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June 30, 2006
Sadly, I have to express my disappointment with Fundamental, the new Pet Shop Boys album. I'm usually a big fan of the songwriting and production choices of Tennant and Lowe, but this set shows some poor decision making on both fronts. Although parts of the album are worthwhile, one of the themes that kept creeping into my mind with repeated listenings was that most of these songs would have only qualified as b-sides during the Behaviour or Very eras. In terms of general listenability, this album is probably about as spotty as Bilingual, and a bit less substantive because it is trying hard only to be a pop masterpiece.
The Boys made one really good choice, which was to bring in legendary producer Trevor Horn to polish up the tracks and bring his signature huge sound to the proceedings. When it works, it works well. Horn makes "The Sodom and Gomorrah Show," the album's track 2 anchor, a synth-rock masterpiece even though the song is not really up there with classic PSB masterpieces. Ditto "I'm with Stupid," the first single, which has a huge, classic electro-pop production sound that polishes over the fact that the song is not particularly dense. But my praise pretty much ends there. The album opens with an unmitigated disaster, "Psychological," which is probably one of the worst songs to ever appear as a PSB album, and here it's track 1. It was supposed to serve as an intro of some kind, but it just lays there hookless like a cadaver. Then, the album alternates between uptempo tracks and some slower ballad numbers. The aforementioned production masterpiece "The Sodom and Gomorrah Show" sounds great, but I wondered whether the world really needed this track so soon after "The Barry Williams Show," from Peter Gabriel's Up, which I enjoyed a bit more as a song. The ballads eventually outnumber and overwhelm the more poppy dance tracks. Only "Casanova in Hell" strikes me as being worthy; the other four ballads--"I Made My Excuses and Left," the Diane Warren number "Numb," and especially "Luna Park" and "Indefinite Leave to Remain," are pleasant enough but simply don't have much traction. Earlier PSB ballads, even ones on Release like "Love Is a Catastrophe" and "Birthday Boy," were far better. (This is to say nothing of "Only The Wind," "Jealousy," "Liberation" and "Dreaming of the Queen.") Neil's vocal performances on these tracks are also not particularly good, sounding a bit too autotuned and bright. The futurist/electro track "Twentieth Century" is a nice idea but suffers from underdevelopment and gets buried as track 10 of 12. The album ends with the dance track "Integral," the Boys' grandiose protest of Britain's proposed ID card system. It's a nice song, and Chris even gets in a Bobby O-esque synth riff, but it's too little, too late. After the sluggishness of the rest of the album, the track feels more than a little desperate and out of place. June 22, 2006  It has been brought to my attention that many people are not aware of the prodigious exploits of Crackers, the Corportate Crime Chicken. June 21, 2006
I guess I don't feel too bad for Mark Cuban; this might go a long way in taking the sting out of those bad late foul calls against the Mavs.
June 16, 2006  The wikipedia entry on "problems solved by MacGyver" is priceless. Also, I recently witnessed a MacGyver episode called "The Outsiders" that is, no joke, an homage to Witness. June 13, 2006  If we are to assume that a species is ours to do with as we please, we would be as guilty as those who caused its extinction. June 10, 2006  Garyville, Louisiana, vaunted hometown of the G.V.P. and a place in which I spent much time with my students when I did Teach for America, has made an unlikely appearance in this week's New Yorker. As you'll note, the story doesn't mention Garyville's bizarre pedigree as a former sugarcane plantation hamlet, nor its abject poverty and violent reputation. (Given its population, which is below 3,000, it is likely per capita one of the most dangerous places in the United States.) Instead, the story focuses on Garyville's other distinction: As one of the crown jewels of cancer alley, it is the site of the most recent U.S. oil refinery, which is a Marathon Oil facility constructed in 1976. All along the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge to New Orleans, these monstrosities rise against the backdrop in an apocalyptic fashion, spewing enormous amounts of foul-smelling gases into the air. With their huge flame plumes that rise up into the night sky, I always thought of these refineries as perverse statues of liberty, introducing the true face of American racism and economic fascism to the minority populations that they contaminate. Amazingly, it was not uncommon that these plants would have accidents resulting in dangerous emissions--the area was equipped with an air raid-like siren system--and depending on the severity, the plants would then have to write every family in the affected community a check. From the corporate perspective, it helps to do this to a poor community, as they will think that a $5,000 settlement is fine compensation for having breathed in enough ammonia to fell an elephant. June 02, 2006  With the December release of Rocky Balboa, I decided to revisit The Specialist, a movie that I saw in the theater in 1994 and recalled fondly as some serious cinematic garbage. A quadruple whammy of bad, expensive movies in the mid-90s--this one, Assassins, Judge Dredd and Daylight--put Stallone's already faltering box office muscle on life support, a state from which it has yet to recover. But calling The Specialist bad doesn't quite cover it; dollar-for-dollar, this is likely one of the most ill-conceived and incompetently executed big-budget movies of all time. There isn't space to describe all of the movie's sins, but here are a few of them: --The atrocious screenplay. It moves unceremoniously from major events that happen without warning, such as the death of antagonist Eric Roberts (!), on to random other action setpieces, leaving the audience wondering what happened. Possibly the most disjointed movie I've ever seen. --Luis Llosa and Miami. Apparently scrambling for hipness, the producers hired hot director "Lucho" Llosa, who had just made the Tom Berenger stinker Sniper, in a somewhat offensive, politically correct attempt to bring some authentic Hispanic flavor to the Miami locale. They failed. (The producers of Llosa's next movie, Anaconda, would fare better.) --Special effects that have to be seen to be believed. There's one sequence in which Stallone rigs a hotel penthouse to explode and fall into the water. The use of miniatures and blue-screens does not exactly inspire.  --Sharon Stone. The producers must have paid her a ton of money to do the shower scene with Stallone, but really, she's just terrible in this. The character, a woman seeking revenge whose parents were killed in front of her when she was a little girl, is not written with much depth, but Stone manages to make the audience think she wants to be in this movie even less than her co-stars. --The Weekend Warrior BBS. Stone contacts Stallone using a local BBS, the concept of which will baffle most modern-day viewers, even moreso because the technology is not accurately portrayed in the movie. --The music. Someone had the bright idea to hire John Barry, the legendary British composer of the Bond movies, to score this. But Barry's forte has never been writing for bad action movies, and his good but very unfashionable melodic score only drags the movie down. The Latin dance songs, selected by Emilio Estefan Jr., made me think, "Was music really that bad in the mid-90s?" --Criminal underuse of James Woods. The only thing worth watching is Woods chewing scenery, which he does with reckless aplomb in a few scenes that feel like they're from some other movie. |