Anyone paying attention to the timestamps, I’m not actually burning away an hour for each entry here. I’m actually knocking out each entry every time I break away from playing video games (Zelda, Def Jam Vendetta and Gungrave, if you were wondering).

ANYWAY, last night’s movie was Identity, the new psychothriller from James Mangold (Heavy, Copland) starring John Cusack, Amanda Peet and Ray Liotta among others. It’s a new twist on Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None (or Ten Little Indians), as ten strangers end up stranded in a Nevada motel to find themselves getting knocked off one by one, in increasingly weirder and weirder circumstances. It’s pretty scary, has some good acting performances and some really cool scenes (the laundry room scene is awesome), but the central conceit and the way it is revealed in the movie is so ludicrous that I ended up laughing throughout the entire second half of the film. Maybe I ruined it for myself by outguessing it about halfway through.

I can’t really go on without giving away the movie… bug me personally if you really want to know what the movie’s about, and why the movie makes me think of “Adaptation.”

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For a band with only eight songs officially released, they managed to stuff 800 or so people in this place. I had a lot of fun at this show, although the front got kind of pushy towards the middle of the stage and a phalanx of funny smelling dudes just forced themselves in. Karen O spit water at me and I touched her glove hand when she extended it into the audience.

The band live sounds pretty much as it does on record, which surprised me. I was expecting it to get a bit more raw on stage (not that the baseline is really that polished to begin with). Instead, most of the difference is just watching Karen O’s onstage antics, which alternate between sexy raunch and just plain retardedness. She came on stage with her bra stuffed full of straws, which she then tossed into the crowd. She wore fishnets… but then topped it with a neon green top with a big superhero “Y!” on it, which made her look like a big piece of Bubbilicious. It was just that kind of act. Nick Zinner and Brian Chase were dead on in the performances, but when you’re fronted by that kind of monstrous persona, it’s hard to notice sometimes.

A week later, I must admit I remember very little of the content of the show… it was a great show of flash and thunder, but it really lacked any emotional punch for me. Even at their most reflective (“Maps”) or anthemic (“Our Time”), there was never a feeling that this was a unique experience. There’s nothing really wrong with that though, as bands that are able to deliver a good, solid energetic set are rare enough. My thoughts on the show were pretty similar to my thoughts after listening to Fever to Tell for the first time: This is a damn good band, but have yet to make the big jump to become a great one.

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I love IMAX movies. I love IMAX 3D movies. I love Jim Cameron movies. So when I saw that there was going to be an IMAX 3D film of Cameron research dives down to the wreck of the Titanic, I thought it was all good.

I didn’t really like Ghosts of the Abyss much. It’s a cool movie, but compared to the last few IMAX movies I saw (Ultimate X, SpaceStation 3D) it’s not quite thrilling. Content wise, it’s actually fine. It’s pretty interesting to be able to see the wreck of the Titanic, and the computer recreations help to tell the story of the Titanic (again). The main problem is that the moment they go underwater… it’s NOT FILMED ON IMAX. That kind of killed all the fun for me. It’s still interesting, but the 3D and the IMAX weren’t really necessary. This could have been just as easily aired as a Discovery special on television.

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Catching up on past business… caught Mighty Wind a few weeks back. I’ve been intrigued wih the Folksmen ever since I saw them perform at the Harry Smith tribute. Just the idea of the members of Spinal Tap in old man makeup singing folk songs makes me giggle.

A Mighty Wind features the same crew that Christopher Guest used in Best in Show and Waiting for Guffman, and a lot of the off kilter, improvised humor is still here. The loose plot is based on a big folk reunion show featuring the aforementioned Folksmen and two other acts, The New Main Street Singers and Mickey and Marty. Micky and Marty (Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara) are really the only people with any sort of compelling story, while the rest of the characters are there to hang funny gags on. It works well enough, and I found it as funny as the rest of this crew’s films.

The best feature of the movie are parody folk songs, which are frighteningly authentic. The soundtrack is so deep that many of the best songs don’t even make it to the screen, like the Folksmen “classic” “Blood on the Tracks,” a story ballad about a train that derailed and went INTO a coal mine.

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Anybody remember her? The freshman ferocity of Exile in Guyville seems so long ago, and it was. Since whitechocolatespaceegg, the last thing I heard from Phair was her backing vocals on the ubiquitous “Soak Up the Sun” from Sheryl Crow. I’m still trying to forget about that, but they’ll play it in every mall I’ll ever walk into for the rest of my life, apparently.

She’s back and she’s got some songs on her website. “Extraordinary” starts off with a riff that seemingly belongs to her Capitol label-mates Queens of the Stone Age, before settling down into a more familiar sound, including a layered wet/dry vocal and a quirky two part chorus. “Why Can’t I” sounds off for some reason, like a good version of Avril Lavigne, but it’s still Avrilesque… if that makes any sense. “Rock Me” fares a bit better, a Phair song with a drum machine verse and a soaring chorus that sounds like the better parts of Billy Corgan’s writing. She remains talented at taunting me, as she mentions how she wants to “Play X-Box on my floor.” Whatta tease.

Anyway, welcome back. 2/3 ain’t bad, and hopefully the full album’s strong.

“Extraordinary”
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“Why Can’t I”
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“Rock Me”
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Better Luck Tomorrow turned out to be a lot better than I thought it was going to be. It’s not perfect by any means, but it’s a good movie about Asian American kids growing up in Orange County, being perfect students on the fast track to good colleges who have some extracurricular activities that they don’t put on their applications. Namely, stealing, buying and selling whatever cash-friendly goods they can get their hands on.

While it is a film about Asians, it does a good job of addressing its points without feeling preachy and didactic, and the characters are drawn universally enough that it’s not a film that you can really pigeonhole as an Asian American experience. Everyone turns in really good acting performances and director Justin Lin does a magnificent job of delivering a professional looking film for a really teeny budget. The main problem the film has is that sometimes it feels more like vignettes strung together than a strong storyline. The movie happens over the course of four months, so sometimes there are gaps where you feel like the story kind of jumped. Minor quibbling though.

One of the crew is named Han, and I must say, the resemblance is uncanny:

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