November 2010
57 posts
Cub Country - "Could Be The Moon" →
I seriously love the shit out of this song. THIS is what the How I Became Invisible full-length will sound like.
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My Year In Movies #115: Batman: Under The Red Hood
Yeah, I watched this again. Because it’s goddamn AWESOME, is why.
October 2010
50 posts
gametavern asked: On a scale of awesome to extremely awesome, how awesome is GametavernNews?
Got any questions for me? I will totally answer... →
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My Year In Movies #114: Shadow of the Vampire
Film as immortality is not a new idea. But film as vampire?
I’ve loved this for a while. The mix of horror and comedy, and the whole metaphor/thesis of the film, really connected with me. We watched this immediately after watching the original Nosferatu, and that actually made the film even better. You can see the connections and the contrasts more clearly, especially in the scenes in...
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My Year In Movies #113: Nosferatu
The seminal vampire movie, the restored silent film, Noseferatu deserves its reputation as the founding block for pretty much all modern vampire films. I will say the music was definitely too much, as it was a modern composition, recorded in 2000, and not the original score as intended by the filmmakers. It was annoying and actually detracted from the experience at certain points. In any event,...
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This is a song I’m probably going to do a...
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My Year In Movies #112: Splice
A strange mix of monster/science-gone-wrong and psychosexual thriller, Splice ended up being a lot more fucked up than even I expected. The trailers (which I’d heard were misleading) made it out to be almost Species-like, and while there were elements of it in the design of the genetically bred fast growing Dren, it was so much more than just a standard monster movie.
The relationship of...
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My Year In Movies #111: My Neighbor Totoro
I liked how laid back the story in this was. It was not a traditional Western-style plot, no three act structure, no real antagonist. It was simply a series of amusing sequences and events that added up to the story of this young family and their interactions with the wood spirits that live next door. It was very cute, and while it might not be as epic as Howl’s Moving Castle, it was still...
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My Year In Movies #110: Monsters
What a sneaky movie. Seriously, what a goddamn stealth film. There’s spoilers coming, so be warned.
Supposedly shot for $15,000, this directorial debut for Gareth Edwards was billed as a cross between Cloverfield and District 9, both of which I love, but turns out to be like neither. It is entirely its own thing, less a monster movie with some plot in it, and more an indie drama about...
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thoughts on film/narrative review writing
When writing about film (or anything narrative-related), it’s hard not to resort to straight plot recap. I’ve been stressing over how short my MYIM pieces have seemed to me, but I think a lot of it is because I’ve been avoiding recounting plot and set piece details, instead going for observations and thoughts, with some analysis as the subject wonts. I mean, I could pad out the...
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My Year In Movies #109: Vampyr
My girlfriend chose this film, due to the season and the fast approaching Halloween, and I can’t say she chose wrong. It was actually pretty damn good. Though our grasp of the plot was tenuous, due to the multiple languages used, the languid pace of the film built this ever-encroaching sense of dread, that coupled with the somewhat hallucinatory cinematography, really helped sell the...
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My Year In Movies #108: Batman: Under The Red Hood
SURPRISE: I actually liked this a LOT. As of right now, this is probably my favorite of the DC Animated movies so far. The action and the fight choreography in it were impeccable, possibly the best I’ve seen in ANY Batman-related media. The voice cast, while not the classic Kevin Conroy/Mark Hamill combo, were uniformly good; I especially liked John Dimaggio as the Joker. He brought much...
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My Year In Movies #107: Once
I love this movie. The music is what brought me in. The song “Falling Slowly”, which won the Oscar for Best Original Song, is an amazing piece of writing and performance, and it completely enamored me, to the point that I went and got the soundtrack. And after seeing the film, and seeing the music in context, it amazed me even more.
The story of these two people almost falling in...
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As an addendum to my “Everything Zen” essay of yesterday, there’s 3 things I’m most looking forward to in my cd listening project:
Rediscovering more old and forgotten albums that I haven’t listened to in forever.
Seeing if I still love all the Smashing Pumpkins albums (up to Machina) as much as I used to.
Getting to the “J” section, as it will involve...
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Everything Zen
SO I’ve been in the middle of this personal project for the past month and a half: to listen to every single piece of music I own, in alphabetical order. I started with the physically purchased cds, so I’m now most of the way through the “B”s. And honestly, it was a great idea. Sure, there’s been a couple albums where I desperately wanted to skip some tracks, but I...
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Me covering “Landslide”, from about 10...
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My Year In Movies #106: Ponyo
This was cute, and quite astoundingly animated. Not as rich thematically or animation-wise as other recent Studio Ghibli films, like Howl’s Moving Castle or Spirited Away, it was still quite a good little movie. And it is filled with CREATURES. Creatures are cool.
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My Year In Movies supplementary: The Last...
So an attempt was made yesterday evening to watch M. Night Shymalan’s adaptation of The Last Airbender. I cannot in good faith include this as an official part of the MYIM project, because we did not finish it. It was, in all actuality, completely terrible, in a way that goes beyond just the problems of translating a full seasons worth of character development and story into an hour and a...
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My Year In Movies #105: Zardoz
What did I just watch?
Was it a strange, pseudo-spiritualist, dystopian sci-fi film? Was it a weird Biblical retelling in a future time period? Was it Sean Connery’s home movies, showing what he was actually like off-camera on the set of Doctor No? Was it a look inside the severely bizarre mind of director/writer John Boorman? Was it Connery running around in a diaper and a fabulous...
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big bang baby
The television told me the universe is going to end. Actually, let me rephrase that, so that I don’t sound like that crazy person on the corner with the radio around his neck who sometimes sneaks in to your room and touches your stuff when you’re not there: I’ve been watching The Universe on Netflix Watch Instantly the past couple weeks, and it struck me how many episodes end up...
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Robots and Racecars covering My Chemical Romance...
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Braid has been one of my favorite bands for a while. They still are. And I think my favorite thing about them is that every song sounds like it’s on the verge of falling apart into chaos, but the band has such a strong rhythmic backbone, that it ends up holding together. Love love love love love love love. See for yourself if you want.
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My Year In Movies #104: Shine A Light
I watched this solely based on Martin Scorcese’s involvement. I’m not really a big Rolling Stones fan; I mean, I like some of their songs, but they’ve never grabbed me as a band the way that, say, The Beatles or The Who have. It turned out to just be essentially a straight concert film, with occasional older interviews with the band interspersed throughout. It wasn’t bad,...
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“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.”
– Kurt Vonnegut
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My Year In Movies #103: Air Guitar Nation
There is a World Air Guitar Championship. This is a real thing. It actually happened. And they made a movie about it.
There’s… there’s no words. This represents everything I hate about bands; the flash and glitz and antics instead of the music. At the end, someone actually says “I’d like all the contestants out for one more song, dedicated to world peace.”
...
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My Year In Movies #102: Bomb It
This is a documentary about graffiti/street art, it’s brief history, and where/how it is perpetuated across the world. It starts in New York City, and goes east around the world to Los Angeles, stopping all over the planet along the way. It’s interesting, as the motives and and methods and reasons vary so wildly around the world, as does the reaction of authorities to it. I found...
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