13 Albums That Rocked My Face In 2008

13. What Made Milwaukee Famous, What Doesn't Kill Us

Why do I listen? Because they sound exactly like bands as diverse as Spoon, The Replacements, and The Format, often times within the same song.

Highlights: "Sultan," "Cheap Wine," "For The Birds"

12. The Kills, Midnight Boom

Why do I listen? Because they make me feel like I spend all of my weeknights in New York City dive bars.

Highlights: "Last Day of Magic," Hook and Line," "Sour Cherry"

11. Crystal Castles, Crystal Castles

Why do I listen? Because they let me dance to Atari games.

Highlights: "Alice Practice," "Vanished," "Knights"

CRYSTAL CASTLES - KNIGHTS
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10. Why?, Alopecia

Why do I listen? "I'm not a ladies' man I'm a land mine filming my own fake death/Under an '88 Cavalier I go..."

Highlights: "The Vowels Pt. 2," "Good Friday," "Simeon's Dilemma"

9. Rhymefest, Mark Ronson presents Rhymefest: MAN IN THE MIRROR

Why do I listen? Because I miss the black Michael Jackson.

Highlights: "Dancin' Machine," "All That I've Got Is You," "Can't Make It"

8. M83, Saturdays = Youth

Why do I listen? Because they are exactly right for a gray, rainy day in the fall of 1987, which is how Northeast Ohio feels for 9 months out of the year.

Highlights: "We Own The Sky," "Couleurs," "Kim & Jessie"

7. Beck, Modern Guilt

Why do I listen? Because it's the first Beck album since Midnite Vultures that sounds like a Beck album.

Highlights: "Modern Guilt," "Gamma Ray," "Chemtrails"

6. Johnny Foreigner, Waited Up Til It Was Light

Why do I listen? Because I want to karaoke the entire album with my girlfriend.

Highlights: "Salt, Peppa, and Spinderella," "DJs Get Doubts," "Our Bipolar Friends"

5. Kings of Leon , Only By The Night

Why do I listen? Because it makes me want to just keep driving forever when I listen to it on my way home from wherever in the early morning hours.

Highlights: "Sex On Fire," "I Want You," "Revelry"

4. The Black Keys, Attack and Release

Why do I listen? Because it makes me feel like Brad Pitt and Ed Norton walking into Lou's in the movie Fight Club.

Highlights: "I Got Mine," "Strange Times," "Same Old Thing"

3. Phantom Planet, Raise The Dead

Why do I listen? Because every single track is the catchiest song I hear all day.

Highlights: "Dropped," "Leader," "Raise The Dead"

2. The Teenagers, Reality Check

Why do I listen? Because they make me feel like a Euro-trash douchebag who laughs at Americans.

Highlights: "Homecoming," "III," "Love No"

1. Girl Talk, Feed The Animals

Why do I listen? Because they make me feel like the coolest kid at the party.

Highlights: "Here's The Thing," "No Pause," "Still Here"

Liam Neeson: Father, Mentor, Deceased

I just finished up Fallout 3, which I discussed here, and which also features the voice of Liam Neeson as your character's father. As soon as I recognized the voice, I was crestfallen, for, as you are about to see, this particular bit of casting serves as a tremendous spoiler. If you haven't played the game and plan to or have not figured out where I'm going with this, then, please, read no more. For the rest of you...

Have you ever noticed that Liam Neeson is a bit type-cast? Every movie I see him in, he is a mentor, or a father, or a father-like mentor. More disturbing, however, is that he never makes it to the end credits. My friend Jon pointed this out during Batman Begins, and as you will soon see, he is onto something.

Star Wars: Episode I--The Phantom Menace
Character: Qui-Gon Jinn
Mentors/Fathers: mentors Obi-Wan Kenobi, father figure to Anakin Skywalker
Dies Before Credits?: Yes, fighting Darth Maul



Gangs of New York
Character: "Priest" Vallon
Mentors/Fathers: is Amsterdam Vallon's father
Dies Before Credits?: Yes, in the Battle of the Five Points, at the hands of Bill the Butcher (in fact, I think Vallon meets his end before the opening credits)


Kingdom of Heaven
Character: Godfrey de Ibelin
Mentors/Fathers: is Balian de Ibelin's father
Dies Before Credits?: Yes, of some sort of illness if I remember correctly (video is of Neeson mentoring, not dying. Sorry.)


Batman Begins
Character: Henri Ducard
Mentors/Fathers: mentors Bruce Wayne
Dies Before Credits?: Yes, when Batman leaves him to die on a train

Picking Through The Rubble: My Fallout 3 Experience

When I wake in the blinding light of my new beginning I reach out for something solid and real to pull me down and let me know what I am. A voice speaks out, and I know I am Darkman's child. I realize my error almost instantly when the menu pops up asking me about myself and informs me that, yes, I am a sorry-sack alone on Saturday night playing a video game, and that my "father" is nothing more than a video game character voiced by Liam Neeson (which further informs me that he will be dying before the end of the story). The more I play, the less immersed I feel, going through a thinly veiled tutorial in the form of childhood and its trappings (picture books, birthday parties, school). As my character reaches maturation, the inevitable upheaval of my cozy-yet-boring vault life comes to fruition, thrusting me out on a quest to find my father and into a wasteland filled with...nothing.

I turn right, rocks, I turn left, rocks, I go straight, dirt. Alone, for as far as I can comprehend, I continue forward, the wind whistling and my boots crunching the barren ground beneath me. While immersion is still a ways off, there is a definite uneasiness creeping over me. I come upon my first building, a school, which I know I can probably enter but choose to ignore for now. I make a right, and notice a run down fuel station littered with broken-down automothings that are right out of the worst-interpretation-of-what-people-in-the-1950s-thought-future-cars-would-look-like-you-have-ever-seen. I am suddenly a guy playing a video game again, shocked by how poorly designed these things are. I quickly make my way past the gas station, and hear a voice rapidly approaching. An authoritative figure addresses me through a PA robot literally flying down the road. This is what people in the '50s thought the future would be, and I am Darkman's son again. A house is to my right, and, figuring that there can be at most 3 bogeymen inside, I enter. I am met by a woman who appears strung out, but I suppose it is all relative. She has been living in this world for who knows how long; maybe that's just how people are. After interrogating her through the tried and true art of menus, I learn that she is a former drug addict (although the Jet vials littering her home say otherwise) who stole money from a bar owner named Moriarty. I assure her I won't tell on her and set out for the town she fled, Megaton.

Upon approaching the pile of scrap metal that is Megaton, I am beseeched upon by a desperate drifter for clean drinking water. Although I have none to give him, I lift his spirits with promises of some as soon as it is in my possession. We'll see. Another robot, this one with legs and arms and (maybe) a gun, greets me at the gates, and I enter. After the informative load screen (I have completed zero paralyzing palms!), I find myself staring down the barrel of a black sheriff's gun. Despite my yearning to make the obvious Blazing Saddles reference (which I doubt he would even get since the world he inhabits is an alternate to ours and is--quite probably--rife with black sheriffs), I keep things civil and, after vowing to disarm the undetonated atomic bomb in the center of town, am allowed to explore the humble hamlet at my leisure. Climbing down the stairs into the heart of Megaton, I pass a two-headed cow (how novel!) and some Megaton settlers that are too busy walking up and down the steps to talk to me. At the bottom of the crater is the aforementioned atomic bomb, surrounded by worshippers called the Children of Atom. After talking to their loony leader about the beliefs of his strange cult, I head to Moriarty's saloon. From Moriarty, I learn that he has spoken to my father and knows where he is, but won't tell me for free. Lacking funds, I leave, searching for a way to make money.

An hour (in real-time) later, I give up looking for an honest way to make money, and head back to the reformed addict's house in the Wasteland to collect the money she stole from Moriarty. Unable to think of any other way to persuade her to hand it over (my menu lacks the proper options!), I beat her with a bat, which is surprisingly disturbing. I return to Moriarty with my blood money only to learn that his price is 3 times as much now. Beside myself, I contemplate giving up on the game, certain I have played it wrong. This is when I find Moriarty's relatively unsecure computer terminal, and thus the answer to my (current) life's quest.

And this is when Fallout 3 grabs me, when I finally get it. There is no right way to play, so therefore there is no wrong way to play, either. Everything I did leading up to that point was exactly what my character was supposed to do, because I decided that's what he's supposed to do. If I had chosen to just live my days out in hiding with the drug addict, that would have been fine with the game (if a bit boring for me). Later on, in an attempt to find an orphan a proper home, I accidentally stumble across a colleague of my father's who has seen him. Even though her part of the story hasn't officially been introduced to me yet, the game adjusts, eliminating the need for me to go to where my father was before meeting the colleague and accelerating the story to catch up to where I am. Also, by completing tasks such as helping the orphan find a home, I gained renown as a "good" character, communicated mostly through the singing of my praises by a renegade radio DJ. Despite this, I never felt truly pure. The choices I have made matter, sometimes even when the game doesn't acknowledge them.

Even now, about one month since it happened, I'm still haunted by my bludgeoning of the drug addict. Although it was done in secret and the game never punished me for it, I still feel twangs of guilt about what I had done. Fallout 3 has, in a small way, made me feel like I've gotten away with murder, and that there is nothing good about it, which, even if an unintended consequence, is a possibility that only exists in video games, and even then only in video games as well-crafted and, yes, immersive, as this one.

Digging Deep Into The Ruins

It is not a stretch to compare horror movies to porno movies (the feature types, not the clip variety). Both waste our time with paper thin plot and character development before getting to what we really want to see. For example, the following scenario fits the template for either a slasher movie or a hardcore stag film. An early twenty-something urbane girl inherits a diner located in the boonies from her deceased grandmother. After her and 3-5 of her attractive friends get to work fixing it up, menacing locals attempt to intimidate the plucky youngsters out of the diner and off of the property. Eventually, the twenty-something girl prevails. The only difference between the slasher version and the porno version would be that in the slasher version, the girl would have to endure random acts of violence, while in the porno version, she would have to (obviously) endure random acts of sex. The point is, we don't really care about the diner, the girl, her friends, or the locals. They all just serve as bodies/holes. Any exposition explaining who or what these holes/bodies are is just filler.

Which brings me to The Ruins. The film begins with a girl trapped in a pit of some kind, screaming in vain for help. As something attacks her from the darkness, the beginning looks promising, filling us with hope that this director gets it, that we don't need to know who any of these people are. Unfortunately, we are next introduced to two couples, lounging by a pool, talking about drinking. Discussing drinking with people you have actually spent the night drinking with is boring. When it is carried out by four of the most annoying representations of American youth ever portrayed, such discussion is unbearable. Thankfully, a German fellow interrupts and invites the Americans to visit an archeological dig site at some Mayan ruins. Of course they say yes. To prove my point that most of a horror movie is filler, let me outline the contents of that roughly fifteen minute scene and then show how it could have been 30 seconds, with nothing lost on the viewer.

ORIGINAL SCENE
Dark-haired couple: You drink too much, no you drink too much, no you drink too much, no you drink too much...
Blond-haired couple: Stare vapidly and smile at the obviously smarter dark-haired couple (of course they're smarter, look at their hair!)
Dark-haired girl: I lost an earring!
They all tepidly look for the earring on the beach chairs and towels (I don't know if the lack of urgency in this search was to show that the characters were hung over or that even the actors were bored with this nonsense).
Across the pool, a German (we know he's German because of the neck beard) eavesdrops on the commotion and grabs his scuba gear, hoping to be a hero. Ze German succeeds, lucking out that a pool in Cancun is empty during Spring Break, and finds the earring, returning it to dark-haired girl and sharing some forced sexual tension with her. In order to relieve said tension (I guess) the German asks the gang if they want to check out some ruins where his German brother is helping a girl dig for the Ark of the Covenant (or something). Of course the gang says yes. Then some Greeks say they are coming, too. (This really happens, just as one of the Greeks does a cannonball into the pool. And, no, I did not skip the part where we meet the Greeks. This is their first appearance.)

HOW THE SCENE SHOULD HAVE GONE
German: You guys want to check out some ruins?
Youths: Yes.

Next, there is a 15 second shot of a group of people (who I assume are the protagonists but am not sure of because the director chose to film the scene from the Pacific coast of Mexico) staring at the sunset. By the time the sun is down, 7 other people have joined them on the beach for a typical Cancun Spring Break Party of quietly lounging on the beach, and they all talk about nothing. Then the dark-haired girl drunkenly tries to kiss the German, but the German is a man of principle, and refuses. The blond-haired couple look on, barely more interested than us. I described this utterly useless scene only to illustrate how boring and pointless the first half hour of this movie is. I will now skip the morning wake-up scene (the highlight is a gratuitous shot of the blond girl's boobs) and get to the meat, the ruins.

As the group looks up at the Mayan pyramid, a villager from the picture above shows up and starts yelling at them like he is a zombie from Resident Evil 4.

He gets all upset about something, and then shoots the only Greek who shows up in the head. Everyone is scared now, but not that bothered by the Greek's actual death. They scurry up the pyramid and settle in for the horror movie action we've been waiting for, right? Actually, no. Although there is a gruesome leg decapitation (maybe the most horrific thing I've seen on film), there isn't much horror. There is a killer cannabis plant that gets into cuts and eats dead bodies, but that's about it. The scary part is more psychological, as the four American youths struggle with their isolation and the paranoia caused by the killer weed and the crazy village that has set up a siege around them. Also, the German falls instantly and is paralyzed, and then worse. Oh, and the blond girl decides to give the blond guy a hand job in a tent, even though she just gashed her leg open pretty bad and the dark haired girl is lying right next to them. While there are some tense moments, all in all The Ruins lacks in the horror department. Unless you count the dark-haired girl's superfluous glasses that she takes on and off arbitrarily, which are completely unnecessary since we already know she's smart (see the hair). Just as you don't need glasses to get boned on film, you also don't need glasses to die on film.

In conclusion, The Ruins is a solid thriller, but I hesitate to call it a horror movie. The characters are rather boring and unlikable, which is unfortunate since they all end up living longer than I or you would prefer. While we become quite intimate with the ugly Americans, the only characters that matter, the pyramid and the weeds, are hung out to dry in terms of development. They are simply there, as are the villagers. The connection between the two (as well as why the Mayans built a pyramid on a killer weed) is never explained, leaving me for the first time in my life wanting more exposition from a porn--uh, I mean, horror movie.

The Playlist: Early Autumn Edition

DVNO

4 Capital Letters

A Good Use of Time #1

Congratulations are in order

I'm not a lady's man I'm a land mine filming my own fake death...

...under an '88 Cavalier I go.