Diarios de Motocicleta

Excellent movie.  Above all else, it's a true movie.  Not true like "wow, it's a true story," true like it's genuine.  Every moment that has any potential for melodrama is artfully dodged in favor of something more real.

As always, Gael Garcia Bernal kicks ass.  Mostly for his acting, which was excellent as always, but partly for his depiction of asthma attacks.  He scared the living shit out of my shit, long after that shit had been scared out of me.  I spent a solid month or two doing almost exactly what Ernesto does... unable to sleep or breathe, puke flying all over the place, certain I was within a few seconds of dying, over and over again for, ohhhh, six hours.  Once a night.  Scariest feeling I've ever had.  I'm seizing up just thinking about what it felt like when it happened to me.  So Gael, if you're reading, you got that part right.

Anyway, great movie, highly recommended.

Late Adopters: The Reject Files

I've decided, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Hot Fuss by The Killers is only so-so.  The sound is incredible, the songwriting is good, but ultimately, just not that good.  The second half of the album is straight-up filler, and it bores me.  The only way to get away with a filler-filled pop album is if every song on the album sounds the same; not true of Hot Fuss, which starts out with four or five songs that are clearly above and beyond any that follow them.  They aren't bad songs, they're just plain old boring pop, and as such aren't compelling enough.

Why think about this?  Because I just listened to The Back Room by Editors, which I do find compelling, all the way through the sixth bonus track.  They've clearly duplicated The Killers' sound (albeit not as effectively or impressively), and have no singles as strong as "Somebody Told Me" or "Mr. Brightside," but the Richard Butler/Morrissey-esque vocals on The Back Room give the filler a little more urgency.

This isn't to say The Killers suck.  They are good.  But I think the praise for Hot Fuss is misguided.  Praise the band, not the album.  Hot Fuss is nowhere near the blazing debut that Franz Ferdinand or The Back Room are; instead, it's a gauntlet, thrown at their feet in anticipation of their next few albums.  We will see better from them.

(P.S. I really should have listened to Interpol before commenting on this, but what can I say?  I'm bored.)

Uhhhhh...

Wow.  I had never read these lyrics before.  "Take a piece of your pie and say bye / Or be honest and rub your thighs"???  Hey-ooooo!  Not like that's shocking, but it's a lot more graphic than I remembered.  So much for the downward spiral of raunch and morality on television and radio... things seem to be holding steady, if this is any indication.  And if you can't rely on Gerardo, then who can you rely on?

Vultures of Doom

So I'm getting out of my car this morning at work when I look over at the UPS dispatch lot, and this big turkey vulture flies up from ground level, crosses over to my side of the road, and starts circling.  About ten feet from the ground.  Not every day that you see a vulture so low to the ground.  I usually see them way overhead on I-95.  The rare occasions when I've seen them up-close had all been when I was hiking up a mountain (a rare occasion in and of itself).  It was cool to see one of them bird-of-prey bastards close enough to see the sharp tip of his beak.

This calls for a...

...sexy party!

Some TV Thoughts

ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT
I thought tonight's episode was a little subpar.  It was good, and it involved all the show's trademark twists and turns, but I think the show was so Charlize-centric that the supporting cast ended up pushed to the side, thus cutting into the comic hijinks.  Gob, Buster and Tobias made the most of their opportunities (especially Gob and Buster... but especially Tobias) and yet the episode seemed very flat to me.  I'm OK with that, because it clears out the Wee Britain/Mr. F. storyline, which kinda fizzled in the end.  I liked the whole "British intrigue" angle more than the MRF angle, and I really liked seeing Dave Thomas doing a ridiculous Cockney accent.  But I feel like we never learned enough about who and what was behind all that spying... what the hell were they after the Bluths for?  Maybe I missed something in "Mr. F" or "Notapusy" but I don't think so.

And when are they gonna get Anyong out of that crawlspace?

EXTRAS
In other social-gaffe-sitcom news, I just discovered that I have this in my On Demand area.  Score!!!!!  Wow, though.  The first episode makes The Office feel like a warm glass of milk by comparison.  I could barely watch it... I had to take two separate breaks just to keep from gouging my own eyes back through my ears, thus saving me from hearing or seeing Ricky Gervais weasel his way out of a Catholic prayer circle.  The agony!  Almost everything in the whole episode was gutwrenching.  On a larger scale, I'm having a hard time understanding who I'm supposed to sympathize with... part of what made The Office so lovable, despite all of the despicable behavior, is Tim and Dawn's groundedness.  No matter what David Brent did, there were sane people to compare him to.  Here, it's just him.  Those two people were us, the two normals in a nutty office.  Who in Extras am I supposed to latch onto?  But that's something I can't know right away necessarily.  I did think it was really outrageous.  And Kate Winslet was really funny lampooning herself.

In short, the first episode was absolutely excruciating, so mission accomplished, but I also see plenty of potential.  I'll keep you posted.

Hunting For The Holidays

I'm watching hockey on OLN right now.  OLN is primarily a hunting channel, and they apparently have a show involving Larry Csonka, the former Dolphin running back.  In their promos for the show, they use the phrase "Stalking Stuffers."

Now, I'm all for risque cleverness, but isn't it a little creepy to use that imagery?  Especially for a network that is trying to reach out beyond the hunter-gatherer demographic?  I'm not arguing the definition of the word, or its meaning within the context above.  I'm just saying that if you aren't a hunter, your first reaction to the word "stalker" is not going to be about cloaking oneself in camo and hiding behind a tree... with no women around.  Sure, you may counter that the "stalker" imagery that irritates me is, in fact, the application of a primal, animal act to a sophisticated art, thus the word in its sex offender context (creepy) is dependent on its meaning in the hunting context (literal).  But then I can come back and talk about connotation vs. denotation, where the connotation dominates the denotation and its literal meaning is irrelevant.  And if you argued with that, I'd get bored and walk away.

I have little else to say about any of that.  Good hockey game though... 1-1 between the Rangers and the Wild.

I'd Like To Buy A Vowell

This link, the current installment in my "I bet nobody ever thought of that before" series of post titles, is a sampling of readings from the audiobook of Sarah Vowell's The Partly Cloudy Patriot. The excerpts are of her celebrity guest readers, including Seth Green, Conan O'Brien, David Cross and Stephen Colbert, performing as politicians from the book.

Vowell is probably best known as a contributor to NPR's This American Life and as the voice of Violet in The Incredibles. She was also a memorable contributor to the excellent They Might Be Giants documentary, Gigantic. More than anything, she has a distinctive, weird, expressive, and ultimately compelling voice, which is ultimately what sells the often-boring material that interests her so much. Anyway, the idea of listening to her dictate her book is a lot more appealing to me than just reading it myself. (This from someone who becomes deeply irritated when people read to him instead of just letting him read the goddamn thing when the aforementioned hypothetical person, who really isn't anyone in particular, is finished.)

Link Fix

1. The Bad Plus Tackle Literature
First, a goodie from jazz trio The Bad Plus... they recently posted, on their blog, a list of musical acts and the authors they most closely correspond to.  Some are uncanny (Phish = Douglas Adams, Elliott Smith = Sylvia Plath), some are amusing (Dave Matthews = John Grisham, lol) and some have better intentions than credentials (The Beatles = Roald Dahl?  I like Dahl as much as the next guy, but COME ON!!!).  Either way it's food for thought.  Knowing that TBP spent a great deal of time discussing the issue internally makes me happy.  And any list that includes Haruki Murakami is fine by me.

(Quick aside: I can't claim to be a huge Murakami fan, having read only A Wild Sheep Chase, but I was really impressed.  His bizarro storytelling is very much in line with how I used to write.  When I come away from a book thinking "damn, I need to start writing again," I know it's a winner.)

2. The Boondocks' Aaron McGruder
Next, the misunderstood and multitalented artist addresses how he spoke with Fidel Castro, why Reginald Hudlin is credited as a Boondocks co-creator despite not having even spoken with McGruder for a year, and what he thinks about the New Yorker profile that flayed him like a butterfly pork chop.

3. Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic's Sarah Silverman
Interview of the year, despite doing the whole thing over email.  She wins three LOLs, two ROFLMAOs, and a OMFG.  She's one of the best around at using the element of surprise to say some outrageous shit.  For example, take the story of how she and Jimmy Kimmel started dating... let's just say the story of how Kate and I got together will be ending differently from now on.

Thought Of The Day

You can't spell "biotech" without "biotch."  Holla.