A Fistful of Reviews
"The Twilight Saga: Eclipse" (2010)
Really, what can be said about this newest obscenity that can't be said about the previous one or the one before that?
Once more, any given "Twilight" film can be illustrated for the uninitiated thusly: imagine a beautiful, perfectly-cooked steak. Or some leaves or diatomaceous earth or whatever it is vegetarians prefer instead. Perfectly seasoned and seared and cooked to order. The waiter brings it to your table and proceeds to ladle a dollop of excrement right in the center of it. Regardless of how good it might have been, there is no separating it from the excrement. You could cut around the sullied parts, but there's still the smell and the subject of dignity to consider. No amount of washing or nose-holding or anything else can save it: both the steak and the experience of eating it have been permanently ruined.
The scenery-chewing actors playing Beautiful Graceful, Edward, and Jacob and the forehead-slappingly trite lines they speak are the offal, in this case.
As I've said before, it's not a challenge to bash Stephanie Meyer's misbegotten squishy-headed literary children and the resultant ur-blockbusters. As I've intimated, they're all neat, tidy instruction manuals for mixed-up teenaged girls to turn themselves into spineless concubines for uncaring, abusive men for the rest of their pitiful and in all likelihood short lives. Through my self-torture insofar as forcing myself to watch these initially out of a masochistic curiosity but later out of some half-baked tongue-in-cheek messiah complex, I've learned that, really, they're not all bad. I, personally, don't like Meyer's new twist on the vampire legend - sparkling and quite unharmed in sunshine, apparently totally composed of crystal under the skin, and as we learned in this film, "more powerful in their first seven months of life than at any other time" thanks to the remnant human blood in their veins -- but in a vast ocean of bloodsucker harlequin romances, one can't truly fault her just for trying something new.
One CAN fault her for removing from vampires nearly all weaknesses and thereby castrating their post-human pathos, but in so doing she also avoids the utterly time-worn self-loathing that has been explored to death (and explored very readably) by Anne Rice. If only she took the same care to avoid all the other cliches: love triangles ripped straight from the pages of "Archie," vampire/werewolf enmity, a shadowy cabal of ruling vampires, vampires who would feel quite bad about turning someone they love, and so on.
Back in this installment are the rest of the Cullen clan, who unlike Robert Pattinson can actually act (though they are rarely called to do so), and this time around we're given glimpses into the pasts of two of them. These are without question the high points of the film. In the flashbacks, one set during the Civil War and one around the turn of the century, the audience is given not only character development for these two, but are actually given reason to care about what happens to them, both sorely and glaringly lacking from the three main-main characters. But, having killed their requisite time between then and Beautiful Graceful pouting and looking vaguely disgusted some more, the plot shuffled them back to the rear and forgot about them.
Furthermore, the film starts to edge into interesting territory when the Cullens and Jacob's Native American werewolf pack find themselves strange bedfellows in the face of renegade vamp Victoria raising an army of newborn vampires to hunt down Beautiful Graceful. Cliche again, but given the quality of the supporting cast it was actually handled surprisingly well.
However I maintain that if the boring and bored-looking main characters were somehow magically left on the cutting room floor and with it all their soap-operaish mooning over eachother and their whining and pouting, and this was somehow just a film about a vampire coven and a werewolf pack forging an alliance as forbidden as love between a vampire and a human, it would have been pretty watchable.
But, ultimately, there is still shit on my porterhouse.
"Attack Attack!" by Attack Attack! (2010)
I have to hand it to these guys, because despite earning their sound the nickname "crab core" for the strange poses the bassist and rhythm guitar make while playing, not only have they improved on their last album but perhaps have produced my favorite record of the year.
When their first album came out, its big single was a song whimsically titled "Stick Stickley." By "whimsical" I mean an eye-rollingly banal pop culture reference, which is actually the only way they know how to name songs. "Stick Stickley" starts out like every other hardcore/grindcore/deathcore/goatsecore/whatevercore song, with unintelligibly growly vocals and actually pretty good bass and guitars, all nice and heavy. But then, after the second chorus, it abruptly shifted gears into this truly bizarre guitar-driven synth-dance music. Like, completely turned on a dime. One moment it's URRRRRR URRRRRRR OOOOOOOOHHH with the standard metal accompaniment and the next it wouldn't be too out of place at a circuit party on Ibiza.
I loved it. I loved the juxtaposition of the two styles, I loved the sound of metal guitars used as rhythm in dance music, and I loved the autotuned vocals of the auxiliary singer they ungagged just for that part of the song. I wished aloud that every song on the album sounded just like it: what a dedicated metal fan hears while having a minor stroke.
Their producer must have been passing by right then and otherwise liked the cut of my jib, because my wish has been granted. With just one exception, where Attack Attack! goes back to their grind/death/who cares roots ("AC-130,") all the songs sound like "Stick Stickley" to varying degrees. But not content to merely grant my wish, apparently, in a few songs they worked in a DubStep beat. The result veers so wildly between styles that it sounds like someone changing channels on a satellite radio. And the result, if you can stand it, is glorious.
It's amazing, but it also defies quantification. DubStep...fucking...Hardcore...fucking...Synthpop...Dance...music. Hardstep Dancepop? Dubcore Synthdance?
With their eponymous album, I am firmly convinced that someone at Attack Attack!, though probably just their producer, is hard at work inventing a new subgenre of music. Decades from now, "J-Country Acid-Soul Scream-Hop Electro JazzStep" will be the only music in the world. Every dentist's waiting room, every karaoke bar, every coffee shop. I have seen it. This cannot be prevented; only delayed, only the details changed.
"The Sixth Column" by Robert Heinlein
This 1949-vintage tale of the occupation of the United States I bought along with his 1964 effort "Farnham's Freehold," based solely on hearing that they were wildly racist stories. I bought Norman Spinrad's "The Iron Dream" for much the same reason: these books are legendarily criticized as being horribly bigoted. "The Iron Dream" isn't -- at least, so much as any book with Adolf Hitler in full SS regalia popping a wheelie on a swastika-covered motorcycle on the cover isn't -- because what Spinrad did was craft a marvelous parody novel written by Adolf Hitler in an alternate history where, instead of getting into Austrian politics in the '30s, he moved to the United States and became a science fiction author...and worked all his "Mein Kampf" wiles out in the form of a future post-apocalyptic dystopia filled with sinister Jewish caricatures and blond-haired blue-eyed genetically pure "true humans." His Mary Sue? "Feric Jaggar." Feric's weapon of choice? An invincible metal mace with a clenched fist for a head.
It was a riot and I didn't feel bad at all for paying an arm and a leg for the fair-condition paperback I spent days trying to find. And it remains the crown jewel of my book collection, albeit a feverishly-justified one. "Wait, wait, let me explain...yes, that is a swastika...yes, that is Hitler popping a bitchin' wheelie...hold on now..."
"The Sixth Column," conversely, I didn't quite know how to take. It concerns, basically, the Chinese taking over and occupying the United States, and the six men left in NORAD who fight back with superscience and a comically phony religion to hide it. On the one hand there is a really annoying amount of phrases like "yellow-skinned" and "slant-eyed" and quite a bit of the (naturally) two-fisted, lantern-jawed all-American heroes referring to them as "monkeys." But on the other, after a while I thought: "If China decided to up and conquer the U.S., I myself would probably spit some pretty vile racial epithets." And so, likely, would you. People in war have a long and rather understandable tradition of dehumanizing their enemies (or at least their quarries): Nips, Japs, Krauts, Chinks, Slants, Slopes, Hajis, Skinnies...the list goes on. They're racist, sure, but when you're trying to take a beach or defend a convoy, one really doesn't have time to check yourself for culturally-sensitive language or put yourself in their shoes, and when you're trying to kill someone it never helps to take care to not hurt their feelings.
But so far as this novel goes, it seems more than anything a product of the same zeitgeist that compels your kindly, loving old grandmother to scandalize you in public by saying something about "the niggers." Back then, that's simply how people thought about race, which is regrettable but should also definitely be remembered as a definite improvement on how they thought about race at the turn of the 20th century and in the early 19th.
Unfortunately the plot suffers from pacing issues and the central deus ex machina that literally and figuratively powers the plot never really gets any easier to swallow.
"Eclipse:" F+
"Attack Attack!: NO FATE BUT WHAT WE MAKE
"The Sixth Column:" C-
Really, what can be said about this newest obscenity that can't be said about the previous one or the one before that?
Once more, any given "Twilight" film can be illustrated for the uninitiated thusly: imagine a beautiful, perfectly-cooked steak. Or some leaves or diatomaceous earth or whatever it is vegetarians prefer instead. Perfectly seasoned and seared and cooked to order. The waiter brings it to your table and proceeds to ladle a dollop of excrement right in the center of it. Regardless of how good it might have been, there is no separating it from the excrement. You could cut around the sullied parts, but there's still the smell and the subject of dignity to consider. No amount of washing or nose-holding or anything else can save it: both the steak and the experience of eating it have been permanently ruined.
The scenery-chewing actors playing Beautiful Graceful, Edward, and Jacob and the forehead-slappingly trite lines they speak are the offal, in this case.
As I've said before, it's not a challenge to bash Stephanie Meyer's misbegotten squishy-headed literary children and the resultant ur-blockbusters. As I've intimated, they're all neat, tidy instruction manuals for mixed-up teenaged girls to turn themselves into spineless concubines for uncaring, abusive men for the rest of their pitiful and in all likelihood short lives. Through my self-torture insofar as forcing myself to watch these initially out of a masochistic curiosity but later out of some half-baked tongue-in-cheek messiah complex, I've learned that, really, they're not all bad. I, personally, don't like Meyer's new twist on the vampire legend - sparkling and quite unharmed in sunshine, apparently totally composed of crystal under the skin, and as we learned in this film, "more powerful in their first seven months of life than at any other time" thanks to the remnant human blood in their veins -- but in a vast ocean of bloodsucker harlequin romances, one can't truly fault her just for trying something new.
One CAN fault her for removing from vampires nearly all weaknesses and thereby castrating their post-human pathos, but in so doing she also avoids the utterly time-worn self-loathing that has been explored to death (and explored very readably) by Anne Rice. If only she took the same care to avoid all the other cliches: love triangles ripped straight from the pages of "Archie," vampire/werewolf enmity, a shadowy cabal of ruling vampires, vampires who would feel quite bad about turning someone they love, and so on.
Back in this installment are the rest of the Cullen clan, who unlike Robert Pattinson can actually act (though they are rarely called to do so), and this time around we're given glimpses into the pasts of two of them. These are without question the high points of the film. In the flashbacks, one set during the Civil War and one around the turn of the century, the audience is given not only character development for these two, but are actually given reason to care about what happens to them, both sorely and glaringly lacking from the three main-main characters. But, having killed their requisite time between then and Beautiful Graceful pouting and looking vaguely disgusted some more, the plot shuffled them back to the rear and forgot about them.
Furthermore, the film starts to edge into interesting territory when the Cullens and Jacob's Native American werewolf pack find themselves strange bedfellows in the face of renegade vamp Victoria raising an army of newborn vampires to hunt down Beautiful Graceful. Cliche again, but given the quality of the supporting cast it was actually handled surprisingly well.
However I maintain that if the boring and bored-looking main characters were somehow magically left on the cutting room floor and with it all their soap-operaish mooning over eachother and their whining and pouting, and this was somehow just a film about a vampire coven and a werewolf pack forging an alliance as forbidden as love between a vampire and a human, it would have been pretty watchable.
But, ultimately, there is still shit on my porterhouse.
"Attack Attack!" by Attack Attack! (2010)
I have to hand it to these guys, because despite earning their sound the nickname "crab core" for the strange poses the bassist and rhythm guitar make while playing, not only have they improved on their last album but perhaps have produced my favorite record of the year.
When their first album came out, its big single was a song whimsically titled "Stick Stickley." By "whimsical" I mean an eye-rollingly banal pop culture reference, which is actually the only way they know how to name songs. "Stick Stickley" starts out like every other hardcore/grindcore/deathcore/goatsecore/whatevercore song, with unintelligibly growly vocals and actually pretty good bass and guitars, all nice and heavy. But then, after the second chorus, it abruptly shifted gears into this truly bizarre guitar-driven synth-dance music. Like, completely turned on a dime. One moment it's URRRRRR URRRRRRR OOOOOOOOHHH with the standard metal accompaniment and the next it wouldn't be too out of place at a circuit party on Ibiza.
I loved it. I loved the juxtaposition of the two styles, I loved the sound of metal guitars used as rhythm in dance music, and I loved the autotuned vocals of the auxiliary singer they ungagged just for that part of the song. I wished aloud that every song on the album sounded just like it: what a dedicated metal fan hears while having a minor stroke.
Their producer must have been passing by right then and otherwise liked the cut of my jib, because my wish has been granted. With just one exception, where Attack Attack! goes back to their grind/death/who cares roots ("AC-130,") all the songs sound like "Stick Stickley" to varying degrees. But not content to merely grant my wish, apparently, in a few songs they worked in a DubStep beat. The result veers so wildly between styles that it sounds like someone changing channels on a satellite radio. And the result, if you can stand it, is glorious.
It's amazing, but it also defies quantification. DubStep...fucking...Hardcore...fucking...Synthpop...Dance...music. Hardstep Dancepop? Dubcore Synthdance?
With their eponymous album, I am firmly convinced that someone at Attack Attack!, though probably just their producer, is hard at work inventing a new subgenre of music. Decades from now, "J-Country Acid-Soul Scream-Hop Electro JazzStep" will be the only music in the world. Every dentist's waiting room, every karaoke bar, every coffee shop. I have seen it. This cannot be prevented; only delayed, only the details changed.
"The Sixth Column" by Robert Heinlein
This 1949-vintage tale of the occupation of the United States I bought along with his 1964 effort "Farnham's Freehold," based solely on hearing that they were wildly racist stories. I bought Norman Spinrad's "The Iron Dream" for much the same reason: these books are legendarily criticized as being horribly bigoted. "The Iron Dream" isn't -- at least, so much as any book with Adolf Hitler in full SS regalia popping a wheelie on a swastika-covered motorcycle on the cover isn't -- because what Spinrad did was craft a marvelous parody novel written by Adolf Hitler in an alternate history where, instead of getting into Austrian politics in the '30s, he moved to the United States and became a science fiction author...and worked all his "Mein Kampf" wiles out in the form of a future post-apocalyptic dystopia filled with sinister Jewish caricatures and blond-haired blue-eyed genetically pure "true humans." His Mary Sue? "Feric Jaggar." Feric's weapon of choice? An invincible metal mace with a clenched fist for a head.
It was a riot and I didn't feel bad at all for paying an arm and a leg for the fair-condition paperback I spent days trying to find. And it remains the crown jewel of my book collection, albeit a feverishly-justified one. "Wait, wait, let me explain...yes, that is a swastika...yes, that is Hitler popping a bitchin' wheelie...hold on now..."
"The Sixth Column," conversely, I didn't quite know how to take. It concerns, basically, the Chinese taking over and occupying the United States, and the six men left in NORAD who fight back with superscience and a comically phony religion to hide it. On the one hand there is a really annoying amount of phrases like "yellow-skinned" and "slant-eyed" and quite a bit of the (naturally) two-fisted, lantern-jawed all-American heroes referring to them as "monkeys." But on the other, after a while I thought: "If China decided to up and conquer the U.S., I myself would probably spit some pretty vile racial epithets." And so, likely, would you. People in war have a long and rather understandable tradition of dehumanizing their enemies (or at least their quarries): Nips, Japs, Krauts, Chinks, Slants, Slopes, Hajis, Skinnies...the list goes on. They're racist, sure, but when you're trying to take a beach or defend a convoy, one really doesn't have time to check yourself for culturally-sensitive language or put yourself in their shoes, and when you're trying to kill someone it never helps to take care to not hurt their feelings.
But so far as this novel goes, it seems more than anything a product of the same zeitgeist that compels your kindly, loving old grandmother to scandalize you in public by saying something about "the niggers." Back then, that's simply how people thought about race, which is regrettable but should also definitely be remembered as a definite improvement on how they thought about race at the turn of the 20th century and in the early 19th.
Unfortunately the plot suffers from pacing issues and the central deus ex machina that literally and figuratively powers the plot never really gets any easier to swallow.
"Eclipse:" F+
"Attack Attack!: NO FATE BUT WHAT WE MAKE
"The Sixth Column:" C-