I HAVE SOME EXCLUSIVE WILD SHOCKING BREAKING NEWS STRAIGHT FROM ROLLING STONE!!!!!
ADAM LAMBERT IS GAY!
I am so scared and confused right now. I don’t even know what to think to be perfectly honest. Oh, and he also likes butterflies and snakes near his wee-wee.
Annnnnnnd the performance that won Kris Allen the competition:
P.S. I don’t really watch American Idol.
P.P.S. I’m going to the Santigold concert here in New York tonight!! I will report back tomorrow.
Because my opinion really matters, I’ve written a quartet of quick reviews. (Is that even proper grammar?) Anyway, we’ll be covering a movie, a book, a videogame, and a television show.
DOUBT
I would love to say the movie was life-changing and amazing. In reality, the best part was acting by Philip Seymour Hoffman, Meryl Streep, Amy Adams, and Viola Davis. The story itself, while somewhat interesting but slow at times, was only brought to life by the strength of the movie’s actors. At times though, Streep and Adams are a bit cartoonish. While Streep and Davis are receiving the most praise out of the cast, I would say that Hoffman was the most convincing as a priest accused of improper relations with a student at the parish’s middle school. The climatic scene with Streep and Hoffman was amazing and the movie should be seen to experience that at the very least. Personally, I most enjoyed reliving my own Catholic school days with a principal not unlike Streep’s Sister Aloysius. I wouldn’t say you absolutely MUST SEE this movie, but check it out if you can.
HEARTBREAKING WORK OF STAGGERING GENIUS
Breaking my own personal preference of not reading multiple books by the same author, I decided to pick up David Eggers’ memoir “A Heartbreaking work of Staggering Genius” after reading his novel “What is the What” this past summer. The book is about Dave’s journey as a guy in his early 20’s during the 1990’s who is forced to care for his middle school aged younger brother after the sudden death of his father and then mother within a month of each other. The book’s best part is the opening which recounts his father and mother’s dying days, the subsequent funerals, and the aftermath. Once Dave and his younger brother, Toph, move to California, the book moves at a crawling pace and the characters become less sympathetic. The Real World interview scene was painful to get through as were other parts of the book. I can usually fly through a book within a week and this took me well over two months. “Staggering Genius” is filled with what seems like inside jokes and stories that I’m supposed to care about but just did not. I really just cannot recommend this book, and while I did not LOVE “What is the What”, I definitely enjoyed Egger’s novel far more than the memoir when I expected the opposite to be true.
LUMINOUS ARC 2
I am a sucker for strategy RPGs. Typically I love the micromanaging and the long drawn out chess-like battles, and Luminous Arc 2 is no different. Like many SRPGs however, the story comes second to the gameplay and I found myself frustrated by the long dialog scenes in between battles that were not very visually stimulating and only occasionally peppered with voice acting. Additionally the story was cliche as they come with character deaths being made very obvious before they occur, characters who seem like they might be bad unsurprisingly joining your party later on, and characters who you thought were on your side being so obviously shady from the get go. If you can get past the typical corny anime dialog scenes, the battle system is pretty fun. My one suggestion… KEEP YOUR ARCHER-TYPE CHARACTERS LEVELED UP. The entire game makes it a pain to ever bother using the archer typer characters so I let them collect dust the entire game and then the very final boss essentially requires that those characters are leveled up. I ended up just giving up and watching the (awful) ending on YouTube rather than spending several hours just to level up those characters at the very end of the game for one battle. Weak, I know.
REAL WORLD: BROOKLYN
This IS the best season of Real World I can remember; easily the best season of this decade. For some totally unexplained reason, the cast has been expanded to eight for this twenty-first season. For the first time ever there is a transgender roommate. These are the two things MTV did to get people talking about the season. It’s not like it really matters that there’s eight instead of seven now, but we MTV viewing folk are creatures of habit and we want all our Super Sweet Sixteen birthday girls to be complete brats and we want a minimum of eight minutes of blank stares during a 20-something minute episode of Hills and we want seven roommates on The Real World. Either way, we are only two episodes in (until tonight’s third airs), so not all the characters have been really developed yet, but the four who have are all interesting/annoying/compelling people in their own right and not because they are absurd caricatures that have been the standard since Real World: Las Vegas. I’m gonna talk about this season in a little more detail when I get more into it… but watch it, okay?
Oh, by the way, I’m a reality television star.
Last week I was sitting around holed up in my apartment and I texted little Mikey something to the effect of “I’m bored, help.” Surprisingly, my text was not ignored, and I was actually graced not only with a response but with a PLAN. He informed me that I’d be joining him and his boyfriend at a gallery opening and that I didn’t have a choice in the matter.
I hoofed it down to the Lower East Side and met Mikey outside this mess of I line. There were people with clipboards and camera equipment and I was like, “Oh lordy, I don’t know if I can do this.” Mike explained that from what he heard some sort of MTV show reality show was filming and my first thought was, “Real World Brooklyn…? Let’s leave.” We then found out:
BAM! Now we’re talking. Without Tivo I have not really been able to sit through full episodes of The Hills anymore since I can’t justify all those commercials and blank stares and chewing without a fast forward button. For those not in the know, Whitney Port of The Hills is getting her own spin-off called The City based in… you guessed it: New York City. She never really played any role in the original series other than a tool for exposition but she at least seemed to be the least brainless (except that I’m convinced Lauren is secretly smart but that she plays down her intelligence because, like, that’s what girls are supposed to do, duh).
ANYWAYS, we had to sign waivers, take pictures, and were led into this very crowded studio with a pretty awesome DJ and FREE open bar (HELLO!). The art was cool, I met the artist, whatever blah blah blah. He said something like “Yeah, I don’t know what these cameras are all about, I don’t really pay attention to any of that MTV stuff.” Ok, yeah I know, you’re so alternative, I get it.
Whitney eventually showed up with this weird bedazzled headband thing worn around her forehead with some other girl who I recognize from the show but have no idea what her name is. She talked to some ~important people~. I’m sure Mike, Richard, and myself were in the background of at least some of her conversations but who knows. The three of us were definitely not cool enough for the party. I was “day look” J Crew-ed out from head to toe and feeling particularly heinous that day anyway, so we didn’t stay long and ended up having an incredible and CHEAP meal at Cooper 35. They had an amazing drink selection all for $4. UNHEARD of. I had a decent mojito served in huge pint glass.
I’m not sure when exactly I’ll make my reality television debut, but we’ll see what happens.
I gots sumptin to say. While I await getting some piece that will make my Tivo work again (because apparently everything time I get a new cable box, a new piece must be purchased), I have to deal with the Time Warner interface in an attempt to watch live television.
Can someone please explain to me why when I’m paying eighty-something dollars for cable and internet that I have to deal with the hassle of navigating a menu that lists hundreds upon hundreds of channels (90% of which I don’t have). Yes, I understand the concept of ~showing me what I’m missing out on~… BUT I DON’T CARE, TIME WARNER. The regular channels and HD channels are separated by hundreds of channels I don’t have which means I have to remember the actual channel numbers. Look Time Warner, I don’t have space left in my brain to remember that 710 is CNNHD. While we’re at it, why are you providing me both regular CNN and CNNHD… if I have an HD box and HD television can’t you just take away the non-HD channel. I feel like cable companies can all just be crappy because no one can really do anything about it and just start up a competing cable company of their own.
Also, while we’re complaining about television, I hate the black boxes on the side of the screen even on some HD channels. Can’t they figure this out already and make the picture fit the whole screen?? Lastly, Project Runway has not kept my interest this season, I haven’t caught a single episode of Top Model yet, and Gossip Girl has been kind of disappointing compared to last season. The question is will I actually care about any other shows once the actual season begins on all channels?
Maybe I should go read a book. Peace be with you.
LOST (yes, it deserves to be in all caps, thank you very much). Wow. To think I originally missed season one due to being a senior in college and freshly 21. When ABC re-aired it over the summer of 2005, I gave the pilot a shot as recommended by LOST devotees Jamie and Terence, but I think I was distracted during it either by talking on the phone or playing on the internet. Any LOST fan knows this is NOT the way to watch the show.
As the second season premier hype was building, I went on a few dates with this guy who was a fan of the show. We watched the second episode of that new season together and I was intrigued. Then the perfect combination of me having no plans on the actual day of my birthday and wanting to “be into” something that interested that guy caused me to stop by the now defunct Tower Records on Newbury Street and pick up the first season. I had a nice little night to myself and probably steamrolled through four episodes.
I think I can safely say that my favorite episode was from season one: the Locke flashback episode where we learn that he was in a wheelchair before he came to the island. The episode ends with Locke, in a flashback, not being able to go on the walkabout in Australia because of his disability and then the scene returns to the present with him smiling at the wheelchair burning during the memorial service for the dead passengers. I remember just bawling. After falling in love with the show, I spread the gospel to many, notably Mike, Dave, and Julie (just to name a FEW), and I have many fun memories of LOST watching parties where at the end of any given episode everyone is like, “WHAT?!”
Yeah yeah, LOST is a very different show from how it started, but still amazing nonetheless. I’ve made it through the awkward second season, the painful division of the third season, and the glorious strike-jeopardized fourth season, and I cannot wait so see how it all wraps up in the next two years.
LOST isn’t a show known for showcasing outside music, but one rare instance was the inclusion of Damien Rice’s “Delicate.” It was sneaked in by having Hurley listen to it on his CD player while defiant Sun removes her towel and wears her bikini as she enters the ocean to the chagrin of her husband, Jin! Incidentally, the song would have served as a nice little break up song as I was “just friends”-ed by the guy who actually motivated me to watch the show, but I kind of saw that coming a mile away so I wasn’t really upset over it.
So yeah, if you haven’t already explored Damien Rice, go try out Volcano, Cannonball, The Blower’s Daughter, The Rat Within the Grain, 9 Crimes, and his cover of Radiohead’s Creep.
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