Sweeney Todd (2007)

Spoiler-free impressions:

It's hard to judge this one as a film, having recently seen John's Doyle's award-winning production on Broadway, featuring a stripped-down cast and minimalist set design. Tim Burton's film, by contrast, is positively (perhaps needlessly?) maximalist: the grime is grimiest, the blood is bloodiest, the squalor is, um, squalidest. It's pretty much exactly what you'd expert Tim Burton to do with Sweeney Todd: cast Johnny Depp in the lead (as usual), alongside his muse/girlfriend Helena Bonham-Carter (as usual), Alan Rickman as the dour British guy (his usual role), Timothy Spall as the smarmy British sycophant (having, in 2007 alone, tackled that role in Harry Potter 5 and again as Fagin in a BBC adaptation of Oliver Twist)... and then slap the usual coat of Tim Burton patina (squiggly black curlicue hair, desaturated tones) over the source material, adding little and illuminating less.

What strengths exist in the film-- and there are many-- are doubly strong, however, on Broadway: the counterpoint and consummate Britishness of the songs, the suspense of the murders, and ultimately the themes (primarily the central counterpoint of protagonist and villain, the barber versus the judge, the lowly versus the powerful). Depp does his best Bowie impression on the musical numbers and the cast sings surprisingly well (perhaps with the aid of digital correction?), but there's no remotely essential, let alone breakthrough, performance...

A decent film with some flashes of inspiration in the imagery, but overall a perfunctory and forgettable adaptation.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007)

Spoiler-free thoughts:

For my money, the best movie of 2007. A film adaptation of the bestselling memoir of a French fashion magazine editor who becomes completely paralyzed except for the ability to blink one eye, through which he dictates his entire book.

The film has had critics in rapture, and although the New Yorker's admirably over-the-top praise, "It feels like nothing less than the rebirth of the cinema," (which New York Magazine called "the blurbiest blurb that ever blurbed") goes a bit far, it's easy to see what they mean. Diving Bell uses the camera in such a fresh way that you feel practically engulfed by a new medium, something beyond mere film. Not content to rely on camera tricks, the film surprisingly fires on practically all other cylinders: impeccable French acting, a painter's obsession with original imagery, and a rockin', rollin' soundtrack. If there is an imperfection to the film, it stems from its perfect portrayal of an imperfect man.

A must-see.

Ashley Tisdale's nose job

NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! Argh. Thus ends the greatest nose in American popular entertainment. She evened out the asymmetrical tip, which doesn't look bad, but also unfortunately shaved the distinctive bump from her bridge. A sad, sad day.

Trapped in the Closet (2005-present)

Youtube is where we are right now as a culture, but apart from a bunch of funny little clips and shit I have yet to see almost anything of actual cultural value (in other words, awesome and not just a novelty) that fits in the Youtube/podcast medium... until Trapped in the Closet, a series of 3-4 minute rap soap opera episodes by R&B singer and songwriter R. Kelly. Only seen four eps so far, but I'm completely sold on this musical narrative of a one night stand that sets off a series of crazy events.

Hilarious, great lyrics, stellar singing, and most interestingly, the futuristic concept-- rap opera in Youtube-size chunks-- is paired with in the oldest tool of serial fiction like Dickens, early radio, and early film: the cliffhanger. I'm dying to know what happens next at the end of each episode. Watch the first one and see if you agree.

High School Musical 1,2 (2006-07)

"Oh, don't mention that backstabbing yogini to me."
There comes a point in any pop culture phenomenon when the man of culture simply has to pay attention and see what all the fuss is about.

The first time I tried High School Musical, I balked. I simply could not watch past the first two minutes. But, like many things I initially hated-- girls, beer, stinky cheese-- I eventually got the appeal. And it's this: there's something for everyone. Kids, adults, jock, geek, smart, dumb, black, white, Asian, the MTV generation, the VH1 generation, and the Youtube generation. More importantly, it's a middle ground they can all live with. Only a freakishly wild outlier on the the bell curve of American cultural taste would find absolutely nothing to enjoy in HSM. More freakish than even me (a scary thought, I know), cause I enjoy it quite a bit.

The central message of HSM is a good one for today's youth: step outside your own interests and don't just "stick to the stuff you know." Be weird. Have embarrassing interests. The jocks secretly want to sing or make the perfect creme brulée, the drama pansy is dynamite on the baseball field, the lawyer is a grown man who enjoys children's television... Oh, wait.

In Search of Steve Ditko (BBC, 2007)

"Steve Ditko, who was politically very conservative, was suddenly the idol of a whole generation of hippies, who were reading some kind of drug parable into these colorful other dimensions that Dr. Strange was zipping through, all without leaving his Greenwich apartment. He would just be sitting there on the floor, in a trance, while imagining that he was battling the dread Dormammu, in some kind of zone of the nether dimensions." ~ Alan Moore

A one-hour documentary about Steve Ditko, the mysterious co-creator of Spider-Man, by the likable BBC presenter Jonathan Ross. In its own way, the perfect little documentary. Ditko, like Pynchon, is a mysterious guy who refuses to be interviewed or photographed (only a handful of photos of him exist in public) and has established a cult following spanning generations, including such comics luminaries as Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore, who make characteristically entertaining cameos here.

There's controversy (did Stan Lee try to take sole credit for creating Spider-Man?), lots of crazy 1960's comic art, and ultimately an attempt to meet the man himself in New York City (I won't give away the ending). A must-see for anyone with a passing interest in comics, and a pretty good watch for everyone else (by which I mean, everyone I know and most people in the world).

Mötley Crüe: The Dirt (2001)

Each and every paragraph in The Dirt, the story of Mötley Crüe, puts the wildest night of your life to shame. The Crüe's excess would make freakin Caligula look like a prude, and anyone hoping to top their insane heights of drugs, sex, and rock n roll would find themselves dead, simply dead, cause the Crüe came within an inch plenty of times.

It's a hell of a story with some classic characters: psychotic force of nature Nikki Sixx, charismatic man-boy Tommy Lee, paranoid blues man Mick Mars, and Vince Neil, who devotes his entire life to blond, big-boobed women, booze, and sports cars without the slightest bit of irony or posturing. These guys were not faking it. They were rock and roll with a raging hardon who destroyed everything they touched. A whiskey bottle is thrown, on average, every ten pages.

I think I'm ready to proclaim ghostwriter extraordinaire Neil Strauss to be the new Tom Wolfe. Maybe the new Hunter S. Thompson. In either case, the most important young(ish) nonfiction writer around. Like Wolfe, he dredges up the weirdest, most entertaining personalities and stories in America and crafts them into page-turners. In addition to The Dirt, Strauss penned similar books with Marilyn Manson and Jenna Jameson, two more American originals, for better or worse. And like Thompson, Strauss entered the fray when he plunged himself into excess and celebrity in The Game (see ecstatic review below).

Couldn't put it down.

Wacom Intuos3

Finally bought a computer tablet, an Intuos3, to get back on the whole drawing thing. These sketches were done entirely on that. I see I haven't gotten any better in the five years since last putting ink to paper, but at least I haven't gotten worse! Hopefully more soon.

Icky Thump: further thoughts

After a couple weeks with Icky Thump, I'm changing my tune from an already favorable whistle of approval to outright screaming and yelling. This album just may change your life! One of my problems with previous White Stripes albums, impressive as they were, was the lo-fi production. Yes, it brought back rock and roll and arguably the guitar itself just when the guitar seemed relegated to last century's junk heap, but lo-fi doesn't do justice to Jack White's voice and guitar-playing, something I would now describe, after the hi-fi production on Icky Thump, in language typically reserved for highly addictive drugs or outright religious experience.

Jack White's guitar-playing on Icky Thump is downright relevatory. I'd thought the guitar had evolved as far as possible, but no-- White has stepped into a time machine and brought back an instrument from the future: guitar equipped with so many pedals and effects and played with such brilliant intensity that it's hard to go back to most of the guitar music in my iPod, which sounds positively stone age in comparison. On top of it all, White's voice is the best it's ever been, now that he's quit smoking... Oh, and Meg sounds great, too.

I've been accused of filling Unload My Head with excessive hyperbole, but Icky Thump has elevated Jack White from respected rock star in my book to something of a personal hero.

iPhone!

Amazingly, I am posting this from my new iPhone, which completes me as a human being.

The White Stripes - Icky Thump (2007)

There's music so wondrously strange it seems to come from an alternate Earth, a world mostly like ours but tweaked, changed, full of sounds in familiar instruments but played in weirdly alien ways. Examples include Chinese opera, Björk, Miles Davis' more LSD-influenced records... and now Icky Thump.

Jack White's a true American original: not quite Dylan stature but from the same mold, a chameleon with a hyperactive imagination who refuses to give simple answers to simple questions, a freaked-out troubadour, an enigma...

Not gonna change your life, but fascinating rock/blues/something from the only American band whose every record is still an event.

Sicko (2007)

"Here's what it cost to buy these men." Campaign contributions by drug companies
to key health care policy Congressmen.
The new Michael Moore documentary, this time tackling the US health care industry. I don't always agree with Moore's methods-- he's manipulative, insanely one-sided and speaks habitually in sweeping generalizations-- but he's got some worthy messages in Sicko. Mainly, why are we the only western nation without universal health care?

Worth a watch, and hopefully the first big, opening salvo in the battlefield issue that could decide next year's Presidential election.