The critical plaudits have been somewhat overstated—more of a commentary on the state of movies set "over there" than on the particular merits of Kathryn Bigelow's contribution to the genre, although there are merits to be considered—authenticity, immediacy and restraint among them. It's just that we've seen these characters in this setting before, and not fucking the whole thing up isn't as exciting as bringing something new to the table. Nevertheless…. Grade: B
Second verse same as the first. It's hard to find fault with a movie that knows exactly what it is. The fault here lies with the audience. The grade I'm giving myself for watching this: D+
Artist: The Submarines. Album: Honeysuckle Weeks.
Duncan Jones' modest sci-fi head trip draws inspiration for its solid production design from the usual sources, although the director presents his lunar backdrops with a distinctive tilt-shift charm. What the film lacks in a sturdy premise—suggesting a world that's a few shades too engineered to be plausible—it makes up for with a refreshing lack of the genre's tendency toward horror, despite a freeze-dried evil-corporation subplot. Moon is a sad, dreamy little diorama about the cost of life amidst lifelessness and the residue of humanity in unexpected places. Grade: B
Artist: Spinnerette. Album: Ghetto Love – EP.
More like The Warmed Over. The usual cocktail of dick jokes, misogyny, homophobia, lazy setups and lazier acting. Lick it up, baby. Lick. It. Up. Grade: D
Artist: Hockey. Album: Too Fake – Single.
Artist: Seabear. Album: The Ghost That Carried Us Away.
Artist: Black Eyed Peas. Album: The E.N.D.
Artist: New Young Pony Club. Album: Fantastic Playroom.
Pixar finally devotes an entire feature to its animators' longstanding fetish for cantankerous codgers. As such, Up is an efficiently calculated, if somewhat trite, meditation on aging, loss and—aw fuck, it's a bunch of pet jokes wrapped around an animated short's worth of plot, drizzled with Michael Giacchino's almost diabetically treacly score. As much as I enjoyed its surfaces, the movie left me somewhat unsettled. It's basically the sentimentalized story of a friendless shut-in who becomes violent once his wife's no longer around to share his codependence. When his increasingly erratic behavior prompts the state to institutionalize him, he flees the country—accidentally kidnapping an ADHD-addled Boy Scout along the way. The two journey to Donkey Kong Country—I mean Paradise Falls, South America—where they proceed to murder an elderly explorer (voiced by Christopher Plummer since Peter O'Toole already did Ratatouille) and steal his zeppelin—returning Stateside just in time for the boy to receive some merit badges and the old man to face no consequences whatsoever for his crime spree. At least the 3-D wasn't super-obtrusive. Grade: B
Artist: Matt & Kim. Album: Grand.
The butler did it. Grade: B-