...In which our heroine reviews "Up"

Pixar, you did it again. I had no expectations for Up, and if the passes weren't free, I wouldn't have gone. But I'll be damned if I was wrong again, just like with Ratatouille, and you've made another fantastic film. I was crying within the first fifteen minutes and then three times after that - a new record for tears shed at a cartoon.

I really had no interest in this film. The premise seemed goofy - hey, let's attach balloons to our house! The cute little boy helps a persnickety old man! Look a talking dog! - but I can assure you the film is far more complex than the trailers. As with Drag Me to Hell, the way Disney promoting this film is very different from the tone that it creates.

This is by far the most grown-up of the Pixar flicks. I can honestly say that I appreciate their films much more as an adult than I did when something like Toy Story first came out. Something about the themes they explore - in Up we follow an old man who has to learn that there's life to be lived after loss - in such an innocent way tears me up inside. 

However emotionally affecting Up was for me, it wasn't I would categorize it as a good but not great Pixar film, so it's better than most everything else out there. Plot-wise, it feels like they took this big idea about love and loss and how we deal with it...and then remembered that it was a movie for kids. Even my precocious eight-year old self wouldn't have appreciated a lot of the subtlety in Up, especially on the emotional front. I don't know, something about the tones didn't quite match up for me. I still really enjoyed the film, I just thought the story was a little too complex for the intended audience.

Also, I saw it in 3-D, which honestly didn't add much. Coraline used the technology far better, and with the emotional intricacies in Up, I think it's a little distracting. 

So I've reviewed two really good films coming out this weekend, Drag Me to Hell and Up, you should go see one. I enjoyed Hell more, but that was almost guaranteed.

This trailer for Werner Herzog's remake of Bad Lieutenant is probably the funniest thing ever. I can't believe their remaking the Harvey Kietel/Abel Ferrara film in the first place, but this "re-imagining" starring everyone's favorite emotionless actor, Nicholas Cage, looks epically shiteous. There are no words for how terrible this is. The trailer alone is full of enough what the fuck moments to cement a terrible, terrible film. Enjoy:

...In which our heroine forgets and is yet destined to remember.

WOXY is currently playing Feist's "My Moon, My Man," a recent favorite. They're only about 20 songs into the countdown, and it's ridiculous how many of them I know all the words to. 

These are the songs that taught me how to love music and have been through my entire adolescence as it drags on. I use these songs to contextualize my life, where I was in my life when I heard a particular song for the first time. For instance, last year, I heard little of the countdown because I was too busy slinging slop at Bob's and being a trixie, but "My Moon, My Man" was one of the songs I took from that countdown. The year before that, grandma was in the hospital, but I managed to take "The Bachelor and the Bride," and now The Decemberists are one of my favorite bands. 

I can tell you where I was the first time I heard "Bela Lugosi's Dead," "Personal Jesus," "Black Metallic," "Psycho Killer" - all the songs that have defined my life so far. I just re-read Love is a Mix Tape by Rob Sheffield and that is the best book ever written about what it means to love music, what it means to equate songs with memory. 

Jay Bennett died yesterday and so I had to give Yankee Hotel Foxtrot a spin, as much as I didn't want to. It was one of the previously mentioned albums for this year, but I haven't been listening to it much lately. The first time Ben spent the night, that's what we listened to, and it has been really hard to listen to since. But I listened yesterday, and as sad as it made me, it was good because ironically enough, Bennett's death made me reclaim that album. It was there before Ben, and it's here after Ben. For a brief moment, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot belonged to us on a too-small dorm mattress, face to face, breathing in each other's air, wrapped up in the body of the other. But us is now me and him, and now it belongs to us as individuals - we are free to do or not do what we wish with it.

That's the remarkable thing about music, or any pop culture for that matter, but mostly music. Songs or bands become synonymous with people in your life, but whether the people go or stay, the music is always around. You can even hide from people, but the music that you associate them with will find you at the most unexpected times. Whether it hurts or heals, the music is there if you want it. Once you've heard it, connected it with a person or a time in your life, you're done for.

And here you go, WOXY is listening to me write this. The current tune is "Need You Around" by the Smoking Popes. The lyric "'I'm gonna feel this way 'til I'm six feet underground/crazy as it sounds, I need you around." This song, but that line in particular was a mantra for this time last year, for what else, another boy. I don't think I've heard this song since that time last year, but here it is, finding me when I wasn't looking for it, and immediately, I go back into the wayback machine. I don't feel the same as this time last year by any stretch about said boy, but the song reminds me that I once did. 

There's the most beautiful part about music, how songs, albums, artists, lyrics become people or times and the memory is compounded forever in your mind. Even if you want to forget it, the music won't let you. But of course it works both ways, and the music makes you remember things forgotten that shouldn't be.

Now: "Could You Be Loved?" by Bob Marley. Now I'm thinking of Gypsy, of fruity tasting tobacco smoke, of steamed up windows from the cold outside, of screaming, of the boys, of menthol cigarettes, of the cantaloupe after-taste of hookah, of 3AM, of Waffle House, of opening the front door as quietly as possible. And I'm back to last winter instantly. Music makes you remember things you want to forget and reminds you of things you shouldn't. 

...In which our heroine moves up, so to speak.

The lack of posts has been the fault of the fact that I've been moving - just a floor up and five rooms over, but moving nonetheless. I love the new apartment and since it's just Kristen and I, things are much cuter and much cozier. Too bad she's only my summer roommate and will be an RA come fall. Pictures to come of the new digs. The air conditioning is out, which has been really fantastic on the 27th floor. It's not like heat rises or anything.

Mommy is also here, and she brought all my books, which are a comfort to simply have around. I did shudder when she said she forgot my "cartoons" at home - meaning all my issues of The Sandman. One of my projects this week is getting a library card because I have been a major slacker. The summer list is something like this currently: On the Road, Downtown Owl, The Graveyard Book, Pygmy, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Doors of Perception, Tropic of Cancer, The Sound and the Fury, Freakonomics, 1984, Lolita, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. 

I am still, alas, jobless. I had two interviews this week with Bubba Gump Shrimp Company for a host job and they have yet to let me know if I got it. It's just really frustrating to have three years of experience in a field where I can't get a job since I'm not 21. So that's another project for the week. I may just have to go beg at the office of student employment. I think I'm at roughly 15 places with three responses. Awesome. 

It still doesn't feel like summer. The weather has been lovely, but I keep waiting for the summer euphoria to hit me. Maybe it will this week, since I'll be all settled in the new place. Oh, and silly WOXY has moved the Modern Rock 500 to this week, Tuesday through Friday. Please do give a listen - if nothing else, those 500 songs mean some kind of summer to me. 

...In which our heroine gets dragged to hell.

Oh Sam Raimi - you've been gone a while, with the mediocre Spiderman films, but I found you again. I knew you had it in you, another fantastic film that continues your legacy as director of my favorite horror films ever.

Emily and I hit up a preview screening of Drag Me to Hell last night and I loved every damn second of it. I hate the trailers for the movie, and had a little trepidation about the premise, but I should've known Sam Raimi's first horror film since Army of Darkness would be awesome. It was.

I could wait time talking plot, but this movie comes down to one idea: it's FUN and it's SCARY. This is such a good summer movie. Some review I read mentioned that in tone, it's a combination of Evil Dead I and II, and I think that's spot on. Raimi uses lots of little gags, especially in terms of sound, that heighten tension and provide lots of jumpiness. It had me on the edge of my seat, which is no easy task. There's as much gore as a PG-13 film can handle, so I was satisfied there. And, a lot of that gore is done in a comic manner, or at least to me it was. 

It was also amazing to me that there are no big names in this film. Alison Lohman has done some good work in independent films, and then there's that Mac-loving man-child Justin Long, but that's it. Surprisingly, I didn't want to stab him in the heart, and Lohman was quite a good horror heroine.

The trailers are pretty terrible for the film, but I promise, it's much better than that. Easily the best horror film of the past couple years, barring some of the J-horror, but this is far more accessible. 

Thanks Sam Raimi! I loved this film and it warmed my heart so to see you back to your old tricks of exploding eyeballs and the like.

Speaking of directors who finally got their stride back, Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes looks to be quite a lot of fun as well:

And finally, I have it on good authority (meaning my dad) that Terminator Salvation is both "the suck" and "disappointing as hell." Of course my almost fifty-year old father saw it at midnight though. Gee, wonder where I get it from...

...In which our heroine doesn't get it.

The AV Club does a great weekly list feature they call Inventory. It's a random list of something pop culture related - songs that you can't listen to anymore, who gets a lifetime pass, things you didn't get the first time. I love the lists and highly recommend checking them out. 

So today I have a list in a similar vein. Lately, it seems that a lot of people have been imploring me to watch things, like Star Trek, that I absolutely refuse to. Thus this list.

Pop Culture everyone seems to love except for Katydid:

Transformers

Kill Bill, Vol. 1 and 2

The Departed

Crash - the best picture winner, not the wacky Cronenberg one. 

Most Bob Dylan - although he is the greatest lyricist of the rock age and Blood on the Tracks is the jam.

JJ Abrams

Lost

Garden State

Seinfeld

Coldplay

Nicole Kidman

Eva Longoria

Matt Damon

Megan Fox

Twilight

Robert Pattinson

Contemporary hip-hop - Lil' Wayne I'm talking to you

Will Smith

The Saw films

Jason Statham

Woody Allen

House

CSI

Paul Simon solo

Moulin Rouge!

Hugh Jackman

Musicals

RENT

The Who

Phish 

Jamie Foxx

American Idol

The Da Vinci Code/Angels and Demons

The Oceans 11 films

Wes Anderson after The Royal Tennenbaums 

There's lots of other things I'm forgetting, but let the arguing commence.

...In which our heroine smiles.

Summer is here! But it doesn't feel like it, maybe since I'm still in the dorms, sans roommates. It's weird - no one is here. I don't mind having the apartment to myself  and mommy will be here on Wednesday to hang out for a few days.

Kristen, the new roommate for summer, and I hung out today. She's awesome and we have a similar sense of humor. But...she also found out she's an RA for the upcoming school year, so I'll get a different roommate when school starts. Silly Columbia, you make no sense. You should've told her this a long time ago. I did get a bitchin' tapestry for our room and we scammed a shelf set and some mixing bowls from things people were throwing away.

Also, here is an official invitation to come see me this summer. I have the advantage of living in a lovely city, so if you feel the urge, stop by. I'm a pretty decent tour guide at this point, if nothing else. And I'll be home the 2nd from the 9th - show a girl a good time in the nasty 'Nati.

Monday and Tuesday, I WILL FIND A JOB. I have to, funds are getting low. I'm up to 12 places with no luck, but it has to happen, period. At this point, I'll take almost anything. 

I have a DVD of my final film, but can't figure out how to convert the VOB file to MPEG or AVI. Anybody know how to do this?

Tonight, some much deserved revelry in Emily's sweet new Lincoln Park apartment with the gang for probably the last time until August. Le sigh. 

Lots of good things. It was sad to exit my freshman year and all that meant, but new beginnings are always good. Change is the only constant. I will miss my boys in 813 and my girls in 2602, but these are all steps in the awfully big adventure that is the life of Katydid. This has been the worst best year of my life. I've been the happiest that I've ever been and the saddest I've ever been.I'm so different than when I came here in August. I know so much more about myself and yet don't know anything.  All the agony and ecstasy - I wouldn't trade a second of it. 

...In which our heroine has little bits.

...Of movie stuff from all over.

First is the trailer for Nine. Normally, a musical, especially a musical directed by the same guy who did Chicago would make me run the other way, the vomit. But there's one reason I'm excited for this: Daniel Day-Lewis, oh how I love thee. The supporting cast is excellent except for Fergie, who couldn't even die with grace in Planet Terror. It looks interesting:

Then I got this thing of beauty in the mail today:

Normally $90, I got it for $35 on Amazon. For that I got 2-disc editions of The Shining, 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, Full Metal Jacket, and Eyes Wide Shut. Kubrick is one of my favorite directors and his films are visual treats - I'm especially excited to watched the European cut of Eyes Wide Shut, a movie I don't really like, but I think is stunningly beautiful.

My list of summer movies to see: Drag Me to Hell, Away We Go, The Hangover, Moon, Food Inc., Public Enemies, Bruno, I Love You Beth Cooper, 500 Days of Summer, Funny People, Taking Woodstock, Paper Heart, The Boat that Rocked, Extract, and most epically of all, Inglourious Basterds. This is in addition to the 86 movies in my Netflix queue. 

The Cannes Film Festival is this weekend and all I can say is le drool. New films from Quentin Tarantino, Jane Campion, Ang Lee, Isabel Coxiet, Lars von Trier, Terry Gilliam, and Sam Raimi. Columbia has sent students to Cannes before, and it's one of my dreams. I wanna go! *stomps like a four year old.*

And on a personal note - my final film is fin! We finished yesterday and I'm really happy with it, editing be damned. Hopefully I'll be able to post it as well as my second project and show you folks that I actually do stuff in clown college.