Jeff's Best of 2008

Teeth

So, yes, it's a movie about Vagina Dentata and, yes, there are plenty of scenes of male genitalia getting removed. But, it's still worth a look. Darkly comic and lots of good scenes to make you squirm. Or, at least make the guys squirm. I really enjoyed it.

Diary of the Dead

Diary of the Dead is the 5th zombie movie from George Romero and it is a story that reverts back to the beginning of the zombie infestation. We get to see another small group of people make their way through the world that is slowly being overrun by the undead, but this time, we get to also see how they record the events that are happening around them. I had no problem with the 'film within a film' aspect of this and thought it was handled pretty well. I also thought there was plenty of good zombie action - the highlight probably being the scenes taking place on an Amish farm. Definitely better than Land of the Dead and Day of the Dead.

The Dark Night

So, pretty much everybody has weighed in on this one, but I'll just say that I really enjoyed it. I've heard some complaints about the length, but I didn't notice the length the first time I saw it. I was completely involved in the story and never felt things drag at all. I thought that they made the right choice by not making the movie all about The Joker and letting him monopolize screen time. Having him simply be an instigator was a novel way to handle the character and allowed the writers to move along ideas about Batman and the people around him. I'm curious to see what comes next.

That will do it for now, still plenty to come...

Trans-Siberian

First, I really hate the Steelers.....

Anyway, we watched Trans-Siberian last night, which is a Hitchockian thriller that takes place on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. It was pretty good and worth a look.

Jeff's Best of 2008

Since everybody likes to read a "Best Of" list at the end of the year, I thought I would throw my hat into the ring and create one myself. This isn't going to be a list focused on only one thing, such as music, but I'm going to try to fill it with things that I thought were great about 2008 (which rhymes). However, I'm going to start with a cd. Also, the numbering is arbitrary and does not indicate any ranking, other than the order in which I thought of them.

Portishead - Third

Portishead's first cd in over 10 years was, I thought, particularly interesting and challenging. So, really, it was just like the Portishead of 10 years ago. It's nothing that is '10 years in the making' or anything along the lines of Guns N Roses Chinese Democracy that had been worked on over that long hiatus. The album is definitely rooted in the past year. It has a definite Portishead sound, long spaces between notes and sounds. Sometimes mechanical. Lots of samples. But, I thought it also took those staples and did something new with them.

The song 'Machine Gun' is a good example. It takes a sparse arrangement and mechanical sound and pushes them so that the drum line is so obviously mechanical that you automatically think of a factory and production line. The vocals sound as if they are recorded in the largest space possible and only the chill of the higher notes is left. The only time the song sounds organic, and this is a little paradoxical, is at the end when an electronic keyboard line enters.

Now, if only they would tour North America.

Here's some samples.

Click to hear Machine Gun

Click to hear The Rip