May 2012
23 posts
3 tags
Film: Thelma & Louise (1991)
Two women drive off in a Thunderbird for a short vacation. Perhaps the most they have in common is a displeasure with their work lives and their men. Thelma is the housewife to her controlling and argumentative husband. Louise has been a waitress for too long, and her boyfriend doesn’t want to settle down. Thelma, in a moment of daring perversity, packs a handgun into her bag. From...
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Film: Bernie
For those directors who are worth discussing as an auteur, it is not often so difficult to place their general interests and style. Though several of Richard Linklater’s films have commonalities in style and substance (Slacker, Waking Life, Before Sunrise, Before Sunset), their broader landscape and his filmography as a whole present no clear interests or style type. While aspects of...
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Album: Heaven - The Walkmen
In a recent interview with Pitchfork, The Walkmen’s frontman Hamilton Leithauser mentioned that they had considered using a photo of the band standing behind their bassist’s son as the album cover. In fact, a number of promo shots of the band that came around with this album have involved their families. The Walkmen are ten years old now, and all of their members have young...
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TV: 30 Rock (Season 6)
There are rarely multiple good sitcoms being produced simultaneously. No matter what your friends say about Adult Swim’s lineup, The Big Bang Theory, or The Office only getting better, there simply aren’t a surplus of good comedies. The bad sitcoms become such by being so drab and cheap as to offend the viewer’s intelligence. The good sitcoms are actively, intelligently, and...
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Yahoo Axis & Facebook Camera
It’s been a long time since Yahoo has done anything notable. Wednesday afternoon, with a product video that looked like it was produced for a cheap Kickstarter, Yahoo unveiled Axis. Axis is a multi platform strategy to put Yahoo (that is, Bing’s search, Yahoo’s name) front and center. It’s not necessarily brilliant, but it might just be the first example of a major...
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Album: Clear Moon - Mount Eerie
In the wake of Bon Iver and Fleet Foxes, we’ve been somewhat saturated with mountainy musical landscapes, and if on its surface Mount Eerie’s Clear Moon appears to be among them, it’d be hard to fault anyone for thinking so. Between the name, the album art, and the fact that this album was recored in a small town in Washington (which includes the area Mount Erie), it’s...
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Film: Sin Nombre (2009)
These landscapes are stunning. The tightly packed homes, the filled hillsides, the bright colors. It’s a wonderful locale to visit. After spending not long there however, it becomes clear why the characters in Sin Nombre want to leave. They’re afraid of the gangs - even the gang members had better fall strictly in line or face a bad fate. A gang leader tells a rival that he will...
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Album: Internal Logic - Grass Widow
Perhaps it’s only a matter of diminished coverage, but it seems as though there have been fewer and fewer bands riding the coat tails of that early 2000s indie rock sound. You remember the wannabes, those mimicking acts that had the same vibe but lacked the true attitude and talent, those who had only heard the new stuff, rather than properly responding to the old. In a lot of ways, Grass...
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TV: Community (Season 3)
Community is something of an anomaly among sitcoms. It’s incredibly smart (of course, we should ask this of all shows…), but more notably, it has no boundaries. For most sitcoms, the plots switch between the characters’ apartment and workplace - if they ever do something different like go to a beach house, it’s a notable change that almost feels cheap, as if the writers needed...
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Album: Quarantine - Laurel Halo
The electronic singer songwriter is still coming of age. Most notably, we’ve heard James Blake’s self titled debut, an all at once cool, emotional, and atmospheric piece. Laurel Halo’s Quarantine may look like K-pop from the album art (or maybe a crop from an anime version of a Pieter Bruegel painting), but it’s perhaps more relevant - a woman expressing herself in a...
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Film: 2046 (2004)
Wong Kar-wai’s films often present a stunning sense of emotion to make up for otherwise weak narratives. Sometimes it all comes together to create fantastic pieces like In the Mood for Love. Other times, like in 2046, what we get are jumbled vignettes, casual coherency, and brilliant visuals (and not just the cinematography - Wong chose these actresses for a reason). It’s more Wong...
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Album: Royal Headache (Self Titled)
There’s something going on in the garage space, something of a miniature revival of trashy, easy, excitable rock music. This year we’ve heard The Men and OFF!, and now we have Royal Headache. All three are different sounds, but there’s a clear aesthetic of glory and carefree days that runs through these albums. Now we have Royal Headache’s self titled LP, and it plays...
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Stories: Pulse - Julian Barnes
Out last year by Julian Barnes, Pulse is a particularly varied collection of short stories. Barnes stories move around in era to surprising times, and elsewhere present more experimental than traditional narratives. Breaking up the collection’s front half is a series of four stories titled At Phil & Joanna’s that are all short, dialogue heavy pieces. It’s an interesting...
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Album: Bloom - Beach House
I saw Beach House perform the fall after Teen Dream was released. The band wore sweaters and sat between two large silver pyramids. Aside from this, the stage remained dark. As the songs hit their chorus, tiny lights would flutter and twinkle behind them like a star field. It created a mystic atmosphere that encapsulates what it is to listen to any Beach House song. As you listen, you can...
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Film: The Thin Red Line (1998)
After his stunning film Days of Heaven, director Terrence Malick disappeared from filmmaking for two decades. It’s hard to imagine what aspect of The Thin Red Line prompted Malick to return. It’s a bizarre, often ephemeral piece of filmmaking (an aspect that Malick excels at), though it’s hardly a coherent piece of cinema, at least on a meta level.
Who is the main character? ...
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Google Updates iOS App. Users Amazed at Quality.
Yesterday afternoon Google put out something of a surprise: a redesigned Google+ app for iOS. Google is notorious for putting out iOS apps that range from mediocre to careless. Late last year Google finally (after over four years of iOS’s existence) put out a native Gmail app for the platform. It’s biggest selling point was Push, except that on launching the application, every...
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Album: The Only Place - Best Coast
Best Coast’s debut LP, Crazy for You, succeeded more on a charm and an atmosphere than as a matter of novel or complex songwriting. Bethany Cosentino sung of being hung up on boys, getting high, and either hanging with her cat or at the beach. It was all a little trite (and repetitive), but it’s simplicity was its strength. The song were like candy, and even though they had little...
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Film: The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover...
It is only appropriate that The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover opens with a curtain being drawn, for this is a film inspired by theatre, with only a few locations, and sets that seem to be missing sides, and loud characters, and a broader attention to its form. It’s characters may be little more narrow than their titular roles inform, but they are such compelling and strong (and...
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AT&T: Too Worried to Do Anything but Hide
On Friday, The New York Times published a number of quotes from AT&T’s chief executive, Randall Stephenson, discussing recent changes in the industry. The degree with which he spoke openly is both surprising and welcome, but while it’s nice to see so vividly into AT&T’s workings, the quotes illustrate a company who’s culture is focused on stifling others rather...
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Album: OFF! (Self Titled)
There is a certain ease and joy to hearing hardcore punk, and if anyone should be able to tap into it, it’s OFF!, a supergroup of classic hardcore names. It’s a joyride of an album, taking you along for sixteen tracks in just as many minutes. It’s an oddity, at least when viewed among the broader landscape - sixteen minutes is hardly the introduction to any good prog song. But...
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The Proliferation of Persistent Ecosystems
As previously discussed, Microsoft is making some big changes with Windows 8, and yesterday, they announced a bit of cleaning up in preparation. The strength of a company’s ecosystem is becoming more and more important. Google launched Drive to begin creating a seamless user experience. Apple launched iCloud less than a year ago for the same purpose. Microsoft has had a bit of a mess on...
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Album: Hoyas - S. Carey
S. Carey is known best as part of Bon Iver, but he has a solo album to his name and now a new EP as well. It’s clear how working with Vernon has impacted these sounds, creating in his solo work an almost electronic country feel. The EP is brief, but each track is working in a slightly different space, be it slightly club centered or more on the chamber side of things.
Opening track Two...
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Film: 3 Women (1977)
This film exhibits nothing unnatural, yet the entire experience feels surreal. It opens on pool water, like some sort of embryonic fluid. Nothing is in it but murals of vicious and sexual reptilian-humanoid creatures. The camera cuts to another pool in a geriatric facility where an older woman is slowly stepping into the water. The film has hardly begun, and we’ve already experienced an...
