Skins & Futurama

Skins is a British show about the decline of youth and the sex and drugs they get into. The first season is a little strained, but is fairly enjoyable, with kids doing stupid things and having sex (lots of nudity, and many shots of the male cast in underwear) and doing lots of drugs, in a mostly believable fashion. But the plot twist at the end of the first season is clearly a jump the shark moment, and while the first episode of the second season is still ok, the second is terrible (short of the Osama! musical (it's at least the third English spoof of an American musical with an ! after it, following The Tall Guy's Elephant! and Gay! A Gay Musical from The IT Crowd (and by the way, I've since seen the American IT Crowd pilot, and it's terrible, as it's the same jokes as the English version, but Joel McHale as Roy is no good, and the woman who they brought in to do Jen was way off, and although Moss was the same, it wasn't nearly enough to make that a travesty of television), which I think is making fun of Oliver!) which is funny), and it just gets worse and worse. The third season starts over with an almost entirely new cast, so I didn't even bother watching those. So, Skins first series is watchable, but second isn't.

Futurama: Into the Wild Green Yonder is something I saw back when it came out on DVD. I also realized I hadn't rated it back then. It seems like a good time to do that, now that Futurama has started airing new episodes on Comedy Central. Those two episodes made me very happy, but weren't quite up to the high level of the show pre-cancellation. Maybe still more nudity and ridiculousness than the Fox episodes, but they fit in quite well with the movies. Back to which, it really is very much for fans. Call-backs to previous plots, along with obscure science references are classic Futurama, but it just wasn't as funny as I would've wanted.

The Informer, The Informant!, Toy Story 3, & Day & Night

The Informer is a John Ford film about the IRA, and made just after the Hays production code was introduced. As such, the IRA was made into much more of a quasi-governmental organization than it really was at the time. Also, the woman in it was so clearly a prostitute, and they went to a whorehouse. And yet, they couldn't possibly mention either of those things in the movie. About the only surprising thing is that the eventual execution is portrayed as completely justified.

The Informant! is Soderbergh messing with you. Having listened to the This American Life episode a couple times, I knew the plot, so it was easy to enjoy Mark Whitacre's insanely random thoughts, and just how crazy he really was. The cast was full of extremely funny comics (Joel McHale, Tony Hale, Patton Oswalt, Paul F. Thompkins, Scott Adsit) and some other Those Guys (Scott Bakula, Thomas F. Wilson), but the movie really belongs to Matt Damon and Melanie Lynskey's reactions to him. As much as it can be anyone other than Soderbergh. He needs to make more movies like this. I will watch anything he does.

Toy Story 3 has Day & Night in front of it. Day & Night is the typical Pixar short, winning, almost dialogue-less, and impressive technically. The many women in bikinis was a little surprising, but there are no real complaints with it. Toy Story 3, however, has a lot to answer for: after 11 years, why the hell was it made? After watching it, though, it follows along perfectly with both those who saw the first one as children's growing up, along with Pixar itself. And it has one of the most depressing scenes of all time in a kids film. Even with that, I was laughing and crying throughout, and I just can't say enough: Pixar's batting average is the highest among all production studios. Only A Bug's Life and Cars (the latter the only one that is an actual bad movie) are not masterpiece's.

The Special Relationship, Blood Diamond, Funny People, Repo! The Genetic Opera, & How to Lose Friends & Alienate People

The Special Relationship is from Peter Morgan (and starring Michael Sheen as Blair), who also wrote The Queen and The Deal. Unfortunately, this is a 90 minute version of Blair and Clinton's relationship, which really doesn't give enough time to do anything other than gloss over details and hit some high points. Also, I really didn't like Dennis Quaid as Bill Clinton. He was much better as a faux-Bush in American Dreamz. Sheen is again perfect as Blair, but there is little else to recommend about this film.

Blood Diamond hits all the major points a good liberal movie about Africa in the 1990s and 2000s has to: conflict diamonds, child soldiers, mutilation to send a message, apartheid, mercenaries, white journalists trying to make a difference, Rhodesians unwilling to acknowledge that their country isn't called Rhodesia anymore. Oh, wait, that last one is just funny to me. It's also way too long, trying to fit all of those things in, and suffers for it. Leonardo DiCaprio's accent comes and goes, and that may be the best thing I can say about his performance. Sorry, Leo, but this was far from your best performance.

Funny People is indulgent. Did we really need Judd Apatow's duaghters in the movie, let alone one singing Memory being a huge plot point? Also, two and a half hours was way too long. There were some very funny bits, but the "emotional" parts were just ugh. He needs someone to take a vicious scalpel to his films to cut them down to a reasonable amount. Some subplots really went nowhere (The charity stuff? What the hell was the point of any of that?), and we really didn't need quite so many unnecessary cameos (the Eminem-Ray Romano bit was funny, though). I'm sure there were many other things you could've cut down or out to make it closer to two hours, or even less.

Repo! The Genetic Opera is utterly unwatchable. I am a huge fan of Anthony Stewart Head. I made it through 20 minutes before I had to turn it off. The songs are horrendously bad, full of muffled lyrics and unnecesary guitar and industrial flourishes. Nothing can save this film from just being aggressively terrible. Do not watch. Do not consider watching. Do not consider considering watching.

How to Lose Friends & Alienate People is full of a great cast. Including both non-Moss IT Crowd people. It does, however, suffer from having multiple elevator wipes. Plus an all-too-obvious transsexual. Not-too-obvious that they actually showed penis. Maybe the only one in a major film besides The Crying Game. That one was a great movie full of fine performances. This one is... mediocre. Not quite good enough to recommend to anyone, not bad enough to watch as a bad movie. Actually, the faux trailer for the fake Mother Teresa movie was the best thing in it. Otherwise it's a crappy version of The Apartment.

3:10 to Yuma, Ride Lonesome, Smash His Camera, & The Devil and Daniel Johnston

3:10 to Yuma is the remake of the 1957 Glenn Ford-Van Heflin film, this time starring Christian Bale and Russell Crowe, with Peter Fonda and Alan Tudyk in supporting roles. It's quite good, holding up as both a remake and as a standalone film. If you like westerns, you'll like this.

Ride Lonesome is a Randolph Scott-Budd Boetticher western, referenced in "The Cursed Tuba Contingency" episode of The Middleman. Which is why I added it to my Netflix queue. It's a short little movie, about a bounty hunter trying to bring in a murderer, and ending up trying to keep the brother and his gang from setting him free. He gets involved with a couple of petty criminals and a widow. They also have to fight off Mescaleros. The ending scene in the film is very awesome, with some quick cuts and rampant symbolism.

Smash His Camera is a documentary about a famous paparazzi who basically hounded Jackie Kennedy. There are some interesting stories (Jack Nicholson punched him in the face), but overall, the guy is just annoying and only worth half-watching while doing something else until he talks about his more interesting stories.

The Devil and Daniel Johnston offended me on a very basic level: I like Daniel Johnston occasionally, and some of his music is good, but all of his friends and family comparing him to Bob Dylan and the Beatles and saying he's better than them? You're wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. He's an obviously mentally unstable man who was able to pull himself together a few times in his life to make good music, but mostly just needed to get serious help that his family and friends were unable and/or unwilling to provide.

Flesh + Blood, Running out of Time 2, & Le Doulos

Flesh + Blood is Paul Verhoeven doing an utterly ridiculous middle ages movie. Rutger Hauer is the lead mercenary, who kidnaps a virgin from the son of the man who refused to pay him for helping to take back his town. It's violent, full of sex (although a fairly explicit rape scene is disturbing), and kind of funny, exactly what you'd expect from Verhoeven's films. It isn't as good as his last Dutch films, or his later English films, but it's enjoyable enough.

Running out of Time 2 is the sequel to the non-2 movie, but this one isn't nearly as good. It's still kinda stylish, but the plot is just extremely silly. A magician basically shuts down all of Hong Kong by being utterly ridiculous and doing very elaborate tricks. Including a lot of coin flips that all end up the same way. Every times I saw him flip coins, all I could think was that they never actually showed the coins. They didn't have to actually flip the coins and have them end up all the same side. This bothered me. Gives you an idea about how much I cared about the plot when this was all I could focus on.

Le Doulos is a Jean-Pierre Melville noir film, and the Netflix summary says "Fedoras, trench coats, dark alleys and jazz pervade this intricate crime drama", which basically should just be "Noir, noir, noir, noir, noir." It's stylish almost to a fault, with a great interrogation scene, but also lots of characters doing stupid things because they look cool. Can you really blame someone for doing something that looks cool rather than being the most sensible thing at the time? It's not as great as Melville's best, but I greatly enjoyed it anyway.

Now We Are Six

Now we are six years, so I'm redoing the iTunes meme again again, and noting that I saw 222 films this year (total of 4060 films), meaning I saw 6 more films this past year than the previous year. Woo!

How many total songs?
26366, that's 67 days, 28 minutes, and 1 seconds or 121.19 GB. That's 2098 more songs than last year.

Sort by Song Title - first and last?
A.B.C. by The Jackson 5 on the Hitsville USA box set
___ from Regina Spektor's Soviet Kitsch
Same as last year.

Sort by Artist - first and last?
a-ha
+/-
Same as last year.

Sort by Time - first and last?
We're a Couple from the Spaced Soundtrack
Symphony no. 9 from the BBC Philharmonic's Beethoven's Symphonies
Same as last year.

Sort by Album - first and last?
The A List by Wire
() by Sigur Rós
Same as last year.

Top Five Played Songs:
Holland, 1945 from Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane over the Sea
Drill Me from Portastatic's The Summer of the Shark
Blue Bird from The Rosebuds' Birds Make Good Neighbors
Which are the same top three, and there is a four way tie for fourth:
Miracle Drug from A.C. Newman's The Slow Wonder
16 Military Wives from The Decemberists' Picaresque
Two-Headed Boy from Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane over the Sea
The District Sleeps Alone Tonight from The Postal Service's Give Up