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Sunday, June 21st, 2009

DVD and Blu-ray Review: “Friday the 13th” II-VI and 2009 Reboot

by Jeff Giles

friday13th[1]Chee-chee-chee. Ah-ah-ah.

With those few syllables, a very low budget, and buckets upon buckets of brightly colored fake blood, producer/director/writer Sean S. Cunningham laid the foundation for what has got to be one of the most ridiculously profitable film franchises in history. Between 1980 and 1989, watching Jason Voorhees hack people to bits was an almost annual ritual for filmgoers of a certain age and temperament, and though the ’90s and early aughts weren’t as kind to the series, Friday the 13th has undergone a bit of a renaissance this year, thanks to the Platinum Dunes-produced reboot that scared up a $90 million worldwide gross, and Paramount is celebrating by reissuing the first eight films on DVD and/or Blu-ray. They passed me over for the first installment (don’t they know who I am?), but sent chapters II through VI, plus the reboot, so I’ve spent the last week or so reliving my Camp Crystal Lake memories with a series of Deluxe Edition discs. It’s been an exhausting journey, but now it’s over, and I’m here to tell you about it.

Though I was only six when the first Friday the 13th debuted in 1980, the series quickly attained enough pop culture clout to attract the fascination of grubby young boys all over America, and by the time Lar Park Lincoln used her telekinetic powers to dredge Jason’s corpse from Crystal Lake in 1988’s Part VII: The New Blood, the lumbering, hockey-masked killer had already been on a first-name basis with me and my friends for several sequels. I was never much of a slasher fan, but there was always something undeniably fascinating about the Friday films; inspired directly by John Carpenter’s Halloween, they were proudly crass and cynical, and they never earned the kind of critical respect enjoyed by peers like A Nightmare on Elm Street and the first Poltergeist, but as each of those franchises withered away, Jason continued lumbering on. Hell, even Halloween had to take most of the ’80s off after the producers fucked things up with Halloween III: Season of the Witch, but not Jason — no matter how desperate his handlers grew, he kept popping up on the big screen. He went to Manhattan in ‘89, Hell in ‘93, and all the way to outer space in 2002. He even managed to drag Freddy Krueger out of retirement for 2003’s Freddy vs. Jason. (more…)

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Posted in Blu-ray Review, DVD Reviews, Featured, Featured - Frontpage, Film | Comments

Friday, June 12th, 2009

Letter from the Editor: Parked in Alex Kimmell’s twodoggarage

by Jeff Giles

My dad was an opera singer when he was a kid and later turned into a huge folk music fan. He taught himself to play guitar and would sing all the time to my sister and me when we were little. My parents thought music was extremely important, so we had to pick an instrument by age 10 and take lessons for at least a year. My older sister was already taking guitar lessons, so I had to pick something completely different. I got dragged to a party with my parents when I was about nine. Like many of these parties, I was the only kid there. The host, Mel, could see I was bored out of my mind, and took pity on me. He came over and said, “Do you want to see something really cool?” I followed him up to the attic and as I turned the corner at the top of the stairs, I saw him pull a sheet off of this beautiful, old, glittery white Slingerland drumset. I couldn’t breathe and time seemed to hold still. Right then, I knew I was going to play the drums.

After a couple of years I started to take playing pretty seriously, and ended up majoring in music at USC. At my senior recital, Mel came up to me and reintroduced himself. We talked a little about drums; unfortunately, I never saw him again. A few months after I graduated, I got a phone call telling me that Mel had died and he had left me the Slinglerland kit in his will. So everything had come full circle, and I started playing on the kit that made me fall in love with the instrument in the first place.

Pinboy-by-Twodoggarage_dffq3CMcOs0x_full[1]That’s the beginning of the story of singer/songwriter Alex Kimmell, a.k.a. twodoggarage — and only the beginning. You’ve likely never heard of Alex, or listened to his music; in practical terms, he’s just another guy with a day job and a dream, one without the bucks or the luck to push his way through the crowd and into your stereo. Scratch beneath the surface, though, and you’ll find some uncommonly beautiful songs, delivered with a graceful hand and an open heart — the kind of songs you can tell have intensely personal meaning, expressed with the kind of universal sentiment that draws you back to them again and again. Songs like my personal favorite, “Everything Happens to Me” (download), from 2008’s Pinboy. This song has come up on my iPod dozens of times since I first heard it, but there’s something about it that strikes a deep chord in me. Every time I hear Kimmell’s clear, plaintive voice, the gently surging melody, and the way he sings the refrain… (more…)

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Wednesday, June 10th, 2009

iPod App Review: “Stuck Genie”

by Jeff Giles

appicon_stuck_genie1Stuck Genie (Warner Bros., 2009)
purchase this iPod app (iTunes)

There’s a seemingly limitless number of them, but the rules for most iPod game apps are essentially the same: they have to be affordable enough to trigger a regret-free impulse buy, they need to be colorful enough to grab our attention, and they have to be simple enough to get the hang of in a few minutes (or less). Warner Bros.’ latest entry into the app arena, the intriguingly titled Stuck Genie, goes three for three; it sells for $1.99, boasts the sort of bright, cartoony graphics that iPod game developers (and consumers) seem to love, and its mechanics are simple enough for anyone with one finger and two minutes to master.

stuckgenie_031-266x4001The premise is simple too, pitting the player against the mischevious Puzzle Genie, who has challenged you to free his captives by pushing a ball through a series of mazes via click and drag. In each maze, you need to collect a handful of other balls, which is accomplished by simply bumping up against them. Get them all before your time runs out, and you’ve completed the level. Repeat as necessary.

If this sounds like a premise in need of a twist, don’t worry — Stuck Genie gives you one, in the form of a series of mazes that require you to pick up the balls in a certain order, then rotate the shapes you create in order to get around corners and through passages. The developers did a fine job of ramping up the difficulty at odd intervals, too, allowing the game to lull you into a pattern of gameplay before delivering an unexpected jolt that inevitably produces colorful bursts of profanity. I picked it up quickly, and so did my 10-year-old nephew; like any good iPod game, it’s great for short bursts of concentration when you’re stuck without anything else to do, difficult to put down and easy to resume. (Word of warning, though — simply hitting the home button on your iPod and leaving the game won’t save it; you need to exit and save manually if you want to retain your progress.)

For fans of colorful puzzle games with deceptively simple mechanics, Stuck Genie delivers 73 increasingly infuriating levels of action for under two bucks. What else do you want?

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Monday, June 8th, 2009

Blu-ray Review: “Gran Torino”

by Jeff Giles

Gran Torino (2009, Warner Bros.)
purchase from Amazon: DVD | Blu-ray

I enjoy a nice Unforgiven viewing as much as the next guy, but I’ve never really bought into the whole cult of Clint — for movies that are supposed to disassemble and analyze the various aspects of American manhood, Eastwood’s films often strike me as curiously dull. During A Perfect World, for instance — a movie I went to see knowing full well that Kevin Costner was Eastwood’s co-star, and hoping two negatives would produce a positive — I’m fairly certain I had an out of body experience, during which my spirit floated to the ceiling of the nearly empty theater and took a long nap. I went into Gran Torino, in other words, expecting very little; I certainly didn’t plan to feel a bitter swell of nostalgia as the closing credits rolled. But life is full of surprises, and as it turns out, Clint — and by extension Gran Torino — has a few too.

Billed in advance as a sort of unofficial sequel to the Dirty Harry movies, Torino stars Eastwood as Walt Kowalski, a retired auto worker who, as the movie opens, is in attendance at his wife’s funeral. It quickly becomes clear that aside from his dearly departed better half, Walt wants very little to do with anyone — not his kids, nor their kids, nor the young, well-meaning priest that reluctantly promised Walt’s wife he’d look after him. And certainly not the families on his street, which no longer have familiar Polish surnames; Walt’s neighborhood has changed, with an influx of Hmong immigrants replacing the solidly Caucasian blue-collar demographic with which he identifies. He’s a grumpy, openly racist old man, but Nick Schenk’s screenplay does a better job of generating empathy for the character than you might think; surrounded by clueless kids, grasping grandchildren, and neighbors who seem to have no pride in their homes, Walt comes across at first as a sort of seething, epithet-spouting version of Dick Loudon, the character Bob Newhart played on Newhart, a guy who feels like the last oasis of sanity in a world gone mad. (more…)

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Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009

Blu-ray Review: “Spring Breakdown”

by Jeff Giles

Spring Breakdown (2009, Warner Premiere)
purchase from Amazon: DVD | Blu-ray

My good friend (and Rotten Tomatoes higher-up) Tim Ryan is a man whose passion for pop culture rivals each of our own. Most of you don’t know him — much to my chagrin, I haven’t been able to convince him to write the Popdose Guide to Sonic Youth yet — but I mention him here because of a lively debate we engaged in a few years ago, one which, to my memory, took up most of a phone conversation and was never resolved. The crux of Tim’s argument, which was triggered by a Jefitoblog post about some crappy record or other, essentially boiled down to his belief that, while watching a bad movie is a lot of fun, bad music is just depressing, and doesn’t deserve to be glorified with analysis. I disagreed, obviously, but we had to call it a draw after awhile, and I eventually forgot about the conversation.

And then I watched Spring Breakdown, a movie of such punishing awfulness that one of the only reasonable explanations for its existence is a yawning black hatred for fans of its cast and crew. It sounds absurd, I know, but I can’t think of any other circumstances by which this group of A-list comedians and talented actors would come together to produce something that sucks so much. Really, it’s as if Rachel Dratch, Amy Poehler, Will Arnett, Parker Posey, Seth Meyers, Amber Tamblyn, and Jane Lynch all got together and said “Hey, you know what would be fun? Tricking everyone who might have enjoyed any of our past work into seeing a movie that looks and sounds like it might be sort of entertaining, but is actually beyond horrible.” And then then they drew straws, and Rachel Dratch got the short one, so she had to go write the script, which she did with SNL associate producer Ryan Shiraki, who did such a marvelous job of coming up with unfunny lines that he was hired to direct — and by “direct,” I mean repeatedly tell the actors “Do it worse! Now do it louder and worse!” (more…)

Posted in Blu-ray Review, Film | Comments

Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009

Book Review: Travis Elborough, “The Vinyl Countdown”

by Jeff Giles

Travis Elborough – The Vinyl Countdown: The Album from LP to iPod and Back Again (2009, Soft Skull)
purchase from Amazon

Okay, so the title triggers unbidden memories of a song most of us would rather forget — and may create the impression that the book is about a format whose time came and went 20 years ago — but trust me, if you consider yourself any kind of music geek, you need to get your hands on a copy of Travis Elborough’s The Vinyl Countdown: The Album from LP to iPod and Back Again. I went in expecting a book-length defense of vinyl, but Elborough’s really up to something different here: Over the course of the book’s 480 pages, he leads the reader back through the history of the long player itself — from 78 to 33 to 8 (track) and onward, all delivered from a chatty first-person perspective and dotted through with various footnotes, personal anecdotes, and observations. If that seems like a lot of paper for a single subject, it is — but Elborough takes an impressively wide approach, beginning by circling around the hows and whys of the long player’s creation and finishing right around the time Axl started crawling up his own ass for Chinese Democracy.

It can be a bit of a slog, but it’s fascinating stuff; you could devote an entire book, for instance, to the “speed wars” that erupted when Columbia debuted the 33 1/3 LP in 1948. Elborough kicks things off with a description of the press demonstration at which Columbia president Edward Wallerstein stood next to an eight-foot stack of 78s, holding an armload of 33s, and proceeded to stun the assembled journalists into silence by contrasting the older format’s four-minutes-a-side limit with his company’s new “Revolutionary Disk Marvel,” capable of playing an entire 22-minute symphony without making the listener get up off his ass to flip it over. This introductory section is filled with fascinating tidbits about the 33’s first few unsteady steps, but it’s just a primer — before long, Elborough is off and running with in-depth looks at what the LP meant for everyone from the avid music collector (the expanded time limits of the new format made building a personal library much more affordable) to Frank Sinatra (no LP, no concept album — and no In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning). (more…)

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Monday, June 1st, 2009

Popdose Flashback: Georgia Satellites, “In the Land of Salvation and Sin”

by Jeff Giles

flashback_wide

It’s been forever and a day since I felt like this
I want a fifth of Wild Turkey and one little kiss
And I don’t miss that girl; if I did, I wouldn’t let it show
I might go to the moon, might wind up dead
Wake up in morning in a stranger’s bed
Well, I’m not concerned with any of that no more — “Six Years Gone” (download)

51sajf9w3rl_sl500_aa280_1The Georgia Satellites shot to the top of the charts in the fall of 1986 with “Keep Your Hands to Yourself,” a jokey little play on Southern morality that sounded nothing like anything else on the radio at the time. Real drums, no keyboard player, and a sound that wasn’t so much produced as it was simply recorded. With their bad hair, crooked teeth, and dirty clothes, they looked more like beer-swilling rednecks than rock stars; in the age when physical imperfections were beginning to be sanded out of the music business by MTV, the Sats were exceptions to just about every commonly accepted rule of fame. Their debut album, the simply titled Georgia Satellites, was a reminder of what rock & roll was supposed to be: loud, rude, and sloppy. They covered Terry Anderson’s “Battleship Chains,” one of those musician’s favorites that was later recorded by Warren Zevon and The Replacements, among others. They tore the shit out of Rod Stewart’s “Every Picture Tells a Story.” Overall, they channeled their rock heroes (a group that includes the Stones, the Faces, the Beatles, and Jerry Lee Lewis) without simply aping them. What they didn’t do was record another hit single. “Hands to Yourself,” great as it was, pigeonholed the band as something of a novelty act, and they receded from the public eye almost as quickly as they’d entered it. (Thus proving the rock & roll maxim that you can’t yodel in a song and have a long career:unless you have a fabulous rack.) (more…)

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Sunday, May 31st, 2009

Blu-ray Review: “Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace & Music Director’s Cut”

by Jeff Giles

Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace & Music Director’s Cut (40th Anniversary Ultimate Collector’s Edition) (2009, Warner Bros.)
purchase from Amazon

Good news, home theater-owning former hippies! You can now relive the original Woodstock festival, in all of its muddy, THC-laced glory, through the marvelous magic of a new 1080p hi-def and Dolby TrueHD 5.1 surround sound transfer — with an extra disc of bonus performances and assorted extra content — thanks to Warner Bros.’ brand new 40th anniversary reissue of Michael Wadleigh’s Oscar-winning documentary. For once, we’re looking at a title that lives up to the word “ultimate”; not only does this new box collect the four-hour Woodstock director’s cut, but it tacks on two more hours of performance footage, plus another hour of featurettes, plus BD-Live content — and that doesn’t even take into account the box itself, which handsomely houses the movie in a fringe leather case, or its other assorted contents, which include a reprint of Life’s Woodstock issue, a replica ticket, an iron-on patch, a Lucite paperweight, and more. Unlike the vast majority of catalog titles seeing Blu-ray release, Woodstock takes advantage of the new medium’s capabilities; not only do you get a superior picture and sound, but the studio has taken care to add plenty of extra everything, expanding the movie along with its price tag (this set lists for $69.99, but Amazon has it available for pre-order at $48.99 — and their version features an exclusive third disc).

Personally, to put it mildly, I’m not in the target demographic for Woodstock; I’ve never found the ’60s all that fascinating, and although I consider myself a fan of many of the artists who played the festival, the movie has always struck me as a bloated, spaced-out beast of a documentary — the kind of thing you need to have been at Woodstock to enjoy. (Or high.) All that aside, I can’t deny that it’s a beautiful film, and if it seems to go on forever, then it’s just living up to Wadleigh’s original goal; he did, after all, oversee more than 365,000 feet of film, all of which was jealously guarded from Warners executives, and he would have turned in a five or six-hour film if the studio had let him. Like any documentary worth its salt, Woodstock approaches its subject as if it’s endlessly fascinating, and even if you tend to think that seven-plus hours is a mite excessive for a movie about any event, Wadleigh’s enthusiasm is as infectuous as his shots are beautifully framed. Woodstock is as fluid as the spirit of the festival, tumbling from widescreen to split-screen and back again, a visual extension of what was going on all around Wadleigh and his crew. (more…)

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Sunday, May 31st, 2009

CD Review: Willy Porter, “How to Rob a Bank”

by Jeff Giles

howtorobabankWilly Porter – How to Rob a Bank (2009, Weasel Records)
purchase this album (Amazon)

In the fall of 1995, I was just getting my life back in order after a horrific breakup that had driven me into self-imposed exile on a friend’s farm, and then wandering halfway across the country with my best friend in tow. I was preoccupied with healing, in other words — and in the perfect emotional state for making Willy Porter’s musical acquaintance through his medium-sized AAA hit, “Angry Words”:

I have cursed your name a thousand times or more
Your photograph lies deep at the bottom of my drawer
But when i looked at it this morning
I had no angry words to say
No angry words to say (more…)

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Sunday, May 31st, 2009

CD Review: Lisa Donnelly, “We Had a Thing”

by Jeff Giles

Lisa Donnelly – We Had a Thing (2009, BT Media)
purchase this album (Amazon)

Open your heart and close your legs
They only want what makes ‘em beg
Get hurt and do it again — and laugh at it all

Lisa Donnelly’s We Had a Thing opens with “Laugh,” a perky piano-led pop song with a catchy melody and the sage advice laid out in the lines above, but she isn’t just another Sara Bareilles or Colbie Caillat; as this 10-track effort makes clear, she’s just as comfortable vamping it up, as she does in the funky, fingersnap-laden dance number “Little Devil,” or spinning gauzy webs of atmospheric sound, as on the moody ballad “Julian.”

In the not-too-distant past, Donnelly would have been classified simply as a singer/songwriter, but in these days of microformats and crusted-over lines in the artistic sand, Thing feels like a defiant work of eclecticism. She’s already been accused of “hopscotching,” which is valid, I suppose, but when you’re this good at writing indelibly catchy melodies, the ability to swerve from irresistibly catchy uptempo pop (”Naturally” [download]) to moody, vaguely Fleetwood Mac-ish balladry (”Better”) — and then head into Emmylou Harris territory (”Stuck in a Rut”) — is an asset, not a liability.

Singer/songwriters aren’t exactly in short supply these days, and even keeping track of the ones talented enough to make it is a full-time task — but if she can navigate her way through a crowded marketplace, Lisa Donnelly has the voice, and the material, to carve out a niche among fans of catchy, smartly written pop music. (It also doesn’t hurt that she’s smoking hot, but hey — every artist needs some kind of image “hook” these days, right?) In a fair and just world, Donnelly would reach Katy Perry-sized success before the year is out. (Also, Perry herself would be eaten by bears on live television. But the world isn’t fair.)

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