musings

Last week I got a pair of shiny new cds – the new Skinny Puppy album, The Greater Wrong of the Right and the new (and possibly final) Front Line Assembly album, Civilization, and I’m totally diggin’ them both. The FLA album is like a throwback to Hard Wired – more punchy and aggressive, and less electronic sounding than Flavour of the Weak and its followers. Given that Rhys Fulber is back in the fold for this album, this isn’t much of a surprise. That said, it doesn’t sound recycled at all. It’s not a great leap forward for FLA, but certainly not a bad step.

The Skinny Puppy album is a different beast – it doesn’t really sound much like Old-School Puppy, but that’s not a bad thing. A lot of reviews claim that the new album picks up where The Process left off but I think that’s unfair to the band and to the album. Eight years have passed since The Process and both Ogre and Cevin Key have done quite a bit of work in that time (Key more than Ogre). All of that time comes out in the album – it’s a logical meshing of Ogre’s work as OhGr, and Key’s The Ghost of Each Room (which featured Ogre on the track Frozen Sky). The result is what you’d expect – more melodic songs with less distortion on the vocals. We’re never going to get another Too Dark Park or Last Rights, and to be honest, I’d have been a bit disappointed if we did. It would have meant that Skinny Puppy didn’t grow as a band, and that Key and Ogre didn’t grow as musicians.

The bottom line is that no fan will be disappointed with either of these albums. To paraphrase Ferris Bueler, they are so choice – I highly suggest acquiring copies of your own.

I just got back from seeing Fahrenheit 9/11 and it’s absolutely riveting. I don’t care if you’re for or against the war in Iraq, or pro or anti-Bush, every last one of you should go see this film. Draw your own conclusions. Sure, the film has bias – and the fact that Moore’s politics mesh well with mine help the movie work for me – but this movie is much less a Michael Moore film than either Bowling for Columbine or Roger and Me – most of the movie is just statement of fact with Moore narrating. And when Moore descends into conjecture he makes it clear that he’s doing so. Please, go see this movie, and, perhaps even more importantly, remember what it had to say when it comes time for you to vote.

Some of the negative movie karma of the past few months came back around last night and paid off in the form of The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi. It’s an action movie, but it has a lot of diversions – from slapstick comedy to dance numbers. I enjoyed it enough that I’ll pick it up on DVD when it comes out. The CG blood looks really fake, but apparently that was intentional, and I didn’t mind it anyway. We managed to catch it on the last night of its (very short) run in Toronto, so if you get a chance to see it, run out and do so, ‘cuz I suspect it won’t be around in the theatre for long. The movie is pretty enough that it’d be worth seeing on the big screen.

I saw The Chronicles of Riddick last night. I know, after the last few reviews you’re probably expecting me to tell you how much I hated it. You wouldn’t be far from wrong. Unlike Van Helsing, or The Day After Tomorrow, I didn’t walk out of the theater feeling ripped off. But this was no Pitch Black. Where Pitch Black was a (mostly) well-written character-driven three-room drama with a science fiction setting and no budget, this was all special effects. The premise was utterly contrived, and the character development largely non-existent. There were plot points that felt like they were unexplored (like they met the cutting room floor, actually) and others that felt like they were inserted just so as to be “less Hollywood”.

That said, with one exception, the movie looked great. The CG wasn’t nearly as obtrusive as in some other movies (mind you the Giant Spiky Dog Thing was as awful as VelkanWolf in VH). I was never actually bored by the movie. Would I go see it again? Nope. Will I go the sequel? Probably.

Ray Charles died today. It’s always sad when the world loses someone of such genius.

I’ve just tweaked the layout for this page a bit more. The menu bar on the left is thinner, and the link hover stuff is less offensive. I’m actually having fun with this – CSS is pretty neat. Who’d've thunk it?

Somebody out there decided to show just exactly how little creativity there is in Nickelback’s catalogue by recording two different songs into the left and right channels of one mp3. The result is fascinating – it’s reminiscent of watching The Wizard of Oz to the tune of Dark Side of the Moon – they just go together. Same tempo, same structure, and at about a minute and a half into the “song” you’ll hear the same lyrics through both channels. You can grab the mp3 here.

I’ve done up a new template for this log, so if you’re not seeing a blue themed page, reload. This is just slight layout change and color theme shift until I think of something flashier. I’d appreciate comments and/or suggestions. Thanks!

Binary Goddess just posted a blurb about Van Helsing (which, as you may recall, didn’t inspire charitable thoughts in my mind). I remembered seeing this in Boing Boing and had to spread the giggles just a bit more:
Van Helsing in Fifteen Minutes

I seem to be having a really long streak of rotten movie karma. Tonight I went to see Harry Potter & the Prisoner of Azkaban. I thought the first Harry Potter movie was okay, and the second was rather better than the first, so I figured I’d give this one a go.

Now, let’s get things straight – Harry Potter & the Prisoner of Azkaban is by no means as bad as the last two movies I’ve seen. Given the choice between going to see it again, or suffering through Van Helsing or The Day After Tomorrow again, I’d, sit through Harry Potter. But I would sit through it – see, it’s really, really boring. The pacing is just terrible. In an effort to fit the book into 142 minutes the screenwriter skipped great chunks of the story, yet failed to inject any excitement or sense of forward motion into the first 120 minutes.

I hope King Arthur fares better.