CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
Profile continued . . .

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POLARITY 172

Monday, December 05, 2005

this entry brought to you by trans-siberian orchestra, "wizard in winter" (see "christmas lights of the damned, below)


THE GOOD

Donnie Darko Every now and again, it's a real good feeling to watch a completely befuddling, stupefying, puzzle of a movie that makes no sense. This is one of those; a David Lynch-like psychological thriller with extremely deep, complex characters, thoughtful, spot-on social commentary, and an incomprehensible plot involving an incredibly creepy 6 foot tall demonic bunny rabbit that may or may not be from the future, and the way he relates with Donnie, who may or may not be totally and completely insane (though we know Donnie has... issues, this last question is never answered, which gives the movie that much more credit). Jake Gyllenhaal is absolutely fantastic as a right-on-the-edge of going totally crazy teenaged boy, and the flip-flop of letting himself slip into full-on sociopath and trying to keep himself as normal a human being as possible is what makes this movie so completely watchable. This is a thinker's movie, and if it makes no sense, that only makes you want to see the movie multiple times. Absolutely brilliant.

Handsome Boy Modeling School, White People The concept: two ridiculously handsome hip-hop producers (Nathaniel Merriweather and Chest Rockwell, who are the alter egos of Gorillaz producer Dan Nakamura and De La Soul producer Prince Paul) open up a school for handsomeness, and multiple guest stars drop by to make extremely handsome music. Although this sounds like a concept that would be a laugh riot, other than the somewhat amusing hip-hop skits starring Tim Meadows as the Ladies' Man, Father Guido Sarducci (!), and a couple of dead-on impressions of Jay-Z and RZA from Wu-Tang (the latter even funnier because the actual RZA shows up on the excellently funky "A Day In the Life" which also features The Mars Volta, where Cedric Bixler-Zavala's voice is one of the highpoints of the album), what's surprising is that none of the songs are particularly funny-- in fact, they often tackle some pretty serious topical subjects. Because of the nature of working with different artists in every song and, in most cases, multiple artists per song, there are a few rough spots ("Are You Down With It" with Mike Patton seems a little out of place because Mike is just too weird for this kind of project, and the sloppy, inconsistent "Rock And Roll (Could Never Hip-Hop Like This)" would have been difficult to enjoy in the first place but is utterly ruined by Mike Shinoda and Chester Bennington of Linkin Park), but for the most part, if hip-hop was always this good, I'd buy a lot more of it. Del The Funky Homosapien is welcome as always on "The World's Gone Mad" with Alex Kapranos from Franz Ferdinand cooing wistfully "Take me away..."; "Class System" with Julee Cruise's wonderously airy, jazzy croon and Pharrell Williams smooth-as-silk backing vocals; the bouncy, tribute-to-the-homies "If It Wasn't For You" with De La Soul. The best songs on the album, however, are "Breakdown" with otherwise mediocre Jack Johnson (if Johnson hired Nakamura and Paul to produce all his records, he could count me as a fan), and the utterly gorgeous, hauntingly aching "I've Been Thinking" with Cat Power.

The Test Your Music Muscle Game at Heavy.com Some genius graphic artist over at Virgin Digital came up with this utterly brilliant webgame to test your music knowledge. The game is a picture of 74 different visual analogies to bands. For example, there is a man taking a hammer to a pumpkin-- this is obviously Smashing Pumpkins; and so on from there. The references are extremely clever, and some of them really hard to spot. There is no answer key because it's actually a contest where you can win a brand new computer, and that's cool and all, but I really don't care one way or another if I can possibly win something, because this is honestly the most fun I've had with a web-based game in a long time-- and it's barely even interactive! So far Michelle and I have gotten 46 bands-- to think that there are almost thirty more is kind of staggering.

Final Fantasy X I know it's been uhm, four years since the game came out, but I stopped playing about three and a half years ago when I was at around 75% completion, and just got around to beating it last week. I'd forgotten how much I loved this game. The boss was more than disappointing and was a total pushover ( I had Game Over three times in the room before him, but could have defeated him in my sleep), and the ending was a bit predictable, worsened by the fact I never liked the way characters looked in CGI, but I had a blast playing it again. Shame the next FF is probably going to suck.

Emotion Eric I linked to this page years and years ago, and I was thinking about it last night, and ended up finding it and laughing my ass off. This kid Eric gets requests for emoting something-- at first just "happy" and "sad" and "fear", and he acts them out for the camera. At first they're not that funny, but if you give it a while and start to get to the really good stuff (such as "Eric as a Chick Magnet", "Thinking Outside the Box" or "Computer just ate my 20 page research paper"), you'll end up laughing your ass off. I'd recommend starting at the bottom where the more creative ones are and working your way up-- this kid is seriously hilarious. It's a shame he doesn't appear to be updating the site anymore.


THE BAD

Christmas Lights... of THE DAMNED When you're a kid and you're real, real bad, Santa gives you coal. When you're grown up and you've been real, real bad, Santa gives you a neighbor like this guy. Click the link, and prepare for utter insanity. Be glad that you gave that extra 15 cents that was in your pocket to the Salvation Army hanging out in front of your local Wal-Mart, because if you hadn't... you'd be singing this fucking song through the whole month of December, even when he turned off the music. Note: yes, I actually think this house is frigging awesome, and I've seen this clip like 15 times in the past two weeks. Doesn't stop me from thanking Jesus I don't live next to him. If you're totally blown away by this like I am, click here to learn more who this guy is and how he did it.

Aeon Flux the movie It's not that I expected it to be fantastic, but all the trailers I saw of it actually got me rather excited. I haven't seen it yet, but critical response has been damning. I could handle a movie that hovered around the 50% area at RottenTomatoes, but 13%? I can't help but feel a little disappointed.

Fall Out Boy, "Sugar We're Going Down" Hey, it's another soaring emo-punk song with obnoxious vocals. Somebody make it stop. Please?

Black Eyed Peas, "My Humps" I have to admit a certain catchiness to this song, but everyone keeps acting like they're this great progressive rap group, yet their newest single is a near-retarded jingle about a girl who is very proud of her "lady lumps". Hey, good for her.

Beer I've never liked the taste of beer. Ever. It always tastes like nicely chilled animal piss to me. But then, I'm not a beer connoisseur and I haven't tried that many varieties, so, with our experience lately with wine (I think we've bought about 15 bottles of different kinds of wine since we saw Sideways), we decided to go ahead and give beer a whirl, but attempting it with fine imported beer, hoping that would make the difference. After having tried Tsing Tau and Groltsh, I've made up my mind: beer is for suckers.
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with love from CRS @ 8:44 PM 

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