A couple of nights ago I hopped up on campus to see Elvis Costello and the Imposters rock their first Los Angeles dancehall show since 1978. This is essentially like seeing Elvis Costello play a high school gym, a rare opportunity at his point in Costello’s career.

I wasn’t going in expecting much. After seeing various live appearances by Costello, it really seemed like his rock days were behind him, and he was more than happy to bring his new sophistication to all his material. Man… was I ever wrong.

Backed by longtime cohorts Pete Thomas and Steve Nieve, Costello blew through a two hour set of unrelenting menace. Spanning 26 songs and 3 hours, the concert was a marathon run at a sprint’s pace. New material that seemed a bit staid on record came to life on stage, holding up well in comparison to Costello’s legendary back catalog. “Spooky Girlfriend” in carried a particularly nasty edge live, with a snarling lyric and melody constantly fighting against the laid back trip-hop groove.

While the new songs felt strong, older material was still the highlight of the show. The stabby rhythms of “Chelsea” and “Lipstick Vogue” highlight Pete Thomas’s nimble command of the drums, while Steve Nieve brought his manic keyboard solos and a soaring Stax/Volt vibe to “High Fidelity” and “Clowntime is Over.” Whether it was the faux reggae of “Watching the Detectives” or the one chord crunch of “Uncomplicated,” the Imposters were remarkably tight throughout. Closing the set was Costello doing an eerily powerful version of “I Want You,” often times filling the room with just his unmiked voice and virtually no instrumentation.

Two bands opened for Elvis at AGB. The first was a band of teenage girls named The Like. They were surprisingly good, and incredibly endearing on stage. I found out later that the drummer is the daughter of Pete Thomas, apparently inheriting his impeccable sense of rhythm. They rocked enough to cause plaster to start falling from the ceiling, which is always a good sign. The Like were followed by Autolux, who put together a competent set, but were horribly out of place. At a show that was essentially about crowding together in horrible conditions and sweating and dancing, Autolux’s spacey art rock tested the patience of the audience.

Setlist:
45
Waiting for the End of the World
Watching the Detectives
Spooky Girlfriend
Chelsea
15 Petals
Sulky Girl
When I Was Cruel No. 2
Clowntime is Over
High Fidelity
Tart
Deep Dark Truthful Mirror
Beyond Belief
No Action
Uncomplicated
Dust

First Encore
I Hope Your Happy Now
Tear Off Your Own Head

Second Encore
Alibi
You Belong To Me
Pump It Up

Third Encore
Radio Silence
Radio Radio
Lipstick Vogue
I Want You

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I’m super duper late with my Star Wars: Attack of the Clones review, so I’m not going to go in too deep with it. Love it or hate it, chances are you’ve seen it and have paid tribute to Lucas already, so you know everything I’m going to say. Basic rundown: Better than Episode 1, good action, not-so-good acting, Vader has NO GAME. The only thing that I’m probably running contrary to popular opinion with is the fact that I didn’t like Yoda’s big fight scene. I may or may not go again to check out a digital projection, so you might get an entry on the more technical aspects of the film another time.

If you want a breather from the summer spectacles, I’d highly recommend Christopher Nolan’s Insomnia. I’ve been fairly suspicious of both Al Pacino and Robin Williams as performers lately, but the overwhelmingly favorable reviews lured me. Set in the endless midnight sun of Nightmute, Alaska, Insomnia, at its heart, is a basic cop thriller, with procedural elements and a bit of the cat and mouse games that have been so common since Silence of the Lambs. There are just enough new bits to make the film seem fresh, and its the most technically proficient film I’ve seen this year. Nolan does a great job telling the story, and more importantly, reigns in Pacino and Williams. Showing the slow fraying of a man wrought by guilt, pressure and constant insomnia, Pacino hasn’t been this good since Donnie Brasco. As the For Williams, this is his finest non-bearded role ever, letting his villain be menacing while still being fiercely normal. Williams really does seem like the killer next door, and his performance keeps Insomnia grounded in reality. This film is the only choice right now if you don’t feel like turning your brain off at the multiplex.

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Enigma is a new Michael Apted film about the codebreakers of Bletchley Park, the British thinktank that broke the German encryption code during WWII. It is essentially a WWII espionage thriller, with many of the facts based in true fact. Bletchley Park existed, and the Enigma machines that cranked out the german “Shark” code are all true. What screenwriter Tom Stoppard did was to create a fictional character by the name of Tom Jericho, troubled mathematical genius, and station him in the middle of a fairly familiar tale of love and intrigue. The character of Jericho is loosely based on the C.V. of Alan Turing, who invented the giant thinking machines that helped crack the code in the real world, and is generally considered the father of modern computer science.

The film starts off really slowly and doesn’t get going until Jericho finds a stash of unencoded papers that may lead to the whereabouts of his long lost love. Once Jericho and Esther Wallace (Kate Winslet) start sleuthing around to find answers while avoiding a smarmy intelligence agent played by Jeremy Northam, the film finally gets on the move. When the film is explaining the workings of Bletchley Park, as well as how all the codebreaking efforts affect the war efforts, Enigma is genuinely interesting. While it doesn’t have really interesting characters, much of it seems passable due to solid acting efforts all around. The plot bounces around quite a bit, but I was never invested enough to really buy into the plot twists. The credibility is hurt a bit by the fact that all the detective work is dependent on absolutely horrid security efforts in a Bletchley Park, which is supposedly a top secret, super secure military installation. I’m a sucker for crypto fiction, but this isn’t as strong a work as Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon and is about as entertaining as Sneakers. I’d probably consider it a better film than U-571, since they at least got the basic facts correct (it was the British that recovered a working Enigma machine, not the United States).

While I enjoyed Enigma, those interested in the subject should check out this website from PBS. It’s got a lot of detailed info on the Enigma machines and the codebreaking efforts, as well as some introductory information about cryptography.

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Go see this. It’s the X-Games writ large on the IMAX format, a perfect 42 minutes of the mindblowing footage of skateboarding, bmx, motocross and street luge. Blown up to this scale, the madness of the “action sports” really begins to take a new life beyond what’s normally seen on ESPN2.

Apart from the beautifully shot IMAX footage, there’s also a ton of blown up digital footage of cameras mounted on to the athletes themselves. The most breathtaking is the material shot from the sleds of the street lugers. Hurtling down a hill at 80mph, the cameras capture the jostling as well as the pure velocity of the sport. The ground footage shot from the front of the luge is positively vomit inducing. There’s also some wonderful shots of the BMX work, including the footage of one fallen downhill BMXer crawling up a dirt ridge as his competitors launch over him. It’s straight out of D-Day.

The appeal of watching breaks down like this: “I didn’t know anyone could do that!” and “Dude, did he just shatter his junk?” To these athletes, the latter is somehow justified by the former. The sheer amount of brutal physical abuse (one motox guy had so many injuries he referred to his bones in shorthand, like “left tib” and “right fib”) is meaningless when you can fly for those fleeting seconds.

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Ths summer officially began today as Spider-Man opened on a gazillion screens nationwide… Everyone’s going to see this thing, so I really don’t feel the need to do a blowout review or anything. I didn’t have any real expectations and I thought Spidey was great fun and all. It’s not the strongest film ever, but Sam Raimi compresses a LOT of story into a short amount of time and keeps the gee whiz factor high. Technically, my only complaint was the rigid techno-design of the Green Goblin’s mask, which was a bit too cold to really feel scary or menacing.

The strangest thing about it is just how faithful (in plot point and in tone) it is to the O.G. Spidey books of the 60′s. There’s a part of me that thinks that Sam Raimi would’ve set the whole thing in the 60′s complete with paisley if he could have (MJ still wears the microskirt with the go-go boots). I’ll probably be the only one on earth that says this, but there’s a point in the movie where everything got so cheezeball and melodramatic that it started working on me on some whole other level. Maguire and Dunst are unhaltingly sincere saying their hopelessly outdated dialogue, and then J Jonah Jameson comes along like he was imported from a knockoff of “His Girl Friday” and the whole thing starts to look like the some mish-mosh time capsule of a script. Normally, I’d stab my eyes out with a straw for this sort of stuff, but somewhere along the line Maguire’s sleepy portrayal of Parker just kind of won me over.

More than anything, this movie is about Peter Parker and Mary Jane, and it’s as sweet a teen film as I’ve seen in a good while. You never really root for Spider-Man to deliver us from evil… you root for him to get a little somethin-somethin from Mary Jane. The agonizingly painful reality that Parker will never get anywhere, regardless of his powers is the great heartbreak. It’s all so strangely appealing.

Oh yeah, and some webs and stuff fly around and a couple of buildings fell and some other stuff like that. Go see it. Then you’ll hate it and send me horrible mail.

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