The Hangover was not a great movie.  Shut up, no it wasn’t.  It was a funny movie, that much is true, but as far as things like plot and character development are concerned, well, let’s put it this way: if you took everything from when the guys are on the roof to when they are driving back from Vegas, threw it away and replaced it with something completely different, you would be left with the exact same movie.  Which is fine.  As far as gag delivery systems go, The Hangover is tops.  But where do you go with a sequel?

Well (and this should come as no surprise), they decided to go the “same, but bigger” route.  So the movie we are left with hits a lot of the same beats.  Let’s see, bizarre facial mutilation for Ed Helms?  Check.  Small lifeform for Zack Galifianakis to tote around?  Check.  Montage of pictures detailing the forgotten night?  Check.  Sardonic, yet strangely earnest song by Stu?  Check.  Mike Tyson cameo?  Check.  Ken Jeong’s junk?  Check.

If that looks like a lot of sameness, you’re right.  The Hangover Part II is very similar to it’s predecessor, and the law of diminishing returns is very much in play here.  Whereas my face actually hurt when I left the theater after the first one, there was no danger of that happening this time around.  Don’t get me wrong, chuckles (and the occasional guffaw) were had, and quite frequently, but even the best joke stops being hilarious after you’ve heard it several times.

So what, then, about the bits not blatantly cribbed from the first film?  Well, there’s not a ton, but what is there is pretty damn funny.  Most of it heavy on the raunch, which actually works in the film’s favor, because the one truly new beat that the sequel hits is plenty hysterical and was virtually impossible to spoil in the trailers (if you’ve seen it, you probably know what I’m talking about).

Also there’s a monkey, and if you can’t mine humor out of a monkey (especially one as expressive as the one they found), well then you should just give up and move back into your parents’ basement and just stay there so we don’t have to deal with you anymore (too harsh?).  And of course, the chemistry between the three leads remains strong as ever, but where the humor was pretty evenly spread amongst them the first time, Galifianakis does pretty much all the heavy lifting in this outing (and Justin Bartha remains a non-entity).

But it is pretty funny, and that’s really all that matters (well, that and good box office numbers, which, check).  There’s no real important plot developments, but there weren’t in the first one either.  What we’re left with is a less successful, yet still worthy follow-up to one of the most impossibly funny movies to come out in recent memory.  It always had a tall hill to climb, and so you can’t really blame it for chickening out and taking the path already cleared by the first one, even if all the useful materials on that path had already been cleared out, leaving very little for the sequel to provide to the audience that they hadn’t already seen and… you know what, on second thought, skip this.  Go see Bridesmaids instead.

Posted under Kyle's Adventures in Pop Culture

Let’s get free-form, y’all!  My ingestion of pop culture lately has been less structured than usual, leaving me kind of at a loss for cohesive blog posts pertaining to one topic.  So, this being my blog and since you’re not my real mom (except you, Mom) I’m going to, just this week, hit you with a mix of mini-posts, covering a plethora of topics (plethora being taken at its loosest definition).  Ready? Here we go! (If you read that in Mario’s voice, will you marry me?)

– I finally watched The Ladykillers (Tom Hanks version) and while that is not exciting news by any stretch of the imagination, it is big for me because that finally makes me a Coen brothers completist (directorial).  I suppose if there has to be a Coen brothers film that you haven’t seen, The Ladykillers is probably the best (in that it’s basically their worst), but I liked it.  It has problems, sure, Marlon Wayans is ungodly annoying in it, and, being a remake of a perfectly decent film, it’s fundamentally pointless.  But Tom Hanks is terrific in it, it’s got some solid black comedy (cribbed from the original, but whatever), and it’s got a kick-ass gospel soundtrack.

– I bailed on Infinite Jest.  I don’t think I even made it to a hundred pages.  I know, I’m terrible.  What I read I enjoyed, but the thousand-plus pages and all those footnotes were too stressful so I gave up.  I’ll give it another go at some point.  I’ll also finish The Grapes of Wrath and Of Human Bondage at some point, too, I swear.

– I saw Thor.  It was awesome.  I wasn’t watching it terribly critically, so that’s basically the end of my discussion on the topic.  I have some thoughts about how Marvel is handling the build-up to The Avengers, but I’ll save that for after Captain America.

– I started reading The Hunger Games.  The writing’s a bit clunky, but it’s entertaining and fairly easy, which is refreshing after I let David Foster Wallace down (I’m sure he’s taking it very personally from beyond the grave).  I hadn’t really heard anything about it up until all the casting announcements started pouring out, and I became curious.  It’s surprisingly dark (given that it’s about kids being forced to murder each other) and compelling (albeit, kind of cheaply), so I can see what all the fuss is about.

– I’ve been reading some Batman graphic novels.  Some.  Not many.  Three to be exact.  In the past month I’ve read (in order) Batman: Year One, The Dark Knight Returns, and The Killing Joke.  I’ve never been huge into comics and I’ve always regretted that.  The catalogues are just so massive, I wouldn’t know where to jump in, so I tend to stick to graphic novels, or limited comics runs in graphic novel form.  I thoroughly enjoyed these three,  The Dark Knight Returns and The Killing Joke especially.  Batman is one of the few superheroes that you can get really dark with and these books took advantage.  And I will totally take any suggestions for other graphic novels worth reading.

– Amazingly enough, Glee has actually been kind of okay lately.  It’s nowhere near as good as its first season, but it hasn’t been wildly divergent or actively terrible, so it gets a pass from me.  This week even found a reason for Sue to actually act the way she does in the form of her sister dying (the show kind of tried to use this as a way of retconning her character for the season, but I’m not having it).  The finale’s next week, and I gotta say it, I’m hopeful.  The tournament episodes are usually better than most, although Quinn’s up to some pointless shenanigans, so it could go either way.  As long as it isn’t a total trainwreck, I’ll be fine with signing back up next year.

– I watched On The Town starring Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra a couple weeks ago, and holy crap did I love that movie!  I figured I’d like it fine, given that it’s an MGM musical from the heyday of MGM musicals and Gene Kelly was awesome, but I completely fell in love with it.  It’s pure entertainment, with great songs, wonderful ensemble work, and a sense of palpable joy throughout.  Singin’ In The Rain is still the best musical, but On The Town just might be my favorite.

– CBS cancelled Mad Love.  That doesn’t surprise me.  I am disappointed by the news, because I enjoyed the show.  It wasn’t the most original (or funniest) show ever, but it was delightful in its own way, and I will miss it.  I’m pissed, however, because clearly they had plans for a season 2 and they ended the finale with Tyler Labine and Judy Greer realizing they had feelings for each other, but with Labine hooking up with Greer’s boss instead in a moment of weakness.  And that’s frustrating.  It’s The Class all over again.

–I want to see Bridesmaids.  Not as a social statement, or a display of my support of equality for women (for the record: I do support that), I just want to see it because it looks hilarious and I like the cast.  Deal with it.

– I finally saw The Road Warrior.  When that scenario comes true, I call dibs on the one-sleeve leather jacket.

Posted under Kyle's Adventures in Pop Culture

Songs That Kill Me is a new feature here at Adventures in Pop Culture.  In it I will do my absolute best to take a song that I love, and dissect it.  It will not be an extremely regular feature, because the prospect of doing that scares the crap out of me.  Let’s begin.

I don’t know what it is about certain songs.  Some songs just seem determined to go beyond a nice beat or a catchy hook.  These are songs that will haunt you ’til your dying days.  Songs that grab you by the skull and shake you like a beach towel.  Sure, it’s not always the same songs for every person, but there are just some songs that burrow deep and stay there for the rest of your life.  Wilco’s “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” off their absolutely phenomenal Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is one of those songs.

It was just last summer when I first heard it after picking YHF up at the off-handed recommendation of a friend of mine.  Prior to that I had been aware of Wilco (my high school Spanish teacher claimed them as his favorite band), but I had never had the urge to seek them out in school (‘cus they weren’t PUNK ROCK, MAN!!! [for the record, I wasn't actually that big of a tool]).  So you can imagine my surprise and regret when my first conscious attempt to listen to Wilco left me quaking with awe.

I had found what I had been looking for, and I didn’t even know it had been missing.  And quite frankly, even if the rest of the album hadn’t measured up to the first track, the sheer force of “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” would have been enough to leave me completely staggered.  It is here that I must admit that I don’t fancy myself as much of a music critic.  I can recognize good music from bad music, and I know enough to not always care about the difference (especially when dealing with the Top 40 or latter-day Weezer), but going from recognition to description is a hefty leap, so bear with me.

That warning is apt, because while as much as I love “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart,” it’s beauty is matched only by it’s difficulty.  The song, moreso than any other on the album, is treated with an almost free-form sensibility.  The basic structure of the instrumentation is constantly shifting, with the opening consisting of a swirl of piano, acoustic guitar, percussion and synthesizer.  The music eventually sorts itself out, but only in time for Jeff Tweedy’s lyrics to send the song back to a state of flux.

“I am an American aquarium drinker, I assassin down the avenue.”  The first lines (well, really every line) of “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” are simultaneously haunting and confounding.  The song is not interested in telling a concise narrative.  It’s a song of half-remembered love and anguish.  It’s lyrics provide an overwhelming barrage of imagery, so that we, the listener, don’t get a clear picture, we get a general idea.  The relationship being described here is one that had its ups and downs, and the narrator is just trying to figure out which were more prevalent.

As the song progresses, so too do his feelings of nostalgia for a lost love seem to turn to a sense of relief.  He starts out asking himself “What was I thinking when I let go of you?”  By the end he’s wondering “What was I thinking when I let you back in?”  His continued examination painting an ever-clearer picture of the neglectful person he no longer has to deal with.  “I always thought that if I held you tightly, you’d always love me like you did back then,” he says at one point, indirectly acknowledging the irreparable rift that she either caused or wasn’t interested in fixing. 

And yet, despite that, the doubt remains, as he barely manages the half-hearted assurance that he is “trying to break your heart,” but that devolves even further and he ends the song again wondering why he “let go of you.”  And as the music once again gives way to a mess of electronic noise, he weakly states that “I’m the man who loves you.”  It’s a song of heartbreak and loss that will continue to persist long after the album comes to an end.  It’s a curiously realistic ending to a delirously dream-like tune.

Which is to say nothing of the fact that the song is achingly gorgeous.  The music, despite being purposefully haphazard at times, rolls along smoothly with Glenn Kotche’s amazing percussion work seeming manically random, yet wonderfully precise, sort of like an indie Keith Moon.  And the rest of the band provides a beautifully layered tapestry of sound, one that is constantly morphing and circling back on itself, and in doing so it further advances the uncertainty inherent in the song.

But the real star of the song, if you can call him that, is Tweedy, who sings every line with such earnestness that even lines like “take off your band-aid, ‘cuz I don’t believe in touchdowns” start to make a weird sort of sense.  That certainty in what he’s saying is crucial, because without it the song quickly descends into kitsch at best, poetic tripe at worst.  But thanks to his self-assuredness, what Wilco was able to achieve is a song of heart-stopping beauty.  One that, at face value, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but is still devastating with the power of the emotions at play.  My only regret is that I didn’t hear it sooner.

Posted under Kyle's Adventures in Pop Culture