I find that I barely watch actual movies any more, because they all suck. But Sleep Dealer was fantastic, and you should watch it at once. It reminded me of Varley's Blue Champagne mixed with Haldeman's Forever Peace.

Also Moon was really good.

I can't actually remember any other movies I saw this year that I enjoyed. (Oh, Up. That was cute.)

Then there's the televisions.

In fact, yes, I did put this off so long that it's two weeks late. You'll have to excuse me, I have been somewhat distracted with the  REDACTED .

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 2008, but that is when I discovered them, so I'm allowing a little slack (but less slack than in previous years!) In 2008, I acquired roughly the same amount of new music as I did last year, but this year a lot more of it was recently-released: roughly 230 new releases and 100ish old ones.

I think all of these bands have made appearances on the jwz mixtapes this year. Mixtape Ø64 corresponds to this list.

I spent a week trying to write a couple of sentences about each of these telling you why you should listen to them, like I did in each of the last seven years (!!) but you know what? That's a pain in the ass, and I'm not really very good at writing about music. I'm not convinced any of you read this crap anyway. So, instead, here's a list of roughly forty albums that were released roughly last year that you should listen to because I loved them and you trust me.

I feel a little bad about doing it this way, because I know that when I come across someone's un-annotated list of favorite music, even I am less likely to click the links, and I'm a near-pathologically compulsive seeker of new music. But, if you've been listening to my mixtapes, you know what kind of things I like, and you've already heard all of these anyway.

Here, then, is the new.     ( --More--(35%) )

Key scenes from the famous movie rediscovered.

The museum director from Buenos Aires had something special in her luggage: a copy of a long version of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, including scenes believed lost for almost 80 years.

Fritz Lang presented the original version of Metropolis in Berlin in January 1927. At the time it was the most expensive German film ever made. It was intended to be a major offensive against Hollywood. However the film flopped with critics and audiences alike. Representatives of the American firm Paramount considerably shortened and re-edited the film. They oversimplified the plot, even cutting key scenes. The original version could only be seen in Berlin until May 1927 - from then on it was considered to have been lost forever. Those recently viewing a restored version of the film first read the following insert: "More than a quarter of the film is believed to be lost forever."

I find Metropolis a hard movie to watch, because just about every frame of it has been imitated so many times that there's nothing left that isn't a cliché today. As history, it's amazing; as a movie, hard to sit through. But, years ago I got to see The Clubfoot Orchestra playing along with it live, and that was amazing. Live music made it a lot more compelling.

The anime remake of Metropolis is surprisingly good, by the way.

The Fall: Very pretty. Basically the same movie as Pan's Labyrinth (which I hated), but with more interesting and less despicable characters.

Prince Caspian: I've already forgotten it.

The Incredible Hulk: A lot better than the first one, but it's no Iron Man.

Get Smart: Pretty funny. Please keep in mind that the original tv show was much, much worse than you remember, so there was literally nowhere to go but up.

War Inc: Deeply weird. It starts off as a political satire, then it takes a sharp left turn into bugfuck-crazytown. Which is not a bad thing. It got nutty enough that it started reminding me of Southland Tales (which I hated), but it was much better.

These are the movies at this year's Hole in the Head that I saw and deemed good. (I'm going to just try and forget the ones that sucked instead of micro-reviewing them.) Some of these might still be playing. (There are also a few left in the festival that I haven't seen yet).

The Machine Girl

Awesome. This is the movie that Planet Terror wished it was.

Brain Dead

A lot of fun in the way that Evil Dead 2 and Night of the Creeps were fun.

Exte: Hair Extensions

Killer hair extensions! Hairy tongues! Hair that bleeds!

Alone

A formerly-conjoined twin is (maybe) haunted by her dead sister. The ending is a little predictable, but it was well done.

Atom Nine Adventures

A fun 30s-scifi-serial style flick made with no money. Has the kind of campy earnestness that Raiders of the Lost Ark did.

The Gene Generation

Ok I said I wasn't going to review the movies that sucked, but seriously, stay the hell away from this one. This was some serious bullshit. It wasn't even as good as Gunhed or Death Machine, which movies it desperately wanted to be. And yes, those movies sucked too. But this not only sucked but was also completely redundant.

I didn't review any of last year's Hole Head movies, so better late than never I guess. Here are the ones that I remember being worthwhile. There may have been more, but their web site has gone stale, so I can't look up the schedule to figure that out.

Murder Party

A bunch of art-school douchebags decide to kill someone for an art project. Hijinks ensue. Hilarious if you enjoy seeing art school douchebags get gored.

Blood Car

In the Peak Oil future, nerd figures out that his car runs on blood, gets babes. Pretty funny.

El Muerto

This was, basically, The Crow in Mexico. But it was pretty good. Certainly better than any of the "real" Crow sequels.

The Man from Earth

A bunch of people sit around and talk to their friend who claims to be thousands of years old. It's a lot more compelling than it sounds.

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%)  )