Music Review - The Faint - Doom Abuse

If any of you have known me for long enough, you'll known I love The Faint's 2008 album Fasciination. I loved it so much I pushed it during my high school news broadcast's music segment. Well, it's been 6 years and The Faint are back with Doom Abuse, an album I am loving.

While I don't totally love The Faint's back catalog, Fasciination was a perfect album for me, a combination of electro-style synths and basslines with a rock band behind them and an eccentric vocalist behind it all, giving me catchy yet out there lyrics in what would come to define my idea of Dance Rock/Dance Pop music for a very long time. With Doom Abuse The Faint drop a large portion of the bouncy Electro synths for noisey ones and a harder rock edge, but it's still the same band and still giving me exactly what I never knew I wanted.

Doom Abuse is a short blast of danceable, weird pop rock. They come in at 12 songs in just over 39 minutes. The songs are catchy and convey just as much as they need to before jumping to the next one. Allmusic review James Christopher Monger called this iteration of The Faint "Equal parts whimsical and despondent, it's Disintegration-era Cure, wearing an Imagine Dragons hoodie trying to have an LCD Soundsystem "All My Friends" moment." While that is a lot to swallow, I think it's pretty apt. The lyrics are often on the downward slope, about the decline of one's mental health, the degradation of society and a cynical view of how the world is changing, but told through upbeat, rocking numbers you can't help but move along with. Two of the biggest examples of this are the back-to-back combo of Mental Radio and Evil Voices, pairing lyrics like "Evil voices lie when they say you're alone" with arguably the catchiest songs on the album. On tracks like Salt My Doom they go for a noiser edge, tapping into their punk influences for a short, shouty number. Help In The Head is the opening track and pretty much a combination of both previous styles, being catchy and flippant, but also dark and with a noisey overtone. While not the best song on the album, it gives you a damn good idea of what the rest of the music is going to sound like, more or less. If you like Help In the Head, you'll like the rest of the album. The track Animal Needs might be the most The Faint song out of all of them, with a strong synth riff and a pounding drum beat play while the lyrics talk about what they do and don't need, which comes down to pretty much, we don't need anything from structured society, but they have the same needs as an animal." An anthemic track you can dance along too with a message about society.

Doom Abuse is the kind of album that makes me fall in love with a band. Their Dark Wave/Dance Punk outlook has enough twists and turns in between songs while still keeping to a very similar and established sound throughout the piece. The only time it really lets off is the final track, a beautiful but slower piece named Damage Control. While not a revolutionary album in itself, it's a totally different experience from most popular music going on today, with just as many catchy riffs, hooks and choruses. At under 40 minutes, it's really just a fun experience to put on and let it play all the way through, and when it's done I'm ready to start at the beginning all over again.




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Movie Review - Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Captain America: The Winter Soldier was awesome, and you should totally go see it.

The Winter Soldier is the second Captain America film, and the last of the main Avengers to get a solo movie before the next Avengers film. The basic plot is that Steve Rogers is adjusting to living life in the modern age and dealing with S.H.I.E.L.D., when he eventually gets tangled up in a terrorist plot to kill millions of people all over the world and it's up to him to stop it.

I really enjoyed The Winter Soldier. Like, really enjoyed it. The opening fight sequence alone got me hooked. As much as I enjoyed the first Captain America film, it was easily the most boring of all the first wave movies. My biggest problem with the first one was one I understood was not exactly the writer's fault, but they had to tell Cap's origin story. The problem with Cap's origin story is that he did some cool stuff in World War II and then gets frozen until he's thawed out in the present day. While it's important to set-up Captain's past history and his involvement in the war and why he was so revered, it takes all the tension out of all the action scenes because you know that at the end Captain America has to be frozen in ice, then thawed out in present day and be fine. In the first film, you know nothing can happen to him while he's in the 40's because you know he has to end up perfectly intact in present day. I suspect that's a big reason they added a troop of guys for him to fight with in the first movie, because you could care about them living and dying, in a way you couldn't care about Captain.

One of the things I liked most about The Winter Soldier is that instead of trying to create tension with the possible safety of Captain America, they took a different approach and really hit home how much worse it's been on Steve Rogers emotionally to be alive. If he had died after the events of The First Avenger then he would have been the hero everyone wanted and would have gone out a hero. But in The Winter Soldier they emphasize how hard it is to deal with the fact that not only shouldn't Steve be alive, but that everything he knows from the life he knew is over and he has to start all over. They play several of these sequences for laughs, but there is still an underlying tragedy and darkness to it all. In the opening sequence we have Black Widow ask Captain America what he does in his free time and he quips that all the guys in his barbershop quarter are dead so he's got nothing to do.  While a humorous statement, it shows you something some people might forget about good ol' Cap, everyone he knew in his original life are dead or dying. The woman he had feelings for in The First Avengers is in a hospital as an old woman and has some form of Alzheimer's. Steve Rogers is all alone in this new modern world and has no one.

Things I really liked about this movie: The action, the relationship between Black Widow and Captain America and the humor. The action and stunt choreographer's deserve awards for what they accomplished in The Winter Soldier. All the action set pieces look and feel real. Also, the decision by The Russo's and company to go with as many practical effects as they could also made it all feel that more real, which is something you want from a Captain America movie I think. Iron Man has the movies with crazy technology, Thor has the movies with fantastical worlds, Captain America should have movies that ground themselves in as much reality as they can because in The Avengers, he's our everyman. Steve Rogers was just a normal guy who happened to be injected with a crazy serum that made him a perfect specimen of man. Sure, he was always brave and heroic, but the serum is what made him stand-out. Tony Stark and Bruce Banner are genius scientists/engineers, Thor is a god-like being, Black Widow and Hawkeye are extremely dangerous and expertly trained assassins. Steve is essentially a regular guy on super juice.

The relationship between Black Widow and Captain America was also a lot of fun. Scarlett Johansson and Chris Evans have really good chemistry together and after seeing that they're good friends in real life and have worked on a bunch of movies together it totally makes sense. Apparently they also made up a bunch of their own dialogue for their scenes together which if true is great because it feels so natural. They get to bounce a lot of jokes off of each other and at once they both humanize Black Widow who up to this point has just been this crazy assassin woman with a fun personality and give Captain America someone to relate to, something that he is shown over and over that he is having a hard time doing in the present day.

Finally, the humor in this movie was really a delight. The Russo's come from a comedy background, including directing a ton of NBC's Community and as such it came as no surprise that they added a bunch of humor in what would otherwise be a pretty serious political thriller. One of the biggest letdowns of the first Captain America movie for me was how serious it was. There was humor, but for the majority of it the movie is played straight and that takes away from it I think. These Marvel movies work best when they have humor injected into a serious story. Thor was another good example. When Thor is on earth there's a lot of good humor about how much he stands out, but when he's in Asgard it's all totally serious. In the Thor: The Dark World there's humor in every sector of the movie and it plays a lot better. Not just because of the humor, but at least in part. The third Iron Man works way better for me than the first two (especially the second) because it's basically a buddy-cop movie re-skinned as an action/sci-fi film.

Overall, I greatly enjoyed The Winter Soldier. The story was good, the cinematography and sound design were good, the action and stunt choreography was brilliant and the acting was good all around. I was totally happy with how the film played out and I'm excited to see where Guardians of the Galaxy and Age of Ultron take us in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

I figured I'd talk very briefly about the things I didn't like about the film, which will include spoilers for the movie, don't read past this point if you haven't seen the film.

Spoilers
I thought it was a nice touch that they referenced Tony Stark a bunch in the film, and even Bruce Banner for their creations, but it was a little irritating at the end to see that they never mention Hawkeye and never call up Tony Stark. However, there are things I don't think we know, like the timeline of these films. In the first wave of films, they don't happen in chronological order and/or take place at roughly the same time. Thanks to Shane Black's love of using Christmas as a back drop for his movies, we know Iron Man 3 takes place around Christmas time, but I'm unclear of when the other movies of this wave take place. While I understand that these solo movies are supposed to be that, solo, it feels funny that after The Avengers if something big is happening like say, S.H.I.E.L.D. is secretly half Hydra and is trying to kill millions of people around the world that you reach out to Tony Stark and ask for help. The biggest problem for me in this regards was the lack of Hawkeye. We're shown in the first Thor and in The Avengers that he does a lot of big S.H.I.E.L.D. and as such he may have been off on assignment somewhere (possibly being saved for a Black Widow spinoff movie that is supposedly in production) but he's never mentioned by name in the film. The fact that Hawkeye isn't even mentioned seemed like just a waste, as we've established he is a main Avenger that is directly working for S.H.I.E.L.D. and in this movie S.H.I.E.L.D. was compromised and destroyed. I would have understood if there were filming complications due to Jeremy Renner being in other movies or not writing him into a plot corner if he's supposed to be tied into this supposed Black Widow movie, but even then they should have at least mentioned him the way they name drop Tony Stark for a bunch of his technology.

The other thing that bothered me was the possible romantic subplot between Black Widow and Captain America. If the intention was just for Captain to make a friend then to me it seemed that Scarlett and Chris' chemistry worked too well for them because throughout this movie it feels like they're making a romantic bond. One of the recurring gags of the movie is Black Widow asking Captain if he's thought about asking any girls from work out on a date, and he has a reason for each one for why they wouldn't be compatible, and by the end of this movie it feels like a woman who could easily understand and relate to Steve would be her. There is very clearly romantic tension between the two in the film, especially when they kiss, and the resulting conversation after that. To me, it felt like the writer and directors didn't want to commit to anything because Black Widow has an off-again-on-again relationship with Hawkeye in the comics, and with a Black Widow movie possibly getting off the ground they didn't want to jeopardize anything for that movie. I thought it was a nice touch that at one point we see Black Widow wearing a little arrow necklace, if they want to setup that she's romantically involved with Hawkeye. But then that goes back to my other problem, if she really cares about him, why does no one mention Hawkeye once in this film.


In reality, these are just nitpicks in what I find to be a superb movie and a fine entry into the Marvel cinematic universe. I guess my problems with the film are really just tied into the movie not wanting to interfere with any possible plot or storylines from the movies they have planned. We might find a reason for why Hawkeye or Iron Man weren't called in for this story in Age of Ultron, or why there wasn't a romantic sub-plot between Captain and Black Widow in Age of Ultron or her spin-off movie. Not everything has to be a definite and known thing in film, but both these things just felt like windows of opportunity or even logic that were sacrificed for the ability to keep everyone's options open for future movies.

TV Review - How I Met Your Mother Season 9 - Overview and My Thoughts On The End

First, I want to explain my absence, I was at Emerald City Comicon in Seattle! I saw a lot of cool cosplays, got some rad comics, and met Ron Perlman. I didn't watch any tv during this trip, but last night was the finale of How I Met Your Mother and I watched. Since there has been a ton of outrage and confusion about the end, I figured I'd throw my two cents on what I ended up coming away from it after my initial confusion.

Warning, the rest of this post will spoil pretty much anything about How I Met Your Mother, so if you haven't seen the last season or even the last episode, don't read this yet. Instead, wait until you have and come back.

 
Overall, I really, really liked Season 9. However, it had problems that became very apparent with the release of the finale. So in the finale we find out many things, the two biggest revelations being that The Mother (named Tracy) has been dead for six years at the time Ted is telling the story to his kids, and that Ted is in love with Robin and brings a blue french horn to her place and presumably they will live a happy rest of their lives together.

I was confused and a little mad initially after watching the end. On it's face, it seems like it's two series endings that had competed to be the one that won out. Ted being with Robin felt like an end that would have made sense up until this season, while the mother being dead was an end that people had been guessing for a long while but was really foreshadowed this season. During season 9 it did not feel like Ted and Robin could ever be together, which makes the end of them being together feel so forced and contrite to many fans. The real problem of the show though is the narrative framing constraints they gave themselves and how it affected storytelling.

 In my opinion, the real problem with Season 9 is that it has to tell two different and conflicting stories, one for "Future Ted" in 2030 telling his kids the story and one for present day Ted. For "Future Ted" he's been telling this story about how every decision he made up until this point led him to their mother. The problem being however that the biggest problem present day Ted faces is getting over Robin, which he needs to do in order to meet the mother. So this season spends a good 2/3+ of it's Ted storylines dealing with Ted's unresolved issues with Robin and how he gets over them. In order to meet Tracy, Ted had to know that him and Robin could never be together. It's only once he resigns having feelings for her that he falls for Tracy. However, the reason "Future Ted" has been telling this story is really because he wanted to tell his kids how much he loved Robin, and that although he loved and cherished Tracy, she was gone and thought he could be happy with Robin.


The point of the end, in my opinion, was to show how everything changes, but some things are constant. In the begining of the show, we are shown many times that Robin and Ted couldn't work as a couple as they were. Ted wanted to meet "The One" and experience pure, true love, have kids and the dream relationship he always wanted. Robin did not want, nor could have kids, and wanted to be someone who was successful in their career and wanted to be responsible for her own success. Ted met "The One" and had kids, they're now teenagers. Robin came to realize once Ted was taken that he was the kind of guy she actually wanted, despite having rejected the idea for all those years. She also had a very successful career, and judging by the home and dogs, was back to living in New York, so she had somewhat settled down in her middle age. At the end, they've both experienced the things they wanted for themselves that had made them unable to be with each other.


The creators foreshadowed Ted's decision in the episode this season called How Your Mother Met Me, Tracy's origin story. We find out that on the same day as the first episode starts, Tracy loses her boyfriend Max to a car accident. She goes on to mention that he was "The One" for her, no matter what. After 5-6 years she starts dating a guy but she's just dating him to do so, she's not in love with him and still considers Max her one true love. After he proposes to her, she makes a speech to Max that even though she would always consider him "The One" he would want her to move on and be able to love someone else and have a good life with them. They will never replace him, but they could be happy together. Tracy was "The One" for Ted. You can tell from how he talks about her that he never stopped loving her, and still considers her "The One." However, she would have wanted him to be happy, and he's been alone 6 years since she died. His story shows non-stop that he always loved Robin and held out hope that they might one day be together. He knows now that she is not what he wanted or needed, but now that he got the thing he wanted, but can no longer have it, he can be happy with Robin. His kids are cool with Robin and can see how much they both love each other, and they are the ones encouraging him to go after her. They want to see their dad be happy because they know that as much as he loved their mother, she's gone. The kids also point out what most fans complained about all along, that Ted clearly loves Robin from the beginning of the show all the way until this season. If the show was truly about the story of how Ted met Tracy, it seems totally out of place and fans got real tired of it. Though it did get irritating the way it was told, it does make sense in context that the story of How I Met Your Mother isn't how Ted met Tracy, but instead that he wants to go after Robin and is telling his kids this story because he wants to emphazie how Tracy was his perfect opposite, in order to bring up the idea of him trying to rekindle his relationship with Robin.


The fact that Ted wasn't telling the story to just tell the story is what got most fans upset. They didn't want to hear that Ted was going back after Robin after finding out in a space of about 1 minute that the mother died and that she died six years beforehand. The season really kind of screwed itself by being about the two days leading up to Ted and Robin's wedding, only to have the finale be all the time after that. The problem was that they had to many cross-purpose reasons for storytelling that they corned themselves into doing. Season 8 was supposed to be the finale season, but they found out pretty early on that they would get one more season, which means that they had to stretch out the ending a whole 'nother season. Season 8 was good, but it felt like they were just prolonging the inevitable. Here with season 9, it feels like they had all the time after the wedding planned out, but for whatever reason couldn't think up a way to write those as whole episodes and instead focused on 22 of 24 episodes on the wedding and then the last 2 episodes on everything else. The problem with the wedding being the focus of the entire season is that in an early flash-forward to 3 years after the wedding in the finale we are shown that Barney and Robin can't make it work even though they love each other, and they get divorced. We are then shown important flash-forwards that establish that after the divorce Robin knows that her locket speech from episode 22 was right, Ted was "The One" for her. But, because of them spending 22 episodes showing Robin accepting Barney as the one she loves and Ted not being right for her and them both moving on, it's hard to then squish them knowing they are right for each other into the last two episodes, and seems contradictory. In reality, this season should have spent the first half of the season and no more on the wedding. Then every flash-forward we saw could have been it's own episode. Though people still would have been mad at the end I'm sure, it would have eased people into the way it ended instead of just going, "Hey remember how for the last 22 episodes we've estasblished Ted and Robin are totally wrong for each other and will never be together? Well in these last two episodes we're going to show that they were really meant to be together all along, they just had to experience some cruical life moments first for it to work."

I was not surprised at all that the mother turned out to be dead. Anyone who didn't think so hadn't paid attention enough throughout the last few seasons. Though I did help in having every hint pointed out to me through the HIMYM Reddit sub, it was still pretty obvious that she was not around. In one of the best episodes of last season, The Time Travelers, Ted spends the end of the episode telling the kids that although he loved his time spent with the mother, he wished he could have had more, and he makes a tearful speech about how she was so close and he never knew it, but it would be another 45 days until he meets her, and that he would have given anything to have spent those 45 days knowing her. It's very romantic, but not something that he would be that emotional about unless she was no longer around. In that end scene, Ted was literally on his knees in tears giving the speech. That was what sealed the deal for me, and was the real big clue. Other small ones included the way he used past tense throughout this season, like in How Your Mother Met Me, where he talks about how no matter how many songs Tracy sang that he heard, that first one was his favorite. The other big clue was an episode near the end, named Vesuvius, in which Tracy says in relation to current Ted and her planning their wedding, 'What Mother is going to miss her daughter's wedding?" And Ted gets real choked up and she tries to distract him with another story. It's clear that at that point they already know she is sick. If just taken at face value, it's a very confusing reaction to have, unless of course they know something we did not about.


Overall, I liked how the show ended. The show had this big habit of making deceiving twist endings. Throughout all 9 seasons, they pulled off multiple episodes where you thought the story was one way, and then they reveal in the end that there was actually a hidden purpose that was the actual reason the story elements happened. It's literally the same way they had Barney propose to Robin. It seemed that the show's favorite thing to do was give you all the pertinent information but mislead you into thinking it was meant for a different purpose. It turns out that that's how the actual story of How I Met Your Mother went. We were given all the information we needed to know that Robin and Ted were meant to be together in the end, but we were led to believe we were being told the story of how Ted met the Mother. While that was true, the real story was that Ted was telling the story of how Ted met the Mother in order to approach the idea of finally moving on and being able to be happy in a life without her. Once this is put into context it re-values everything we've seen so far, because all of the episodes now have a second meaning. Ted is at once telling the story of how his decisions led to him meeting Tracy, but they are also there to show how close him and Robin were and how it was always on his mind, especially now that Tracy is gone. He's bringing up to his kids how important and integral Robin was to him over all these years to justify why he wants to be with her. Though it's an offhanded comment, the kids mention to Ted that they've seen how Robin and Ted interact when she comes over to visit. Since Robin was pretty much absent during Ted's time with Tracy, it can be assumed that she would continue the tradition of "being there for the big moments" and rekindled their friendship once Tracy died. From the way the kids talk about it, Robin has visited more than on a blue moon, enough to see the history Ted and Robin have together before hearing this story confirming that.

The show tricked us, and I'm okay with it, it's a plot device that the creators loved doing, so it's totally in tone with the show. The biggest problem was just that the format of this season does not go well with having to both tell the story of how Ted got over Robin to fall in love with Tracy and how Ted has come to terms with losing Tracy and wants to move on and try again with Robin. In the end, How I Met Your Mother did everything I wanted it to, and it was a wonderful 9 year ride that I will love re-exploring when I rewatch the series from start to finish some time from now on.

TV Review - True Detective

I haven't posted anything in a little while because most of what I've been doing is catching up on series that I've been following for a long time and I didn't want to post a review of just like, Justified Season 4 when I didn't review 1-3 or How I Met Your Mother Season 9 when I hadn't done the others. For HIMYM I'm thinking of doing a show retrospective once the last episode airs next week. What I did just finished however and would love to talk about right now is True Detective.

True Detective is the new show from HBO, written and created by Nic Pizzolatto. The show was pitched as an Anthology format, like how American Horror Story is, meaning each season will be it's own self-contained thing, with it's own characters and story. This first season starred Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson as two State Police detectives in Louisiana, solving a crime and exploring their lives in a 17 year period. I think it's hard to talk about the show without spoiling it at the same time, so I'm going to talk in broad strokes about the season and my general impressions and then later in the post mark a spoiler section and talk about my complete thoughts.

This first season was fantastic. In the 00's we had just...an overload of crime shows, and although they kind of died off, we're starting to see a resurgence of crime shows in the last few years that all have a specific twist. In NBC's Hannibal, we have a character who has complete empathy with the killers, in BBC's Sherlock we have Sherlock Holmes and his brilliant observation skills. In this first season of True Detective, we have Rust, McConaughey's jack of all trades detective who sees connections others do not, and often speaks in philosophical riddles about what it means to be alive. What makes this show really work for me is that it's not about the actual crime they are trying to solve so much as the conversations that Rust and Marty (Harrelson) have around the situation. While Marty is our stereotypical alcoholic, cheating on his spouse, good ol' boy detective, Rust is our nihilistic, philosophy spouting outsider, who pretty much everyone hates, but he's damn good at his job. What makes their partnership work I think is that Marty does not like Rust. He pretty much hates him, but he knows the guy knows what the hell he's talking about when it comes to solving crimes. As they make it a point to show in the show, Marty is the only reason Rust has the job he does, as he sticks up for Rust and tells the state police to keep him on the force.

The set-up to the show is interesting, and shows some creative storytelling. We open the show with older, more downtrodden versions of Rust and Marty in 2012, being interviewed separately about a case they worked in 1995. We spend a large amount of the show in 1995, with much younger, more energetic and youthful versions of Rust and Marty solving their crime. We also get a middle period where they look slightly older and some interesting things happen, and we get a bunch of time with both of them in 2012. It's a show that literally takes place over nearly 20 years, and it's executed near perfectly. The characters look respectively older and younger, depending on the time period they are supposed to be in.

The show itself is a play on the Detective genre, particularly the pulp detective stories from the 20's-40's. The crimes are often gruesome, the sexuality is rampant, and the detectives are just the unlikely pair that are able to solve the case. However, the show does a great amount to subvert the genre tropes and make something interesting. When Marty goes on about how much he loves his wife and then is actively cheating on her, we are shown that it's wrong, and that it's actively destroying his life. While we see Rust be the detective who digs into old records and old cases looking for a new lead, which is normally lauded in standard crime shows, pretty much everyone tells him to stop and that he's wasting time and money doing so. They aren't praised for their genre-normative actions.

I'd almost go and say that this season of True Detective is Film Noir style. Colors are bleak, most characters don't get a happy ending, the philosophical questions that are brought up, and the narration of most of the season. Since I absolutely love the Film Noir genre, this is easily a new favorite show of mine. Another thing I liked was that the season is 8 episodes. They're tight, concise. It's exactly as much time as the show wanted to spend with those characters and nothing more. Before I found out the show was going to be an Anthology series I would have been all for more adventures with Rust and Marty, but the way it is now is exactly what you want from a show. You have enough of these characters to get a good idea of who they are and how they interact with the world and they get a story that spans 20 years. However, we want more of them, but we aren't getting any more, which might dilute their characters down and make us think less of them. There is such a thing as too much of a good thing, in TV especially. The season felt like just enough story without running into filler, which can even happen in a show with just 12 episodes, like say, True Blood. Though that isn't strictly a good comparison, as True Blood is a show that is ostensibly about the town the show is set in and all the goings-on in it, while this season of True Detective was purely the story of Rust and Marty, everyone else was pretty much just there to serve the story.

So in my spoiler-free conclusion, this first season of True Detective was awesome. The acting is pretty much outstanding across the board, especially from McConaughey, whom it seems can do no wrong right now. The narrative and framing of the season keeps it engaging all the way through, and the writing is impeccable. I can't wait to see how they follow up this season, and how much will stay the same and how much will change. If you get a chance, check it out.

SPOILERS BELOW

One thing I wanted to address right off the bat the accusations that the show is heavily misogynistic and treats women poorly. To that, I'll say, not really. Aside from Rust using the term pussy, he treats women perfectly alright. The one time he does something poor to one is Maggie, Marty's wife, and that's because she intiates sex with him and then reveals that she specifically did it to get back at Marty. While he is responsible for having sex with a married woman, he always treats Maggie up to that point with respect, certainly more than Marty does. The character that treats women poorly is Marty, and it's not glorified. It's put right out there that he's wrong, and everyone but him thinks it's wrong to do. Against the criticism that the women characters all are just flat pieces of writing that aren't full characters...sure. But no one else is either, apart from Rust and Marty. The show is about them, and their perspectives in solving a case. Apart from them, we don't get full characters of anyone else, aside from our Yellow King, and even then he's still mostly left in mystery.

I know a lot of people also had problems with how the season ended, particularly the mystery around the Yellow King. A lot of people felt like it was anti-climatic, and I see their point. We start in the first episode with all these symbols and crazy stick built-things and crazy phrases like "The Yellow King" being thrown about, only to have it be some mentally-deranged hillbilly on a farm in the middle of nowhere. I agree that it was a little disappointing to me that we didn't get to see more of the connections there in how things went down. We just see that he's crazy, but we don't get to see him spout all the crazy stuff that led everyone to that point. Other than that though, I don't know what else I could have asked for. Our characters did all the difficult legwork to track down the bad guy, they put all the pieces together, ended up with a realistic confrontation scene and a very realistic take on what would happen afterwards to these two men. I was incredibly happy with how the season ended, otherwise. It answered all the answerable questions it asked, and it made me think about the point of life and existence and what it means to be alive and doing what you consider good.

Music Review - Pharrell Williams - G I R L

Pharrell had a tremendous 2013, being involved in a ton of high profile projects, including the latest Jay-Z, Beyonce, Frank Ocean's Channel Orange and Robin Thicke's Blurred Lines, to name a few. The one that related the most to me was his work with Daft Punk on Random Access Memories. So when I heard Columbia asked Pharrell to record an album for them after his work with Daft Punk I got pretty excited. I like his production, and I like a lot of his contributions, but I've never been a huge fan of his solo work. Not that it's not good, just that I've never gotten into it. G I R L changed that for me. I'm real into this album in a big way.

Pharrell seems to have taken a page from Daft Punk and explored older styles of his own music that he could bring back into style, and this album is just layered with Soul and Funk on top of R&B. It's fun, carefree and catchy. After the negative press that Blurred Lines caught for being incredibly disparaging to women, Pharrell reportedly wanted to work on music that represented what he actually thought of women. As such, G I R L is an album dedicated to Pharrell's views on women. Though it can be raunchy, it's never the way Blurred Lines was.

My favorite track on the album, and the one that caught my attention most was "Gust of Wind" a track that has Daft Punk producing and providing some guest vocals for Pharrell, returning the favor for his work on Random Access Memories. It's a Disco-Funk tinged R&B jam. It sounds like an outtake from the RAM sessions, it fits so perfectly into their recent sound. I absolutely love it to bits. I thought the album as a whole sounded familiar to RAM, and then when looking it up found that Mick Guzauski, the man who mixed RAM did the majority of the tracks on this album, and you can tell. Every song he did sounds big, open and warm, dipped in 70's-80's R&B essence. Another thing I thought was interesting is that iconic film composer Hans Zimmer was responsible for the strings arrangements on a handful of songs. Huh, I wouldn't have called that in a million years, but those strings do sound damn good. I guess Pharrell was one of the session drummers for Hans' Man of Steel score and that is probably how they met. Whatever the case, I want Hans Zimmer arranging more damn strings. Happy is of course another standout track. Originally penned for the Despicable Me 2 soundtrack, it fits right at home here. It's just pure fun.

Features on the album other than Daft Punk include Justin Timberlake and Timbaland on Brand New, Kelly Osbourne on groovy album opener Marilyn Monroe, Miley Cyrus in Come Get It Bae, JoJo on Lost Queen and Alicia Keys on featured duet Know Who You Are. Though I wasn't a huge fan of Timberlake's verse on Brand New, the production and added beatboxing from Timbaland made it feel like a crossover of male R&B world's. Lost Queen is a nearly 8 minute song about how Pharrell falls head over heels for a women, asking what planet this girl is from, because she must be a lost queen, meaning she is this amazing and powerful person and no one else is like her, so clearly she must be missing from the place she's actually from because there is no way she could be from the same world as he is. It's a charming epic, and an unexpected turn. One thing I noticed is that this album seems to have taken a lot of it's song-structure idea from Justin Timberlake's 20/20 experience, in that several songs are two part-ers, finishing off one song idea, then having an interlude and finally switching up to a second half. It's most evident on Lost Queen due to it's 8 minute length and very clear two half split, but it also happens on opener Marilyn Monroe. While I don't think it's necessary, it provides an interesting dynamic to the songs it happens on.

All in all, I really dig this album. I'm not huge into R&B, but I enjoy Justin Timberlake and some female R&B artists, but if more people took this kind of retro-look at the genre I'd probably jump right into it. I like big horn sections, big strings, and infectious beats and melodies on traditional instruments. As much as I love the sound of synths, it's nice when someone can create something that still sounds like them but in a style that isn't as popular anymore. This album is 10 tracks and lean at 45 minutes. No filler, this is the exact album that Pharrell wanted to make, and I can respect him for that. G I R L is one big 45 minute exercise in fun with 70's-80's R&B style.

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Movie Review - Kick-Ass 2

One of my most anticipated films of last year, which quickly diminished to expected disappointment after the reviews came out. I ended up not seeing Kick-Ass 2 while it was in theaters and only just now got around to watching it. I know it's pretty late now to effect anyone going to see it now, but I figured that since I watched it, I'd write about it.

I was a big fan of the first Kick-Ass from 2010, though I do easily acknowledge that is has it's own problems. The first half of Kick-Ass is a fantastic satirical look at the origin stories of superheros and how they would look set in a real life environment. Then, about halfway through, it just becomes the kind of movie it's satirizing. That isn't to say it's bad, but it switches tone from funny and violent superhero parody to violent and dark superhero film. I still enjoy watching it, but I feel it could have been better. I never did read the comic, though I have wanted to. Amidst stories stating that the book was finished at the same time as the movie, I figured I'd get the same basic story from watching the movie. Later I found out a lot of people like the movie more because it's somehow more reserved than the comic. The movie does have a lot of fun moments and it's action is as enjoyable as it is violent. The actors all put in great performances, especially Nicolas Cage, who was unbeknownst to the cast and crew at the time doing an Adam West impersonation. Chloe Grace Moretz did a fantastic job and Aaron Taylor-Johnson did a pitch-perfect rendition of what I always hope Spider-Man will be, though less smart and more of a loser. The soundtrack uses a few songs from The Prodigy's album Invaders Must Die multiple times and they help give the movie some music motifs along with the movie's score. It's also shot and edited very well, it's infinitely watchable.

I said all that about the first film to make this one point; Kick-Ass 2 has hardly, if any, of these qualities. The writing is stupid, the cinematography is bland, and the soundtrack generic. The acting from Chloe Grace Moretz is still great, in fact, better than ever, but it's hard to recognize that when you just get bogged down with so much stupid.

The main plot of this film is Dave Lizewski coming to terms with what it means to be a superhero. As we start the film, he's angsty and frustrated that all these superheros have come out because of what he did, but he's promised to not be Kick-Ass again for the sake of his worrying girlfriend. Mindy Macready has taken to skipping school every day and hanging out in her dad's lair, training up her superhero skills. When Dave decides he needs to be Kick-Ass again he tries to recruit Mindy but due to her new parental figure telling her he won't tolerate her being Hit-Girl, she continuously says she's out of the game. We spend the rest of the movie with Dave meeting up with the Supergroup Justice Forever and him trying to bring Hit-Girl in while Mindy holds out and tries to be a normal high school girl. At the same time, Chris D'amico who was one time faux-hero Red Mist has decided to become the world's first actual supervillian.

That basic plot isn't bad. We spend a lot of the first movie showing how woefully unprepared for the superhero life Dave is. He's a bare minimum hero that is essentially a figurehead while people like Hit-Girl and Big Daddy do actual work. It makes sense that in this movie he's retired. At best he was a figurehead for the superhero movement, but at worst he was a catalyst for a lot of bad things happening to people around him. We also spend a lot of time with him trying to win the affections of a girl who admired Kick-Ass, but made him promise to stop once they were together because she cared about him too much. So we open this movie with Dave saying he can't be a superhero because of his girlfriend. He then does nothing but try and get back in the game from there on out and ignores the wishes of his girlfriend. When she sees Dave and Mindy talking together often in the halls and witnesses a conversation out of context, she immediately thinks Dave is cheating on her, which...would make a lot of sense. However, when asked to explain himself right then and there he doesn't, which makes sense because they're in a crowded hall in a public place. But he...then never tries to explain to her in private that it was about superhero business and that she was Hit-Girl and nothing was going on and they just break up. A relationship that was one of the primary focuses of the first movie is just thrown aside. Once we meet Justice Forever you can figure out why.

So already we've lost one of the primary focuses of the first movie, his girlfriend, which he worked pretty damn hard for in the first film. And she's gone in the first half hour and that's the last we see of her. Then there's the focus on Dave's friends. Clark Duke gets a pretty good role in this film, about as good as the first one, and he gets about all the same one liners as he did before. Unfortunately his other friend Todd just gets absolutely screwed. In the first film, Todd, played by Evan Peters, is just as equally Dave's friend as Clark Duke's character Marty is. In this film, Evan Peters was busy filming American Horror Story, so they recast Todd and made him one of the worst damn things of this movie. Todd went from every bit of Dave and Marty's equal to being just shy of mentally retarded. You don't understand why Dave and Marty would hang out with this guy in the first place, and it makes sense later why they'd stop hanging out with him, even if they were being jerks about it. This leads to one of the dumbest things in the whole movie, but it spoils a whole lot of the end so I'll save that for later.

When we get introduced to the Supergroup Justice Forever, it's mostly just sad and not the funny you want it to be. They went the serious route with everyone except Marty who is now a clone of Captain America in costume, and Donald Faison's Doctor Gravity. Colonel Stars and Stripes, played by Jim Carrey becomes the Hit-Girl violence replacement for the time he's on screen. A former gangster inforcer who is a born-again Christian. The rest of the team includes a girl who's sister was an unsolved murder, a husband and wife who's young son went missing and never found and a gay guy who was bullied and decided to step up for those who can't stand up for themselves. Donald Faison's Doctor Gravity is a guy who just wants to go and do cool superhero shit and goof around. See the difference here? Doctor Gravity, Colonel Stars and Stripes, Marty and Kick-Ass all feel like they're fun, goofy characterizations of superheros that would fit with the light-hearted but violent tone the first half of the first movie takes. The rest of them are all these super grim and depressing characters that don't feel like they exactly belong in this world. Well, either they belong or the others don't. Having both exist is what feels weird.

The introduction of Night Bitch is the whole reason they got rid of Katie, so Dave could start hooking up with her as Kick-Ass. They spend a good amount of time cementing how close they are as a replacement relationship for Dave, but then when a certain event happens about mid-way through the film, they just drop it.

Jim Carrey's performance as Colonel Stars and Stripes is wonderful. Apparently he's only on screen for roughly 8 minutes of an hour and forty minute movie, but he's one of the most inspired characters of the whole thing. I wanted more of him. Along with Chloe Grace Moretz, I think he has the best performance of the movie. Aaron Taylor-Johnson does what he can, but the writing is just not the same. In the first film he's a comic-book loving nerd who has the crazy notion that he could become a superhero and right some wrong-doings. In this movie he's just your standard boring superhero, but with even less motivation for half the things he does. Christopher Mintz-Plasse does a fine job as The Motherfucker, but he was just an older version of the same guy as the first movie, I expected nothing more or less from him.

The writing is awful. I already mentioned the destruction of Todd and Dave is hardly any better. Mindy gets fine writing treatment, but I think that's mostly because her sub-plot was already covered in a separate book that wasn't being published as the same time as the film was made. The rest of the movie though is just so dumb. For every good thing that the movie does for itself, it takes two steps back within minutes. They traded in the wit and common everyday man style dialogue for crass jokes. There is a device in this film that makes people vomit and shit themselves when it's pointed at them. Not only that, it's used for comedic effect and as an important game changing device. I hated every second on screen. The fact that they went through the trouble of making it look like a high school girl is violently uncontrollably shitting and vomiting in a school cafeteria is all I need to say about the quality of the writing. That would not have happened in the first movie. Sure, there were jokes about jerking off, but it's not like it showed you a geyser of jizz shooting out and that being the joke. It's hard for me to say that a joke about jerking off with Jergens and tissues is a refined joke, but in comparison to the shit (literally) in this film, it totally is.

Before I go into spoilers I'll say this. The cinematography is for the most part boring, the soundtrack is generic, the editing is nothing like the first film. It's just...all wrong. A lot of the acting takes a dive because they have nothing to work with and the plot is largely dumb. I still enjoyed the film, but it's not one that I will enjoy like Kick-Ass. It's one to watch for a continuation of the story when you need something dumb and violent on, but not something that can just be appreciated as a good film, because it's not. If you were a fan of the first movie, you'll probably still like this one, just not as much. Jim Carrey's performance is worth seeing however, and Chloe Grace Moretz does a fine job. The film has some interesting concepts but squanders them in search of crude humor. If you were midly interested, skip it. This one just barely makes the cut of an enjoyable film for me. I'll watch it again, but probably not by first choice. Maybe if a third one comes out I'll re-watch it. But it's nothing like the first movie.

Spoilers

I had so many problems with this movie that by the end I was just mad. They literally made Todd a bag of bricks. The plot needed something to bring Hit-Girl back, because Mindy was done with that. So what do they do? Why, they just have Todd walk into the fuckin' bad guy's lair and tell him who Kick-Ass is. I don't care if your two best friends are becoming famous superheros and they were being jerks to you, you don't go up to the nortiously bad, bad guy, who in a few scenes prior had a fuckton of cops murdered, and just tell him where your best friend is. The worst thing is, they don't play it like Todd's getting revenge on Dave. That would have still been dumb, but at least he reasoning is there. Instead, they just have him fuckin' tell him like he couldn't connect the dots. "Oh, you're looking for Kick-Ass? Yeah, that's a guy I know. Hey, you want to know who that guy is? I'll tell you because I've been one of his closest friends and you two should clearly meet up and have a chat. I did a good thing just then, I tell you what." He gets Dave's dad killed which was totally unnecessary because they already gave Dave the anti-superhero origin story of his mom dying of like a brain tumor or something in the first movie. Now both his parents are dead because they needed a reason for Hit-Girl to get involved. Not only was it unneccessary, the death of Colonel Stars and Stripes served the exact same purpose for everyone except Hit-Girl. They did two deaths for the same exact reason except the first time was for all the other characters and the second time was just for Hit-Girl.

I did like the majority of Mindy's side story however. Her trying to fit in and be a normal girl and have it backfire when the other girls are Mean Girls ripoffs. It almost had a nice resolution too, with her deciding to be herself but still embrace her feminine side, and then she uses a poop machine on them. Then they brought the poop and vomit machine back for the final battle and it plays a part in saving someone's life. Utterly stupid.

One thing I never liked about the first movie was that Big Daddy "traced the location of Kick-Ass through his IP address through his postings on Myspace." That is not how that works, but I was able to forgive it because essentially it leads to nothing. In this movie, the police trace the location of Kick-Ass through his IP address through postings on Twitter. Come on. That's even less valid because Twitter is generally a mobile phone app. Unless he was posting only from his room there would be many more than one solid location from his postings, and a mobile device not on Wifi would use the IP Address of the nearest tower it is connecting to. Even then, you can't just look at a post and go "hmmm, this post came from here!" Because IP addresses are based on an approximate location. You can track IP Addresses to neighborhoods, not houses. They find out where Kick-Ass lives and set Dave's dad on the path to death on something that does not happen.

The attempted rape scene I kind of liked, because it serves a purpose. Chris D'Amico is trying to be as stereotypically evil as he can but, but he being shown repeatedly just hiring people to do the dirty work for him. He attempts to commit an evil act such as rape and can't do it. I think that's a good character-building insight. I've heard that in the comic he actually does commit a rape and does many other evil things. I think that would have been a total misstep in the movie world. In the first movie Chris is never evil, just misguided because the person he looks up to most happens to be a very bad guy and when he gets caught in between being a hero and being the person his father was, he loses focus. His father does get murdered, that's enough to drive someone over the line between good and evil in my book. But in this movie you can tell that he's not truly evil, he just wants to do what he thinks is the way to exact revenge for the death of his father, by being the most bad guy he can be to counteract the most evil act he has ever witnessed.

The shark was the one of the dumbest things ever. You can't just say half a dozen times that the shark should be dead because he literally should be, and just have one character continuously state that it's just hungry. That doesn't make sense. They said exactly that it was in the wrong kind of water and it's implied it hasn't moved in days. It's a dead fucking shark. It's not hungry. It doesn't sit perfectly still in the wrong kind of water for days on end just because a character says it's hungry. So what does it do when The Motherfucker lands in the water in the end? It eats him because it was hungry. Fucking stupid. What's more, after the credits Chris D'Amico is revealed to not be dead, just that it ate his legs and his dick off. One last dick reference in the movie in case you forgot, and a totally implausible outcome to the situation. Everyone around him was dead except for the good guys, who did not take him out of the water. He falls into the shark tank and pools of blood come up. How could he have gotten out of there by himself? He couldn't have. They just couldn't kill him because he needed to be around for a third movie and also to make reference to not having genitals anymore.

This movie was stupid. It has it's fun moments but is greatly outweighed by the dumb and nonsensical. I went into this movie expecting a piece of shit, and I got a fun piece of shit. You've been warned.

Music Review - Burning Brides - Anhedonia

Back in August I saw Black Sabbath. It ruled, and my life will never be the same. While me and my buddies were out camping at the concert site, we had our nearest neighbors hang out with us for most of the time. They were two 40-something dudes from Portland and we spent hours swapping music recommendations and stories. One band they recommended was Burning Brides, so in honor of Kenny and Larry, I'm reviewing Burning Brides' 2008 album Anhedonia.

Burning Brides are a Hard Rock band from Philadelphia, and while I'd never heard of them until this weekend, they've toured with several of my favorite bands, including The White Stripes, Queens of the Stone Age, Mastodon and even Peaches. The band is mainly comprised of lead singer and guitarist Dimitiri Coats and his wife Melanie on bass. Anhedonia is a 13 track affair, with the majority of songs within the 3 minute or under range, which is something I always enjoy. As much as I like songs that go longer, I think it's sometimes more interesting to see what a band can some up with in such a short time frame. An example of this is the second track, Summer Leaves, which has a cool riff and is supported by a QOTSA style vocal, and it comes in at two minutes and one second. It's in and out in two minutes and I still find it incredibly memorable.

The whole album feels kind of like a mix between QOTSA and Foo Fighters, but never as hard rockin' or distinctive as either. This isn't exactly a bad thing, as both of those bands are led by very recognizable people who keep their distinctive style no matter what they do. So on Anhedonia, Burning Brides have seemed to capture what makes both bands good that doesn't encapsulate either of those band's most prominent features.

I think my favorite song might be Fire Escape, it might also be the most Foo Fighters'-y track the album has to offer. The riff is just really nice and light and Dimitri is doing a total Dave Grohl vocal melody. It's just...pleasant. I think that's my overall feeling of this album. It's not going to win any awards for being unique, but it's just nice. It's a band that knows exactly where they want to be and what they want to accomplish and them going for it, and you know what, more power to them. Not everyone is cut out to be the big, unique, stadium-filling band. Some bands are just good enough to be recognized by those other bands as just as good.

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