Jeff James
The dancing in An American in Paris is gorgeous.
We saw it at the Hollywood Bowl with the LA Philharmonic playing the score, and we were lucky to have pretty great seats dead center. If you come away with nothing from this movie but the dancing and, to a lesser degree, the singing, then I think you’ll have a wonderful time.
If you pay any attention to the story, however, you’ll probably raise a few eyebrows. The woman sitting behind me kept hmmm-ing at all of the many problematic elements.
Recommending new TV shows to your friends is a social faux pas at this point. Everyone already has plenty of shows to watch, and who are you to insist they give up even more of their precious time?
The good news is that even though Get Shorty originally aired on EPIX, it should now be available on more popular streaming services like Netflix or Amazon Prime if you check over at JustWatch.
That’s all a roundabout way of saying that Get Shorty is one of the few shows I want to recommend to people. The Good Place was the last show I could recommend without reservations, but Get Shorty is so good that I don’t mind risking offending my friends with their never-ending watch-lists.
I’ve Kickstarted a few things over the years, but I’m much slower on the trigger these days. There aren’t any projects I regret funding, but there are definitely categories I don’t fund any more.
I have more than enough games to play, for example, and I’ve barely scratched the surface of the ones I funded through Kickstarter. Instead, I put most of my funding dollars towards fiction magazines and anthologies. They always seem like worthy causes even if I never get around to reading the stories. Also, magazines tend to deliver their rewards on time.
I’ve also shifted most of my funding towards Patreon instead of Kickstarter. Most of the creators I want to support release content on a regular schedule. They’ve all realized that it makes way more sense to send them a few dollars every month instead of hoping they reach full funding for their newest campaign.
I’ve only barely watched Girls, but it’s clear from what I’ve seen of it that realistic, awkward sexuality is an important part of the show’s DNA.
Accordingly, when Tim Malloy from The Wrap discussed Lena Dunham’s nudity at a recent Television Critics Association panel for the show, he set off a miniature firestorm when he said he didn’t “get the purpose” of all that clothes-free acting.
Although I definitely don’t want to add to the dog-pile that inevitably occurs when someone makes a faux pas that goes viral, I would like to discuss some aspects of Malloy’s “question” that may help explain why this incident rubbed so many people the wrong way.
The 2013 Academy Awards ceremony was last night, February 24th, and critics both amateur and professional are weighing in with various post-ceremony reactions. There weren’t any huge upsets – Argo won Best Picture, as the buzz had predicted – and most commentators agree that Seth McFarlane relied on too much crass humor and approached the ceremony as if it was a roast instead of a celebration.
However, the most lingering controversy originated from outside the event, when The Onion’s Twitter account tweeted (and later deleted) a joke that referred to nine-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis as a “c—“.
The Onion quickly posted an out-of-character apology from their CEO first thing this morning, but memories are long on the internet, and there are some people who will never forgive them for this incident.
The interesting thing is that The Onion has a long history of posting edgy satire, but as far as I know, this is the only time they’ve ever chosen to publicly apologize for one of their jokes missing the mark.
Last night I played The Witcher 2 for several hours by accident.
I’d just re-installed the game on my Mac Mini’s Bootcamp partition after realizing that I could free up space by reformatting a spare external drive. I sat down at the computer to make sure everything was up to date and running properly and ended up getting sucked into the game.
Freeing up disk space was actually kind of a huge deal because until recently I could either have The Witcher 2 installed (it takes up most of the partition with its 21gb install) or I could install a handful of games in Steam. When your hard drive is always about to run out of storage space it definitely puts a damper on things.
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the passage of time, mostly because I just turned thirty and that is supposed to Mean Something.
One thing that struck me recently is that this year marks the fifteenth anniversary of Radiohead’s OK Computer, which is literally half a lifetime ago.
I can’t quite wrap my head around it.
OK Computer was a complete revelation when I first heard it back in 1997. You could draw a line and separate my experiences with music into the years before and the years after I heard it.
I finished playing Heavy Rain last night, and it got me thinking about plot twists and their function in storytelling. Heavy Rain is a game that places itself firmly in the “thriller movie” genre, for better or worse.
It’s great at building tension and getting you to care about the characters you meet and control, but it falls into the trap that undermines so many thrillers, namely that its endgame centers around a “shocking” reveal that doesn’t actually make any logical sense.
(Just a quick warning: this rest of this post will contain spoilers about movies that are old enough I will assume everyone has seen them. There will be no Heavy Rain spoilers, however.)
The problem with plot twists, see, is that by nature they should make you jump out of your seat or gasp in horror. You’d never expect that [CHARACTER NAME] was the killer in Heavy Rain, after all, and you are of course horrified that you empathized with the character while playing. That’s the root of the problem, though; in order to make the twist ending truly surprising, the game’s writers decided to fill the story with red herrings and give no real concrete clues about the real killer’s identity. They didn’t want you to figure it out ahead of time, after all.
Just got caught up reading a very lengthy (and contentious) comment thread over at Making Light regarding Amazon vs. Macmillan and eBooks in general, and it got me thinking. One of the commenters puts forth the idea that eBooks are the ultimate future of reading, and that those silly old things made out of paper will disappear into history shortly enough once eReaders make it big.
I see a couple of problems with this. First off, the 250 unread books currently looming on my bookshelves beg to differ. They sure aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. Same with the millions of books in new and used book stores and libraries. The commenter theorizes that non-electronic books are going to become collector’s items for folks (like me) who just can’t let go of physical books and want to live in the past.
The problem with this, though, is that the argument is completely backwards. eReaders are the luxury item. The people who are most interested in eReaders are people who read a LOT because they see the attraction of carrying around 100s of books in their pockets and also because they think they can justify the sticker price. I definitely know that if I took the plunge and dropped several hundred dollars on an eReader any time soon that I’d feel the need to buy all my new books on that platform to justify the cost.
A bit of background: although I enjoy Rilo Kiley’s music, I’ve never been a huge fan. They are a nice little indie band that does quirk and usually does it fairly well. I have several of their albums, but I haven’t listened to them much recently.
The first time I heard their most recent album, “Under the Blacklight“, I was turned off pretty quickly and ended up deleting it from my hard drive. From that first impression, it seemed clear that they had decided to jettison everything intimate and quirky about their sound in an effort to make it big in the mainstream, and I found the results lacking.
As for Jenny Lewis, I enjoyed her first album under her own name, thought it was a nice change of pace, but, again, I didn’t think it was anything earth-shattering. It seemed more like Neko Case-lite with a girl group spin. It’s one of those albums that I appreciate but never listened to that much or that often. However, when her second album, “Acid Tongue“, came out, I listened to a few samples and was immediately hooked. I bought it pretty promptly and it’s not only in heavy rotation, it’s easily one of my most favorite albums of the year.
After listening to Acid Tongue a few dozen times, I started wondering if I had written off Under the Blacklight unfairly, so I decided to give it another spin and see if there were any hidden gems I missed the first time around. To make a long story short, there are definitely some pretty amazing songs on the album, but they’re the exception to the rule. Although my first impression was harsh, it wasn’t too far off base.
The best song on the album is Close Call, the second track. It’s got a good hook and a really catchy chorus. Even though it isn’t that stylistically different from the rest of the album, its one of the few places where the different elements the band is working with here actually gel into a cohesive whole. I also like the first track, Silver Lining, even though it sounds like a Jenny Lewis solo song fighting to get out of a traditional Rilo Kiley arrangement.
The most consistent stylistic elements throughout the album are robotic drums (drum machines or otherwise), new-wave synths and a band taking itself way too seriously. Interestingly enough, the robotic drums and new wave synths have always been a big part of their sound, but in their earlier work it sounded more like a teenage girl recording cynical ballads in her bedroom with a drum machine. Not in a bad way, mind you, but the songs sounded smaller, more intimate and less self-consciously “mature”. Lyrically, the subjects were far more mundane and/or knowingly quirky. They had the new-wave style without turning into something inorganic.
Almost the entire first half of their newest album seems to be trying to prove that they are, in fact, a serious band ready for the big leagues. Mostly, they just sound like they need to relax. Most of the songs have a chilly, distant atmosphere, which works well in small doses (Close Call), but just seems overwrought after four or five tracks. There’s a crucial point in the album about 6 songs in where I’ve wanted to turn it off almost every time. When I’m in an album-listening mood, I don’t like skipping tracks, so if a song gets on my nerves, I’m more likely to never hear the rest of the album after that. Today I made myself keep listening, and I have to admit that the album continued getting on my nerves.
It’s kind of amazing how stark the difference is between Lewis’ solo stuff and her work with the band. Where Rilo Kiley has become more inorganic and stilted, Lewis’ second solo album feels organic, warm, lived in and vibrant. Apparently the recordings were all perfected on tour and recorded live, and it shows. Ironically, Lewis is more cohesive with the rotating cast of characters serving as her solo bandmates than she is with her ostensible mainstream gig.
Solo albums are kind of a strange animal. They’re oftentimes nothing more than experimental detours or egotistical failures. It’s a rare case where a solo album is this much better than an artist’s work with their actual band. Considering how much her solo work has grown by leaps and bounds, I would be very surprised if Rilo Kiley has another album in them. At this point, they’re doing nothing more than holding her back.