The Wire:Season 1

If you've ever read the blog Stuff White People Like you'll know that white people really like The Wire. My friend Evan is indisputably white. He's one of the whitest people I've ever met (not that there's anything wrong with that) regardless of skin color, and he absolutely loves The Wire. "Greatest Show ever," He is fond of saying. And I can't really disagree. I've been a David Simon fan since Homicide: Life on the Streets was on TV in high-school. It came on Fridays at 10 pm, the television graveyard as viewers of shows like Firefly would know but I still found ways to see it somehow.

After the major actors left Homicide most notably Andre Braugher, they brought in new blood to replace them and elicit new story lines I suppose. I don't feel like it really worked all that well. It was like they were trying to start over on a serialized television show. I've yet to see that work. If you watched any of The Wire you'll recognize names like Peter Gerety (Judge Phelan) and Callie Thorne (McNulty's long suffering ex-wife) as new detectives on Homicide. But anyway, they all got back together to act on The Wire, a show I thought, by virtue of being on HBO at the same time that The Sopranos was, would make it a gigantic hit. It had dynamic characters that were all thoroughly fleshed out, compelling "bad guys" that turned out to have just as much depth as the the good guys. The good guys were flawed but not so much that you didn't root for them. Savvily.

Thirst

Let's start off by stating that I loved Old Boy. I discovered it by accident while playing one of my favorite games, Netflix have you seen that. I try to see if I have seen all the recommended movies of a movie I liked. Having freaked out at the cringe inducing Ichi the Killer I was willing to subject myself to more. Ya gotta test ya limits ya know.

So imagine how excited I was at learning that Chan-wook Park's next movie was imminent. I knew somehow the movie would be exhilarating and interesting and never boring. At least that's what I thought.

The set-up was appealing, a priest becomes a vampire in order to solve a rare blood disorder then falls in love with a beautiful damaged soul. But the execution of this set up was absolutely painful to watch for long stretches of time. On at least two if not more occasions I looked at my watch wondering, "what the heck? This movie should have been over like 40 minutes ago."

A lot of this stems from strange plot choices made by the director. I felt like the film couldn't decide what it wanted to be. At first it was a horror movie, filled with inventive twists on old horror movie tropes. I was willing to get into it, I wanted to get into it. But that's when Thirst got weird. It strayed off the tracks. I don't want to give away plot details but the forward momentum of the movie definitely switched gears. One of the main characters is dispatched, sort of, but in a very Blood Simple way it's never really clear if he's dead and who sees what.

Then the film becomes a situational comedy! The humor is ratcheted up and the two main characters are forced to relate to each other as they learn to live undead love like we dove through the Woody Allen situational rabbit hole. And it almost works too which is the weird part! The movie almost redeems itself from its weird transition. A lot of that is due to the amazing acting of Hae-sook Kim. She literally acts with only her eyes and it works to hilarious results. But then the movie turns again (see told you it was too long) and becomes more Bride of Frankenstein than vampire movie. When the sun finally rises on this movie, get it rises not sets? woka woka woka! Yeah I know anyway, you are exhausted and perplexed. A really good film was in there somewhere.

My Big Unwieldy Music Project

Top 10 most slept on albums cross genre

This is a big giant incredibly subjective post that after long thought, I have decided to break up and update. Seems like the only way to do it. Here goes…

You ever had an album by a band you loved but none of your friends did? Maybe it was the second or third album of a really popular band but no one but you paid attention to it? Or it’s the album before or after the album that came out and straight up smashed everything? I’ve been trying to pinpoint which number it is but the exact album seems to be random for each group I’ve chosen.

A great point for us to start with is A Tribe Called Quest. Tribe started in 1989 for me with the remix for Buddy by De la Soul. I was like, “Huh, who’s this Q-Tip guy? That’s a weird name Q-Tip. And his voice is crazy. Did he just say McGuillicuddy? Who raps like that?” My interest was piqued.

Not long after that someone gave me a tape of the first Tribe Album and I was hooked. (Back in the olden days we used to have these things called “cassette tapes”. They were these real world physical things that contained your favorite music. They weren’t nebulous like the Internet. The main downside to tapes though, was that to get to your favorite song you had to fast forward until you reached the song you wanted to hear. Whirrrrrr. Fast Forwarding could take 30 actual seconds. Yeah I know 30 seconds! If your favorite cut was deep on the album, (we can discuss album bloat and how the CD was the cause of that on another post) you were SOL. I won’t say I could relate to everything a bunch of guys from Queens, New York were about but their vibe meshed with mine and I was a die-hard. Now days there are so many names for fans of their music, backpackers, cerebral, (blah, blah, blah on labels!) but I was just happy to hear something I could nod my head to. Maybe even smile god forbid.

But back to my initial point, must stay on topic. So after the phenomenal success of The Low End Theory, pretty quickly by hip hop standards, Tribe came back with Midnight Marauders. Midnight Marauders seems to be in response to accusations from the gangsta rap coalition that Tribe was too soft. All this coincided with their infamous rap beef with Wrexx-n-Efxx. I love rap beefs. Sometimes they bring out the best in each rapper. Like Nas totally came alive after his rap beef with Jay-Z. He had been wallowing in that lame ass Cristal Crap as I call it when he got called out by Jay-Z. It seemed to revive him. His last three albums have been absolutely amazing. God’s Son was inspired and Hip-Hop is Dead was a classic in my opinion, ironically, probably not though, it included a joint track with the man who revived him Jay-Z.

It just occurred to me that Tribe also made one of my all time favorite songs in Hot Sex (On a Platter). This song was on the Boomerang soundtrack which was mostly forgettable. I like that song so much I stole the tape from my Dad (sorry!)

By the way, this is something that I would love to hear your opinion on.

Michael Bay Hates You (But Loves Your Wallet)

Transformers 2: Revenge on my wallet.

Where to begin with this dreck?

I was kinda excited when the movie came out. I actually enjoyed the first one. Yes, I am aware that it didn’t have any plot, but all I wanted from the first movie was to see Transformers transform and make that cool noise. I got that and was immensely satisfied. I kinda wished that there were no humans in it at all but well, that wasn’t my decision.

When the sequel was announced my fist thought was, “Boy they better get some good screenwriters to work on this.” And they did! The dudes who wrote Star Trek wrote the screenplay (reputedly) for Transformers 2. I know the general rule is to fire the screenwriter straight off. It’s her baby and she may be loathe to change things that a Director wants. But that is wholly different than the circumstances that took place with Transformers 2. Who knows what the hell happened to this incoherent steaming pile. Even the screenwriters came out and said: "yo, dude we didn't write that crap" More to the point, who cares? Someone cared to the tune of 400 million bucks and counting. We were all snookered and Michael Bay gets to dance an evil jig all the way to the bank… again. I'm not forgetting or ever forgiving you for Pearl Harbor.

I read Peter Travers’ review after I saw the film, I was desperate to read someone else’s perspective, and his scathing account was both hilarious and wholly accurate. He too had enjoyed the first film for what it was, summer entertainment, and yet he was so disgusted by the sequel he didn’t even give the film one star. And he might be accurate. It may well be the worst film of the decade. But we both could be wrong. The theater I was in was certainly divided.

And this is not the first time I’ve been bamboozled by a Bay film. I went to see Pearl Harbor with two friends of mine years ago and we sat in the theater in the dark confused, and bewildered. We were pretty sure we were watching putrescence but no one else in the theater seemed to be having the same reaction. Then something happened in the middle hour of that three hour debacle that caused someone behind us to laugh. It wasn’t a funny scene, there was no humor, heck it was Pearl Harbor we were all watching. That really happened. But that person laughed, and another person snickered, and very quickly the entire audience had joined in on the wisecracking and derision. When we stepped out of the theater we swore to each other that we would admit to no one that we had seen that movie.

When I returned to my apartment from the theater after Transformers 2 I started to read the Twitter reviews and they were all glowing. WTF? Had I gone insane? What did those people watch that I did not? I know these are the same people that saw Iron Man, which was actually good, so what did I miss in this flick that everyone else caught?

This movie was so bad that even the little pieces deserve mockery.

Minutiae:

-Do we care about Sam’s parents? Does his mom need to have a stoner moment like a complete fool? HOw lame was that?I know this was done for comedy but really? Do we even care? The parents were completely superfluous in a movie that made no sense. That's hard to do right?

-The little Decepticon that tells Megan Fox she’s hot but not too bright? Wow, somebody really hates starlets. Why were women even in the film? Let’s take a moment to discuss Michael Bay’s usage of women in this film, nah, let’s not. That’s for his therapist.

Bang Boom Pow

At first I was just gigantically disappointed by how mundane it was. I was really bored, the movie is over 2 and a half hours long, (this is summer right?) but then I was stunned by the Autobot with the gold tooth. Seriously? If you’re going to be racist at least be racist in the 21^st century Michael. The kids are wearing diamonds now. It keeps the Cristal cold. Keep up with your audience.

Enough of this though. Go see The Hurt Locker or, I never thought I would say this Up.

As I watched The Hurt Locker I noticed that the main character looked really familiar but I couldn't put money on where. It just wouldn't come to me. So finally I went to that bastion of relief IMDB.com and looked him up. I seem to remember actors from random places like a commercial here, or a guest spot on The Equalizer there, but sometimes actors are so memorable in a role that what else can you do?

I looked at Jeremy Renner's rez and lo and behold he played Doyle in 28 Weeks Later. I really enjoyed the blank stare intensity he brought to that role. I believed he was a conflicted sniper. But back to the review... Renner plays Staff Sgt. James, newly transferred head of a bomb disposal unit in Iraq. The original leader has just been K.I.A. during a routine disposal call. If you're not familiar with the perils of IEDs then take a look here. This sequence is unexpected and gripping.

Make no mistake, this is no In the Valley of Elah type emotional hand-wringing. This is a straight up pulse-pounding thriller that details the emotional inner life of men whose job it is to dispose of IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) in Iraq. This is a tense film that actually deserves the words tense and pulse pounding. When I left the theater I had to take a deep breath and let my stomach untangle from all the knots it was in.

The acting is superb, literally littered with blink and you miss them nuggets by actors of note like Guy Pearce, David Morse and Ralph Finnes. Job well done goes to Anthony Mackie who continues his quest to be his own actor, and hello to Brian Geraghty who plays hte third in this grim trio. I love it when actors with chops as they say, act and don't play the hero, it allows the viewer to enjoy their talent without the distraction of having to root for them. I have a list of at least a dozen roles like this. I will post the in the future though.

I really recommend this film and hope that Katheryn Bigelow not only gets her due with an Oscar nomination but also gets to make more films sooner rather than later. She really knows how to keep her audience riveted to the edge of their seat. Catch it.

What does one put in their first blog post? We'll do this:

I used to love the original programming on HBO. Mr. Show, Dream On, The Larry Sanders Show, Tenacious D, Tales from the Crypt, 1st & 10. It was all quite "original" and refreshing, bawdy and unencumbered by censors or typical canned Hollywood thinking.

Then something changed. The Sopranos. Now don't get me wrong, I appreciate the quality that went into the first 2 seasons of the Sopranos, and heck Matthew Weiner, creator of Mad Men exec produced some of the better episodes, but since then they have hit kind of a dry spell. John From Cincinnati anyone? So wait, you quit making Deadwood to make that?! Mind of the Married Man? (putrescence). Here's hoping they get better.

Hung seems to be treading the line between Dream On and something better. It could be very funny. Belly laugh funny not groan inducing funny as it is right now, if only they would stop with the terrible puns. As some poet once said to me, "puns are the worst." Puns are funny for a second not for 30 minutes. The concept of the show treads similar ground and concepts as Six Feet Under as in the weird doings of Mainstream America (read: white people do the darnedest things!).

Alexander Payne directed the Pilot. He has a great sense of tone as displayed in his near classic Election and surely the under appreciated although Oscar winning Sideways ("I hate f*cking Merlot!!") Dmitry Lipkin, late of The Riches also has a really good sense of the odd but the the sight gags and innumerable d*ck jokes and puns are exhausting and unnecessary. The second episode was better in tone though. We''ll see...