Velcrometer
Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks
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M. Giant's Velcrometer Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks |
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Tuesday, August 30, 2011 M. Ovie Reviews: Captain America: The First Avenger I wasn't all that excited about seeing Captain America: The First Avenger, to be honest. I've never been a Captain America fan in any sense. But then I've seen it came out and got really good reviews and I'd already seen both Iron Men and Thor, and I had a free evening, so I figured, why not complete the set? I'm glad I did. After all, it's not like this would be the first time I'd had doubts on my way to a movie about a comic-book superhero, and Superman had turned out pretty well for me in 1978. As spoiler-free as I try to keep these reviews, the movie itself doesn't help much. It opens with a scene set in the present day that pretty much gives away the ending and goes from there. Seriously, from the beginning of the third act you know exactly how this thing is going to end. Not that that's unusual in a superhero film, but one expects a little effort at keeping us guessing. Then it's the height of World War II, and a skinny little runt named Steve Rogers is trying to get into the army. It's a pretty off-putting image, because he looks like I could take him, and yet the voice coming out of that birdlike chest is the deep rumble of a much larger man. That seems like something they could have fixed. After all, I'm assuming this first act of the movie was filmed last, after the producers had skinned beefy star Chris Evans and wrapped the bleached pelt around the stripped skeleton of DJ Qualls, which explains why we haven't seen DJ Qualls in anything for a while now. But scientist Stanley Tucci sees through Steve's pipe-cleaner-man exterior and recognizes him as the perfect candidate to become his first "super-soldier." Try to ignore the creepy implications of that, because events transpire in such a way that Steve also becomes the last. The good news is that now he's a towering hunk of man, running barefoot through the streets of 1940s New York in uniform pants that have fortuitously become a fashionable pair of man-pris. But his challenges aren't over, because there's a war on. Not that he gets to go join it right away, oh no. In fact, he has to jump through quite a few unlikely hoops before he gets to fight, and even then it's not against the Germans as a geopolitical entity, but some crazed splinter group right out of…well, a comic book. But it's all a lot more fun than it sounds, believe it or not. For some reason, comic book movies are expected to go for natural realism, whether it makes sense or not (and I suspect that reason is Dick Tracy), and there's enough stuff you can almost buy in this one to wash down the stuff you can't. And of course, like the other moves I mentioned, Captain America isn't designed to stand on it's own, not really. It's more like it and the other movies I mentioned are part of a multi-movie buildup for The Avengers, coming out next year. It's won't be the first time we've seen an ensemble superhero movie, but it's probably the first time we've seen one with an ensemble of prequels. And of course, with all of these Marvel films, everyone knows to stay to the end of the credits for a "teaser" of the next one, which lasts about thirty seconds, or about five percent of the lengths of the credits themselves. At this point, these movies could get away with just being examples of the most effective closing credits delivery system of all time, but Captain America does it in a way that doesn't make you feel suckered about it. Mainly by making the stuff before the credits entertaining. posted by M. Giant 9:55 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Tuesday, August 23, 2011 All My Bass Are Belong to Me When I just now totaled up how many strings in all are in or on the various musical instruments in our house, I came up with the rather alarming figure of 278. Yes, the majority of those are in the piano, but if you subtract 216 that's still a pretty big number. It actually just reached that total this past weekend. Trash has been after me to buy a backup bass. Given how busy the band has been lately, she thinks I should have an extra axe on hand in case I break a string or pull a Townshend or something during a gig. I've been resisting the idea, not just because I'm cheap (which I am -- very, very cheap), but also because I pretty much already have my dream instrument, a Fender Precision Bass I bought more than a decade ago when I was in my first band, as an upgrade from the used Gibson Epiphone I'd bought with my high school graduation money. Yes, these are the kind of arguments we have: Trash wants me to buy more musical instruments for myself than I want to. But she kept at it, and when we basically got a 20%-off-$500-or-more-coupon from Guitar Center, my resistance crumbled. I headed to the store. That woman always gets her way. Trouble was, there wasn't really another bass I wanted badly enough, at least not there, and at least not for the price I was prepared to pay (remember how I'm cheap?). I mean, I could have dropped a grand on another P-Bass, but if I wanted to do that I wouldn't have gotten the Squier model in the first place. Plus it's totally contrary to my perverse self-pride in being the opposite of a gear-snob. I could have gone the other direction and nabbed the $99 Craptone they had stashed shamefully in the corner, but that would be leaving all that coupon-cash on the table. And I was torn between a desire to get something totally different from what I have and my partiality to the classics. The latter helped me rule out the multi-pointed hot-pink ones and the seven-string beasts with graphite bodies and collapsible necks and onboard MIDI interfaces, but I confess that I tried out a big white Thunderbird, on the grounds that John Entwhistle used to play them. It was like playing a snow shovel strung with power lines. Then I remembered that I wouldn't play most of the other goofy-ass looking basses The Ox routinely carried onstage anyway. I gave up, bought some other crap (there's always plenty of other crap you need at Guitar Center – it's like Target for musicians) and headed home otherwise empty-handed. But then the next day, the last day the coupon code was valid, I went to the other Guitar Center across town, a larger one that I thought might have a wider selection. Which is where I found my new backup bass. Behold: 
No, that's not my actual new bass, that's from a sales website. But mine looks just like it. I'm not going to bore you with technical specs, because they bore me too and if I did I'd be a total gear snob. But what first caught my eye -- aside from the fact that it was laid out in a plush "coffin" case -- is the extra control knobs, as opposed to my P-Bass's two knobs that only allow me to control the ranges between soft-loud and boom-pimp. I also appreciate the pickups, a pair of humbuckers (dirty!) that rise up in the middle (dirtier!) to mirror the curvature of the strings so they'll all sound equally loud. Count the frets: 24, representing two octaves per string, my personal record. And it looks different, with its 3-D front and warped-Fender outline, but not too different. It's basically as close as I'll ever get to what I call a "space bass." But I think my favorite thing about it is how light it is. It almost makes my P-Bass feel like I'm playing a snow shovel strung with power lines. I got home with it and showed it to Trash. She agreed that it was pretty enough, but when I handed it to her she was like, "Whoa!" Even her self-described Muppet-hands, which alone kept her from taking up guitar at all until just a few months ago, fit all the way around the instrument's slim neck. She held it in her lap for a while and played a few notes, for fun. Which, to understand what that means, if she ever actually agreed to pick up my P-Bass, she'd feel like she was playing an oil derrick strung with anchor chains. "Why don't more girls play bass?" she suddenly asked me from behind my new backup instrument. And instead of flashing on Tina Weymouth, Johnette Napolitano, Kim Deal, Sara Lee, and Meshell Ndegeocello, I realized, "I just bought you a bass, didn't it?" Meanwhile, M. Edium was asking me, "Can I have your old bass?" I may need to go bass-shopping again soon. Now that I've gotten good at it. * * * If you're going to be in Minnesota this weekend, you'll actually have a chance to see my new bass in person. The band I'm in, The Question, will be playing a Toys for Tots benefit show at Sal's Angus Grill in Withrow, Minnesota on Saturday night. We're the second band on the bill and will probably be going on sometime after 9:00 PM. If you show up and say hi I'll tell you when and where our next gig after that's going to be. Hope to see you there! posted by M. Giant 7:08 PM 2 comments 2 Comments:My sister is the bass player in a blues band in Phoenix. She just started a couple of years ago (was always musically talented with wind instruments) and is happily playing gigs now. I'm so proud of her!
By
Ha—isn't there an unspoken rule that if there's a lone female in a rock band and she plays an instrument, she's almost always the bassist? Besides Tina and Johnette, I'm thinking Kim Gordon, Aimee Mann, Sean Yseult, D'arcy Wretzky...well, Christine McVie was the only woman in Fleetwood Mac for a while, but that was a generation earlier.
By Wednesday, August 17, 2011 M. Ovie Reviews: Cowboys & Aliens I've been excited about Cowboys & Aliens ever since I saw the title on Twitter and thought, dude, what a fun, stupid idea for a movie! Turns out I was only half right. Let me start by saying my sister-in-law is the only woman I know who hates Daniel Craig. She doesn't seem to see what most people see, just a grumpy sourpuss. But maybe more people will see it in Cowboys & Aliens. I certainly did. As is apparent from the advertising, Craig plays an Old West mystery man apparently dropped from the sky with some alien hardware locked to his wrist. Even he doesn't know who he is or where he came from, so he spends a lot of the movie seeking those answers, most of which turn out to be less interesting than you can imagine. And, almost in vindication of my sister-in-law's opinion, he mostly does it glowering from under the brim of an unflattering cowboy hat, with his mouth screwed up into a tight m. The plus side is that when he's doing that with his mouth we don't have to listen to his American accent. In short, he doesn't appear to be having any fun at all, which is bad enough in a movie called Cowboys & Aliens. But what's even worse is that almost nobody else seems to be having very much fun either -- even director Jon Favreau, who can usually be counted on to do so. Harrison Ford plays a grizzled Civil War veteran who does a lot of glowering and tough talking, but he keeps himself from descending into self-parody in his one recent gig where self-parody seems called for. Adam Beach, formerly from Law & Order: Sex Police, has a fairly large role in his usual capacity as a charisma-sink, and Olivia Wilde's character basically kicks the Manson Lamps on high-beam and keeps them there. Thank God for Clancy Brown and Sam Rockwell, who even as tired archetypes give it all they've got. Brown relishes his part as a crusty preacher, while Rockwell gets to deliver all of what this movie calls jokes from behind a Teddy Roosevelt moustache and spectacles. Other than those two, though, everyone else seems to be following Craig's lead and make sure everything comes off as seriously as possible. Which doesn't really seem appropriate for a movie called Cowboys & Aliens, does it? I think therein lies the problem. Obviously a big part of marketing a movie lies with setting expectations, and I suppose I can't claim that the trailers lied to me. But if you put out a movie with that title, you're creating an impression that it's going be a fun, genre-bending mashup that lets you in on the joke. Instead, it sets out to be both a dead serious Western and a dead serious sci-fi actioner, and ends up not succeeding at either. Instead, while you're watching Daniel Craig taunt his torturer, or Harrison Ford get captured and then form an uneasy alliance with non-English speaking indigenous life forms, you just wish you were watching them doing those things for the first time in Casino Royale and Return of the Jedi, respectively. And then you're wishing you were watching Sam Rockwell in a different genre send-up, namely Galaxy Quest. Makes it tough to enjoy this film on its own terms when it keeps messing with the terms of other films. Seems like I've seen a lot of Westerns in the past year. Priest was a post-apocalyptic horror Western, Rango was an animated Western with a cast of talking varmints, and True Grit was, well, just a Western. I guess I probably shouldn't be surprised that that was the best of the bunch. posted by M. Giant 8:34 PM 3 comments 3 Comments:I liked it.
By I think the Daniel Craig grumpiness was faked -- he just married Rachel Weisz, and I think he was so goddamned happy with that and with her and the whole honeymoon phase that the only way he could deal with it for the movie was to put on Serious Grumpyface Mask, to hide the silly smiling. I doubt his mind was on the film at all.
By Cowboys & Aliens is a movie for all interest as it has action.thrill and drama.Other than brilliant performance by Harrison and Daniel Craig.I watched this movie 3 times.So you can understand how much I like this movie.
By Saturday, August 06, 2011 Trail's End There aren't many places I went thirty years ago that I still go to. Not my home at the time, which we vacated near the end of the eighties. Not my elementary school, although I still have the occasional dream that I'm back there and this time I'm going to kick ass. Certainly not the Catholic church we went to, or any Catholic church at all, and church in general hardly ever. Not any of the stores or parks or friends' houses that used to make up my neighborhood circle. In fact, there's just about one place I still go to that I went to in 1981. That was the year my parents sent for a brochure (yes, people used to do that) and decided to take us all up to a resort a half-day's drive away in Northern Minnesota called Trail's End. I thought it was a terrible, depressing name, ripe for mocking even by eleven-year-old me. You drove way up out of the northern suburbs, past Lake Mille Lacs, through Judy Garland's home town, and then another hour or so until you were off the paved road and making your way with increasing apprehension down narrowing dirt tracks right out of a Stephen King short story. But then, on that last Saturday in July 1981, it suddenly opened out into a sprawling collection of rustic, run-down cabins, overlooked by a slightly less rustic lodge and sloping down to the dock extending for what seemed like miles into Bowstring Lake. And then we all realized why it was called that. My parents, my two sisters, my aunt and uncle, their two daughters and I spent a week sharing a three-bedroom cabin. We spent a lot of time swimming and fishing and exploring the region, and one night my older sister watched Charles and Diana get married on the fuzzy screen of a portable black and white TV we never bothered with again. It may not sound that great, but the nine of us went back that same week every year pretty much all through our teens, and at least a couple of us have gone back almost every year since. That first year, the owners and proprietors were an older couple we referred to as Bert and Mrs. Bert, but after a year or two they sold the place to a younger couple with a couple of young sons. And they made that place their livelihood. The cabins stayed rustic, but got a lot less run-down. The grounds were completely made over, the docks expanded, some cabins torn down and rebuilt from the ground up. Every year we went back, something else was new. They were tireless, pouring all their energy into the place. Their dad used to say, "We don't need to go anywhere, we're already on vacation." Most of us kids quit going in our late teens, at least for the whole week, but then we all started going back, at least for a few days. I brought Trash up there the first summer after we got married, although I admit I have a hell of a time finding the place the first time I tried to navigate up there on my own, in the days before even my early-adopter uncle had a GPS. One year we brought Trash's mom and stepdad with us and shared a cabin with them the same week my family was there. We've also skipped a number of years, and I haven't been back at all since M. Edium was born. Until this last week. He went up with my parents and younger sister and my aunt and uncle last Saturday, for the whole week. My younger cousins, one of whom was younger than M. Edium is now the first year we went, both have husbands and kids of their own, and they also made the trip up for their first time in years, from Kansas and Texas respectively. My older sister was there the first half of the week, but had to return to work before I could drive up and join them on Wednesday. Now, instead of nine of us in one cabin, there were fourteen of us spread across three cabins, one of which had been renovated since we started going and two of which hadn't been there at all, I don't think. The place has changed so much since my first sight of it, back when my dad was my age. It's going to change more. The man who bought the place with his family decades ago passed away this spring. Some of us drove up to Deer River for the memorial, and we were far from the only family from the cities who did so, judging by the guest book. Just his last week, his widow signed the papers to sell it to a new family, who is going to try to run the place the same way it's been run all this time. That's going to be a tall order. I don't expect the one place I've been going semi-regularly for 30 years to stop changing over the next 30. That would be the biggest change of all. I just hope it's not the end of the trail. posted by M. Giant 9:28 PM 1 comments 1 Comments:I am currently experiencing a similar past/present holiday nostalgia dichotomy and it’s a wonderful thing.
By Monday, August 01, 2011 M. Ovie Reviews: Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer M. Edium is a fan of several book series, but with one glaring, culture-redefining exception, most of them don't get made into movies. In most cases, this is entirely understandable. Unfortunately, in this one case, they did it anyway. M. Edium enjoys the books by Megan MacDonald that center around Stink, who is the younger brother of the protagonist of MacDonald's Judy Moody series. Apparently Judy Moody books are such a hit that the author launched a spinoff series. Or she was trying to score some boy readers. Either way, M. Edium really wanted to see Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer for Stink, and I thought, well, how bad could it be? I will now attempt to answer that question, although I will almost certainly fail. Here's how bad it was: I was glad M. Edium likes to sit in the back row, because that way I could break my rule against texting in theaters and send Trash this exact message, three minutes in: ZOMG I ALREADY HATE THIS MOVIE SO MUCH And my phone doesn't do all caps easily, either. So here is a partial list of all the things I hate about this movie. It starts with the protagonist beginning her day in the morning, which is the laziest beginning possible for a movie. At least her hair looks like she just woke up, but after a while you realize that it's going to look like that through the whole movie. Judy is a ragamuffin who looks like what you might get if you took a few decades away from Joan Cusack, and then took away everything else you like about Joan Cusack, particularly her smoldering charisma. Judy's also a borderline-bippolar idiot whose mission for the movie is to maximize her fun over the summer using a lame points system of her own devising which, as someone points out to her waaaay too late in the movie, sucks the fun out of everything, especially for the viewer. I soon found myself agreeing with M. Edium that Stink is the real star here. Sure, the young actor playing him is locked in an epic struggle with a crippling speech impediment, but Stink's the Moody who actually makes things happen. Pretty much the best thing that can be said about perennial loser Judy is that she eventually figures out that she needs to abandon her own lame pursuits and glom onto whatever Stink's up to instead. This is not to say the movie doesn't try hard with every frame, because it does. Oh, my Gaaawd, how it tries. Nearly every shot is a "wacky" close-up or other nutty angle with cartoon sound effects and text and arrows and other crap scribbled on the screen; nearly every cast member hams it up so much they're practically spiral-cut; and there are several irrelevant animated fantasy interludes that make you want to kill yourself and everyone involved in making the movie even more than you did before they started. I'll give props to Heather Graham for almost not looking embarrassed to be there in several scenes. She plays Judy's stereotypical "free spirited" hippie artist aunt almost as though the rent isn't due, so good on her, I guess. Oddly enough, I'm reminded of Eyes Wide Shut, about which my first reaction was that although I could see what Kubrick was trying to do, I couldn't decide whether he did it, or whether it was even worth doing. In this case, I can say without reservation that I saw what this movie was trying to do, it certainly did it, and it definitely should not have been done. Watching Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer manages to be both hyperactive and boring at the same time, which means that watching it is almost exactly like being trapped in a small room with an emotionally unstable third-grader. So kudos on accomplishing that, I guess. posted by M. Giant 9:48 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:
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