1/2/2011 No pretensions of starting the blog going again, but rather than flood my facebook friends with 11 updates in quick succession, topics involve the following:

Titus Jones has replaced Party Ben as the go-to mashup expert. Bootie should hire him to mix their next Best of compilation, as A+D didn't really get it done well this year.

256kbps Amazon MP3s playing on a Google Android sound better than native AAC audio files sound on my iPod Nano (5g).

And it's not even all that close.

Relevant listening is "My Dark Beautiful Twisted Fantasy" by Kanye West, which is the best album of this year, and about 20 previous years as well. Not because it is perfect, but because it is wildly imperfect and still so phenomenal.

The second-best album of the year, in my opinion, would be Sufjian Stevens ""Age of Adz"; likewise, imperfect, but in a lot more quantifiable ways. That is just an opinion, though.

I'd consider the statement "Kanye West put out the best album of 2010" to be as close to incontrovertible fact as any musical preference statement is capable of being.

Lots of other stuff probably not to come.

Miami Vice

One of the best movies of the year?

Not as good as The Prestige but very very good in a different way.

#2 on my list of the, like 17 movies I've seen from this year with a full review coming shortly, I think.

Because I have gotten so much amusement from Mike D'Angelo's site: The Man Who Viewed Too Much I feel compelled to add a link and also the note that he turned me on to the Dismemberment Plan's The Face of the Earth which I love, and thus, in counter offer Stay Together by Suede. Amongst my favorite songs ever, should you be able to find it, which, if not, MP3's will be available shoud you ask.

New bonus feature:

Song of the past that I am amazed at how much I like, and thus listen to about 100 times quickly:

Last week: Ah! Leah! by Donnie Iris

This week: Synchronicity II by the Police

M:I:III - C-

There are a lot of things about the Mission Impossible movies that the large majority of people hate. One of my favorite people summed up the most grating thing, though, I think for most people, when he said (of M:i:II): "It is two hours of Tom Cruise being the baddest ass ever" (Hey Peter!)

I should say that I really liked both of the earlier films - I'm torn as to whether what is going on with the franchise is that Tom Cruise is letting auterist directors go nuts with their versions of the same story time and again, which I think he was. The DePalma entry was excellent if excedingly cold. I disliked it more than a little bit when it came out in 1996. I would have given it something like a C+ or two stars then.

Sidenote here: If you are an HTML wizard and know how I can put little notes that would appear as cursor floaties in a nice font on a decent background when you move your mouse over them I would really appreciate that knowledge. What I'm thinking of is the visual equivalent of the awesome technique in David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster Audiobook, which I love. I wish I could microphone in certain points.

I'm back:

I would now rate the movie at a respectable 4 stars or an A-. It isn't perfect, but it manages to grab at something ineffable for a little while. It doesn't ever make Tom Cruise awesome or sexy, but it gets very close. And DePalma's usage of gadgetry as modern wizardry is inspired. It is also gorgeously shot, which, I suppose is de rigeur for movies that cost as much as that, which more about in a bit

M:I:II is a much more complicated monster. It is a better movie. It had a different kind of director and it had one of the best screenwriters ever write it and make several bad decisions.

A lot of people dislike M:I:II on varying levels, and I have no answer to their complaints. There are genuinely bad scenes, but for whatever reason, and I've watched the damn thing about 9 times with the last three of them all intending to dislike it (see, I wish I could insert an audio or extratextual note here because when applying the same standards to "classic" Star Wars, I really disliked it an amazing amount - I still love that movie, but the movie that I love is not the movie that can ever be seen by anyone again, and I don't mean because of Lucas' incessent meddling. I think Lucas knew that he made a very dated/kinda shitty movie that would look historically awful once people actually had access to his source materials (Kurosawa films are obvious, but crappy 70's blaxploitation pictures do have some revelence also), and so he attempted to retroactively cover his tracks), but I simply can't dislike M:I:II because it is utterly awesome.

M:i:II also had the best score of these movies, which leads me to:

The Prestige - A- - ****

I can not help but think that if this had a much better score it would have easily earned "movie of the year"-type honors from me. The score is somewhere between awful and passable. If it had been great, well, I don't know how much more I could have otherwise liked the rest of the movie.

I've now listened to the book it is based on, and every decision Christopher and Jonathan Nolan made was solid. I wish the movie and book didn't devolve into science-fiction on a crucial point, and I had for a long while even after I left the theatre assumed that is wasn't actually science-fiction: I assumed there was a twist coming that explained the weirdness (audio-note here would include a bit about how Memento had mental surprises for the viewer long after one left the theatre which, amazingly, all held together!), but book-listening now in, I think it does indeed have a simply unexplainable element.

That said, I need explanation of the final shot, which is, I believe of Angier's wife in a state. I believe.

There are many incredibly interesting things going on throughout the film, which work on multiple levels. It is an smart screenplay. There are easy and obvious echoes like the fact that this movie about people in the same field that hate each other is interupted briefly at a crucial moment by Edison's goons burning down Tesla's laboratory. (Would-be audio-echo note: David Bowie is _excellent_ as Tesla). There are also minor touches that tend to exist only in very smart screenplays that directors respect completely, like, for exmple, Rupert Angier declaring that the name Danton sounds too French.

For reference, I had the "twist" figured about about 7 minutes into the movie (the book makes it very much more explicit, more or less immediately), but that didn't ruin the experience - it just made me enjoy a secondary character's action much more, emotionally speaking, because those actions became more relevent.

I can't help but think just how excellent it could have been, however, if a decent composer had been in charge of the music.

So back to M:I:III:

This movie makes explicit my cousin's complaint about the second movie: People actually talk about how hot/pretty/awesome Tom Cruise is. "I'd marry him" two women say, at an early moment.

Ye gads!

J.J. Abrams sucks, in my opinion. Don't get me wrong, in that he seems funny and nice and likable in interviews, but he is not even a one-hundredth of a movie director, and unlike the other TV wunderkind of last year that came out and made the big-screen his bitch (Joss Whedon with Serenity said the audio-note), J.J. looks like he has never _seen_ a movie before. I guess I can give him credit, not that I know that this was his intent, in that M:I:III is, by far, the movie that most resembles the TV show that was his inspiration. But that isn't a compliment. At all.

Phillip Seymour Hoffman is more menacing than previous baddies John Voight and Dougray Scott, and that's pretty much the only positive comparison that I have.

Other movies seen:

Slither - B
Star Wars - C-
The Lakehouse - B-
X-Men United - C-
Thank You for Smoking - B-

Slither gets ***, and the others get ** should that be your prefered reading rating metric.

Slither also gets notes in the next update, I hope because it is the second horror movie to effectively use Air Supply as foreground music in a horror movie. More on that eventually.

There are many others which I will remember once I get some more sleep.

Movies I have seen recently:

Stay Alive: More in a touch but C+

Brick: B+

Lucky Number Slevin: D+

Nightwatch: T/O

Stay Alive. I Like it very much more than I felt I would/feel I should. It's horribly written in terms of cliche after cliche, and it is somewhat nonsensical. But. It is oddly affecting. Or at least one specific scene is:

I should say that I was watching the "Unrated Version" which apparently extended the following scene by a good solid 30 seconds or more, which is an eternity in film time.

After a character named Phin dies there is a "no shit" cineloquey for him.

I don't know whether this sequence is incredibly awesome and trying to point out the human cost of the awfullness of horror film deaths or if it is amazingly sadistic, because whilst I wasn't at tears, it did put me in a contemplative mood. I guess what is so incongruous about it is that it is very very pretty in spite of the gore. And as it uses the now used-to-death, but apparently not for me, here, Koyanisqaatsi time-lapse effect, it has almost an almost religious aspect.

Also amongst things Stay Alive has is a sequence immediately before the one described in which the character Phin is rocking out to the song "Sweet Dreams" by Air Supply, which is the sort of thing that gives me almost hot fuzzies. If it had been "All Out of Love" it would have been a cheesy touch. That it was "Sweet Dreams" means that somebody was, as some point in their life an Air Supply Fan. That is not a cool thing to admit, and thus the very warm fuzziness.

The Pink Panther - B - I'm surprised how much I liked this movie eventually, though my seven year-old step-daughter saying every so often "Good One" in that insane French accent helps its cause amazingly. She loved it. I think it is funnier than I had previouslly thought. Let us all agree to find it silly and funny and leave it at that.

Jackass Number Two

How do you rate a movie that is supposed to suck? I got a single day off in the last 3 months and I go see this piece of garbage? It sucks exactly the way you expect it to suck and it is intermitantly funny exactly the way you expect it to be that way. I checked my watch _many_ more times than I did in the first movie. Relatively it is only moderately amusing. But I am _very_ curious how these movies get bonded, and I'm beyond curious how Johnny Knoxville can do so. It is heartening that he will do the most painful things that he asks his crew to do. It is also crazy that he does so, as he, like. has a career, potentially.

Instant mini-movie stuff

The Matador - B
The Pink Panther - T/O
Running Scared - T/O
Swimming Pool (repeat) - B+ (repeat)
Inside Man - A (not quite A+ which would be 25th Hour, but a better script)

T/O is the new W/O. Being engaged, with a child around, means that much more of DVD watching. I am, regrettably, probably not going to Toronto again. On the other hand, I have someone that will back me at all, well, everything. And my heart goes buh-bumpy bump just thinking about her. Have a lovely day.

I know it is closing in on forever since I updated this, and there are things that are coming. Stuff to do:

Old Boy (B)
Pirates of the Carribean II (B)
Masters of Horror 1-6 + 13 (In order A, C, B+, D, C, D, B-) (Carpenter, Gordon, Coscarelli, Garris, Landis, McKee, Miike) (My favorite of these is the Coscarelli, by a fair margin)
Dukes of Hazzard (C-)
Final Destination 3 (B-)
and, briefly Talladega Nights (30 minutes in, I left)

Thank you for your patience.