie itself was fairly nuanced – I was expecting the characters to exhibit Romeo + Juliet levels of youth/in love/invinciblity, but B&C are aware from the start that very few bank robbers get to retire with their riches. And all the film-school deconstruction in the world hasn’t managed to robbed the final scene of its gut punchiness.
From there, I moved on to Natural Born Killers, which was a goddamned mess. I knew going in that the film played around with film stock and aspect ratios, but I wasn’t expecting sixteen different formats, subliminal quick cuts and multi-take “vertical cutting.” Between the high-contrast colored lighting and the text on people and walls, it might as well have been Peter Greenaway film. That said, I liked it. I loved the first half, but was disappointed by the second, when the movie transitions from a spiritual serial killer road movie into a too-played media farce. Neither Robert Downey Jr.’s media mogul nor Tommy Lee Jones’ prison warden worked for me, though I hold the script and director responsible. Ultimately, it’s a movie I’m glad I saw, but I wish I had seen it 10 years ago. Network and The Truman Show do a better job of exploring the relationship of creator, createe, and audience in the media; Battle Royale, Fight Club, and A Clockwork Orange are a more nuanced consideration of the relationship of violence and freedom. Sure, several of those films were released after Natural Born Killers, but…
Next was the pilot to Twin Peaks. I’ve never given Lynch enough of a chance; for some reason, I’ve never seen anything beyond The Elephant Man (wonderful) and Eraserhead (student film). I’ve had the complete Twin Peaks for a while and decided it was finally time to give it a shot. The pilot is an excellent piece of television – it lacks the surrealism for which the series became famous, but it’s methodically paced (especially for television), uniquely shot, and packed with character moments equal parts bizarre and authentic. I look forward to starting Season One.
My appetite whet, I jumped straight into the deep end with Mulholland Dr. Now this is a movie. Beautiful shots, an amazing soundscape, and an atmosphere both dreamlike and nightmarish… Most importantly, despite the non-linear, mind-bending structure, the film successfully tells a layered, complex tale about what Los Angeles does to people. It may not be logical, but it’s entirely coherent. That said, I don’t think Lynch’s film would have resonated so strongly without my own complicated relationship with Southern California. Blue Velvet is on the way from Netflix.
The final movie I picked up was Time After Time, a movie that delivers every delight its far-out premise promises. H.G. Wells (Malcom McDowell) invents a time-machine – Jack the Ripper (David Warner) promptly steals it and escapes to the far-off future of San Francisco, 1979! Wells, horrified at the amoral creature he has loosed upon “utopia,” follows him. What follows is equal parts suspense thriller, time-travel flick, fish-out-of-water comedy, and romance – Wells falls for a cute bank teller soon after arriving in swinging San Francisco. The movie is simply delightful, and sadly mostly forgotten. But look at it this way: it’s a cult classic without the irritating cultists.
The Scott Pilgrim movie rounded out the rest of its principal cast this week, moving it from “probably happening” to “almost definitely happening”; pre-production means nothing in this town. Most of the new cast seems pretty spot-on, and I’m even willing to forgive Michael Cera in the lead role, as long as he expands his range — and puts the past few months of karate lessons to good use.
Director Edgar Wright (Shawn of the Dead, Hot Fuzz) posted a picture on his blog of the movies he brought with him to Toronto. Judging from that photo, he intends to make a kung-fu anime musical concert character-driven superhero exploitation film.
…I’m so glad the director understands the source material.
If you’re at all interested in the making of games (and you probably are), then you should read this former NCSoft CTO’s personal Tabula Rasa post-mortem and chase it with Lum the Mad’s personal musings. 7-year, $100 million failures don’t happen so often; it’s worth finding out how they look from the inside.
Indie 103.1 is shutting down. The station is endlessly looping The Buzzcocks’ Harmony in my Head, Black Flag’s Gimme Gimme Gimme, and the Sex Pistols’ Anarchy in the UK while a prerecorded bumper directs people to their website. It’s over.
To say I’m depressed by this news is putting it mildly – listening to Indie 103.1 while driving was one of the top 5 things that made my life in Orange County bearable (number one is probably the pupusas from El Chinaco). The standard format could be a bit repetitive (as all stations are), but it was still the first place I heard “mainstream indie” artists like Santogold, Cut Copy and Silversun Pickups.
Where the station really thrived, however, was with its personality-driven radio shows. The best of these, Jonesy’s Jukebox, gave former Sex Pistol Steve Jones an unedited two hour block (12 PM – 2 PM) during which he could play, well, whatever he wanted. He could even not play music, if he’d rather chat with his guest or drone at the audience. Sometimes he’d bring out his guitar and cover a song he liked, or maybe write a new one. Jonesy was beholden to no one, and you literally had no idea what you might hear whenever you tuned in.
Other shows I loved were the Britpop/shoegaze focused Big Sonic Heaven, Henry Rollins’ stream-of-consciousness sociopolitical rock show, Harmony in My Head, and the overseas-focused Passport Approved. Every Friday I got to hear Joe Escalante hand out free entertainment legal advice to Los Angeles baristas on Barely Legal Radio. As he frequently reminded us, free advice is worth every penny.
As former host Chris Morris laments in his obituary, Indie 103.1 was the last bastion personality-driven radio, where the music you heard reflected the passions and taste of the DJ running the show. And that friendly trust between host and listener is something no amount of trawling MP3 blogs can replace.
Panera Bread got in a legal tiff with rival upstart Qdoba Mexican Grill. Panera, you see, had a sandwich vendor exclusivity clause with a certain shopping center. They felt that allowing Qdoba to open a franchise there would violate this clause…because a burrito is a sandwich.
Panera, in court filings, argued for a broad definition of sandwich, saying a flour tortilla qualifies as bread and a food product with bread and a filling is a sandwich.
The court eventually ruled in Qdoba’s favor – thank goodness. Had the precedent been set, I shudder to imagine what other foods Culinary Activist Judges might start to classify as a sandwich:
What else is – or almost was – a sandwich?
Square has announced a DS remake of SaGa 2, a.k.a. Final Fantasy Legend II.
I’m excited. I’m so excited. SaGa 2 is possibly my favorite JRPG of all time – certainly not the best, but the one for which I hold the greatest nostalgic fondness. And since a lot of people took one look at the Game Boy’s blurry green screen and passed, I thought I’d detail why I love it so.
First is the game’s pacing and scope: twelve separate worlds, connected by giant pillars to the central Celestial World. These worlds include mortals, gods, the afterlife, the inside of a human body, a town based on feudal Japan, &c &c.
Players don’t spend more than 60-90 minutes in each world – they arrive, solve everyone’s problems, then move on to the next world. There’s an overarching plot that ties the worlds together — treasure hunters gathering the 77 pieces of a fragmented statue — but the overall tone is akin to Kino’s Journey – a series of short, thematically connected vignettes. Because the game is always moving forward, never stopping to point how exciting this adventure is!, the result is a game that actually feels like a universe-sprawling adventure, rather than a plodding exercise in genre formalism.
There’s the soundtrack, of course; 1991 was right in the middle of Nobuo Uematsu’s best years, and his frenzied chiptunes still stand above the rest.
Finally, we have multiple advancement mechanics for party members. Humans equip weapons and armor normally and improve their core statistics through battle. Mutants can only equip half as many items as a Human, but can fill their extra “slots” with powerful spells. Robots “permanently” equip weapons and armor, taking on the attributes of any items they weld into their bodies. And Monsters grow by eating the meat of a more powerful monster. Add a rotating overpowered guest character in the fifth slot, and you have a party composition only Akitoshi Kawazu could love.
But even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and SaGa 2 is Kawazu done right: a game where his hyper-random approach to game design matches the kaleidoscopic worldview, pacing, and plot. Simply put, it’s a game where everything works better than we have any right to expect. That it works at all may be a happy accident, but the happiness is still real.
Microsoft has gotten a bunch of good press today for their just-started Windows 7 Beta. So leave it to the Research division to screw everything up.
The typo “charismantic” suggests the Charismancer character class, a person so likeable that people just do whatever the Hell he asks. SEE ALSO: “Yes Man 2″ proposals.
CSS 2.0
