Iron Man was so awesome that I almost wish I was sober for it.

If you weren't one of the thirty people to see Dandi Wind last night at Bottom of the Hill, you screwed up. That was one of the most entertaining shows I've seen in a long time. They were a guy playing keyboards and a girl dancing like a spastic monkey. She was radiating Nina Hagen levels of crazy the whole time, it was awesome.

I wish the Centro camera wasn't so utterly worthless:

Also re-discovered on my phone: here's bathroom graffiti from some random Mission bar from a few weeks ago:

Hello, my name is jwz and I am a pathetic fanboy. ("Hi jwz.")

Ok, I'm hesitant to say this, but the first three episodes of The Sarah Connor Chronicles have been pretty awesome, despite my strong expectations to the contrary. It could easily go steeply downhill from here (after all, the first 1¾ episodes of The Bionic Woman weren't bad either) but so far, it really has me hooked.

(Normally I expect the first two or three episodes of any TV series to suck, since usually the writers and actors haven't figured out what they're doing yet, and those episodes are chock full of exposition of the backstory, which always makes for terrible television. So it took me by surprise when BW started off ok and then immediately ratcheted up the suck.)

Anyway.

(Extremely minor spoilers:)

Sarah's character seems a lot less crazy and homicidal than she was in T2 just after she broke out of the asylum, but it is set four years later, so I can buy that maybe she mellowed a bit. John is still a whiny little bitch, but that's exactly like in the movie. I'm glad they seem to be setting up a long arc story and not the obvious "Terminator of the Week" plots. The River-800 is awesome, even though she's totally typecast now. I'm liking the half-Mulder-half-Scully FBI agent too ("Oh, didn't she tell you? It's because of the robots. The robots from the future.") The Oppenheimer stuff was great, and I enjoyed the shout-out to the Singularity.

And I really liked that they used time travel to delete the third movie in its entirety. That was a very, very, very good decision.

I expect to hate the high school subplot, but we'll see.

Here's a page with a decent breakdown of the timelines and timeline-revisions of the various Terminator movies: Terminator Wiki. It's not nearly as obsessively detailed as the Back to the Future timeline, which is surprising, but it lays it out pretty well. (Both of these would be easier to follow with a graphic; the BttF page used to have a chart, but it seems to have been deleted.)

So, structurefall considers it a point of pride that his musical taste and discoveries are consistently ten years in the past (to the point that it's very much a self-fulfilling prophecy.) Anyway, yesterday he was telling this story yet again, and said "Why, now that I'm up to 1997, I'm even starting to appreciate futurepoop!" By which he meant progressive-house bullshit like VNV Nation.

I started only-semi-coherently ranting at that point, and if he wasn't driving I probably would have grabbed and shaken him.

Anyway, at that point I rattled off a list of bands from 1997 that he should be listening to instead of that recycled lukewarm pabulum. I think most of what I shouted out was actually from 1996 or 1998, but when I got home, I spent ten minutes making a list.

Today he posted his list of the best of 1997, and his favorite bands suck. (I find it hard to be in his car because of this music, srsly.) Here then, is my rebuttal, in two parts:

( The Best of 1997, or, Fuck Futurepop            --More--(28%)  )

In fact, yes, I did put this off until almost the last possible moment.

In only approximate order of favoriteness, here is my year-end wrap-up. As in previous years, a few of the entries on the following list were released earlier than 2007, but that is when I discovered them, so I'm allowing a little slack. In 2007, I acquired roughly the same amount of new music as I did last year: around 160 new-ish albums, and a similar number of older releases.

You've heard tracks by, I believe, all but three of these bands on the jwz mixtapes so far.

I haven't been posting movie reviews in 2007 as I have in previous years, and this is why. I think my new year's resolution may have to be, "I am never going to a movie theatre again, and this time I really mean it." Next year, I should just wait for cable for everything. That way I can fast-forward. And the popcorn will be better, too.

As best I can recall, here are the movies I saw in theatres in 2007, and the shortest possible reviews I can muster, which in two thirds of the cases, is the longest review that they deserve:

Things to do before the writers' strike takes its toll:

Loving these:

Pushing Daisies
Journeyman
Dexter
Californication
Weeds


Mostly enjoying these:

Heroes
Torchwood
Robot Chicken


Awaiting more of:

Battlestar Galactica
Venture Brothers
Doctor Who
Lost


Why am I still watching this shit:

Stargate Atlantis
Bionic Woman
Supernatural
Eureka
Blood Ties

I think I've just listened to "Amaryllis in the Sprawl" about 25 times in a row.

So, I've pretty much stopped writing movie and book reviews this year*, but you should go read BLDBLOG's review of Sunshine for a pretty good explanation (albeit in that weirdly drug-addled and overblown BLDBLOGgish way) of how it was almost a great movie, and then went completely off the rails into OMG Suck.

* Partly I just haven't felt like it, but mostly I didn't get the impression that many people whose opinions I care about were actually reading them.

I just watched This Film Is Not Yet Rated, which I'd been waiting for since I first saw the preview about a year ago. It's great, and infuriating. I don't think it ever actually opened in theatres in San Francisco. The official web site is hosted by IFC, but their channel is not actually showing it any more. They're selling the DVD online, but I find it more than a little ironic, given the subject matter, that the easiest way to see this movie is via Bittorrent.

Anyway, it's a documentary about how the MPAA ratings board works, and who makes the decisions about what movies you get to see (since an NC-17 rating is the kiss of death to distribution and to advertising budgets). The MPAA is very secretive about this: they're the gatekeepers of a huge part of our culture, and we don't get to know who they are or how they make their decisions. So the filmmakers hired a private detective to figure out who these people are. That part is very entertaining. The best part, though, is the side-by-side comparisons of what gets an R and what gets an NC-17. Hint: they don't like women who enjoy sex, or gays.

The MPAA, of course, gave it an NC-17. How could they resist?

Trailers:

Director Kirby Dick's blog. And his response to some "changes" the MPAA said they would make after they started having to answer uncomfortable questions as a result of this documentary.

Watch the DVD bonus material too, it's also good.

Yes, it's that time again...

In only approximate order of favoriteness, here is my year-end wrap-up. As in previous years, a few of the entries on the following list were released earlier than 2006, but that is when I discovered them, so I'm allowing a little slack.

In 2006, I bought in the neighborhood of 180 new-ish albums (I also picked up about an equal number of rather old releases, but those don't really count for this exercise.) That's a whole lot more than last year, and the success ratio was higher. Though 2006 blew chunks by just about every other measure, it has been a very good year for new music. I actually had kind of a tough time trimming this list down to a comparable number of entries as previous years.

I think I've seen more movies than this lately, but I can't remember any others, very probably because they all sucked.

The Prestige

I loved the book, and I thought the movie did a good job of capturing it. It must have been tricky to adapt, since the book is, basically, two diaries, the first half of the book being the story from one guy's point of view, and the second half from the other's. The movie followed a more linear structure, and I think pulled it off pretty well without screwing up any of the revelations. But, if I hadn't read the book, I'm not sure I would have really understood what was going on: a lot of it seemed pretty glossed over.

I liked this a lot. It's weird in the way that 2001 is weird, and the effects are great in the way 2001's effects are great. There are 3 interleaved stories, some of which might not really have happened. It's a cool structure. I also liked that the connection between the "present" and "future" stories -- the part where the protagonist finishes his project and changes the world -- is left completely implied.

I only saw this because it was the only movie starting that day at 2pm. Even with my expectations wedged firmly down in the fifth sub-basement, this movie is complete crap. It's approximately as bad as Harry Potter, possibly even as bad as Dungeons and Dragons. Though at least Dungeons and Dragons had beholders. This has no beholders. And the dragon has feathers. Feathers!

Certainly the best Bond movie in recent memory, though it gets a little too talky and spends a little too much time psychoanalyzing him. I like that it is not smirky and stupid like most Bond movies, and that the violence is actually ugly. This Bond acts like the thug that he is.

The "parkour" stuff at the beginning was a pale shadow of District B13.

This is the one about the founding of the CIA. From this movie we can learn that: A) secret agents are emotionless bureaucrats, B) anyone who ever tells you the slightest fib is probably going to try and get you killed, C) LSD is not a good truth serum, D) senators and spies like playing homoerotic scat games. It's long, and didn't quite put me to sleep, but only just.

Little Miss Sunshine

This movie is awesome. It's National Lampoon's Vacation if you replaced the poop jokes with existential angst and suicide. Very dark, very funny, great pacing. Go see it immediately.

Dark Water

God dammit, it was The Ring, The Grudge, and a dozen other American remakes of Japanese movies that all have the same plot, villain, and look! What the fuck! And how do I keep getting suckered into watching these?

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Winds

This movie is kind of hard to describe; there's a small village living on the edge of a toxic wasteland protected by these hundred-foot-tall semi-intelligent potato bugs. Our heroine has to fend off an invasion from a neighboring kingdom in order to prevent the giant bugs from wiping out both sides. It's deeply weird, but very cool.

IFC played all of Miyazaki's movies a couple months ago, so I've been slowly working my way through the ones I hadn't seen. Nausicaä is my favorite so far, but I've yet to see one of his that wasn't great. (For calibration purposes: I think that almost all of the anime that I've ever seen has been relentlessly terrible. It's very rare that I see one that I like.)

Some stuff I've read in between hitting reload on Livejournal:

Collapse by Jared Diamond

This covers some of the same ground as Guns, Germs and Steel (which is awesome), but where Guns was a history of how civilization progressed, this is a comparison of various societies that failed. It's pretty interesting, especially the stuff about Greenland. Basically, the Norse came to Greenland and died out, whereas the inuit who were there already continued on; he attributes this to the Norse's unwillingness to adapt to their new circumstances.

A bunch of short stories. My favorite by far is "A Colder War", which asks, "what if the technology from Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness was recovered and played a role in WWII and the cold war?" I'm a sucker for Lovecraft sequels.

The sequel, or more accurately, second half of, The Family Trade, which I read last year. It's great -- but it again ends in a cliffhanger. This is what happens when you start reading serieses by authors who are not safely dead.

This story follows a nerd and his family through the transition to superhuman intelligences, and first contact with aliens. It covers a long period of time, and so many of the stories feel a bit disjoint. I wasn't crazy about the ending, and it suffers from the problem that a lot of "singularity" stories do: once your protagonists are effectively immortal, with redundant backups and the ability to fork off clones of themselves, there's not a lot of room left for, well, trouble. It's hard to sympathize with the fates of people who are pretty much incapable of ever being in danger. It's doesn't have this problem nearly as badly as Schild's Ladder did, though.

Another singularity story, and in this one, for the first 90% of the book, "peril" is replaced by "court intrigue", I guess under the theory that immortals with nothing to do would turn into Victorian aristocrats. Then the bad guy tries to kill the world. "Oh bother", says the emotionless shell of a protagonist. Ho hum.

I now promise myself that I'm not going to read books like this any more.

marcus132 (the author) was kind enough to send me a copy of this, thanks! It's a Y2K-apocalypse road-trip comedy full of mutants, zombies, and giant insects. It's chock-full of jokes; not all of them work, but enough of them do to keep it moving along. As in all movies of this sort, there is an irritating character whose death you are praying for, and (as is traditional) it doesn't come quite soon enough. It's a very visual book; it feels more like a script or screenplay. It would probably make a good comic.

One day giant rocket engines grow up out of the ground all over Earth and start test-firing. OMG, someone's stealing the planet! It's a pretty cute premise, with an unsatisfying ending.

One night the stars go out, because the world has been enclosed in a giant black bubble. OMG, someone's stealing the planet! This is actually the same basic intro as Greg Egan's Quarantine which I read a few years ago, but that book sucked and this one is really good. It's good because it has characters that I actually cared about and could empathise with. The technobabble of the bubble and what it's doing are pretty cool, too. And the ending is more-or-less satisfying.

Wow, this book is fantastic! They're making a movie, and I hope it doesn't completely suck. It's the story of two 19th century stage magicians in a bitter rivalry; the first half of the book is the diary of one, and the second half is the diary of the other, with a small wraparound story about a descendant. It's a pretty cool structure; it doesn't quite go all Roshomon or Usual Suspects, but it makes a nice reveal. The two main characters are both nutty in interesting ways. And Nikola Tesla is in it. You can't go wrong with Tesla.

A good old fashioned space opera, and frankly a god damned relief from all of the recent scifi I've read about singularities and godlike posthumans. This is set some 10,000 years in the future, humanity is spread out all over the galaxy and has near-instantanious travel, but there are still telephones and talk shows, and there's not a lot of time wasted explaining why. It's got a bit of an Indiana Jones feel in parts, in that the main characters are "antique dealers" who go out and track down archaeological artifacts from various collapsed and lost human societies. They find a old tea cup, and the logo on it leads them on a long treasure hunt toward a whole lost colony.

I really need to start writing these reviews right after I've seen the movies, instead of letting them pile up until I don't even care any more... Ooh, look, a bunch of one-sentence reviews. That's what happens.

District B13

A near-future french movie where an acrobat-criminal and a cop-on-the-edge have to work together to find the dingus and save the girl before it's too late. CAN THEY GET ALONG? Obviously you've seen this plot before, but that doesn't matter, what matters is the stunts, and they are mind-blowingly good: like Jackie Chan good. It's that "parkour" stuff you may have heard about.

Pirates 2

An adequately entertaining sequel. Not as good as the original, but exactly what I expected. It gives good tentacle.

A Scanner Darkly

This movie is made of drugs. The walls keep seething for at least half an hour after the movie ends, I swear. It's entertaining, and certainly the first movie based on PK Dick's work that actually captured the feel of his stories.

Clerks 2

Eh. It was OK. I enjoyed it while it was on, and I've forgotten it already.

Kinsey

Pretty creepy, but fascinating. This is one of those movies about sex that makes you never want to have sex again.

The Descent

A group of women go spelunking and get trapped. I'm not particularly claustrophobic, but this movie freaked me the fuck out. The first half of the movie is really just them-versus-the-caves, and that in itself was a terrifying movie -- and that's before the Bad Things happen. The way this group of friends let their inter-personal issues completely screw them all over is also handled really well. Highly recommended.

The Cave

I described The Descent to someone and they said "Oh, that sounds like The Cave." Um, no. Except that they're both set in caves. This movie is bullshit.

Velvet Goldmine

A pretty entertaining story about the meltdown of a couple of Bowie-like glam rockers. I liked it.

Pulse

It starts off as The Ring and then turns into Day of the Dead. It's not scary, it's just dumb.

Million Dollar Baby

I guess this, like, won an Oscar or something. It's actually really good.

The Illusionist

This was great. Though I wish there was more time spent on the stage magic itself, and showing how the tricks were done. The ending has a bit of a Usual Suspects feel to it, but I liked how they left it ambiguous.

Crank

This was exactly what I expected, so good for them: no plot, lots of ass-kicking. I really liked the editing style and the weird overlays they used for split-screen-ish effects. In a lot of ways, the editing was overdone like in Domino (which I hated), but I thought that worked really well here.

Superman Returns is even worse than X Men 3.

It has at least half a dozen instances of the most logic-defying intelligence-insulting movie-physics I've seen. Kevin Spacey doesn't even come close to saving it; there's only one 30 second scene that he's in that isn't a total snooze, and you saw that one in the preview. It's hard to decide who's the biggest whiner: the big blue boyscout, Lois, or Lex. Oh, and the plot is stupid and all the characters are boring and totally sleepwalking through their roles.

...And there is a precocious child.

I guess it's an adequate sequel to the others, given how much they sucked too, but ugh, I want those two hours back. Those of you who told me that this movie was ok are despicable.

If you're feeling tempted to see this piece of garbage, just rent the DVD of the modern Superman or Justice League cartoons; they were actually not bad. Clancy Brown is a thousand times the Luthor as the one in this movie.

I wish I was better at writing about music. Most of the reason I post these reviews is for the benefit of future-me, so that years from now I'll remember that I saw these shows (my brain is full). But with most bands I have tremendous difficulty describing them, or what I liked about them.

Anyway. Once more into the breach.

The Presets @ Mezzanine

These guys were great. They are a drummer and a singer/keyboardist. Ash was excited that the guy's keyboard was one he had owned in the 80s, and he pointed out the gag that the keyboard has no presets. So there was actual playing of the keyboard going on, quite the novelty. These guys were a total time-machine band, transported bodily from the 1982 vicinity of Human League and Soft Cell. Looking around at the crowd, I was struck with the strong feeling that we were the only two people there enjoying the band completely non-ironically.

Ladytron @ Mezzanine

Also a good show. I was impressed at how the two singers managed to not crack a smile the entire time, keeping up their deadpan mope the whole time, as if to say, "It is so sad. Being so glamorous." Someone kind of spoiled it for me by calling them "Electroclash ABBA". Ouch.

Sleater-Kinney @ GAMH

Fantastic show. They rock. It was the first time I'd seen them live, and apparently they just broke up. Dammit. They sounded just like they do recorded. The thing I hadn't realized is that they don't have a bass player, which was surprising, since it doesn't sound like it.

This show made me feel very old, very male, and very tall. The audience was a sea of pyramid belts and plumber-crack on 18-year-old lesbians.

Teenage Harlets @ BOTH
Teenage Bottle Rocket @ BOTH

I remember enjoying these guys at the time, but now I can't remember a single thing about them. This is, sadly, often the case with modern punk bands.

Phenomenauts @ BOTH

These guys are great fun, and always put on an entertaining show. Sci-fi rockabilly.

The Epoxies @ BOTH

A huge favorite, who I've praised several times before. The world needs a Devo, and The Epoxies are there to fill that need. I thought the sound was kind of crappy for their set, though. It sounded fine for the first three bands, which is not usually how it goes.

Regina Spektor @ The Independent

This was a good show; it was interesting how her live show made the songs seem a lot more like she was telling weird little stories than singing songs. It was mostly just her and a piano, and sometimes not even the piano, just singing and tapping on the mic. She's got a great voice, but there was a little too much Tori Amos-ish wanking, where she'd spend a while just sort of goofing off with her voice rather than singing, which reminded me of the way little kids sometimes just make funny noises because they can. That makes it sound bad, though; it was a really good show.

The Spores @ DNA Lounge, and 12 Galaxies

This band is awesome. They're mostly a rock band with some electronics, and a very entertaining puppet show. They are weird and great and you should go see them.

Groovie Ghoulies @ DNA Lounge (Pop Roxx)

The second coming of the Ramones, but even sillier. They're always worth seeing.

Now see, here's where I find writing about music really frustrating. I remember enjoying these bands, and most of the other bands that have played at Pop Roxx and Swindle, but I find it impossible to describe them. Or rather, I'd end up with the same description for most of them: rock bands, fairly energetic, and they sound a lot like (and dress exactly like) Joy Division. Which, you know, I don't really have a problem with, because there are worse things they could sound like, but it does make describing them pretty difficult for me.

Gram Rabbit @ The Independent

This was one of the best shows I've seen in a while. I love the two albums I have, and they totally rocked live. The singer went through several bunny-themed costume changes, and they occasionally had spastic go-go dancers in full-on furry-pervert bunny suits. It was awesome. Go see this band!

Halou @ The Independent

This was the first time I'd seen Halou since their terrible show at Mezzanine last year, so it was nice to see them playing on a sound system that actually worked. They sounded great, and I love their music. But, Halou is a pretty mellow band... following a rockin' band like Gram Rabbit was not the best idea, as it left me in a very un-Halou-like mood.

Poseidon

I got a kick out of this; the main character is the ship. The humans are just window-dressing, but not offensively so. It's better than Titanic. The effects are mostly pretty good, and they weren't afraid to deal out the "unfair" deaths (being "nice" didn't guarantee survival, as it usually does.)

This movie was hilarious. The characters (caricatures) are the reason to see it; the plot itself isn't as interesting as the gags about "art school types", but those are awesome.

Really great, and hilarious. Bitter and awesome. It's so awesome it had me rooting for a tobacco lobbyist.

Pretty much crap. I liked the first two, but this one is just a parade of stupid. Among its stupidities is that, halfway through the movie, several major characters "die". Which we all know, simply does not happen in these kinds of movies. So I spent the whole movie expecting them to pop back in at some point. Then the credits roll, and I think, "wait, they actually expected me to believe that?" That was possibly the most insulting thing about the movie. Well, no, the whole pointless "moving the Golden Gate Bridge" thing was even stupider. Yeah, "parade of stupid" sums it up.

Blows up real good. It is what it is, and it did it well. A zillion times better than X Men 3.

A poorly-socialized government finance flunky in his 50s meets a poorly-socialized girl in her 20s and invites her to go to the G8 conference with him in Iceland. The acting is really great; it's painful to watch how awkward they both are. There are lots of great bits like the faces he makes when he's silently talking to himself, rehearsing what he's going to say when he eventually talks himself into knocking on the door in front of him.

Half a movie about global warming and how we are fucked, and half a movie about Al Gore talking about global warming. It's entertaining and convincing, but mostly it makes me wonder where this literate, human-seeming person was during the presidential campaign. This guy might have had a chance.

Pretty good for a chick flick. A woman moves out of her house and leaves a note for the next tenant; he writes back and they eventually figure out that he's the previous tenant, and somehow they are exhanging mail backwards in time: he's two years into her past. The fact that they overlap so closely throws a new twist on the usual time-travel gimick. Keeping track of the two timelines is a little tricky, but it seems to hold together pretty well. (I predict most reviewers will find it "too confusing".) It took me a while to get used to one of the wierd narrative devices they used: they only communicate by writing letters, but the voice-overs don't talk like letters, they talk like low latency conversations. I guess we were supposed to take that part less-than-literally.

I spent last week at the Another Hole in the Head festival at the Roxie, like I did last year and the year before. ( Twenty one movies in six days... --More--(33%) )

Brick:

This is a film noir set in a present-day high school. It has the traditional banter, character types, and plot-style, but doesn't ape the visual look. The surprising thing is that it almost always works. There's only one scene where it seems forced, and that scene is really funny, so it's forgiven. Definitely worth seeing.

A Dirty Job by Christopher Moore:

Moore has not written a less-than-hilarious book yet. This is the story of a guy who discovers that he's a grim reaper, so comparisons with Dead Like Me aren't far off. It's very silly, and very awesome. It also includes some returning characters from both Bloodsucking Fiends and Coyote Blue.

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach:

This is a book about what happens to dead bodies: how decay, embalming, cremation, organ donation, crash testing, medical training, and all sorts of gross things work. It's really interesting, and written in a very non-clinical personal style (e.g., "they asked if I wanted to watch, and I didn't, but I said yes anyway.") You can -- and should -- read part of the first chapter here: A Head is a Terrible Thing to Waste.

My new favorite piece of trivia: it turns out that hearts work just fine without brains attached. During a heart transplant, with a corpse on life support to keep everything warm, after completely disconnecting the heart from the body, the heart keeps beating for like ten minutes. And they really go: they're not cute little gently pulsating blobs, they really thrash around, which means that it's not uncommon for them to get away. And when that happens, they pick 'em up off the floor, wash 'em off, and install them anyway.