Once again I have to lament my ignorance and stupidity on account of missing out on a brilliant piece of pop-culture.  But this time, I can take a whole bunch of you down with me! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!! *ahem* Sorry.  For various reasons I have missed out on a lot of good tv shows.  I’m not caught up on Mad Men or Dexter, I’ve never seen a single episode of Breaking Bad, The Wire, The Sopranos, Deadwood, Weeds, Sons Of Anarchy, Big Love, Lost, and several others.  Some of these I have a valid excuse for, I didn’t have cable (let alone movie channels) when most of these shows started and I didn’t want to start in the middle.

But then you have Pushing Daisies, a beautiful, funny, quirky, intelligent, and thoroughly entertaining show that aired on broadcast television and that I have absolutely no excuse for missing when it was on.  And yet, I stand (okay, I’m actually sitting) here retroactively kicking myself for once again being so, so stupid (I hope that doesn’t become my catchphrase).

I can’t claim ignorance, either.  The show was well-publicized (at least before the ratings took a nosedive), and with my IMDB-nerdiness, I was well aware that it was beloved by critics.  And yet, I still refused to give it the time of day.  I guess I assumed that the television-viewing public was onto something (these are the same people who make Two and A Half Men TV’s number one comedy, what was I thinking?! ).  Ultimately in my misinformed brain, I formed the conclusion that the show was overrated and I didn’t give it another thought.

That is until I was perusing Netflix one day and under Suggested TV Shows, what do you suppose was there?  You guessed it, Pushing Daisies Season 1… you’re so smart.  So, on a whim, I added it to my queue.  That was several months ago (my queue isn’t short) and it finally arrived week before last.  Now when I have TV on DVD, I like to give it as much of my undivided attention as I can muster.  So I burned through the movies I had from the library and made sure I had all three discs for Season 1 before I began the viewing experience.  And what an experience it was!

From the very first episode I was in love with the world of Pushing Daisies.  That they had such a complete vision for this universe from the word ‘go’ is remarkable, what’s more remarkable, though, is that universe itself.  It doesn’t quite take place in the world we live in, it takes place in a land of bright colors, whimsy, and cheap (yet beautiful) CGI.  It’s a world in which everybody has a quick wit seemingly by default, and where a pie shop literally shaped like a giant pie is nothing out of the ordinary.  A world where everybody dresses amazingly all the time… oh yeah, and a world where a guy (Ned the piemaker, played by Lee Pace) can touch dead things and bring them back to life.

Which he does… frequently… for money… sort of.  He works with a P.I. named Emerson Cod (Chi McBride, a source of some the best one-liners I’ve ever heard).  They have found that it’s much easier to solve murders when you can just ask the victims how they died.  And oh, how they die!  For how cute and whimsical Pushing Daisies could be, it could also be terribly (and gloriously) dark and disturbing, like when the woman gets stung to death by bees, or the man gets stomped to death by a horse, or the woman gets harpooned and then melts against the light in a lighthouse (you read that right).  Yet there is no blood or gore, just horribly, hilariously mutilated corpses.

And it’s this murder-solving that sets the story in motion.  Because Ned has grown up with the knowledge that his touch has an unusual effect, he has avoided situations where touching would be a frequent thing.  Then one day, Emerson comes to him with a new case of a woman who was murdered on a cruise ship, and that woman happens to be the girl Ned loved as a little boy, Charlotte Charles aka Chuck (the gorgeous Anna Friel).  Upon touching her to find out what she knows of her death, Ned finds that he can’t bring himself to touch her again (touching dead people a second time makes them dead for good). 

And it’s this that is the source of most of the relationship-based tension for the show.  Ned and Chuck are head over heels in love, and yet one touch would instantly send Chuck back to the grave.  Yet they make it work, mostly through plastic and thick gloves.  And despite being inherently sad, it’s also so incredibly adorable and innocent, that it kind of makes you want the same thing (or at least it did for me, is that weird?).

The other source of relationship tension is Olive Snook (the amazingly amazing Kristin Chenoweth), a waitress at the Pie Hole (Ned’s pie shop) who has more than her share of unrequited love for the piemaker.  And although she resents his relationship with Chuck, she also respects it enough to not try and rain on their touch-free parade.  Instead she passes the time by whipping-off amazing dialogue and singing whenever she can get the chance (and isn’t being interrupted).

I could probably go on forever about this show.  I haven’t even touched on Swoosie Kurtz and Ellen Greene who are amazing as Chuck’s aunts, or the chemistry between all the cast members, or the great guest actors they had, or the great narration, or the fabulously twisty plot, or so many of the other fantastic things that made this show so incredible.  And it was.  I may have arrived in Couer d’Couers late, but I got there, and now I don’t want to leave.

Posted under Kyle's Adventures in Pop Culture

Ah, the curse of the awesome title.  Having an awesome title is a great way to gain attention for your film, especially if its an independent film aimed at a niche audience (like Kick-Ass).  But along with the extra attention comes much higher expectations, and that is where a lot of awesome-title-having flicks fail.  Snakes On A Plane is a good example, that title (and some choice catchphrases) got everybody worked up prior to its release, but the mediocre action movie that it actually turned out to be left everybody pretty disappointed (but hey, Cobra Starship got a career out of it).

So what of Kick-Ass, then?  Well, that title kind of serves as a promise, doesn’t it?  And like I mentioned, that serves as a blessing and a curse.  Anticipation was high, which gave the movie its best shot at a good opening weekend.  Unfortunately, the movie doesn’t fully deliver on the promise built into its title.  Don’t get me wrong, a lot of ass gets kicked, its just not as constant as you would expect from a movie called Kick-Ass.

What the movie actually does have a lot of is angst (again, it’s probably not that much angst, just more than you’d expect, given the title).  Aaron Johnson plays the title character, and he spends most of the film moping.  He mopes about his life before becoming a superhero, he mopes about his life after becoming a superhero, every decision he makes he second-guesses, I don’t think he gained anything resembling confidence until roughly the last 20 minutes of the film.

But that’s not a huge problem, because despite his moniker, his character is not the main source of ass-kickery.  Chloe Moretz plays Hit-Girl who, despite being thirteen years old, has no trouble taking on a room full of fully-grown/armed men (and cracking wise about it).  She learned how to do that from her father, a fellow vigilante who goes by the name Big Daddy and whose disguise includes mustache-extenders and a suit not unlike a certain other caped crusader.  These two in crime-fighting mode provide the film’s best moments (in that they live up to our heightened expectations), but when they are in civilian mode, we get another mopey tale of a dead wife/mother and their vow to avenge her.  Not a lot of attention is paid to it, so it’s easy to forgive.

The main problem (for me) with this film lies in the origin story format of the whole thing.  But unlike Batman Begins or Iron Man where it’s actually impressive and cool to see where they get all those wonderful toys, Kick-Ass spends the majority of the film in origin story mode, most of it consisting of Kick-Ass just trying to convince himself to actually commit to this stupid idea he had.  The last half hour or so is when the movie finally turns on, and despite it finally being exactly what I was expecting, it’s just not enough to save the film as a whole.

I really wanted to love this movie, and despite having several moments of sheer unadulterated awesomeness, too much of the movie is about a whiney teenager who decided to become a whiney superhero.  I haven’t read the comic on which it is based, so maybe it’s just faithful to the book, I can’t say for certain.  But I can say that it does not kick as much ass as promised.  Such is the curse of the awesome title.

Posted under Kyle's Adventures in Pop Culture

Dear Hipsters,

I am writing this letter to ask one simple favor, stop picking on Weezer.  They (as far as I can tell) haven’t done anything to deserve the amount of hatred a lot of you have been spewing on them for the last several years.  Sure, their recent outcrop of albums don’t live up to the quality standard they set early on, but that shouldn’t come as such a surprise.  The Blue Album and Pinkerton are amazing albums and are revered as such.  But there are varying degrees of quality between ‘Masterpiece’ and ‘Soul-Suckingly Awful,’ a fact that most of you are pretty good at remembering… except when it comes to Weezer.

Now believe me when I say this, I get where you’re coming from, nothing Weezer has done post-Pinkerton has been great (except Maladroit, that album honestly rules), but that doesn’t mean they are completely worthless.  The Green Album has more than its share of finely-crafted pop songs (although I really don’t care much for Hash Pipe), Maladroit, as I’ve already mentioned, is an honest-to-God amazing album, and if you haven’t heard it you really need to (and please listen to it with an open mind).  Make Believe, I will admit, I have not given a fair shake to, I’ve heard three songs, two of them I can’t in good conscience say I like (Beverly Hills and We Are All On Drugs) and one that is perfect latter-day Weezer (Perfect Situation).  They, admittedly, went off the rails a bit with The Red Album, but still managed roughly half of a good record.  Raditude, again, not great, but there is way more to like there than a lot of you would like to let on.

Seriously, what is with the hate?  (If You’re Wondering If I Want You To) I Want You To is nothing if not an amazingly fun and catchy tune.  Yet to listen to you, you’d think it was a terribly constructed, cringe-inducing, nightmarish slog of a song that was a chore to even overhear from the next room.  And I don’t think that’s fair.  In actuality, I find the song to be something of a spiritual cousin to El Scorcho.  Think about it, acoustic verses, big bombastic choruses, oddly specific lyrics of love and angst; sure, it’s more poppy than El Scorcho, but there’s more there than you’re admitting.

But like I said, I get it, you want Weezer to make more music like they used to, heck, I want Weezer to make more music like they used to, but you know who doesn’t want Weezer to make more music like they used to?  Weezer, that’s who, and ultimately, it’s up to them.  For now, they seem to be enjoying themselves making low-stakes pop music, and I say, more power to them.  I’m not trying to say you’re not allowed to hate Weezer (far be it for me to come between a hipster and their hatred), all I ask is that, if you must hate them, hate them for the music they are making, not the music they’re not making.

Sincerely,

Level-Headed Weezer Fan

Posted under Kyle's Adventures in Pop Culture

Chemistry is important.  You could say that it makes the world go ’round (though that sounds like a dorky thing to say, if you ask me).  In film, especially, chemistry is key when you have two people sharing a lot of screentime.  Poor chemistry between characters can bring the whole film crashing down so hard, its sometimes painful to watch (although sometimes that makes it more fun, let’s be honest).  In Date Night, fortunately, the two leads (Steve Carell and Tina Fey) have such amazing chemistry that its easy to forget that they’ve never actually worked together before… on anything.

The movie starts out simply enough, Carell and Fey are a married couple who are pretty firmly (yet, for the most part, happily) stuck in a rut.  They are woken up at 5 am by a pile driver from one of their kids (a seemingly routine activity), they make breakfast and pack lunches, he goes to work as an accountant, she a realtor, and periodically they are reminded by their (slightly conniving) babysitter that its date night (hey, that’s the title of the movie!).

Their dates typically consist of a movie and potato skins at T.G.I. Friday’s and imagining what the stories behind other couples in the restaurant might be (an imrov-heavy bit that leads to some great lines in the gag reel).  In this, we get a glimpse that the spark in their relationship has faded considerably; you have to be pretty hard-up for excitement to live vicariously through the other sad people at Friday’s.

The catalyst for the story comes one night at book club when its discovered that two of their married friends (Mark Ruffalo and Kristen Wiig, the latter of whom is apparently a prerequisite cameo for these kinds of movies) are getting divorced due to a lack of passion in their relationship (which is totally what Carell and Fey are going through, it all makes sense you guys!).  This, of course, leads our stars to attempt to reignite their relationship by going out to dinner in the city and not getting a table and taking somebody else’s reservation and blah, blah, blah, I’m assuming you’ve seen the trailer at least one of the 5,000 times it’s been on TV, all this is covered there.

ANYWAYS, at dinner, two men (Jimmi Simpson and Common) ask them to step out back where its discovered that they’re the bad guys and mistaken identity and “You’ve got our macguffin” and “Kill-shot”… seriously, this is all in the trailer.  The movie that follows is fairly predictable (as I predicted!), but that doesn’t stop it from being a heap of fun.  As previously mentioned, Carell and Fey have such great chemistry that it doesn’t matter that the things they do in the movie are either ridiculous or have been done a thousand times before.  Just watching them deal with the situations makes up for a lack of originality, but ultimately proves to not be enough to make the movie great.

What does help though is the superb supporting cast.  Besides the previously publicized Jimmi Simpson, James Franco, and Mila Kunis, you have Taraji P. Henson as one of the uncorrupted cops, Mark Ruffalo, who does the best he can with one scene, it’s not much, but he does get a great joke about Gedde Watanabe.  However the best parts come from William Fichtner and (the uncredited) Ray Liotta, both in full-on scenery chewing mode and both of whom light up the screen in their very brief roles.

Is Date Night an amazing movie?  No.  Is it a fun movie?  Absolutely.  Is it a great date movie?  Probably.  It’s all very well-worn territory, but the chemistry of the leads and a phenomenal supporting cast keep it steadily afloat.  You don’t necessarily have to see it, but chances are you won’t be sorry if you do.

Posted under Kyle's Adventures in Pop Culture

Back in January of 2004, I went to a concert headlined by MXPX (who were good) and Simple Plan (who were not).  The two bands opening for them were Sugarcult (who I was regrettably a fan of at the time) and some little band I’d never heard of called Motion City Soundtrack.  When I arrived at the show, Motion City had already started, and as I was not familiar with their music, I stood in the back and listened respectfully.  I enjoyed what I heard, but I was basically waiting for this little band to stop so I could rock out to some Sugarcult (in my previous blog post I talked about being really stupid, I present this anecdote as further proof).

About a week or two later, I found myself in a record store looking through the racks of CDs.  In my browsing, I happened upon I Am The Movie, the debut full length from that little band Motion City Soundtrack that I had just seen recently.  ‘What the heck?’ I thought.  I had enjoyed them, chances were good I would at the very least not hate this record, so I bought it.  And then I listened to it.  And then my mind got blown.  I had never (nor have I since) fallen so instantly in love with an album the way I did with I Am The Movie.  I was instantly hooked, and Motion City became one of my favorite bands, a position they still hold six years later.

Now to January of this year, and the release of their fourth album My Dinosaur Life, which I was anticipating like it was the cure for an imaginary fatal disease I had imaginarily (an actual word) contracted.  When the day finally arrived, I bought it within the first hour of it hitting the racks and proceeded to listen to it roughly non-stop for the following week.  Given that my anticipation had reached fever pitch and the album was, if nothing else, a solid piece of pop-craftsmanship, I began giving glowing reviews of it to anyone who would listen.

Now here’s where my troubles lie, I started to feel as if I was passing on the perception that this was one of the greatest albums in recent memory, if not ever.  And this is simply not true.  It’s not even Motion City’s best.  If pressed, I’d actually call it their worst (in that it’s the least good).  I don’t want to give off the impression that I don’t like this album, because I do, I really do.  It’s just that it doesn’t come anywhere near the perfection of I Am The Movie or Commit This To Memory and while Even If It Kills Me isn’t perfect, it is solid and consistent throughout.  And this is where My Dinosaur Life‘s problems occur, it’s inconsistency.  For the first time there are Motion City songs that I would rather not listen to.  And that worries me.

But not too much, because My Dinosaur Life does have some amazing songs on it.  ‘Worker Bee’ may be the best album opener they’ve ever had, and ‘Her Words Destroyed My Planet’ has fast proven itself to be one of the greatest MCS songs ever.  Then you have other songs like ‘Disappear’ which is darker than anything that’s come before it (Motion City related, that is), and ‘Stand Too Close’ which might just be the sweetest love song in years.  ‘@!#?@!’ is an interesting curio, as it is simultaneously their nerdiest and heaviest endeavor.  It opens with a crushing assault of a guitar riff, and then Justin Pierre starts singing, ‘Early in ’99, I beat the Ocarina of Time, I’m quite the legend in this town.’  In a word: epic.

But then you have more troubling fare, songs like ‘Delirium’ and ‘Hysteria’ settle for being catchy, yet forgettable.  ‘Pulp Fiction’ has some great lyrics, but not the hooks to fully sell it.  ‘Skin and Bones’ is probably the most interesting song they’ve ever written, but is just sonically bland.  ‘History Lesson’ is strangely Dylan-esque, which is ultimately distracting and unnecessary, and ‘The Weakends’ just sounds unfinished.

Plus, this album failed in doing something all their other albums have done successfully (for better or worse), and that is to find a sound unique to itself.  Their previous three albums, while similar, managed to set themselves apart from each other.  My Dinosaur Life, on the other hand, just sounds like the previous three albums all mixed together.  ‘A Lifeless Ordinary,’ for example, sounds so much like an outtake from Even If It Kills Me, that I’m not entirely convinced its not.  Perhaps this was what the band was going for, and perhaps its actually a good thing, regardless, it yields an album that suffers from an identity crisis, when we, the fans, are used to albums that can stand on their own.

I still love Motion City Soundtrack, and despite having more negative things to say about their latest release than I’ve ever had to say about anything else they’ve ever done, I still greatly enjoyed this record.  While it’s not the most original thing they’ve ever come up with, it is almost impossible to hate.

Posted under Kyle's Adventures in Pop Culture

I have something to get off my chest.  In my formative years (high school, early college) I was a terrible music listener.  Not that the music I listened to was terrible (although in retrospect, a lot of it was), just that my listening habits were deplorable.  I would purchase CDs and proceed to only listen to the one hit song.  I would only give songs on an album about 10-15 seconds to hook me before moving on.  And I would only listen to music that fell under the general realm of ‘pop-punk’ and would pretty much shun any ‘sad bastard music’ (to needlessly [and awesomely] quote High Fidelity) under the pretense that I only liked upbeat music.  I now realize that actually, I was just stupid.  Really, really stupid.

To top it off, I had huge musical blind spots.  There are amazing bands that I hadn’t even heard of until way later that I’m comfortable admitting.  But that’s ultimately a good thing.  Because if I had listened to, say, The Smiths* in high school, the odds are really good that I would not have cared for them, and that would be an opinion I would likely still hold to this day. 

However, since I was so, so stupid, I was able to come to The Smiths on my own terms (albeit extremely late) and they have since become a band I have fallen in love with.  Whether that means I’m going through a darker phase in my life where melancholy music speaks to me more, or my ear has matured enough to be able to appreciate more than just a good hook, I can’t really say.  All I know is, I’m glad my stupid younger self didn’t ruin it for me completely.  I do wish I’d have discovered The Replacements sooner, though.

*Also goes for The Velvet Underground, Radiohead, Tom Waits, and pretty much every indie band I’ve started to listen to in the past two years.

Posted under Kyle's Adventures in Pop Culture