http://us.imdb.com/Title?Sex+and+the+City+(2008)
Professional film critics have understandably exhibited a jaundiced attitude toward this feature-length continuation of the HBO serial. On standalone terms, and to the uninitiated, the movie version of Sex and the City often registers as arrhythmic—awkwardly edited, with intermittent interruptions by seemingly inscrutable minor characters. But of course the production, despite its rough edges, is intended as a glossy valentine to the show's fans, and bearing that baggage in mind, it's a reasonably crowd-pleasing, or at least crowd-respecting, exercise that manages, for the most part, not to fix what wasn't necessarily broken to begin with in the eyes of its core audience. The transition to a larger format doesn't always work, with some of the series' themes and attitudes attaining a new stridency in the upscaling, but for the most part it's an uneven but satisfying confection. Ironically, this steroidal drag-ball of a chick flick may end up being the ultimate critic-proof summer blockbuster—or as Kim Cattrall's Samantha Jones might pun: cockbuster. Grade: B
http://wii.ign.com/objects/142/14236589.html
Lovely little platformer combines cutting-edge visuals and controls with classic side-scrolling action.
http://us.imdb.com/Title?Indiana+Jones+and+the+Kingdom+of+the+Crystal+Skull+(2008)
Watching post-millennial Spielberg riff on fin-de-siècle Spielberg is good fun, and revisiting Indiana Jones and company, however belatedly, is a welcome nostalgia trip; but something has definitely been lost along the way. Gone is the earlier films' undercurrent of mortality—the invigorating tension between popcorn inspiration and weightier philosophical considerations that elevated the Saturday-matinée adventures to full-fledged pop culture mythology. Instead, we now have a protagonist who can withstand ground-zero atomic blasts and successive spills over multiple deadly waterfalls with the resilience and nonchalance of a video game character. Frustratingly, the ingredients for a more satisfying story are all present: the Cold War, weapons of mass destruction, the archeological imperative to preserve the past versus the threat of political expediency to destroy the future—literally tied together with a ribbon of species-consciousness-raising alien intervention; only no one seems to have bothered to assemble the pieces. The resulting absence of any real stakes reaches its apotheosis during an anticlimax where the vaguely menacing bad guys are essentially nonplussed into oblivion by the irritatingly obtuse extra-terrestrials in a sequence that's the visual-effects equivalent of word salad. Cheerful and inconsequential, this latest franchise outing is ultimately, for better and for worse, a pleasant letdown. Grade: B-
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?i=276687615&id=276687553&s=143441
Artist: The B-52's. Album: Funplex.
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?i=278866681&id=278866419&s=143441
Artist: Greenskeepers. Album: The Music of Grand Theft Auto IV.
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?i=279351031&id=279350980&s=143441
Artist: Bitter:Sweet. Album: Drama.
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?i=263684978&id=263684829&s=143441
Artist: Metro Station. Album: Metro Station.
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?i=278671971&id=278671865&s=143441
Artist: Santogold. Album: Santogold.
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?i=279005724&id=279005617&s=143441
Artist: Ali Dee and The Deekompressors. Album: Go Speed Racer Go (Theme Music from the Motion Picture "Speed Racer").
http://us.imdb.com/Title?Speed+Racer+(2008)
With apologies to Dolly Parton: It takes a lot of money to look this cheap. For all of Speed Racer's visual ambition, and what I'm sure was the the Wachowski Brothers' deeply internalized and groundbreaking conceptual approach to rendering live action according to anime aesthetics, the plain fact of its execution is that when you sacrifice depth of field and and saturate every color to the point of chromatic bloodshed, the resulting clutter is invariably chintzy. That said, and despite its problematic pacing, the movie does intermittently achieve the kind of brute-force pop potency that its filmmakers surely intended—even managing to induce an almost synesthetic trance during its climax that borders on physical exhilaration. Grade: C+
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?i=260062094&id=260061987&s=143441
Artist: Jim Boggia. Album: Safe In Sound.
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?i=278317770&id=278317759&s=143441
Artist: Alkaline Trio. Album: Agony & Irony.
http://wii.ign.com/objects/748/748545.html
Fuck if I know what I'm doing or what's going on half the time I'm playing this title, but it's mindless, harmless fun; and while it inexplicably fails to put the Wii controller's specific strengths to good (or any particular) use—à la, say, the exemplary Super Mario Galaxy—it's never less than divertingly, attention-deficiently enjoyable.
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?i=251757267&id=251757242&s=143441
Artist: Lavender Diamond. Album: Imagine Our Love.
http://us.imdb.com/Title?Iron+Man+(2008)
A crowd-pleasing kickoff to the summer blockbuster season and a solid franchise starter. Reliably hits all the origin-story moral-courage-awakening notes, enlivened by playful star turns and director Jon Favreau's palpable presentation of the physics and pitfalls of iron manhood. Grade: B+