The "Greatest" Month in Film.

There's something about the month of January that is eerily fascinating to me. By all means, it's the most boring month of the year, even with the conclusion of college football's bowl season and the NFL playoffs. Nothing really happens in January except returning to school and usually frigid weather. Which is why it still staggers me that movies actually get released in January. I mean, yeah, awards season fare is going to go wide in January, typically, but for the most part, the movies in January are downright terrible. They're the type of fare that's only notable because it will be on TNT at noon on Saturdays in about three years.

And at the same time, January films fascinate me immensely.

Because if a movie comes out in January, it undoubtedly is because it's following some crappy trend that was a few years old, and surprise surprise, the movies end up being pretty horrible. Here is some nice examples:

The Unborn: This is another likely forgettable movie from director David Goyer. David Goyer is famous for basically being really good at writing with famous directors on famous comic book franchises (he co-wrote Batman Begins and has story credit for The Dark Knight). But as a director, he has incredibly poor taste in bad horror. His directing slate has been Blade: Trinity, the forgettable The Invisible, and now another crappy looking movie with a creepy kid. (And one that randomly has Dexter's dad and Vince Masuka in it. Yes, you kind of have to watch Dexter to understand.) And worse yet, the J-horror looking "creepy PG-13" horror film craze is really dead.

Not Easily Broken: This is the second writing effort from the surprisingly entertaining (for an agnostic who dislikes) preacher T.D. Jakes, as in 2004, he wrote the off-color but better than expected Woman Thou Art Loosed. But this is totally sold as Tyler Perry-lite, even down to the slick RnB soundtrack of the ads, so expectations are low.

Paul Blart: Mall Cop: Or, Kevin James is Fat and Wacky: The Movie.

To show how amazingly dull January really is, there are FOUR major horror releases out this month, two "The" generic horror romps (The other is The Uninvited, starring Elizabeth Banks as some weird mix of Rebecca DeMornay in The Hand That Rocks The Cradle and Miri from Zack and Miri.), and two generic resuscitation attempts of properties that weren't very good to begin with (Underworld 3 and My Bloody Valentine 3D).

That said, hope is not lost. Not when Liam Neeson is forced to kill a lot of people to get back his family. Even if Neeson's Taken is basically Death Wish VI (since Death Sentence was basically Death Wish V), Neeson's just too awesome to ignore. People forget until they see the commercial for Taken just how good Liam Neeson is at his job. And Taken could be the most preposterous movie in history, but Neeson will sell the movie like it is cold, hard reality.

So what I'm ultimately saying is that for a film geek that normally laughs at January, Hollywood might surprise me. They might make ONE January release that I remember for once. And that gives me a very warm feeling in a frigid month.

(And no, I didn't bring up Bride Wars because I love Anne Hathaway too much to get my Rachel Getting Married memories soiled by a forgettable rom-com that serves its purpose of giving her a paycheck that's nice.)

I copy good ideas.

So, the Something to Talk About blog on this very site (look to your right), posted their 25 most listened to songs of the year. So I got lazy, and decided to do the exact same thing. Only my iTunes got leveled around June, so I decided to go with the just as great Last.fm, which reminds me that the best song of all time is Kool and the Gang's "Summer Madness". Which they are still right.

Anyways, here's the list, complete with nice explanations as to why I loved such music in 2008. I'd also like to note that I'm not huge on repetition, I tend to get bored with most anything after a few listens. Also, this is overall, not taking into account the year of the music itself, which already explains #1. So that might explain a few of these.

1. Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Cheated Hearts - 26
I find that around one month a year, for the past five years or so, I think Karen O is the best rock vocalist of her time. She tends to bring a lot of elements into one package: unabashed sex appeal (in that odd "she looks strange" sort of way), bravado, and a sense of her being in pure control. Though, I think I end up not knowing what I'm talking about, as the best songs from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs are when they're their most vulnerable, like "Maps" and "Cheated Hearts".

2. Panda Bear - Take Pills - 23
This is the best anti-drug song Brian Wilson never recorded. Panda Bear IS 60s Brian Wilson, and he more or less said what Wilson probably should have done in his life, which is to not take pills because he didn't need them.

3. White Williams - New Violence - 22
This is really dancey. I don't think White Williams had any gargantuan ideas with "New Violence", except that he wanted to make a truly modern retro dance song. And it worked!

4. Metallica - All Nightmare Long - 21
I think I'm one of exactly sixteen metalheads who didn't get bored with Death Magnetic after early November, but this is probably the most well-built up of the album's monster tracks, and the one that is easily the most interesting, I find.

5. Radiohead - Bodysnatchers - 19
I'm not going to be one of those people who continues to extol the good virtues of In Rainbows, but it's a good record that really helps if you're in the "Radiohead mood." (I.E. If you feel in the mood for slightly dreary, slightly incomprehensible music.)

6. Metallica - The Unforgiven III - 17
This is the second best of the three "Unforgiven" tracks, and the third different definition Metallica gives of what makes someone "unforgiven", which is guess here means that you're going around in circles on a boat.

7. Beck - Chemtrails - 17
I think everyone slept on Modern Guilt, and there was a decent reason for it, as it was a bit too short and a good record that never touched great. Still "Chemtrails" is one of the more intriguing songs Beck's done in the last five years, probably matching up -- but not eclipsing -- "E-Pro" in its awesome simplicity.

8. Panda Bear - Bros - 17
This is 1960s Brian Wilson on an acid trip...well, more of an acid trip, which is funny because Panda Bear seems to really not like drugs.

9. Panda Bear - Comfy In Nautica - 16
This is the opener to Person Pitch, and it really gives you what you're in for on the onset. A lot of noise repeated over and over into something that manages to turn into a well-structured song, and proves that all of these electronic acts trying to pass on just doing sloppy noise and saying it's music should maybe look at Panda Bear's records.

10. Ladytron - I'm Not Scared - 16
I didn't realize the shift into dark gothic electronica until right now. Ladytron's got a little bit of a noise mix with NIN, oddly, and I think anyone that appreciates "Discipline" will notice the massive similarities between NIN and Ladytron's work, especially the one this track comes off of, the album Velocifero.

11. Nine Inch Nails - Discipline - 16
This year, Nine Inch Nails gave away a whole album for free, a 10-track record called The Slip. It subsequently was pretty throwaway for the most part, but "Discipline" was a pretty killer song, and the fact that this song is currently available for free means that you'd be silly to at least not take advantage of it.

12. Caribou - Sandy - 16
Caribou is one of the few acts in music that I perceive as making beautiful music, because they pretty well do. But this doesn't really explain why they're great, or why a Canadian electronic artist is a fine musician. Ah well. You'll just have to figure that out for yourself.

13. Beck - Profanity Prayers - 15
This was also a simple song on Modern Guilt that worked in spades. And any chorus that asks who will answer profanity prayers, which I guess is making fun of religion or Beck being goofy, is a thumbs up for me.

14. !!! - Sweet Life - 15
I listened to this song constantly last year. For some reason, I thought Nic Offer was on to some brilliance when he did a chorus that consists of exactly four letters. Which in fairness, it's still a brilliant idea. And this song totally talks about the vapidity of institutions like high school. Or something. I think I just like that the chorus feels like an explosion of sound.

15. Fujiya & Miyagi - Transparent Things - 15
I couldn't tell you much about why I enjoy this band, either. After all, their best two songs ("Ankle Injuries", "Collarbone") have almost nursery rhyme levels of rhyming. So it must be the guitars. Yeah, that will work as a reason for now.

16. The Bronx - False Alarm - 15
This year was the year that I realized that I secretly love punk rock. After being buried by crappy efforts from Green Day and a lot of other pop-punk acts that take their cues from Green Day (All-American Rejects, Taking Back Sunday, etc.), I managed to get a hold of Against Me's 2007 release New Wave. Despite the fact that it's their "sellout" record, it's exact what a "smart" punk record should be. And then there's The Bronx who, along with Tennessee's Jay Reatard, knows how to make a song that rocks but has pop sensibilities.

17. My Bloody Valentine - Only Shallow - 15
You wanna know why this is one of the greatest rock songs of all time? Pipe organ. And plus, they have cred. They made the label spend nearly a million dollars to record the album this track came from, the early 90s classic Loveless. And then I mention for kicks and jollies that this label, Britain's Creation Records, neared on bankruptcy when this album sold poorly, but were bailed out by this new group called Oasis.

18. Caribou - Desiree - 14
As with the previous Caribou song, this is so well composed, but here there's a wonderful buildup that sort of...well...it explodes midway through the song. And it's gorgeous.

19. TV on the Radio - Crying - 14
TV on the Radio managed to make a happier album with the same bleak subject matter. Or I guess it's bleak subject matter since everyone seems to think that Return to Cookie Mountain was the fear of the "Bush Years" in record form. Anyways, this song adds a lot of funk, as Dear Science as a whole adds a lot more nuances that really make songs better, like the 60s surfer pop chant that surrounds "Halfway Home".

20. White Williams - Violator - 14
Also really dancey. But in a more laid back and cool way. White Williams and his randomness and love of the 1980s is just lovely.

21. Caribou - Sundialing - 13
This runs at a nice click. It's one of the few six-minute songs I heard this year that didn't bore me to tears.

22. TV on the Radio - Dancing Choose - 13
This is again one of the inspired choices of TVOTR. They are amazingly successful at their experiments to the point that I almost forget how much I didn't really care for the second half of Return to Cookie Mountain and most of Desperate Youth... Here, Tunde's acting like Michael Stipe in 1987...which is that he's sort of rapping, but he's really just quickly talking. And it works to a tee.

23. Islands - Creeper - 13
While I think I grew cold on Arm's Way late in the year, this is still easily the best indie pop song related to a murderer in quite some time. (The last one was Sufjan Stevens' mega depressing "John Wayne Gacy, Jr.")

24. The New Pornographers - Use It - 12
Okay, this is my chance. The New Pornographers are the best of the two Canadian indie supergroups. (For those lost, it is them and Broken Social Scene. For those still lost, BSS spawned Feist and Kevin Drew. For those who are still lost, you probably didn't read most of this anyway.) "Use It" is the songwriting creation of Carl Newman, who writes amazing old school pop songs that just happen to be filtered out through about ten different people. Even weirder, I'm not partial to his stuff as A.C. Newman, as it's not like his stuff in New Pornographers.

25. Liars - Plaster Casts of Everything - 12
"Plaster" is easily the best metal song that no one will ever classify as metal, probably because 98% of Liars' fanbase hates metal.

Yes, this wasted way too much of my life.

Podcasts and Culture, Or Why I Find Myself Drawn to Internet-based Programming

It's been nearly a decade since the advent of the first iPods and culture has never truly been the same since. Apple Computers was quickly revitalized by the success of this mp3 player that notably stored more than the average CD and had less bulk than say a Walkman CD player. And naturally, it changed the culture of radio broadcasting. Podcasts went from small endeavors to shows that got picked up by public radio stations and all kinds of hooplah came out of that. People wondered if the iPod destroyed radio for good, which yeah, it probably did.

However, it created a sort of new age of wanting to hear about other people's opinions, views, or ideas in such a personal way. I mean, even blogs don't entirely have the personal nature of conversation, as much as I love to think that I've personally endeared myself to the populace who reads these entries. Plus, you can fall asleep listening to podcasts. If you fall asleep reading a blog or a book, you're probably way too tired to have any focus whatsoever.

So it was very easy to see how I could fall into addiction with podcasts, and I have around 40 currently on my lovely computer. 40 podcasts are actually probably way too many to have saved on my computer. It's not like the ones that I have (and that I shall showcase to you shortly) are short deals. For every five minute alert of the week's events in whatever, there are podcasts -- and in turn, conversations -- that go on for hours. And yet I find a way to listen to every single one of them on a weekly basis. So now that I revealed myself to be the exact stereotype of every blogger on earth, let me reveal favorites and reasons why.

ESPN Around The Horn Podcast: This one is completely easy to justify. I love talking about sports. I love mindless arguments about whether or not the New York Yankees are going to suck next season. I love Woody Paige managing one moment of amazing silliness an episode. Thus, this is completely perfect for me.

Scene Unseen: This is probably the most conversational of all of the lovely podcasts I enjoy. It's a simple premise: one guy sees a movie, the other doesn't. Then, they simply talk out what they enjoy about the movie. I have followed this one long enough, though, to see a nice evolution in their sound. They often veer away from the topic of the film, which when they are reviewing such films as Madagascar 2 and Eagle Eye, it's a welcome change.

SModCast: It's Kevin Smith. It's Scott Mosier. It's funny. The end.

Sound Opinions: A podcast is doing something right whenever I can be completely agreeing with its hosts' opinions one week, and then completely disagree with them the next. Sound Opinions has that fun little thing of making me consider my own opinions versus its two hosts, and even though I don't always agree, when I do dislike their views, it's a pretty healthy dislike. It's not vitriolic or the type of hatred I elicit for say, Blender Magazine.

Broken Pixels: While a lot of 1UP's long material tends to bore me, as I remember that I am so impoverished by still playing my year old Playstation 2 and my two-year-old sports games, I love this particular podcast because it's really easy to mock bad video games. Actually, I had never heard of 90% of these games before they were on Broken Pixels, but watching them get torn to shreds by three men who probably are drinking as this mockery occurs is a complete joy to watch. Oh, and don't do it yourself. They are grown-up magazine writers.

Musings of a Middling Christmas.

Okay, let's get things out of the way first. I send my holiday greetings, a nice Happy Holidays so as not to offend anyone. And so with formalities out of the way, let's get to the truth. It doesn't feel quite like Christmas this year. Mind you, I have made no formal studies in the differences in Hanukkah or Kwanzaa or even Festivus, so I don't know if it feels incredibly different by comparison, but Christmas itself feels kind of like another day. I mean, other than the presents, and me being happy that I got a few things I didn't need to save up to buy, it's a very conventional day.

Even Mother Nature last night didn't really care what day it was. In Tuscaloosa, there were high gusts of wind and lots of rain. Also, the temperature was 60 degrees at the lowest. This is not even typical December weather, much less Christmas Eve weather.

And of course, many elements play a part in the mediocrity Christmas has sort of become to me.

The first thing is obvious, I'm not exactly a kid anymore. When I ask for Christmas presents now, I basically just go online, order it, they send it in a week or so and I get it. And it's not even like toys or games or anything. My big present this year was that I got three Chuck Klosterman books and a few T-shirts I had wanted for quite a while. And these things are awesome, but they don't have the instant gratification factor, really. The benefit of shirts is to wear in public, and no sane person is out in public on Christmas Day. And book reading is always great, but most great books are a sort of marathon where you read a good little bit at a time and enjoy the book's structure, words, and whatnot. I never thought I would focus on the future and nice things to wear around from January to May, but that's basically what's happened.

The second thing, though, I can blame on television. With so many television channels running round-the-clock programming, there is no way that everyone wants to cover something about Christmas. While there are the traditional holiday standards like the classic It's A Wonderful Life, television still more or less moves on. Repeats rarely seem to cover the subject, and don't get me started on how little of a damn I care about Nancy Grace and her spending five days a week on a missing toddler when hundreds go missing without a trace of press. Of course, I don't think she spent her Eve show talking about said toddler, instead it's to the just as soul-crushing subject of kids with cancer.

On the television point, it doesn't help that there's crap all for specials these days. I mean, Rudolph, Frosty, and Charlie Brown don't stop being great. But Jeff Dunham? Are you seriously going to tell me that a guy with a mildly offensive Arabic stereotype puppet and who is at most mildly hilarious is supposed to send me some real Christmas funny? Thank God that A Colbert Christmas was on this year, at least.

And finally, I think I see the season through rose colored glasses. There has never been snow on Christmas Eve in the many years I've had Christmas in Tuscaloosa. At least, I don't think there has. But anyways, there never was that much to remember about the season. I think I got a Sega Genesis video game system one year, and that made my life for like five years or so. There was one year where the electricity was out, but that wasn't even here in Tuscaloosa. That was in my former home of Louisiana, and nothing about that year was particularly memorable except for the lack of electricity caused by a nice ice storm.

So I guess I'm the Scrooge of this season. Which is kind of not true in the sense that I still enjoy Christmas and getting free gifts, but I'm on that sort of downslide. There's not much time left to enjoy the getting, so I sort of shrug my way through those years. Or maybe my views on Christmas would've been changed if they just shown It's A Wonderful Life without commercials this year. Get on that next year, NBC.

What I Learned From Saturday Night.

So, it's late December. Late December means watching mediocre college football teams battling it out for who truly deserves a bowl of poinsettias, or a bowl representing the website of a pizza joint. I mean, sure, there's Christmas, but everyone knows about that. There is a pure adoration for Christmas already. Everyone loves Christmas, even if they don't love Christ or Santa or any other figure that impedes into this ritualistic gift-giving time of year.

That said, the best thing I possibly did this weekend, other than watching a few movies I wanted to see, was to immerse myself into the positive effects that professional wrestling can have on soldiers. And how simplistic men (and women) in tights doing fake fighting make a good impact on the armed forces of America.

Yes, I watched WWE's Tribute to the Troops in lieu of the hardcore war between South Florida and...that team South Florida beat in football.

Now mind you, I have an odd fascination with WWE's product. I am talking about a company whose last major storyline involved a seven-foot-tall, 300 pound monster whining about what he and a blonde chick with the same first and last name had together as a couple. The answer, of course, is nothing, but over two hours, we were led to essentially who the blonde was having sex with. This is a product that I cannot justify in the fact that it is pure campiness and upright stupidity. This same company has a Playboy model finding feelings for a man that is functionally retarded excluding when a ring bell is rung. This is hardly the nexus of anything thought-provoking on television.

And yet, that loon Vince McMahon does something that no one else probably will. He's made a tradition ever since the war in Iraq broke out to send his group of superstars to Iraq to entertain the soldiers. Even now, when the celebritocracy avoids Iraq like the plague on the basis of the war being unjustified, WWE spends a random time in December actually giving their moral support to the soldiers. It's not a pro-war sentiment, either. It's merely a pro-soldier sentiment.

I didn't even think I could stand a show in which an address by George W. Bush opened the telecast, but the show is impartial. It merely states the situation, and that WWE helps the soldiers' morale. And then there are good guys versus bad guys and the good guys always have to win. It's a feel good special, except replacing the overbearing Christmas sentiment with American sentiment. And it's a time where something ironic and great happens, in that the "fake sport" brings a sentiment that's very much genuine and stunningly respectful. Maybe something even more genuine than a football team fighting for the Meineke Car Care Bowl.

Tired Debates, Phrases, and Whatever I've Thought Of.

As you've noticed, there's sadly not as much writing in the past few days from myself because, well, it's the holidays and everything seems to completely shut down as far as news goes. My favorite sport of football (college and pro) is busy dashing my dreams and running itself out of town after a few more weeks, all of the fascinating music from 2008 has already been released, and all of the great awards-season fare is either getting released in limited release or on Christmas Day, so it's not like I can find a way to watch said movies without using the ole' hitchhiker's thumb.

So instead, I'll find another way to bring those three great things into something else, and that's to bring up what I'm tired of hearing from the media (and I guess people, too, but mostly the media).

- Stop hating the idea of "playoffs system" people hating the idea of the BCS in college football.

Over the past few years, everyone and their mother has preached about the good of a playoff system in college football. It would make controversy mostly impossible, because at least unbeaten mid-majors would prove if they're actually good or not, and all that jazz. So it's an awesome system that totally makes sense. It makes so much sense that every year when a team is left out in the cold, all college pundits talk about is the playoff system. Which naturally annoys people tired of hearing about playoffs as much as they tire of hearing the name Tim Tebow during every ESPN college football show ever. Which gets the topic off of the table, and leaves out the point that the BCS isn't working and that my favorite sport of college football has a worse system than my not so favorite sport of college basketball, which still sways me to watch during Final Four time because they have an awesome playoff system that's easy to fill out in a bracket.

- When a famous person goes crazy or fails once, don't immediately herald their next project as their mega comeback.

Obviously, we saw this in 2008 with Britney Spears' Circus, which came out like a year after her last record and yet everyone heralded Circus as the comeback record. And guess what? Both records are about the same in quality. (As in, it's well-made dispensable pop.) And guess what? Both sold close to a half a million in one week, which is about the same. Mmmm, isn't media hype crazy?

- Is "crunk" really a relevant phrase to anyone, regardless of what they like?

I mean, come on. It really bottomed up in terms of any sort of ironic luster it had probably right after Dave Chappelle portrayed Lil' Jon, and then right after the man purposefully tried to market another "genre" called "hyphy" that sounded about the same, but didn't have a word that was oversaturated by being used by a bunch of kids thinking it's super ironic. When the man himself is tired of the phrase, you know it's pretty played out.


And then there's some other tired things that I'd save for a nice rainy day, but I felt a need to quench any drought of fine material here in this fine blog. I'll probably only be posting if I see one of those awesome awards season-bait movies in the near future, but other than that, you'll just have to miss me.

The Amazement of Auburn.

When Auburn fired head coach Tommy Tuberville roughly two weeks ago, everyone thought it was a misguided decision, but in the topsy-turvy world of NCAA coaching, putting out the old and bringing in the new is the new thing. When any coach, especially one helming a Southeastern Conference team, messes up badly, the impulse decision is to change things. But presumably, you have to have a clear plan of what you want to head a team. Right?

Now let me put myself into the perspective of an Auburn athletic director or Bobby Jindal or whatever, which you'll notice in that handy quotes box below.

I have many, many options for a replacement...

Turner Gill's done amazing work in Buffalo and made the team go from a laughing stock of Division 1-A football to a conference champion. And on the way to that conference title, they beat a top 25-ranked undefeated team in the process. He seems perfect for the project of rebuilding the Tigers. But eh, he's probably wanting to be stuck in the Northwest or Northeast or wherever Buffalo is. And clearly the MAC's not a legitimate conference. It's not even a big six conference! So, no to him.

Brian Kelly has made Cincinnati into a Big East powerhouse. He is in a big six conference, even if this conference happens to have the least prestige out of all of them. And his team is playing in a Big Four bowl this year (the Orange Bowl), unlike us. He's also had a long trend of turning teams good or keeping the teams on track. Thus, he's an amazing choice. But he doesn't see a problem at being paid $825,000 a year to live in a cold city in Ohio, which is strange but I guess it take him out of the picture.

Boise State's Chris Peterson's much the same. He loves the blue turf a lot. Oh, and 12-0 records. So he's also out.

And I'm too lazy to wait for a pro coach to get fired, like Rod Marinelli of the Detroit Lions or Romeo Crennel of the Browns, despite the fact that lame duck pro football coaches with a clear head have a great history of winning in college. See: Nick Saban, Pete Carroll.

And I don't want a guy who would be brand new to coaching. So even though a guy with a solid pedigree in coaching (Mississippi State's Sly Croom) just got let go, I don't want him. He clearly can't play in our conference, so why on earth would I need a guy who led a mediocre team to a bowl game last season and only lost to my team by one point this year?

So that leaves only one choice left. We need someone from a big conference, but not a big school. This guy should come from the Big 12 North, not the Big 12 South where that Texas Tech guy Mike Leach is. He'll probably just stay in Lubbock and be third in his conference (with a 7-1 conference record) forever. And I don't think Mack Brown of Texas or Bob Stoops will jump out of their posts. And...I guess there's other teams in the South, but why would I care? I want the North.

Missouri's head signed a mega extension, so he's out, despite his winning record. Uhm...Kansas head coach Mark Mangino looks too much like Andy Reid. This clearly is important to my decision, so he's also out. Nebraska's got a fresh coach with an 8-4 record, but he clearly won't leave for a nice plum SEC job. Plus, Nebraska's got some legacy to it.

So that leaves Colorado's head and Iowa State's head. (Kansas State's coach signed a ridiculous $1.8 million per season deal to continue to be 5-7. They'd kill for an Auburn-esque season.) Colorado finished 5-7 this season, too, but we don't want to be reminded of the past. Now what we need is a defensive genius! But I've got Iowa State left, so I guess I'll hire that guy. Oh! Gene Chizik! The man who coached Auburn's amazing 2004 defense! This was a good choice after all. Wait, what's that? His head coaching record is 5-19? Oh, what does it matter?

So, let's recap. I shunned the mid-major guys, despite the fact that the head coach of this year's SEC champion cut his teeth in mid-major jobs. I shunned any recently fired guys like Sly Croom, despite the fact that a team coached by a guy fired last year by an SEC team was the only team this season to beat the SEC champion. I totally forgot about the pros, despite the fact that pro experience and great defensive strategy from a Romeo Crennel is exactly what Auburn needs. I totally forgot that a horrible team like Kansas State even has a coach that's more winning than the coach from the very specific conference I hired from.

Wow, I should be fired.