I have never been a fan of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu.I find his films self-important, over-plotted, over-long, ponderous, and so forth. They all contain moments wonderful, profound, beautiful and hysterically funny, but those moments are always surrounded by so much unnecessary crap and, usually, two narrative arcs too many. I have long felt the man needed …
Month: January 2015
Southcliffe (2013)
Well someone really hates British small towns…
The Bridge aka Bron (2011)
I am reviewing the first season of Bron because I have no intention of watching future seasons. (Though I have heard the second season of the American version of The Bridge is very good so maybe if I do try the American version, I will get that far.) The following review contains spoilers.
Mingus, Songza, and the Problem of Curated Music
So I have been getting to know Songza lately, whether I knew it or not. For the last month or more, my boss has been putting on Songza playlists as our office music. These playlists have mostly replaced internet radio as our workplace soundtrack of late. (I wasn’t fully aware what this was until a …
Bored to Death (2009)
I can’t really tell you how much I love this show, a playful send up / take down of tired noir / hard boiled detective cliches mixed with a celebration / attack on the writer’s role in contemporary society, specifically, and the role of Brooklyn as cultural epicentre, more broadly. I get that it’s a …
The Master (2012, Paul Thomas Anderson)
This is a fascinating film about personality cults – both the people who are lead them and the people who are drawn to them. It’s kind of hard to talk about the film without talking about Phoenix and Hoffman, both of whom are fantastic (as usual) as the film is primarily about their relationship, whether …
The Fall (2013)
This is a mostly excellent British serial killer drama that manages a lot despite the reveal of the killer as one of the two main characters in the very first episode. The show plunges us into Northern Ireland with a great sense of place and little regard for our knowledge of how these things work …
Roy Hargrove Quintet with the Tenors of Our Time (1993)
This record should really be called the Roy Hargrove Quintet with the Tenors of Another Time or the Roy Hargrove Quintet with the Tenors of Our Parents’ Time. I didn’t know Wynton had discovered Hargrove; had I, I wouldn’t have borrowed six of his cds from the library. Oops.
DJ Similac Presents Cut the World (2014) by JT Cuts
So I was walking home from work some time last week and this guy came up to me and tried to push his record on me. He asked me if I liked “dance” music. I told him no. He mentioned other genres I didn’t like. I kept insisting I didn’t listen to that stuff. I …
2015 NBA 1/2 Season Awards
It’s about mid-season in the NBA. Let’s take some stock of the awards races.
Remembering Glenn Gould (2012) by Colin Eaton
This is a very unusual biography in that it is told by the people who knew Gould instead of by an author who tries to create a narrative of his life. The approach is interesting and, if you don’t like false narratives, it’s refreshing. And certainly there is a lot of information for Gould obsessives …
House of Cards (1990), To Play the King (1993), The Final Cut (1995)
This review contains some mild spoilers.
Geocidal (2014) by tetema
Mike Patton has long been one of my favourite rock musicians. And I think he has also made some objectively great music; at least six albums he has been involved with I would put on my “core” list of important music a neophyte should listen to. (For your reference, those albums are, in chronological order: …
Alice (2002) by Tom Waits
So expectations were going to be high for something like this; a “lost” album from a theatrical production in Hamburg ten years earlier. No doubt many people came to this expecting the “lost masterpiece” that we almost always associate with the work major artists don’t record / release at the time of conception.
Treme (2010)
This review of Treme contains some spoilers.
Abaton (2003) by Sylvie Courvoisier, Mark Feldman, Erik Friedlander
So to make this super confusing, apparently the idea here was to actually credit this trio as Abaton rather than the record, despite the fact that there are at least three other bands in the world with that name. It’s a popular idea, I guess, sleeping in temples…
Camouflage (2004) by Acoustic Ladyland
Coming at an artists backwards is always a big of an issue. Not only as it’s sort of unfair to the artist – we get our notions of what the artist sounds like when they are “mature” and try to apply that to their early work – but also as it’s unfair to the listener, …
Songs About Fucking (1987) by Big Black
What probably sounded unbelievably loud – not to mention offensive to a lot of people – has mellowed considerably nearly thirty years later. So much of this record (or even the band’s oeuvre, perhaps) has integrated into alternative rock and even some indie rock. Hell, it doesn’t even sound very noisy compared to what’s being …
Everything is and should be mockable
I would just like to take this opportunity to express my dismay that this is happening yet again and that I fully support any and all publication’s right to satirize anything.
2014-2015 NHL 1/2 Season Awards
The Maple Leafs played their 41st game of the season on Saturday – a loss, unsurprisingly, as it’s that time of year – and so I guess it’s time for a little report on the NHL Awards Arms Race. I don’t know the last time I’ve done one of these, both because of personal issues …
Shyness and Desirability
I have been meaning to post something about my continuing shyness on here for the last month. It would have gone something like this: Even though I have had numerous moments in the past five years where I’ve still made shy, I was convincing myself that things were different. What had changed? Well, I felt …
The Ponder Heart (1953) by Eudora Welty
I’d like to believe that all my favourite funny things – Python, Kids In The Hall, Mr. Show, and numerous others – transcend time and place, and are objectively funny. I know that’s not true, as tons of people don’t like Python, for example. But I’d like to believe. And I’d like to believe it …
Cloud Atlas (2012, directed by Tom Tykwer, Andy Wachowski, Lana Wachowski)
Some novels are just plain unfilmable, and sometimes you wonder why people try. But watching this, and not knowing the novel, I’m not sure this one is such an unfilmable novel. (Maybe I’m wrong.)
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011, David Fincher)
Aside from the bizarre, music video opening – which also features a terrible cover of “Immigrant Song” – and the bizarre “Swedish” accents of all the Swedish characters (a huge pet peeve of mine in any English language film set in a foreign country), I think this is probably superior, as a film, to the …
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011, Tomas Alfredson)
For a while I have wanted to watch first the original version of this and then this remake. However, I lost my American netflix awhile ago and haven’t yet got it back. And I stupidly gave in and watched the remake first. I say ‘stupidly’ because this is an idiosyncratic thriller and I may have …