musings

Last night I went to see The Motorcycle Diaries. Payback for Punisher and Sky Captain was apparently in the cards, because this was one fine movie. For those not in the know, the movie is about a motorcycle journey through South America that Ernesto “Che” Guevara and his friend Alberto Granado undertook in 1952. There’s no overt politics in the movie (other than the journey was the initial seed for Guevara’s political idealism) – it’s really a road trip movie, in the most magnificent setting. Everyone should see this movie.

Here in Canada we don’t get BBC Radio 1, but all through my youth I collected albums and tapes (and taped albums) of The Peel Sessions. The Fall, X-Mal Deustchland, Joy Division, New Order, and countless others. So, I was very saddened to read, this morning, that John Peel has died. Rest in peace, John, the world of music will never be the same. We’ve lost a champion and a hero.

Check out the video for Eminem’s “Mosh”.

Well, the spam filter keywords thing didn’t work, but I noticed something odd – there was a comment already by the time I posted that last entry. I found that Wordpress is set up to notify some blog tracker sites whenever the blog is updated. I’ve cleared that list, so hopefully this will help.

Son of a bitch! Where the Hell is all this bloody comment spam coming from? Wordpress has some comment spam blocking features, and I’ve turned it on, but I don’t know how effective it will be. Those of you following this site with the RSS feed, please bear with me as I experiment with this. There are also some add-ons that I’ll try if the moderation list doesn’t work as well as I’d like. If all else fails, I’ll have to shut comments off, which would be terribly unfortunate.

I want spammers all to be round up and placed on a remote island. And then I want that island nuked off the face of the planet. Bastards.

I found the lyrics, if you’re having trouble following along.

Okay, anyone who knows me knows that I’m not a fan of Eminem. His whole semi-comical white-rap thing just irritated me. Well, I don’t know if this is representative of a change in his musical stylings or not, but one of the songs off his forthcoming album leaked onto the web today, and there’s a story about it on RollingStone.com. Now, it’s not so much that the song leaked, that I’m writing about. It’s that the song is an intensely angry diatribe against U.S. President George W. Bush that makes this musings-worthy. You can grab the song as a RealAudio stream or as a Windows Media stream. The song’s only okay, but the lyrics really do it. Give it a listen, and pay attention to the lyrics.

It’s true! I took the train into work this morning. Had my iPod going with a little bit of the ol’ Dandy Warhols, and life was good. Now, you could argue that it was actually the Dandy Warhols that made my life better, and you’d be right, but without the iPod, I’d have had no Dandy Warhols at all. See: the iPod made my life better. Get one. It’ll make your life better too.

So I went to see Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow tonight (once again, though it’s half past two, it is still Friday until I go to sleep). I’d heard pretty mixed stuff about it, and I’m a pretty harsh critic, so I wasn’t expecting a whole lot, but I was really underwhelmed.

The good: it has a really well realised look and style. It really conveys an 1890s vision of the 1930s/1940s, and the film plays out as homage to the pulp movies of the 30s.

The bad: it’s utterly vapid. I mean, it’s so shallow you couldn’t drown in it. The absolute definition of style over substance. The acting is wooden, the characters are caricatures, and the much-vaunted new technology is neither new nor impressive. The actors were all filmed in front of a bluescreen, and then composited over CG backgrounds to create the movie. The problem is that it’s nothing even remotely like seamless. There’s a visible disconnect between the actors and the scenes they’re in. And to top it off, a lot of the CG is just bad. Further proof that graphics programmers shouldn’t see CG movies? Maybe. Or maybe crap CG is just crap CG. The story could have been written by a sixth grader – the dialog is so bad it defies description, and the flat, wooden delivery only serves to underscore that fact. Every third line is “witty banter” between Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow – two actors who I normally quite like – but the banter is just so bad that I’m shocked they didn’t storm out of the studio in protest over how stupid they sounded. And how I wish Angelina Jolie would stop using that horrible English accent she adopted for the Tomb Raider movies. She sounds nearly as bad as Dick Van Dyke did in Mary Poppins – “Oh, it’s a luv-er-lee day for a jol-lee hol-lee-day, May-ree Paw-pins!”.

It’s too bad, really. The movie squanders a really great look with a lousy story and horrible dialogue and acting.

Just for kicks I visited the site of one of my favourite bands, Sky Cries Mary and lo! They’re recording again! (Those in the know will recall that SCM called it a day on Dec 31, 1999.)