I just got this as a belated birthday present. It’s a little pewter number from Prague. Thanks, Nisha. Oh… and if you had anything to do with the piece of trash that was Thirteen Ghosts, your head is next on that stump.

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Caught From Hell tonight.

It’s a pretty nifty little thriller for the average viewer, I think. Adapted from Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s work of utter genius, the Hughes Brothers’ celluloid version definitely pales in comparison. The book is a 500 page monster, each page busting with information. Despite being set up for a visual medium, it’s not an easily adaptable work.

The film takes the main ideas of the book and restructures it into a whodunnit with a standard Hollywood love story stuck on. The Hughes Brothers may have actually hurt themselves by being too faithful to the book. They try and squeeze too many of the subplots and everything feels very rushed and glossed over. The first hour jumps from place to place, and most of the people I was with had a hard time seeing how everything fit together. The mad conspiracy laid out by Alan Moore was insanely complex, and the film does it a disservice by rushing through it.

Ultimately, the film is a nice way to pass an evening, and it definitely holds up as a good Ripper film, but not much more. The beauty of Moore’s work is the remarkable detail and painstaking research, and all of that is lost in this adaptation.

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Well, I just downloaded DVD Profiler and catalogued my entire DVD collection. The program makes it fairly simple, making most of the input by UPC code. You just stack your DVDs and start data processing on the keypad and you should be done fairly quickly.

For better or for worse: My DVD Collection

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I know I’m about to flush all my street cred down the toilet, but I was watching Bruce Springsteen’s NYC concert on HBO today and I’ll be damned if I wasn’t entertained.

Usually these overhyped specials are more of a curiosity than anything else, and more often than not you find yourself looking at brilliance that’s been eroded by time and hard living. At best you’ll see the “Rock Veteran” show, a performance that is so technically proficient it verges on the robotic. It’s still very good, but you get the feeling that every wave of the hand is rehearsed, every bit of snappy banter repeated from the previous evening.

Now, this show definitely contains some of those faults. This isn’t Springsteen from 1978, and most of the pure raw emotion has been replaced by experience. On top of that, Springsteen’s shows have always been meticulously constructed to squeeze the most emotion out of the audience.

Still, Springsteen manages to fuel his show with an infectious joy and earnesty that is so often missing in performers his age. The man honestly looks like he still enjoys it, and if he’s just cashing paychecks like the Rolling Stones, it’s really hard to tell. After so many years of success, he’s still able to make people believe in his everyman schtick, most likely because he still believes it himself. This old Salon article about Bruce Springsteen nails down his appeal a lot better than I ever could.

I spend so much time looking for the next new thing, it’s sometimes really fun to watch an old dinosaur like Bruce go to work and put on a good old fashioned rock and roll show, steeped in the Americana of blues and folk and gospel, delivered with unrivaled passion and conviction.

Rock on, Bruuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuce.

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After nine long years (including five years at a Zen Buddhist retreat on Mt. Baldy), Leonard Cohen has finally released a new album, simply titled 10 New Songs. With that kind of space between releases, I think I was bound to be a bit disappointed. It’s not very interesting musically, although the lyrics are characteristically brilliant. In that respect, Cohen has certainly lived up to expectations. I think I would have liked a simpler record of just Cohen’s gravelly, weary voice reading the lyrics as poetry.

That would have been nice. Here’s one of the songs:

That Don’t Make It Junk
I fought against the bottle,
But I had to do it drunk –
Took my diamond to the pawnshop –
But that don’t make it junk.

I know that I’m forgiven,
But I don’t know how I know
I don’t trust my inner feelings –
Inner feelings come and go.

How come you called me here tonight?
How come you bother
With my heart at all?
You raise me up in grace,
Then you put me in a place,
Where I must fall.

Too late to fix another drink -
The lights are going out –
I’ll listen to the darkness sing –
I know what that’s about.

I tried to love you my way,
But I couldn’t make it hold.
So I closed the Book of Longing
And I do what I am told.

How come you called me here tonight?
How come you bother with my heart at all?
You raise me up in grace,
Then you put me in a place,
Where I must fall.

I fought against the bottle,
But I had to do it drunk -
Took my diamond to the pawnshop -
But that don’t make it junk.

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Y’know, I had this really long, brilliant account of my evening at the Sigur Rs concert at the Wilshire Theater, but Blogger ate it.

Bad Blogger! Bad, dirty Content Management System!

Anyway. Quick summary (warning, poor grammar ahead) : Showed up at the wrong venue because my friend is a big dork that doesn’t pay attention to ticket stubs. Opening act was a good San Diego band called The Album Leaf. They had three keyboards on stage with a drummer and a bassist. Cool band. Sigur Rs came on and played a fairly meandering set for about an hour and then had a really good closing half hour. Technically, very good performers. Not particularly engaging on stage. I think I prefer them in the studio and on my headphones.

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Beulah just released a new album, The Coast is Never Clear, a couple of weeks ago. I finally got a copy of it and it’s more of the same beautiful dreaminess that made When Your Heartstrings Break one of my favorite albums of the past few years. The layered, orchestral pop is reminiscent of Burt Bacharach or Brian Wilson spun with the indie feel of the other Elephant Six bands. (Yes, Beulah is a member of Elephant Six).

They played Morning Becomes Eclectic on KCRW a couple of weeks ago.

Listen to the show here, and if you take a liking to their lush sound, run out and buy all their albums. Please?

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I was out in Monterey Park this weekend for some dim sum, and ended up buying the Studio Ghibli Archive DVDs from this little bookstore. It’s a 6 DVD box set with twelve movies, the bulk of Studio Ghibli’s output from 1984 on. It’s missing the two latest films, Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi and My Neighbors, The Yamadas. It does contain these works by Hayao Miyazaki: Nausicaa, Laputa: Castle in the Sky, My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Porco Rosso, On Your Mark and Mononoke Hime. It also has these films by Isao Takahata: Grave of the Fireflies, Only Yesterday and Pom Poko. The two non Miyazaki/Takahata films are Whispers of the Heart and Ocean Waves. At least, this is my best guess, since all the packaging is non-English and I haven’t actually seen about half of these movies.

There are two movies on each DVD, and six DVDs total. The whole set cost $99 out the door. It runs about $80 or so on E-Bay after you calculate the shipping costs there. The reason why it’s so low cost is that it is a grey market (sorta bootleggy) item. These films aren’t available in the US, and probably won’t be now that Disney has decided has acquired the North American distribution rights and decided to sit on them. This is probably as good as it gets unless you look for the individual Japanese releases and import them and use a region free player.

I was expecting a fairly low quality set, considering its origins and cost, but was surprised to find a fairly high quality product. The video and sound quality are all very good, all the films are widescreen (despite what it says on the box) and the subtitles are switchable and not burned into the picture. There are teeny little glitches here and there which can be annoying, and there is a company branding logo that pops up occasionally (usually in the letterbox, so it’s not so bad), but those are minor quibbles.

It was definitely a worthwhile purchase, and it’s illegitimacy will give you major street cred amongst your nerd friends.

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