Signs of the Fall

Yesterday at work, I was trying to make a phone call on my smoke break when two landscaping dudes came by. One was blasting a leaf blower, the other halfheartedly raking the leaves his buddy blew. Someone was also creeping behind them in a truck. That's at least three people moving those leaves. Mind you, there aren't many on the ground yet. But today is the first day of autumn, and I'll bet the Leaf Squad will be back to interrupt every cell phone call I try to make. On the bright side, summer is officially over.

For me, autumn is the real "most wonderful time of the year," simply because it feels more and more like Halloween every day. It's the only holiday I really care about. Really, what's the competition, fucking Valentine's Day? The 4th of July? May Day? Of course, there's the big one(s) in winter. My family's Catholic, but I'm recovering, so although it's always good to see the relatives for a bit, I can otherwise do without Christmas. I don't have anything against the holiday's tackier decor nor its more altruistic trappings, but every year Santa totes his sack of tinsel into your local Walgreen's well before October 31. That un-American scoundrel can't even give Thanksgiving a couple of weeks of glory before horning in on the retail action.

But I was rooting for Jack Skellington. You won't hear me bitching about Halloween coming to stores too early. Give me screeching plastic skulls with light-up eyes, paper specters, rubber bats, ceramic jack-o'-lanterns, orange spider rings, jolly scarecrows, crappy pre-fab kids' costumes, even those gross peanut butter candies. While I have issues with Disney characters recently usurping the traditional place of Frankensteins and Draculas and Wolfmen in home decorating, at least those people are decorating. If you stare at the picture below for long enough, I swear you will see a ghost.

Currently romping with: new Exodus, Drums & Tuba, Between the Buried and Me, Sigur Rós and, of course, Opeth... holding off on the "Corpse Bride" soundtrack until I've seen it. One day to go... and a new Cronenberg movie the week after. I'm like a kid on Halloween.

Like a chocoholic, but for misery

Dammit, I'm getting lazy with this blog. But I saw three movies in the theater last weekend. In reverse watching order:

"The 40 Year-Old Virgin" - OK, the scandalous hos in this picture are hilarious. I recently discovered that I'm a fan of director Judd Apatow's work. Other than writing "Celtic Pride," which made me walk out of a free screening, dude's got a good track record. And Steve Carell is a brilliant man, so even though I miss Produce Pete, I'm all for his becoming a box office draw. The only drawback for me is that at times it's waaay too much like my own life for comfort. I'm not 40 or a virgin, but I totally understand what it's like to stay isolated from romantic entanglements for a long time, and how retarded you can get when you try to break out of that. Honestly, it's very smart for a sex comedy, and Catherine Keener, as radiant and badass as always, just makes it even smarter. That's a welcome trait in a time when humans are producing sequels to "Deuce Bigalow" - another free movie from which I walked out.

"Transporter 2" (aka "Le Transporteur II") - I saw the first "Transporter" in the theater, but all I remember was the dude from "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" kicking people and wearing a suit, and I think there was a slinky Asian woman in it. I guess I might not have been 100% sober at the time, but I usually remember a little more about most movies I've seen it within the last decade or so. I remember more about "Wolfman" than I do about "The Transporter," and believe me, that's no endorsement for "Wolfman." But my buddies were psyched about this sequel, and we actually got Barry out of his apartment, and it was on the top of a drive-in double bill, and it was a lovely night... and as I was watching it, I could feel myself forgetting it. The whole momentum of the plot revolves around the titular tough smoothie having promised a rich child he'd look out for him, and when the kid is kidnapped the guy keeps putting himself in ridiculous situations which he has no real reason not to leave to the police. Some bearded French dude shows up, apparently a buddy of his from the first movie, and this guy just hangs out in the police station, hacking into their computers and feeding info to the hero when necessary. There's lots of Eurotrash getting beaten up and a disgustingly bony assassin girl whose zealously-applied mascara is constantly running. That's all I remember.

"The Brothers Grimm" - I didn't doubt Terry Gilliam's ability to pull off a fantasy romp, and sometimes, faith pays off. It pretty much reminded me of those big-budget, low-grossing '80s fantasy pictures I loved in my cable-watching youth such as "Dragonslayer" or "Clash of the Titans" (the greatest of course being "Krull"). Gilliam's fond of dumb slapstick humor, and there's plenty of that, but it's also pretty imaginative (like "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen") and amazingly grimy (like "Jabberwocky"). Peter Stormare and Jonathan Pryce steal the movie, chewing the scenery as over-the-top Italian and French military, respectively. Lena Headey is pretty good, too, sort of an older, crustier, mountain woman version of Keira Knightley. "Grimm" also contains a surprising amount of hilarious (and fake) animal violence, crazy expensive-looking sets and many references to various fairy tales by the Bros - some very blatant, others not. I have no idea why this has gotten such poor word of mouth, or why stupid Disney sat on it for so long. Aside from some shoddy CG and all the Germans with British accents, it's absolutely fine.

Whoo, this mortgage stuff is confusing. Time to chill with the beautiful new Cave In disc, essentially a collection of beefed-up demo tracks (handily streamed in its entirety here). The bad news: it's pretty short, and some of these songs are reportedly several years old. The good news: it's a nice mix of the band's recent pop/indie/psychedelic/punk/emo styles, and they brought back the screaming vocals on a couple of tunes.

If you're not sick of reading, peruse my thoughts about this evening's George Carlin show. Hoppa!

Low-down downloads

So, paying for downloads. It sounds like a fair idea, and in your average circumstance, it certainly is. But when I heard about flat fees such as $1 per song, I figured shit like this would happen soon...

At one site, Downloadpunk.com, you can pay $1.99 for Godspeed You Black Emperor!'s 2000 double-disc "Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven", a hell of a deal for a relatively recent, well-regarded album that clocks in at more than 87 minutes. GYBE! are all about long-ass droning mood piece songs that are perfect for zoning out, working in an office or slitting your wrists, and in this case those 87+ minutes are divided into four tracks. Four long, subtle, dynamic, expansive tracks... obviously not everybody's cup of tea, right?

Now, at the same site, you can also get something peppier, like the first Le Tigre album, but it will cost you $9.99. The Offspring's "Smash", which was actually a mainstream hit you've heard of (albeit eleven years ago), will also cost you $9.99. That seems to be the site's average album price, no matter how old or popular it is, and it turns out length has nothing to do with it. How much do you think The Sunshine Fix's 15-minute "The Future History of A Sunshine Fix" EP costs? Or Jello Biafra's ever-enjoyable 119-minute spoken word album "I Blow Minds For A Living"? Or The Locust's three-track, three-minute "Follow the Flock, Step in Shit" single? Why, they're all $9.99!

At least you can get Daylight Dies' "Idle" demo for $7.99 at Downloadpunk.com, which is less than I paid for the actual disc. But why is that GYBE! album so cheap? It's like a crazy mismarked find in the cutout bin. And the flat per-song fee is the same scam I assumed you'd get from iTunes or eMusic or whatever cutely-capitalized site you choose: tell me it's fair that on The Crown's "Crowned Unholy" redux, the ambient intro track costs the same as an actual song. Or as any actual song from the new Yob disc.

I suppose this lopsided system is not a big deal for someone who only wants to download, say, the same fucking Gwen Stefani song they can just hear for free every hour on the radio. (In fact, I wholeheartedly endorse charging those grazers as much as possible for their lazy listening habits.) But if the industry wants to sell serious music fans on this pay-for-download deal, they're going to have to find a way to get money from post-rock or prog without screwing punk and grindcore, if you catch my drift. Serious music fans will notice that if you want to buy Tee-Pee's "uncut" version of the final Sleep album, you can just pay 99 cents for each of the two tracks individually rather than the $9.99 full album fee. I'll stop now. This is making my head hurt.

On a related topic, downloading is the only way you can get the new Savage Circus single. And guess what? It's totally free. This is a new band with a couple of guys from the Swedish band Persuader, who sound like Blind Guardian back when they used to play fast, onetime Blind Guardian engineer Piet Sielck (of Iron Savior) and Blind Guardian's longtime (now-ex) drummer Thomen Stauch. Thus, Savage Circus, despite their awful name, sound pretty much like old Blind Guardian. That's just fine with me.

When a dog loves a dolphin

Every summer, I try to pick the shittiest movie I can think of and watch it. By shitty, I don't mean unprofessionally made or so-bad-it's good, but painful. It should feel like I'm wearing sandpaper underwear while riding a horse. It can't be any sort of "cult classic" nor very obscure; it should be old enough that most people have forgotten its existence but will have a vague recollection of it upon description. And with a mix of pity, incredulity and disgust, they'll say, "Damn, why did you watch that?"

For some reason, the last few years I've chosen children's movies: "First Kid" in 2004, "Getting Even With Dad" in 2003. I guess that's because awful kid flicks are so much more insipid, simplistic and grating than your average bombs - the Limp Bizkits of the film world, if you will. After hemming and hawing for most of this summer, I started thinking about shitty-looking animal movies. But those always look terrible, right? Which one should it be? Eddie Murphy's "Dr. Doolittle" movies made too much money, and "Racing Stripes" is too new. Thus, I went with the worst-looking one I could think of. No, not "Wild Hearts Can't Be Broken," not "Ed," not even "Slappy and the Stinkers." Last night, I watched "Zeus and Roxanne".

And I got totally sharked! It wasn't what I thought it would be at all. As can be seen on this Japanese Arnold Vosloo fan page(!), the international marketing hook for this atrocity was a dog riding a dolphin. I always thought that was basically the plot - these two animals become pals, someone tries to pull them apart, maybe puts them into show business or something, friendship triumphs. Well, I can assure you, the dog rides the dolphin exactly once, early in the film, and the dog is not standing on the dolphin, but just sort of laying there. The rest of the thing concerns Steve Guttenberg's son and Kathleen Quinlan's daughters trying to hook up their parents, who keep using the bizarre psychic bond between his pet dog (Zeus) and her research subject dolphin (Roxanne) to creepily project their feelings during their bungling romance.

Guttenberg's a lousy single dad. He's a fucking bum who won't get a real job, sitting around recording weenie elevator music all day, riding his motorcycle, sporting an earring and doing other stupid things to dupe us into considering him rakishly masculine. But Quinlan's no catch herself. With that ratty fe-mullet, overprotective paranoia and stink of the sea, it's a wonder her bratty daughters aren't smoking Luckys and earning five dollars a dance at the rec center just to get back at her. Vosloo, the guy who played Darkman twice as many times as Liam Neeson, is trying to steal her research on interspecies communication, apparently worth studying even when the only animals doing it are the title pair. He's one of those unthreatening kid's movie bad guys who surrounds himself with disapproving or apathetic help, falls in the water with his clothes on and can't even out-charisma Guttenberg when he tries to horn in on his imminent coupling with Quinlan.

But those two sad sacks deserve each other, and their kids, who become fast friends as plot convenience dictates, know it. Steve's spawn is played by Miko Hughes, a kid I used to love due to his roles in "Pet Sematary" ("Now I want to play with yeeeeouuu!") "Kindergarten Cop" ("Boys have a penis! Girls have a Vagina!") and "Wes Craven's New Nightmare" ("Holy bananas, my mom is freaking H-O-T!"). Here, Miko is as boring as his platonic palhood with Quinlan's girls - the younger of whom incessantly overacts with obsequious mugging, the older a short-skirted tween sexpot we were convinced was a young Scarlett Johansson until Goad checked the IMDB and found out she was just some girl from "Roswell." With the help of the kids' and animals' antics, Guttenberg finally gets over his dead wife and they all laugh and become some sort of semi-nuclear family. (That's probably what gave Jeffrey Lyons such a boner he proclaimed for the ads: "'Will melt your heart - and parents will enjoy it, guaranteed!")

Folks, this movie flat-out sucks, from the score to the offensive "men are like dogs, women are like dolphins" metaphor to the gangly-ass bizarro "Because of Winn Dixie" dog playing Zeus. I knew that it would suck going in. Why do I do this? Because cinematic pain is its own kind of cleansing, and because summer is the shittiest season. Some things in life just plain stink.

Bonus movie review: "A Sound of Thunder". Bonus track: The Arcade Fire - "Rebellion (Lies)". Have a good holiday, laborer.