Taking a cue from Mark’s recent movie round-up, here are a few I’ve seen recently in the theater and on DVD:

21: Somewhat entertaining but silly, and probably very loose, adaptation of a group of MIT students’ exploits counting cards in Vegas. Loses points for totally marginal female characters, zero character development overall, bad Boston accents, poaching music from Ocean’s Eleven. Academia/fanboy objection: no faculty club or alumni dinner is as nice as the one Kevin Spacey (playing an MIT prof.) attends…at least not where I’ve been.

Forbidden Kingdom: Jet Li! Jackie Chan! Together…in a totally sub-par, saccharine sweet martial arts/coming of age movie. Rips liberally from numerous sources, most egregiously from Lord of the Rings, but less gloriously from The Karate Kid. Somewhat cool combat sequences unable to compensate for terrible plot, in which a martial-arts obsessed kid from “Boston” is magically teleported to “China,” where he is instructed in kung fu, and in life, by a drunken immortal (Chan) and an anti-social monk (Li), who is actually the avatar of a monkey god (also Li). Metafictional potential of a martial arts movie taking place in an alternate universe and hundreds of years before the martial arts movies beloved by one character (the kid) utterly squandered, and reduced to Blade-style admonitions - “monkey fist? That’s kid’s stuff!” Or something like that.

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First of all, it’s important to know that this full-length album is available for free on the internet – Trent Reznor is giving it away, which I imagine alters the calculus as to whether to acquire it or not.  Come to think of it, the fact that The Slip exists (for the time being) as a free download only calls into question its status as a full-length album at all, and also renders interesting and sort of quaint Reznor’s decision to adhere to a form that developed under technology-induced limitations on length that are now overcome, and market-driven constraints on “out there” content to which he is no longer exposed – at least within the limited sphere of this one album.

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Mark’s recent flurry of posting has really energized me to actually write some of the things I’ve been meaning to write about forever. First up is a totally sublime song from Antony and the Johnsons called “The Lake.” The song itself is amazing (lyrics from a poem of the same name by Poe here), but on top of that the video (not sure if this is official or what) has this Disney’s Robin Hood thing that I frankly find irresistable. Alas, no Alan-a-Dale, but I’ll take what I can get.

more below the cut.

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