Batrock

If you watched the Academy Awards this year, you may recall that Robert Altman was awarded an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement. The best thing about all that I saw of the ceremonies was the presentation of the award: Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin came out onto the stage and wigged out and talked all over each other to create the illusion of an Altman film on the stage.

I’d be lying if I said I knew a hell of a lot about Altman, but A Prairie Home Companion is so sublime that I want to know more about him. Even if that means watching Robin Williams in Popeye.

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Anne Hathaway looks pretty for just under two hours while Meryl Streep plays a bitch with rare patches of vulnerability for roughly the same amount of time. Everyone else except for the gay man is a two dimensional person brought onto the screen to say their lines and advance the story.

From the hit literary genre “complain about your former employers”, previous home of The Nanny Diaries (soon to be a film starring Scarlett Johansson as the titular nanny), comes The Devil Wears Prada. It’s pleasant if undemanding and displays a lack of finesse in its morality. Remember, folks: working is good, being a nice person is bad. You can’t dedicate yourself to your job without being a bitch. Know this and know this well!

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There are several kinds of dystopian stories, and many of them deal with a world where Britain is one of the sole superpowers. You can take them as a gradual build up of making a bad situation worse, as in V for Vendetta, or the situation has already reached the zenith of terribleness and the characters have to struggle to survive with a definite sense of immediacy.

Children of Men is an example of the immediate school of dystopia: quick, bleak, grey and terrible.

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Spy movies are enjoyable because they frequently dispense with logic in order to provide their thrills. Stormbreaker, based on an allegedly popular series of childrens’ books (I can be forgiven for not keeping up to date with the childrens’ literature), is designed specifically to be a sort of James Bond for children, right down to MI6.

Yet, with an M rating, not all children will be allowed to see Stormbreaker. Sure, maybe the tweens and teens will, but none of the children of overprotective parents. To that end, I chose to go in their stead.

What we have in Stormbreaker is a spy story that features a villain with a feasible plan that is well executed, but the worst motive for super villainy ever. It’s not rocket science and, at several points, it is nothing more than an advertisement for Nintendo, but that doesn’t stop it from being enjoyable.

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Joanna Newsom has a new album out next month! Joanna Newsom, AKA “Kasbah Harp Lady”, is a woman whose voice is not to everyone’s taste. Yet she has an undeniable charm about her.

Just observe her harmonising with herself in “The Sprout and the Bean”:

I went and saw Joanna Newsom last year (report here), and she was great. I was smiling all the way through her unassuming, charming set. She had a true rapport with the audience, although it turns out that her interminably long songs are going to be no less interminable for Ys when it hits the stores next month.

I was surprised to see on YouTube the following recordings of Newsom singing “Inflammatory Writ” at the concert I was at!

Inflammatory Writ, part I
Inflammatory Writ, part II

I’d embed them, but they’re not embeddable. I could just be making things up here, but I could swear you can hear my laughter in the second one, after she thanks someone for loving her.

The question you must ask yourself at times like these is this: Are y’interested?
It’ll serve you well.

“We’re a part of this together/could never turn around and run”

Roxette are celebrating 20 years with their release of the uninspired A Collection of Roxette Hits: Their 20 Greatest Songs, a title which Something Awful rightly ripped into despite my questioning the rest of their judgements on the content. That is not the big, important thing, though: the important thing is The Roxbox – Roxette 86-06. You get the impression that more work went into this collection simply from the name alone.

The Roxbox is a collection of 78 Roxette songs: some hits, some B-sides, some demos, some … album tracks? Anyway, the lead single in some countries, and number two on the Swedish charts at the time of this writing is “One Wish”:

I’ve been a Roxette supporter since 1995. So yes, I came late to the party. And yes, I let that support lay dormant until I needed them again in 2003, when my Look for Roxette was what sustained me through the HSC. This was, of course, in the days of my rabid obsessiveness. I cannot raise such passion anymore, a source of both relief and distress.

So what to make of “One Wish”? I showed it to my friend William, a casual fan of Roxette (who had rearranged “Listen to Your Heart” as a birthday surprise with another of my friends, but was dashed down during the week), and he said “it’s good that Roxette have retained their sound”.

I’ve listened to a lot of Per Gessle this year, because his two disc album Son of a Plumber had me enthralled for a couple of weeks. When I’m listening to Roxette, though, I’m generally hanging out for Marie Fredriksson to carry me away on the wings of her voice.
“One Wish” is something that we don’t see very often in a Roxette song: call and response! Per sings a verse, and then Marie! It’s not the usual “lead and support” conundrum, and if I were to listen to it again I would be happy that they are working together.

Marie has not, of course, sung on a new Roxette song since 2002′s “Breathe”, since she was diagnosed with a brain tumour shortly after recording. Per is good, don’t get me wrong, but I want the Marie that only Roxette can offer (Marie’s solo efforts – at least those in English [unlike my Per collection, I have no Swedish language Marie] – are uncompelling).

Still, I must let “One Wish” grow on me. On the other hand, I appreciated the constant play from other music videos that Roxette have made over the years, from the camaraderie of “Silver Blue” (also substantially the same as “Dangerous” but I prefer “Silver Blue”):

To the most attractive Marie ever filmed in “June Afternoon” (a music video that features the best and worst of Roxette videos):

Of course, a retrospective video is going to reveal that Roxette may have been popular but they were almost never (I hope) at the height of fashion. For the entire Joyride era into Tourism, Per looked like an over made-up train wreck whose hair might melt off his head at any moment.

Yet I can not help but love him.

The Roxbox is the (not perfect; you should have seen the ruckus at the revelation of the track listing!) antidote to The Roxette Collection. I mean, their fourth “best of” album, when they had only released two new studio albums between their first and second/third compilation, and none since!

The Roxbox is great for a collector like me. Discovering new Roxette is like, I don’t know, finding Life on Mars. While I really want a new studio album (you can do it, Per and Marie! I believe in you and your two solo albums apiece since Room Service!), I will content myself with See Me.

Rock on, Roxette. Prove to the world that Sweden’s got what it takes: pop, metal and one of the world’s most pleasant societies.

At An Inconvenient Truth last night, I was subjected to some more trailers that I wasn’t quite expecting, from movies I had only heard of in passing.

The first was The Holiday (YouTube trailer), which I had thought was a book before it was a movie. Apparently not. Anyway, it’s a romantic comedy about switching Britain for America and vice versa, with Cameron Diaz saying “England is so quaint! Look at its old world appeal!” (carefully ignoring the tackiness of modern English culture) and Kate Winslet saying “America is so … American!” (I don’t know how to characterise America in this film).
Cameron Diaz meets Jude Law, and Kate Winslet meets … Jack Black? Jack Black is my hero, so if I can get the requisite girls in line, I might go and see this movie.
As a general rule, you can tell the calibre of film that Black is in by the state of his facial hair.

The other, more eyecatching, and possibly more noteworthy film, was Marie Antoinette:

Bubblegum pink titles? Contemporary music? People speaking with their “natural accents”? This is what we call “post modernism” or similar. I have an interest in the French Revolution fuelled largely by the anime Rose of Versailles, which is a wildly romantic and fairly balanced account of the times of France from Marie Antoinette’s rise to her fall. It was the sort of thing that I could keep people constantly updated on as I came up with new examples of decadence.

Marie Antoinette is, by many (positive) accounts, more of a trifle; A fluffy confection of a film that revises Marie Antoinette’s image. I like the idea that she felt the whole of Versailles was silly, because it was, but the problem in my mind is that in time she came to believe in the silliness and drove France into a ditch of famine, poverty, and, eventually, cycles of bloodshed.

I won’t mind seeing a sympathetic Marie Antoinette, as the Antoinette of Rose of Versailles travelled between extremes of shrewishness and tears. I suppose it may be just like Doctor Who or James Bond: the actor you saw first is the character. Which incarnation of Antoinette will be the one that sticks?
Considering the different tones taken by these films, I may be able to accept both accounts on their own merits. Whatever the case, I’m intrigued: the trailer has done its work.

Post script, ironically written before I finished writing the rest:
Damnit, I just read what Roger Ebert had to say about the film’s reception about Cannes and now I know how it ends. Sure, I know this history reasonably well, but you can never know when a historical recount ends until it stops being told. That article is interesting until the last paragraph, so don’t feel bad about reading it.
It’s also notable that Ebert got the same impression based on a hypothetical that I did from the ending of Rose of Versailles.

“Oh no!” they cry, “He’s gone and seen a Leftocrat bleeding heart liberal movie! Run for the hills!”

Feel free to run. If you don’t like Al Gore, you’re probably not going to like this movie. I’d like to think that global warming is not really a political issue for the most part, but as this is part biopic that serves to show precisely why Gore does what he does, it does delve slightly into his own campaigns over the years.

Personally, I agree with that which Gore sets out here: we have a problem. I really need to see South Park‘s “ManBearPig” to get another view on the matter (despite the fact that I think the evidence is fairly well … incontrovertible) because there’s no way in heck “Al Gore’s Penguin Army” is anything approaching worthwhile. Even if I had something against Gore, the “Penguin Army” clip would still be crap.

An Inconvenient Truth is an almost bleak but more hopeful than expected examination of the world at large. Despite the fact that Australia deserves its place on the shame list for being one of only two developed countries to not ratify the Kyoto Protocol, this documentary should not be ignored. Unless you really want to, you know, drown. Or you want me to guilt you about your grandchildren’s futures. I can do that.

Please Note: This topic has the capability to be somewhat inflammatory, so if you disagree with this post please just walk away.

This is about my fourth attempt at writing something about Dead Rising. You would have been better served if I chronicled my experience in instalments, because my attitudes changed dramatically over the days … but I was too busy playing it.

Overcoming addiction is a good thing. For the last 7 days, I was consumed by Dead Rising. Now it’s out of my system and I can go on living, and writing. I can breathe a little easier knowing that the zombie threat is quashed.

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The title “Little Miss Sunshine” appearing across the face of the suicidally depressed Steve Carell is proof that irony lives.
Another installment in the great tradition of American road movies, Little Miss Sunshine is one of those “melanchomedies”* that uplifts as it saddens.

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