Saturday, December 13, 2008

Recent things of interest

Destroyer: People have been telling me about this band for years but the name always turned me off. Sounds like bad death metal (I guess that's a redundant term) Turns out they're fantastic. Not at all what you'd expect from the name. I really like the Destroyer's Rubies album the most so far. I have all the albums but I'm kinda slowly digesting them. It may take me at least a year to actually process these.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy: Fucking bleak stuff. I haven't read a book in a while that made me uncomfortable like this one did. The writing style is very engaging for this type of story. Very much a first person type of feel to me. Not much (if any) wasted time on information that's not important to the story. I'm a fan of these type of books in general. I'm suddenly motivated to re-read The Earth Abides which is another end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it type of story. Those two, plus Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven and probably The Stand by Stephen King are definitely the best of the genre.

Frost/Nixon: I liked it but I was definitely hung up over the actor who plays Nixon. It sounded like he was suppressing a British accent. Nixon, being such an iconic character, is pretty hard to pull off. I don't think anyone will be able to beat Hopkins at it. I totally bought him as Nixon 100%. Going back to Frost/Nixon, I think the actual raw footage of the interviews would be more interesting to me.

Milk: Pretty good but overrated. It's a solid political bio pic. Nothing more, nothing less. I did like how they mixed vintage footage into the film at various points. My biggest problem with this film would be how casual and rushed the murders are. I wanted to know more about that character and his motivations. I guess I'm probably bias against all bio pics because I'm constantly frustrated by the lack of detail and scope. Clearly these movies are intended to be a brief entertaining story but I'm naturally interested in getting the whole story.

My Name is Bruce: I'm a fan of Bruce Campbell so I downloaded it. Had a few funny lines. Definitely not what you'd call a good movie but I'm glad I downloaded it anyway.

Indiana Jones 4: I saw this with the aide of the wonderful RiffTrax project by Mike Nelson, Bill Corbin, and Kevin Murphy (among others) and I have to say -- this movie is just as cheesy as the previous 3. I'm not sure why people were so upset over it. Yeah it's campy, the story is forced and has huge logical holes, so what? Did you SEE the other 3? I feel the same way about the new Star Wars movies too. They're really no better or worse than the originals but everyone remembers the first time they saw Star Wars so they view it with equal parts nostalgia and fact. The truth is, they're not very good movies. Out of all 6 I'd say 3 & 5 are the only films I think stand out as being good movies.

New Star Trek movie: I have no problem with them rebooting the series for basically the same reasons listed above. The original wasn't that good. They can hardly do worse. My only problem with what I've seen from the trailer so far is they turned Kirk into an emo kid. A single blog post that covers both Star Wars & Star Trek? I don't know how to explain it. The winter kinda makes me crazy. Nothing to do. Hostile universe outside. I really try to spend the period between October & March catching up on entertainment stuff I didn't have time for over the previous year(s) At this very moment the idea of re-watching some Star Trek DS9 sounds appealing. Sad really.

Starship Titanic by Terry Jones: Somehow I never read this one even though I've owned a paperback of it for about a decade. Good book. It would make a fun movie if handled right.


Since it's freezing fucking cold and I have nothing better to do I think I might re-read the Dark Tower books this winter. It's an epic amount of material but luckily I've forgot most of the details now so I can enjoy it from a fresh perspective. I ended up listening to 5-7 in audio book form but I've never heard 1-4 in audio. The audiobook versions are amazing. Excellent voice acting. Really immersive stuff. I'm looking forward to hearing 1-4 in this format.

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