Notes from the Dan Sessions: A New Era Begins

It's been some time since I've posted, and that's because I've been incredibly busy, and when I haven't been busy I've been exhausted. And when I haven't been exhausted I've been trying to squeeze in as much self-entertainment as possible. But I want to keep this up, and I had the very strange idea to post these. "These" are notes I make, as a track listing as much as anything else, for the mix CDs I like to make. Most people listen to their MP3s on their headphones, but I'm perfectly happy with my portable CD player and an album of my own devisement. I call these CDs "The Dan Sessions", and each ends up with a pretentious subtitle. Think of these as a strange chronicle of my life in song, or as simply music recommendations. And I don't have to come up with them, because they're already written!

A New Era Begins

This disc was made during a period of change in my life that ended a sort of bout with despondency, which was also a period in which I didn't make any mixes. It immediately became a staple of long bus rides and quick-paced walks down wide, empty, condo-lined streets.


1. Saliva – “Ladies and Gentlemen”
And the “New Era” begins with a song that’s one three-and-a-half minute proclamation of forthcoming awesomeness. It’s silly and ludicrous in its brashness (“Your ears and your eyes may be bleeding”), but it rocks and somehow it makes it believes that whatever’s coming will deliver on the anticipation. Saliva isn’t anybody’s favorite band; usually they produce generic rockers, but this time they went with their instincts and delivered a genuine pick-me-up that uses phrases like “explosion of catastrophe.”
2. Fujiya & Miyagi – “Collarbone”
Every once in a while we meet something genuinely different, and it’s love at first sight. Or listen. What is this? Alternative Rock? A strange cousin of rap? Low groove jazz? A children’s rhyme? Who the heck are these guys? Their names sound Japanese. There’s a weird moment in the middle where he rolls the heck out of an “r”. There are sections whispered over bass and claps, mixed with pseudo-beat boxing. And then atonal guitar craziness. What really matters is that the first time I heard it I knew it was something special, and this ended up as one of the most-played tracks on my dearly departed radio show. Try walking down the street to this one.
3. Foo Fighters – “The Pretender”
The Foo Fighters, more than almost any band today, are capable of creating albums full of mainstream rock hits while still appealing to those who like to think of themselves as having discerning ears. This song rocks hard, but it also has a soul. “What if I say I will never surrender?” Was well onto my playlist before it showed up over the first “Dollhouse” trailer, which of course it was perfect for.
4. Vampire Weekend – “Oxford Comma”
I recently read someone, not really in a derisive way, proclaim Vampire Weekend “the Whitest Band in the World.” And yes, their biggest hit to date is about commas… sort of, anyway. It’s also about butlers and chap-stick. This is a song that seems laid-back and angry at the same time, barely contained behind the vaguely calypso rhythm. “Why would you lie about something dumb like that?” Another song that introduced me to something genuinely new.
5. PJ Harvey – “Down By the Water”
What the heck is this song even about? It’s like a low growl, wretched and lonely. It gets under your skin like an itch. PJ Harvey can do that. And it ends with a stretch nobody who hears it ever forgets, that whispered chant: “Little Fish/Big Fish/Swimming in the water/Come back here and give me my daughter.” There are strings here, guitar, drums, but they all seem under Harvey’s hypnotic spell, barely alive. A work of amazing power.
6. Matchbox Twenty – “How Far We’ve Come”
Rob Thomas is one of the greatest songwriters living. Yes, Matchbox Twenty has become so mainstream they get played on easy listening, but that’s hardly their fault, and this is a candidate for best song of the year. It’s been used in every trailer, ad, montage you can think of, but that’s because it the kind of song that genuinely works on myriad levels. It’s driving, it’s urgent, and it delivers its intended feeling with surgical precision: This is the end of this, and that is worth being sad about, but the ride delivered, and we should be dancing.
7. Flobots – “Handlebars”
I heard this song one day on the radio and it was probably the highlight of that week. It’s a song about the sin of pride, and not just that it’s a sin but why it’s a sin. It dramatizes the loss of innocence. This is a song that explains Hitler from Hitler’s perspective. That’s a lot to ask of a short piece of music, but somehow it manages it. Some people will hear it and say “there’s rapping on the radio,” as my mom always likes to. They’ll be missing something transcendant.
8. Sea Wolf – “You’re a Wolf”
For a relatively low-key song, this is one that sure gets stuck in my head a lot. There are about five lines in the whole song, but between the song manages between the quietly insistent guitar and the loping cello to keep itself feeling fresh. It pulls you in, like the semi-mystic encounter with a gypsy woman that its lyrics seem to describe. An indie gem.
9. Cold War Kids – “Hospital Beds”
This is a weird song. Cold War Kids are high-pitched and sparse, and the piano bits seem more to twinkle than play an actual tune. Much of the song seems like a sort of chant, a plea for help, but other times a strange joy seeps in. Somehow it feels to me like something out of World War I, with scenes from Atonement, though that would seem contradictory because it possesses the DNA of alternative rock, and makes no particular effort to be retro. It brings us into something so well that we’re almost startled when we’re let out of it five minutes later.
10. A Fine Frenzy – “Almost Lover”
There is no song that can bring me to the edge of tears so easily. It is almost ridiculous, how emotional this song can make me despite having no particular event in my life to tie it to. There are production pieces shimmering occasionally in the background, but it’s essentially just the singer’s voice and her fingers on the piano keys. I love sometimes just to feel; it brings me out of my life and into a place of startling beauty and sharpness. This song, especially in the startling crescendo of a bridge, does that as well as anything I’ve run across.
11. Scissors for Lefty – “Ghetto Ways”
Strategically placed to bring us out of the previous song’s mood, we have a weird, nearly incomprehensible piece of dance music. It’s like listening to a party through the wall. The chorus seems to just be a strange sort of heavy breathing… but it’s infinitely relistenable. It’s minor key enough not be jarring, but it’s still reminiscent of The Killers… after they dropped acid.
12. Rufus Wainwright – “Going to a Town”
A song written and performed with anger, sadness, and longing by an openly gay artist, this is an extremely slow build of piano rock that makes us really feel the repeated line “I’m so tired of America.” When I first heard this song, Obama was barely a blip on the radar screen, and it seemed like we were living in the last days of Rome, overrun with prejudice and malaise. Even before Wainwright starts singing about “bathing the body of Jesus Christ in blood,” he’s captured that feeling better than any other artist I’ve heard.
13. The Swell Season – “Falling Slowly”
This is a sweet little tune that somehow becomes, over the course of its length, about nothing less than everything. Male and female voices swoop over plaintive strings, lamenting how little time we have. It was from the soundtrack for the film Once, but it became much bigger than the little-seen movie it came from, and ended up winning an Oscar and putting its indie-darling creators squarely on the mainstream map. Glen Hansard makes us believe he’s falling in love and it’s making him cry, without irony and with total conviction.
14. Gomez – “How We Operate”
I discovered this song about a week before it went mainstream, largely due to an appearance on “Grey’s Anatomy”. Its main instrument is a banjo, at least for the opening minute or so, and the voice is almost country, but this is unmistakably a rock song. A rock song not quite like any other rock song. It’s like a night drive in the desert, gradually gaining momentum, adding layers, while something truly meaningful twinkles just out of reach. There are ghosts here, and sweeping strings.
15. Maximo Park – “Books from Boxes”
Maximo Park is one of those ice-cold bands with a low, melodic voice, like Longwave or Idlewild, and like most of those that are successful they somehow manage to be catchy, at least on this track. This didn’t make my collection for any special reason other than that I think it’s really good, and don’t seem to tire of it. In the first verse we hear “We can beat the sun as long as we keep moving.” And I for one believe it.
16. The Wombats – “Let’s Dance to Joy Division”
First of all, there’s a band named The Wombats. Second of all, someone wrote an entire song about listening to “Love Will Tear Us Apart” with an ironic ear. It’s peppy and fast, the single punkiest song on this disc. It made my regular playlist, and then somewhere in there it took on several more layers. This is my song about making the best of it in today’s economy. “It can all go so wrong, and we’re so happy.” It ends in laughter.
17. Fleet Foxes – “White Winter Hymnal”
This is the unlikeliest of indie hits. Time recently named it the third best song of 2008, and called it “choral roundelay.” It feels like the Beach Boys through a glass darkly, and it’s very very pretty. In only a few minutes, we’re once again in another world, this one snowbound and quiet. For all that, there’s a surprising amount of rock here, and I would hardly characterize this as a “slow song.”
18. IAMX – “President”
I never heard of IAMX before this song, but I have to seek out more of them. Like “Going to a Town”, this is a minor-key epic of piano rock. But unlike that tune, this one is post-Obama, and comes off more as an insistent proclamation of hope, a march to victory for the little guy. In a year where I found myself vaulted into politics, this song feels like where I’ve been and where my twisted dreams are going. With a circus-organ thump thrown in for good measure. It ends like a foreboding of the future.

MemeWatch: The Twilight Backlash

Ah yes, the backlash. The movement-ized rejection of something that has already achieved great cultural popularity. The backlash as a phenomenon predates the internet... I'm sure there were plenty of people who thought that "Gone With the Wind" wasn't, y'know, that great, but the instantaneous, interactive nature of it has allowed backlashes to gain a much higher level of notoriety. If a huge cultural phenomenon isn't quite up to snuff these days, a backlash is all but inevitable. (the wikipedia article on "backlash" can be found here)

The new film "Twilight" had a better first day on Friday than either "Quantum of Solace" or the most recent Indiana Jones film. It's less than all but one of the Harry Potter movies, and not even close to what "The Dark Knight" did earlier this year, but it's still far and away the most successful opening for a movie directed by a woman (Catherine Hardwicke). For those who have been either living under a rock or in a completely teenage girl-free evironment, "Twilight" is the first in an incredibly popular series of books by Stephenie Meyer that center around the passionate-but-chaste romance of a high school everygirl, Bella Swan, and a particularly hunky vampire, Edward Cullen, mostly set in a small town in Washington state. The thing about "Twilight" that has struck me the most is that the backlash was in full swing before the "frontlash" was even really up to speed. This backlash has the most lash I've ever seen. Okay, I'll stop that now.

I'll be honest here. I haven't read any of the Twilight books, and I almost certainly won't see the movie until it shows up the discount theater, if at all. I know more than one person whose opinion I trust who absolutely loves them. But the critical consensus seems to be one of understanding-at-best (There seem to be two types of reviews, ones that talk about how it might appeal to teen girls and ignore the actual quality and those that are critical of the actual quality), and the internet... well, the internet does not seem to be willing to tolerate it.

A big part of this, I think, is that the Twilight fandom (my favorite term I've seen so far is "Twi-hards") is almost entirely female. It consists of teen girls, from tweens to college age, along with a decent sampling of their moms, the sort who like romance novels. I like to fancy myself a bit of a geek anthropologist, so to speak. I enjoy the inner workings of various fandoms, even for works I myself am not that into. And this is perhaps the most monolithic major geek fandom I've ever seen. Even "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Xena: Warrior Princess", probably the two most female skewing of the major geek fandoms I've previously looked at, had fairly large male bases, as well. This shows it's not just the female protagonist that's at issue, it's the content. "Xena" was an action show at heart, and "Buffy" was at such a high level of quality that it attracted connoisseurs of all types... plus there was karate and stuff. "Twilight" is a romance, through and through.

Also at issue is how good it really is. Twilight is often compared to the Harry Potter novels, another fandom based on a YA book series that seems to have at least slightly more girls than guys. But general consensus seems to be that the Twilight series isn't even in the same league ("USA Today" was roundly mocked for making the suggestion this week). I've never been afraid to criticize JK Rowling's prose, and "Deathly Hollows" drags way too much for what it is, but Rowling does have an intuitive grasp of how to build excitement and when things are happening in the Potter novels, there's nothing like it. As the backlashers are quick to point out, Meyer's prose has at least as many issues, her content has a strong potential to be laughable, and the plot of "Twilight" doesn't really get going until at least 300 pages into the book (It apparently takes over 200 for Bella just to realize that Edward is a vampire). The Harry Potter books and films have, for the most part, manages to avoid a full-fledged backlash despite their gargatuan popularity because most people who read them are hooked.

Let's take a look at other recent phenomena:
-"Star Wars" eventually created its own backlash with the terrible "prequel" movies. I had a friend who at one point was a hardcore Star Wars guy, but mostly dropped it circa "Attack of the Clones" when he "found out that Jar-Jar Binks created the Empire." Many universes grow richer with continued exploration... Star Wars, not so much. The Spider-Man film series probably also fits this model, as it was riding high after the first two films and nearly completely destroyed its own fandom with the failure of the climactic third film.
-"Star Trek" did get richer with continued exploration, but eventually seemed to run its course. The times, it seemed, had passed the mostly-utopian future it depicted by. Plus there was a lot of mismanagement by Paramount... "Enterprise" would sputter on for a few more strange seasons, but the "Trek" franchise as we knew it seemed to end when "Nemesis" opened opposite a Harry Potter film and tanked. People didn't hate "Trek", they just weren't huge fans. But now the new trailer for the JJ Abrams "Star Trek" film has gotten startling buzz, and it's like the franchise never went away.
-"Lord of the Rings" has its detractors, but the books, and especially the films are so seminal and high-quality that there doesn't seem to have been much of a backlash, at least not within the fandom community.
-"Buffy" and "Battlestar Galactica" are probably representative a group of works that were never quite popular enough to create a backlash, but attracted a strong, loyal following due to their high quality. Both have large numbers of online fans who insist that they should be considered for the best TV series of all time... period, and are very influential within the current "geek" community. But they remain relatively lesser known in the world-at-large, and that seems to have helped.
-"Firefly"'s hardcore fans created their own backlash, not the work itself. It would probably be in the above group, except for the fact that an early cancellation created a strong evangelical streak in the fandom. This got them "Serenity", as well as several comic book miniseries, but it also resulted in everyone else on the internet getting really annoyed.
-"The Dark Knight" is probably the biggest geek phenomenon of this year so far, even more so than "Twilight". At first it appeared it might be among that elite that is so good it's just impossible to hate. But as people thought about it more, and it became even more widely seen, it began to be criticized for its relentless gloom. It's a great movie, but the staying power is in question. It recently showed up at our local discount theater, and I haven't gone to see it again yet, and I'm not sure I will until it shows up on DVD.
-"Pirates of the Caribbean" was totally unexpected, and was driven, yes, by young women. Guys liked pirates in the same way they like ninjas and zombies and all those things, but it was hard for them to participate in a fandom where the main debate was immediately whether Depp or Bloom was cuter. Then the second two movies had interesting bits but were overlong and all over the place, and the fandom did not appear to withstand the backlash. Comparable might be "Transformers", which came out of nowhere with a movie (by Michael Bay!) that was really hard not to like. And, Megan Fox and all, it seems to be more male-skewing. But it has the strong potential to have that luster taken off by subsequent sequels, we'll see.

These, of course, are only some of the geek-related examples recently ("Doctor Who" may have so far miraculously managed to be the most backlash-free of all). There have of course been many other kinds of backlashes, but this is where I like to think my "area of expertise" lies. ;) So "Twilight" has the disadvantage of being a female-oriented fandom based on material that already seems to be showing cracks. io9 has been nice enough to round-up some of the most blatant and hilarious examples of recent online "Twilight"-bashing here. Whatever side you're on, this should be good for a laugh. It certainly cracked me up.

Movie Reviews for People Who Go to the Dollar Movies After Work: Tropic Thunder

This is the first movie I've reviewed in this series that was actually successful, but that doesn't mean you should pay top dollar for it! Tropic Thunder is a middling Hollywood comedy that gets quite a bit of its appeal from its A-list talent. It's directed by the actor Ben Stiller, and he got a bunch of his friends, including Robert Downey Jr., Jack Black, Matthew McConaughey, Nick Nolte, Steve Coogan, and yeah, Tom Cruise, who has a ball as the new modern stereotype of a movie mogul, to appear in it, not to mention a myriad of cameos and in-jokes.

The basic premise is that a bunch of actors making a Vietnam movie end up stranded in the jungle. They think the cameras are still rolling (even after their director (Coogan) steps on a land mine and blows up in front of them), and when they stumble across a bunch of heroin traffickers their movie turns into real life. Stiller's character is an over-the-hill action star, making a bid for mainstream credibility. Downey Jr. is an Australian actor, a five-time Oscar winner who doesn't break character when the cameras stop rolling. For this movie he's had surgery to make himself black... Yes, in the era of the Obama presidency, blackface is apparently finally acceptable comedic fodder. Black is a comedian best known for fart-joke movies who spends most of the movie in heroin withdrawal, which we're also now apparently able to play for laughs.

Rather than a lot of huge laughs or really great lines, this movie generally just does everything with a smile on its face. It has several swear words per sentence, but the movie it reminded me of the most might be, weirdly, another Stiller film, Zoolander. But there's nothing here on the level of "How are they supposed to learn to read if they can't even fit inside the building?" There's a lot of little, tonal jokes given to us rapid fire. The audience wasn't nearly as into it as some other comedies I've seen recently, even Get Smart. That said, this probably required a higher level of skill from everyone involved than a silly spy comedy, as a lot of it depends on timing and how swear words are delivered. This may have had a higher percentage of unintelligible dialogue than any other mainstream comedy I've been to, and I'm not sure if that's a good sign or not. Probably not.

There are a lot of good things here, but I'm not sure they ever come together into anything real. Downey Jr. got a lot of the press, and deservedly so. He just goes on these extended, nonsensical riffs, and they're probably the best thing in the movie ("I know who I am! I'm a dude playing a dude disguised as another dude!"). Nolte, playing the soldier upon whose story the movie is based, has fun pulling out every military cliche in the book, but becomes less interesting once we learn the real truth about him. Black's character just seems superfluous. It's like he was added to create chaos, but he doesn't create enough chaos to justify his existence.

This review feels disjointed, but this is a disjointed movie. I think it probably got better reviews than it deserved. It has some funny moments, but it has too many swings and misses. If you were smart enough to skip the big movie theater, make this a dollar movie.

TV Is Back: My Own Worst Enemy & Crusoe

Oh, NBC, there was a time when you were the most exciting channel on TV. That's still true to a certain extent. You have "30 Rock," and "The Office," which are far and away TV's two best live-action comedies. You have "Heroes," for whatever it's worth (given the current popularity of super heroes, imagine how many people would watch it if it was GOOD), and "Chuck," which is still so much fun, even if no one's really watching. You have "Saturday Night Live," which isn't as biting as "The Daily Show" these days but has its own loopy place (McCain: "Sen. Obama, my invisible friend Simon can't be appointed to the Cabinet. He's a Unicorn. I think you know that.").

But now you've put out an entire new slate of shows, and every single one of them's a dud, without exception. "Knight Rider" is incredibly awful, and I ended up watching most of the last ten minutes of "Kath & Kim" the other night against my will and there wasn't a single laugh in that entire time. This week came the debuts of "My Own Worst Enemy" and "Crusoe".

"My Own Worst Enemy" is, as a concept, about identity. It's billed as a sort of modern-day Jekyll & Hyde story mixed with James Bond. That probably sounds good to you, but the show simply fails to deliver. Its biggest problem is that it's hard to tell its Jekyll from its Hyde. This is a show whose fundamental premise is that two distinct personalities share one body, that of (very) poor-man's Tom Cruise, Christian Slater. One is supposed to be a cool, dark secret agent who can kill people with his feet, and the other is a normal guy who works in an office. But we're not left thinking the two of them are that different, which is fatal.

The first problem is that Slater is horribly miscast. Some actors could have a field day with dual role. Slater is definitely not one of them. As a secret agent he's stoic, and as a regular guy he's... pretty stoic, actually. He's not really capable of anything else. When he figures out he's two different people, he seems mildly perturbed. Then there's the other issue, which is that the normal guy's life is actual a very Hollywood version of a normal guy's life, which makes it almost as glamorous as secret agent guy's. Secret Agent Guy sleeps with hot women, Normal Guy sleeps with his hot wife. Secret Agent Guy drives a cool new sports car. Normal Guy drives... a cool new car given to us by our friends in the product placement department. Secret Agent Guy hangs out in spectacular hotel rooms. Normal Guy hangs out in... a spectacularly large, nice house.

I am normally good with suspension of disbelief. You want me to believe that we're on the rings of Saturn fighting the aliens with laser beams coming from the eyes of the space whale we're riding, I'm good with that. But I need the actions of characters and groups within the story to make sense. The explanation of why our Secret Agency would go through all the trouble of creating Double Personality Action Christian Slater isn't really there here. And without any basis in reality, we're left with nothing but Christian Slater failing to give us two separate people.

On to "Crusoe," which was probably the best of the NBC bunch so far, though that's saying oh so little. The pilot gives us Sam Neill and Sean Bean, but both are in flashbacky guest roles. The star is supposed to be one Philip Winchester, who spends most of the opening episode showing us his chest muscles, which are certainly impressive. He has his sidekick Friday (Tongai Chirisa), who is a lot like Crusoe, in that he seems to be good at everything and also has nice chest muscles. In any case, I was mildly entertained for about 45 minutes. I soon discovered to my horror that the opening episode was actually two hours long. The plot involved pirates who happen to wash up on shore, many of them ending up killed by Crusoe himself (which I think we're supposed to think is funny), except for the hot sword-fighting chick.

These guys come off as the "Pirates of the Caribbean" understudy company, and that's the whole point of the show. I wondered when the schedules came out where the idea for a Robinson Crusoe series could have come from. Surely it wasn't an extremely late attempt to rip off "Lost"? Thankfully, that's not the case. Just as the original "Battlestar Galactica" was a blatant attempt to capitalize on the "Star Wars" phenomenon, "Crusoe" is a blatant attempt to capitalize on "Pirates." I suppose you can't blame them for trying, though it's so blatant we're left thinking about that rather than the what's going on on-screen.

Neither Crusoe nor Friday end up as much of a character. They're just sort of good at everything. Robinson seems to have some ability with ropes and pullies and inventions. He has a contraption that squeezes five lemons at once. Because you need to do that all the time. He has a bridge over pirahna infested water (go to the NBC website to learn how to build your own!) that consists of a very strange wheel mechanism and a complex series of ropes. I was left wondering why he didn't just build a regular rope bridge. As scruffy pirate guy says, "Seems like you've had too much time your hands."

The series is also pretty much robbed of any sense of reality by its crappy production values that reminded me of nothing more than a Halmi miniseries, or maybe "Hercules"/"Xena" type syndicated shows (which, I was not surprised to find, Halmi was also involved with). So what we end up with is a sort of stilted stageplay on a tropical island that plays like kids making up a story based on all the crappy movies they've seen lately while wearing halloween costumes. It's only really worth sitting through if they're your kids, chest muscles not withstanding.

Movie Reviews for People Who Go to the Dollar Movies After Work: Swing Vote

I went to the discount theatre today with the vague intention of seeing Brendan Fraser's Journey to the Center of the Earth, but when I got there I decided to go with my gut and saw Swing Vote. This isn't a bad movie, necessarily. It's an okay movie stuck with Kevin Costner as its star, and that just brings down the whole proceeding. Costner has had good movies before, but even in them he was the stoic rock around which the action moved. Here he's just a dumbass, and the movie seems to think we like dumbasses because we're dumbasses, too.

Costner plays Ernest "Bud" Johnson, a drunk and a nobody. He's a single dad to a fifth-grade-or-so daughter who's much smarter than he deserves ("What do you want to be when you grow up?" "I go back and forth between veterinarian and chairman of the Fed."), making me seriously wonder how his sperm produced this bright little girl, especially when we later see her mother is even worse. Bud is the sort of guy who responds to his daughter telling him she registered him to vote through the mail with "That's just great. I could get jury duty now!" He seems to love her, but then forgets about her repeatedly. I hate Bud. Even when Bud is theoretically redeemed at the end, mostly by admitting that he's a dumbass, I still hated him.

Through some arbitrary plot mechanics that the movie knows better than to dwell on, an entire presidential election comes down to Bud's vote. The state of New Mexico is tied, and due to a voting machine malfunction that caused Bud's "vote" to not count (I'm gonna skip over a whole part here made more complicated than it needs to be, involving how Bud didn't really try to vote), he gets to re-vote ten days later. The global news media (Aaron Brown, Chris Matthews, Arianna Huffington, etc. all have extended cameos) descends upon Bud's tiny hometown of Texico, New Mexico, as do both candidates.

This is where the movie finds itself as much as it does. The candidates include the republican President Boone (Kelsey Grammer), and a democrat from Vermont named Donald Greenleaf (Dennis Hopper). Neither of these men is given much of personality, though Greenleaf, probably unintentionally, reminds viewers of John McCain. A lot. Maybe it was just me, I dunno. Anyway, both of them sycophantically try to please Bud in whatever way that they can, which Bud buys hook, line, and sinker but his daughter Molly immediately sees through. We also spend time with the candidate's advisors, with Stanley Tucci as the President's ruthless Rovian operative and Nathan Lane (perhaps the most restrained I've ever seen him) as an idealist democrat who is just so sick of losing it hurts.

The best parts of the movie come when the candidates fall all over each other in an attempt to conform to Bud's every whim, with the Republican coming out in favor of gay marriage and the Democrat denouncing abortion rights based on off-hand remarks. The campaign commercials in which they do so are absolutely hysterical. We also see each of the candidates questioning, in his own way, whether any of this is right, and how far he's willing to go. Though a bit earnest, all of that works. There's also a fairly worthless side plot involving a pretty hispanic reporter and her boss (George Lopez, who is totally pointless but at least doesn't have time to ruin the movie), but it's also fairly inoffensive.

Where the movie runs into trouble is in the relationship between Bud and his daughter, and the fact that it's front and center more than we really want it to be. Normally, I appreciate character development, but it just doesn't work. There's also a truly bizarre shaky-cam drama detour at the top of the third act that definitely didn't need to be there... it's as if the film-makers think it's the key incident in the film, but the audience just wants it to go away. In the end, Bud gives a long, vaguely poetic speech on national television that is Costner's best moment in the movie by far, but it doesn't feel earned and I was left wondering if we were supposed to think his daughter wrote it for him.

This is a movie with some thought behind it, that manages to comment on our system without seeming like a polemic for one side or the other. However, it runs into trouble trying to make those ideas into a movie. We're left with a comedy with many funny moments, but also moments like that when the Secretary of State and Attorney General of New Mexico show up at Bud's trailer to tell him about the situation. He assumes they're social services and pleads with them not to take his daughter away. I was left not sure whether this scene was supposed to be funny or not. And that's why this is definitely a dollar movie.

TV Is Back: South Park and The Sarah Silverman Program

As Tuned In's James Poniewozik exclaimed yesterday, "South Park is back, just when we needed it." And it brought its friends!

I love South Park. It has an enduring ability to savage the worst parts of our society while still actually being funny, not to mention that it's ability to deal with current events is matched only by SNL, since the episodes are sometimes produced in as little as a week. There are off episodes, of course, but no other current shows has as many "great moments per capita" as South Park.

If you were looking for one of those classics last night, you were mostly sadly mistaken. The episode involved Cartman pulling Butters into his "American Liberation Front" to save us from Chinese domination (he has nightmares about the Beijing Opening Ceremonies), which quickly ascends into a hostage crisis farce where Butters keeps shooting people in the crotch. This is the good part of the episode. Unfortunately, it also includes a stupid plot involving the boys having been traumatized by Steven Spielberg and George Lucas "raping" Indiana Jones in the latest movie, which plays on the cliches of a Lifetime-style weepie. The biggest problem for me with this isn't the way they deal Spielberg and Lucas (incredibly, ludicrously disrespectful, but half the point of these guys is they don't respect anybody... and was it any worse than what they did to Mel Gibson? Well, maybe...), but the fact that it just isn't funny. In a show like this, that's the ultimate sin. There were flashes of brilliance, though, mostly involving Cartman, and I'm confident the show will return to form next week. It's stayed at the height of its powers longer than any other show in my memory.

The Sarah Silverman Program is a showcase for the "no holds barred" comedienne who gets her unique touch from making jokes about racism and bodily functions with a wink and a smile. This works on the internet and in cut-up form, but in half-hour form it has only been really funny in fits and starts. This season premiere was probably the best episode I've seen. One of the large, slovenly, geeky gay guys across the hall (Brian Posehn), introduces Sarah to pot... and she discovers that as long as she's high, she's a genius, but she can't remember her incredible insights while she's sober. So she develops a system where she leaves her sober self voicemail messages urging her to follow her instructions. This also leads to a farcical hostage crisis (two in one night!). On a normal sitcom, Sarah would eventually go the well one too many times and learn, at the very least, that pot isn't for her. But there's no comeuppance, and high-Sarah changes people's lives and takes down a corporation with little to no repercussions. I'll probably never say this again, but it was actually better than South Park.

Bits: Everything Sucks Edition

-The bailout approved by Congress last week appears to have done little in the short term to stop the current worldwide financial spiral, though expecting it to have done so may have been unreasonable. Stock markets around the world went sharply downhill Monday. In the US, the Dow Jones dropped below 10000 for the first time in years. In Iceland, the currency was down 7% and the economy appears to be on the verge of collapse. The Frankfurt markets hit the skids after the German government had to perform its own bailout of real estate firms. Russian stock indexes lost over 15% of their value. And so on.

-Here you can find an easy step-by-step process to construct your own "Egg of Time." "Look into its time vortex, and see all that was, and all that will be." Yes.

-Time has a list of words the dictionary is trying to get rid of to make room for 2,000 new words. I am a word geek, and had not heard of any of these.

-New polls from various sources have shown Sen. Barack Obama up in pretty much every swing state, including Minnesota, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Florida, and New Mexico. However, it's still a month until the election, and we have discussed the accuracy of polls on here before.

-Meanwhile, Cracked.com has come up with a list of 5 presidential elections that were dumber than this one (somehow). It's actually a really good read. I particularly like the caption under the pic of John Quincy Adams: "I'll kill your wife. I don't even care."

-In response to what it says is widespread piracy, Warner Bros. is trying a new tack in Korea... it's going to start releasing its movies online before they hit DVD. How that will help, I'm not totally sure, but it makes sense in other ways.

-The Tampa Bay Rays are in baseball's final four. Hell has told us that it will take more than this for it to freeze over. Hell is just stubborn that way. In other sports news, the Ferocious Walruses fantasy football team remains undefeated. Because I know you've been hanging on every play.

Movie Reviews for People Who Go to the Dollar Movies After Work: Babylon A.D.

Our movie reviews here at the WalrusFile are going to be a little bit different. It’s so expensive to go to a first-run movie these days that I know that there are a lot of people like me who decide to wait, either to rent the DVD or order it from Netflix or, like I usually do, go see the movies once they arrive at the discount theater down the street. But there’s a lot of choices, so we’ll try and weed out the duds.

Babylon A.D. is the most completely nonsensical movie I’ve seen in a long time. I don’t mean it’s weird, though it is, or that it’s brainless, though it’s usually that too. I mean it literally makes no sense. I could use words to describe the plot to you, but they would be meaningless. We are given a series of vaguely interesting pieces here, but there is little to no explanation of how they fit together. That said, there are redeeming qualities here. The movie is entertaining. We’re given a halfway interesting vision of a sort of coherent future (well, visually coherent, anyway). And Vin Diesel is always good for a laugh.

We are shown a brutal mercenary. A girl with the brain of a computer (which somehow means she’s psychic) who may be carrying a “viral bomb.” A nun who knows kung fu. An insane cage fighter (“He is a lost soul”). A crazy scarred boss guy (Gerard Depardieu!) in a tank limousine. Televisions that “you can’t turn off, but you can change the channel.” A vaguely creepy religion. Biker gangs with heat-seeking missiles. Drone aircraft set to blow up refugees. A virgin pregnancy (with multiracial twins!). Computer systems that read your memories by temporarily killing you. Moving robotic walls. “Double Clone” Siberian Tigers. Bombs going off with zero explanation (more than one!). Sexual tension out of absolutely nowhere. And, most especially, Vin Diesel doing a back flip over a missile with a snowmobile. I’m forgetting a lot here.

The basic story is that Vin Diesel (whose character, I think, is named “Toorop”) has to transport this girl named Aurora who has supposedly spent her entire life at a convent in Kyrgyzstan to New York, along with a nun played by Taiwanese actress Michelle Yeoh. This is a fairly standard Sci-Fi plot, actually. But the explanations of the hows and whys that we’re given are what make this all extra trippy. It’s set in a sort of “this goes on” future, chaotic and overpopulated, overrun with refugees, with video screens and advertisements on every available surface. Global warming is mentioned but we don’t really see the effects. The special effects are convincing, especially the gleaming ultra-city of New York. There’s a nice joke when they’re flying on an airliner and we pull back to see “Coke Zero” written on the side in huge letters. At least I think it’s a joke. It could be extremely ham-fisted product placement. And no, the title has no relation that I can see to anything in the movie… except, I suppose, that it does theoretically take place after the birth of Christ.

This movie’s pedigree is, somewhat randomly, mostly French. It has a French director, Mathieu Kassovitz, a French actress playing Aurora (meaning her dialogue often slips into incomprehensibility), and it’s based on a French Sci-Fi novel called Babylon Babies. In a few places it’s reminiscent of that far superior, far more joyous French Sci-Fi classic in English, The Fifth Element. A few places. But in place of garish color everywhere we have black and metal gray, and in place of plucky Bruce Willis we have Vin Diesel, who is not asked to show a single emotion for the entire film. And that’s why this is definitely a dollar movie.

Updates: As the Bailout Turns

-The Senate voted for a version of the bailout today, 74 to 25. Both Barack Obama and John McCain voted in favor of the bill. The current version is very similar to the one the House rejected earlier this week, except for "sweeteners" (and yes, that's apparently the official term) that were added, especially tax cuts. Said cuts are apparently intended to lure Republicans. If I was a Republican, I would feel insulted by that. "They'll vote for anything with tax cuts, it doesn't matter how much they hate the rest of it." And of course, that makes it even less likely that we actually have the $700 Billion dollars to use for this.

-Scientists now say the AIDS virus jumped to people as early as 1884, much earlier than previously thought. I'm not sure what the implications of that are, but it's interesting stuff.

-Sarah Silverman, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Jonah Hill are among an all-star cast that doesn't want you to vote. That reverse psychology won't work on me! http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1832128

-The Baseball playoffs are underway here in the States. Early victories for the Phillies, Dodgers, and Red Sox.

-Comic books too... booky for you? Ever thought "this is great, but I wish it was more computerized?" Comic book stories animated through machinima, now on the intertubes. http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=DF54DE54A3BAA597

-Real life blind people have apparently decided that the upcoming film "Blindness" is offensive in its depiction of blind people. Shocking!