Music Review: Bon Iver - For Emma, Forever Ago

I know I should probably spend some time writing a review for something that has come out in the last month one of these days, but I figure anything that gets me to a write a thought out entry is a good thing. So here's something about a great band.

Let’s talk about Bon Iver, specifically For Emma, Forever Ago.” I have no idea why Bon Iver finally clicked with me, but I’m so happy that it finally happened. I remember having my iPod on shuffle when it just happened to come across “Skinny Lover” and the song was vaguely recognizable, but I hadn’t made a real effort to dig into the album yet so I couldn’t have told you who it was at the time. When it came on I was in the middle of running to a plane that I would end up missing so I didn’t have time to pull out the player and check it out, which made it even more exciting to me as the song went on. I knew that I had a new favorite song, and possibly a favorite band, and I had no idea who it was. When I got around to checking it out, the name didn’t go with the sound at all for me; I had expected something chaotic or noisy for some reason and instead came away with some of the most gracefully layered music I had ever heard.

On the plane I worked my way through the rest of the album and even though the sound was the same, I still needed more time to appreciate every song in the same way as “Skinny Lover.” It’s not a complicated album in terms of composition, but each song needed a different situation or feeling to cling to before it would all come together for me and I could finally get to the core of the painfully meager nine tracks. This made listening to it all the more enjoyable though, I would find myself coming back to the album again and again every few weeks and finding another way to love it.

Apparently the album is about the lead singer, Justin Vernon, dealing with breakup(s) and the entire album has a sense of resignation and passive acceptance, but the songs are not completely caught up in identifying one aspect or feeling so you still get the freedom to explore each song in a unique way. The first track, “Flume”, for instance is about a baby still in the womb and while you could stretch the themes out to relate to the innocence of the unborn child and the lamenting of the pain that is to come, it’s better to take it for what it is and enjoy the picture that Vernon paints with expert precision. You feel comforted in an odd sort of way during the haunting track and eventually I came to realize that the song actually reminds me of a memory that I do not even have, I still can’t get over how weird it felt when I first came to that realization.

Vernon also has a knack for putting you smack in the middle of a situation and bringing you up to speed on the severity of it in almost no time at all, see: “Skinny Lover.” This is the song that would go on my mixtape that I have to make five minutes before the bombs drop and I have to escape down the hatch to my underground shelter where I will be stuck with only a walkman, an endless supply of batteries and one CD. This is the only definite breakup song of the album, the other ones are musing on what comes before and after and how you deal with it, but this is definitely a song of the moment. Vernon acts like the consummate grief victim in the song, going through all the different stages and finally coming to a sort of acceptance. “Come on skinny lover just last the year,” the first line alone is enough to paint the entire picture, Vernon is pleading not just with the girl, but with the relationship itself all while finally seeing that it will be over by the second stanza. Vernon’s normally angelic voice flies into a justified frenzy as he retraces all the missteps that led them to this point and you can’t help but begin to make the same pleas he does to an unfeeling and immovable force.

It’s probably pretty clear by now that I could go on talking about this album for a long time, and I probably will to myself and in other excerpts that I’ll leave out in this “review,” but that would be pointless because I’ve gotten my point across by now. This is a fantastic album, the kind of album that you listen to at 3 in the morning and suddenly feel the urge to write about. The feelings that Vernon stirs up with the sparsest of sounds are as powerful as the music is subdued and it while it doesn’t plead for your attention like so much other music does these days you will still find yourself inevitably drawn to it as it slowly carves the smallest of crevices inside your heart for itself.

Music Review: Lloyd - Lessons in Love

This will be my first review as PopMatters' newest R&B specialist. It's what they consider a "high priority" release, so I imagine they'll be getting this published within the next week. It's been a weak-sauce year in R&B, though, so I'm being allowed to steer clear away from the genre for awhile. Upcoming albums I have in the pipelines are by country artists Heidi Newfield and Jessica Simpson (?!); Roman electronic connoisseur Jacopo Carreras; Israeli surf rockers Boom Pam; singer-songwriter Sonya Kitchell; and a bunch of indie rock cats who call themselves Ten Kens. I'll keep interested parties posted in the coming weeks.

It’s really not much of a secret anymore these days: R&B has spent the bulk of the last several years falling off a cliff. There have been a lot of arguments offered pertaining to where and why the genre has taken this near fatal swan-dive into systematic mediocrity, but many sources consent that R&B’s gradual merger with hip-hop has been an undeniable contributor to this disaster. The new century has seen a slew of top-shelf hip-hop producers strike Top 40 gold with both rappers and crooners alike; and as long as their paycheck has a sufficient number of zeroes, they all seem to be equally and frighteningly indiscriminant with who they contract their services out to.

While this boom in collaborations culminated between the two genres has certainly resulted in a handful of genuinely enjoyable hits in recent memory (Justin Timberlake’s ‘My Love’ immediately springs to mind), the reverse compatibility between backing R&B and rap tracks has – in the end – arguably produced more bad than good by having the unintended consequence of severely narrowing the sonic palette of R&B. Unique traits that the genre has touted for years (danceable mid-tempo jams with a strong, often interesting sense of melody) now sound exhausted and formulaic. Alternatively, even the most average of rappers benefit from this fusion greatly, as the assimilation of R&B’s inherent base for melodic progression has gone long ways to diversifying the soundscapes of hip-hop. The days of being able to actively distinguish between hard-hitting rap anthems against the smoldering balladry of rhythm and blues on the basis of production are nearing an end.

Lloyd Harlin Polite, Jr. is one of the latest in a long line of young, fashionable and artistically faceless R&B vocalists peddling this precise trend. Not one to break the mould, Lloyd has spent his entire career (which is now surprisingly three albums deep) reheating worn-out street love truisms and simplified innuendo; naturally, this would also mean that he has made almost no discernible strides in the direction of trying to differentiate himself from his peers.

Lessons in Love’s missteps are numerous, and with the witless kitsch of ‘Sex Education’ leading off, it’s not very difficult to ascertain how the rest of the album will play out based on this introduction. Dull lines like, “Give me your permission to take a trip with me / To satisfy you is my mission and a bed is all we need” are rife throughout the record, but some of you may shudder to hear that this instance is probably the least severe of the lyrical offenses. Not far around to corner is the synth-heavy slow jam ‘Year of the Lover,’ which houses this nefariously laughable come-on: “Don’t make plans for dinner / I’mma put you up on the stove and take off all your clothes / Girl, watch me cook.” This admittedly wouldn’t sound as scrawny or awkward if he had half of R. Kelly’s charismatic verve or performance flair (whom he is very clearly trying to emulate) in order to properly sell the conceit.

Lloyd’s own syrupy tenor, as pleasant and innocuous as it is, presents an array of problems with each passing track, as well. He has a tendency to sound tinny and childlike against the backdrop of warbling guitars and droning bass. Lloyd is able to wrench attention back from the insistent production whenever he delves into his falsetto, but this is also where his vocal frailties are even more accentuated when he’s forced to compete against the rest of the track. ‘Girls Around the World’ is a crisp ‘80s groove that tries to mask Lloyd’s thin vocal presence behind a veil of multi-tracked harmonies, but ends up having the reverse effect of marginalizing his presence in a muddle of over-production. Even the glimmer of opportunity for Lil’ Wayne to salvage this legitimately engaging track is squandered, as he decides instead to rest on the laurels of his most recent commercial triumphs and sleepwalks through some of the most forgettable and uninspiring 16 bars of his career.

Occasionally, even Lessons in Love's strongest suit in production will yield less than favorable outcomes. Most records – especially those of the hip-hop and R&B variety – would normally benefit from the fluidity and uniformity that accompanies the use of two or three likeminded producers. What ends up happening here instead is that a bland homogeneity in the overall sound of the record emerges, and entire tracks start running together (most notably during the four-track stretch between ‘Year of the Lover’ and ‘Have My Baby’). Lloyd’s generally two-dimensional songwriting, being as prevalent as it is, does little else but punctuates this distinct lack of variety.

Truth be told, however, Lessons in Love is not entirely an unlistenable affair. Where Lloyd tends to falter with absurd sexual propositions and drippy, clichéd love ballads, he tends to fare better with club-oriented material. Pulsing, mushrooming synth pangs swell over the mechanical beat-keeping of space-age snares and bass in producer James “J. Lack” Lackey’s best impersonation of The Neptunes. The focus is shifted away from Polite’s fragile vocals and placed squarely on the track’s persistent, transmittable dance groove.

From a soundboard standpoint, the agile lead guitar as well as its accompanying rhythm guitar flourishes on ‘Love Making 101’ easily makes it the album’s greatest production accomplishment. It’s a surprisingly meticulous and layered song, and Lloyd himself even sounds in command of the entire track itself with his creamy vocals barely rising above a whisper before the chorus. ‘Treat U Good’ slightly picks up the dance pace and also showcases how powerful an ally vocal restraint is to Lloyd; the entire song is almost bereft of him indulging in the upper registers, and he sounds noticeably more robust and melodic as a result. The strengths of his immediate vocal range go a long way toward imbuing his syncopated enunciation on both tracks with a more pronounced punch, as well.

This handful of keepers is unfortunately not enough to redeem what is otherwise an entire record’s worth of vapidity. Run-of-the-mill airwave fodder is exactly what the public has been conditioned to expect from R&B and consume for the last several years, and Lloyd has done nothing but contribute to to its slowly deteriorating state. But do you want to know what greatest tragedy behind Lessons in Love is? – It’s that the album’s sporadic moments of charm and promise make it incredibly tricky to dismiss Lloyd’s efforts all together. Somewhere buried underneath Lloyd’s artistically fruitless four years in the mundane genre trappings of urban radio lies what could potentially be, if not a unique voice, a winsome and entertaining personality. Of course, presenting the mere possibility of being enjoyable doesn’t earn artists extra credit in the world of criticism, and that will (hopefully) be the single greatest lesson that Lloyd takes away from his third album’s imminently short shelf life.

Frownland

Reviews are such a tricky thing. I could construct a hefty list of the reasons why but the most important reason is because you are not me. No matter how similar you think our tastes in awesome things are, you still won't be me and you won't experience things the same way that I do. We all try so hard to to make our friends experience the same feelings we do. When you want to show a movie to a buddy, you generally don't just have them borrow it, you watch it with them so you can see the same emotions it elicited in you boil up inside of them as well and are often disappointed when they take it all in the most slightly different of ways.

Anyway, this is all quite a buildup to say that I really like the movie Frownland and while I am not completely alone, there is a large group of people who do not like it. In fact they hate it. The movie premiered at SXSW and was followed shortly by a few walkouts and a great deal of commotion, the end result was heated discussion from both sides of the aisle and an award for the writer/director, Ronald Bronstein. After watching it this past week at Facets, most likely the most amazing establishment I've ever set foot in, I can see where all this disagreement comes from.

The movie follows Keith, a painfully dysfunctional stuttering short man, who just can't seem to relate to people on the level he wants to. We see him at his depressing apartment in New York City, a one bedroom apartment he shares with a pretentious bully, dealing with his depressing friends, who all treat him worse than even a stranger ever would, and at his depressing job, where he sells coupons door to door. The result is a film that some could say comes off as a tad depressing.

As the movie builds more and more towards the inevitable psychological collapse of this lost soul audiences become quite clearly split. You cannot remain ambivalent about Keith, you can only either hate him down to his core or pity him to the point where you must look away at times. It all depends on how much you see of yourself inside of him. I see Keith not as a sort of plague person that I should try to avoid at all costs, I see him as a cautionary tale. I can clearly see the circles that have brought him to the point where he can barely compose a coherent sentence without falling over his own words and eventually collapsing into a pile of useless apologies. I see the loneliness of a cold city that can strip you of yourself and the things that you used to hold up as a testament to your good character. Keith is not a reality that I expect to ever have to endure, but it is interesting to see where the end of some roads lay.

In the end, the movie portrays a type of person that Hollywood would never dare touch and that is why I appreciate bold films such as this. The story ends up leaving audiences with such a sense of dread and hopelessness that is not hard to understand why the reaction was so varied. Generally we see movies to inspire us or show us a part of life we never knew was there, but this movie shows us a part of life we all know, but have looked away from. To watch Frownland is be force fed desperation while having an intravenous of failure at the same time, and it's a truly glorious achievement.

I am very upset with Hanson's review.

Anyone who has heard me ramble on and on about how well the movie maneuvers through all the interesting facets of one of the greatest comic heroes ever knows that I loved The Dark Knight. However! What is most frustrating about Mr. Le's scathing write up for the current movie of the year is that I now have to counterpoint the review instead of just going on with assuming that everyone loves the movie and being able to talk about it's tie ins to The Killing Joke and The Man Who Laughs. I was so excited to go back and reread these comics and see if even they can hold their own against this milestone epic, but alas, it is not to be as I must once again postpone more exciting endeavors to instead revisit old battlegrounds and set right this egregious error made by my roommate.

Let's start off with an easy one.

"Entire combat sequences are suffocated by series of jarring cuts, split-second angle changes and extreme, claustrophobic close-ups to the action. This tactic is usually deployed in order to mask the lack of actual hand-to-hand combat experience of actors and stuntmen, and to simulate the presence of choreography."

I will admit that if I was forced to pick out my favorite action movies ever based solely on the fightscenes, there are several others that would beat out The Dark Knight but it is hardly what I would consider second-rate. The fighting I felt improved drastically over the first movie, finally I felt that Batman was moving and fighting in the way that he would actually have to, as opposed to what he was doing the first movie, dropping down on some sort of rope and pulley system to sneak up on goons and knocking out the lights to save Nolan the hassle of shooting actual footage. Nolan's movie is rooted very heavily in realism and the first movie sometimes had him moving and fighting in ways that seemed more hassle than it would be worth. I did feel that the S.W.A.T. team scene was a bit awkward, but it was more due to the needless cuts back and forth from SONAR vision. I think if I saw that scene again and knew what to look for I would not be nearly as disoriented, and while a movie shouldn't have to be watched twice to enjoy, I never thought it was unenjoyable to begin with, merely a mediocre scene in the middle of several spectacular ones. (Note: I did indeed watch the movie again last night and the fights weren't as jarring, however, the S.W.A.T. team rope trick is still a bit out of nowhere.)

Additionally, there is a word that Hanson uses to criticize the fighting style of this movie that I find a bit interesting. He laments the movie for not properly conveying what has always been seen a bit of a "mythical" fighting style in the comic books. I think that what he forgets is how deeply rooted in realism that this movie is supposed to be. Sure they pull out some crazy plot devices like the SONAR and the fact that people supposedly wouldn't blow up each other's boats (I mean seriously, you're gonna die for some criminals? Here give me the damn remote) but beyond that the Nolan's seem pretty determined to make Batman something that could exist. They do not entirely disregard the mythical sense of the character though, they just make it something that only exists in the wild imagination of criminals and civilians alike.

MOVING ON!

"My first gripe has to do with the condensed focus on both Christian Bale’s Batman and Bruce Wayne."

This complaint is a bit odd I think mostly because Hanson spent the last few paragraphs before this statement raving, rightfully so, about the amazing performances given by both Aaron Eckhart and Heath Ledger. While I do understand the idea that the titular character in the movie should be heavily focused on and sympathized with, I feel like I do not need Christian Bale on the screen the entire time for this to occur. If someone came into this movie without having seen Batman Begins they may not be able to enjoy it as much, but as someone who has seen the first movie a few times I feel that I know Bruce Wayne well enough that I don't need to see the pain and torment he is going through first hand, I know how he will react and how he will feel without having Batman on screen telling me how sad he is. Nolan obviously took a bit of a risk by taking the limelight off of Wayne for this movie but the performances that were turned in by the other stars made the gamble pay off several times over. I should also note that before I used to think Gary Oldman was always out of place and awkward as Jim Gordan, however, after watching the movie a second time appreciated the new side he has brought to this character, he seems more vulnerable and yet somehow more resilient than ever. His monologue at the end initially comes off as a bit out of place at first, but that can be excused for the way that it ties the entire movie together so beautifully. Tell me you didn't have a "oh shit" moment when you finally pieced together the title and what it really meant.

"The biggest qualm I have with Nolan’s intentions in making a brainy (albeit ham-fisted) summer spectacle comes at the end of the film, where Batman has apparently pegged every last possible nuance of masked heroism and vigilantism in the span of four villains. Here, Batman speaks with an unrealistic amount of foresight (something which took scribes decades to flesh out and his comic book alter ego an equal amount of time to realize), and the soul of an entire mythology is breathlessly compressed into a few lines of forced dialogue."

I automatically win this argument because obviously Hanson was even paying attention to this scene well enough to notice that it was Gordon talking, not Batman, and as I said earlier, I love this monologue. His complaint about how quickly Gordon has surmised what took writers and characters decades to get to is not fair at all considering the first few decades of Batman stories had him traveling to other solar systems to meet alternate reality Batmans and time traveling to joust with the Joker. His mythos grew more in the mind of the readers at this time and was never fully explored until more ambitious writers came on board to work out what really makes the character work. I agree that Nolan did force Gordon to lay it out just a little bit too pretty for the average viewer, but I don't think that is a bad thing for a summer blockbuster where the average viewer probably wouldn't spend two seconds trying to piece together the themes unless someone gives them a little push in the right direction. Nolan has to balance keeping the average viewer informed with the ideas he is presenting while still not giving you the cliff-notes to the movie, it's a tricky thing to make a movie that people of all different types can enjoy and there has to be concessions made somewhere.

While Hanson feels that this movie layers too much on top of itself to be the best comic movie ever, I feel that if that were true, it would not be having the type of runaway success that it has been enjoying for the last two weeks. If the average summer blockbuster fan can get through such a dense and thoughtful film, then in my estimation there is not too much going on. The balance throughout the film is amazing to me, it moves organically and contains one of the longest climaxes I've ever enjoyed without ever making me feel like I was having to work for it.

All in all, it's still better than X-2. Sorry Hanson  :(

Film Review: The Dark Knight

After having spent the last 24 hours sporadically sifting through my jumble of impressions of the biggest movie of the year to date, there is one nagging conclusion that I’m constantly having to come back around to: although it’s a mostly decent and intermittently great summer event, The Dark Knight is colossally overrated.

First things first in this (mostly) spoiler-free take, though – let’s get the high points out of the way. In a sensitive, concerted effort to not beat the dead horse, the late Heath Ledger positively astonishes in his role as the Joker. Director Christopher Nolan and his brother (and co-screenwriter) Jonathan ultimately settled on a significantly more sinister take of the character; a convincingly deranged and cheerlessly brutal psychopath with an unnerving penchant for knife-inflicted torment. Although Ledger’s Joker does his best to sell you his self-proclaimed responsibilities as an ambassador of chaos, his performance throughout the movie betrays something much more meticulously crafted at play. All aspects of the performance were unquestionably products of fastidious design – everything from his cobbled swagger, his deliberately slurred enunciation, and the paralyzing dread that materializes every time that crimson, razor-blade sneer blossoms from scar tissue to scar tissue – and they all go to incredible lengths to create a compellingly threatening presence.

Likewise, Aaron Eckhart is also onboard to turn in a similarly provocative depiction as Gotham City’s new hotshot District Attorney, Harvey Dent. The show-stopping honors may very well be in Ledger’s name, but audiences would be hard-pressed not to find anything as equally engaging about Dent’s candor and winsome sense of righteousness. Even as his lopsided resolve regarding justice and heroism progressively traipses closer and closer to naïveté, it’s still difficult to not get swept away by the sheer enormity of Dent’s earnestness and seemingly unwavering conviction. Simply put, Eckhart’s Harvey Dent is as close as the script could possibly get to the archetypal “white knight” without drowning itself in a deluge of camp – and in a bleak tale that practically hinges on the classical dualities of good and evil, that is truly a sight to behold.

Unfortunately, that’s where most of the consistently decent qualities about The Dark Knight end.

Although there isn’t any singular component that is outright detrimental to the movie as a whole, it’s the minutiae of minor issues and obstacles that the film accumulates over a sometimes glacial, other times excruciating 3-hour running time that keeps it from being the masterpiece many are claiming it to be. My first gripe has to do with the condensed focus on both Christian Bale’s Batman and Bruce Wayne. It was easy to predict this outcome based on the unbridled anticipation for the Ledger’s interpretation of the Joker, but it became increasingly problematic to even sympathize with his character as emphasis on his internal struggles were sidelined in favor of developing other, more prominent subplots. In Batman Begins, Bale was able to articulate a huge array of emotions through his stoic silence, selective speech, and expressive body language; unsurprisingly, Bruce Wayne’s more meditative moments in The Dark Knight is where he is in his finest form. Regrettably, the majority of Bale’s scenes are in costume where he seems even stiffer and more lumbering than before. Stripped of Bale’s facial expression assets, one of the most sympathetic characters in comic book history is reduced to nothing more than an anonymous figure in a cape and cowl, complete with a distracting gravelly rasp.

Elsewhere, Batman’s mythical dominance in combat comes off as muted throughout much of the movie, as Nolan unwittingly carries on Hollywood’s tradition of perpetuating the worst brand of fight cinematography on the face of the planet. Entire combat sequences are suffocated by series of jarring cuts, split-second angle changes and extreme, claustrophobic close-ups to the action. This tactic is usually deployed in order to mask the lack of actual hand-to-hand combat experience of actors and stuntmen, and to simulate the presence of choreography. This style worked to Batman’s favor in Batman Begins, as his approach for most of the movie depended upon swiftness and stealth; all the quick edits worked well in creating an illusion of Batman’s silent, deadly omnipresence. Conversely, very little of that element is seen in The Dark Knight, as what we’re offered instead is Batman nonchalantly dive-bombing through at least two different windows and brutishly tackling packs of goons head-on. If we’re going to be treated to an out-in-the-open rumble with one of fiction’s greatest martial artists systematically devastating hordes of faceless henchmen, someone with a wide-angle lens and an eye for panoramic poetry needs to be filming it.

The most taxing aspect about this editing style is that the logic of stretches of scenes feels like they’re lost in the shuffle. This is most evident in the fight scene preceding Batman’s final encounter with the Joker, where a jumble of dark, schizophrenic images inexplicably lead to the defeat of Joker’s henchmen, the freeing of the hostages, and an entire SWAT team dangling from the side of a building – all courtesy of our favorite masked vigilante in a matter of mere, incomprehensible seconds.

The Dark Knight’s most glaring shortcomings become palpable when things get thematically convoluted. On paper, the juxtaposition of Harvey Dent with both Batman and the Joker as a series of events moves him from one end of the moral spectrum to the other is easily the most fascinating arc simmering beneath the surface of the story. Theoretically, even the most principled, upstanding citizens of society can succumb to the pitfalls of evil. However, it is in the execution where this concept stalls out: the motivating factors which ultimately clinch Dent’s transformation into the murderous Two-Face as well as his subsequent descent into illogical madness simply aren’t very believable. Even worse is the contrived moral dilemma that tech specialist Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) confronts Bruce Wayne with when he’s faced with the decision of invading the privacy of 30 million Gotham citizens in order to pinpoint the location of the Joker. This impasse could have been effective if the entire scene didn’t feel as if it were completely glossed over – there just weren’t any real consequences to justify the needlessly high drama of this scene.

The biggest qualm I have with Nolan’s intentions in making a brainy (albeit ham-fisted) summer spectacle comes at the end of the film, where Batman has apparently pegged every last possible nuance of masked heroism and vigilantism in the span of four villains. Here, Batman speaks with an unrealistic amount of foresight (something which took scribes decades to flesh out and his comic book alter ego an equal amount of time to realize), and the soul of an entire mythology is breathlessly compressed into a few lines of forced dialogue. The fear and anxiety that has supposedly gripped the public as a result of Batman’s presence is something that’s referenced, but sans the pathetically scant press conference scene it’s never once fully conveyed. This is the primary oversight that further sabotages the emotional impact of Batman’s greatest decision: to take the fall for crimes he didn’t commit in order to protect the heroic reputation of another. It’s a noble but ultimately hollow conceit.

As a film endeavor that straddles the line between summer blockbuster and intellectual art-house fodder, The Dark Knight indubitably draws enough from both schools of thought to satisfy a slew of happy customers. At the end of the day, though, the combined salvo of Christopher Nolan's bloated psychoanalytical character examinations and thematic identity crises is clearly indicative of an ambitious director trying to messily cram way too many layers into a grueling 3-hour test of cerebral endurance. There are too many missteps and botched opportunities for this to be the best movie of the year, or even the best comic book adaptation ever. Fortunately, you don’t always have to be the best to be entertaining, and that’s at least something this flick has in spades.

Get on those counterpoints, Ryan!

Introductions

Hi, I'm Hanson and I'm a struggling, dirt-poor college student who loves to write.

Ryan here, one of my three roommates, has recently developed an interest in writing reviews and approached me a couple of weeks ago with the idea of a collaborative blog. It’s an entertaining notion for a number of reasons – the most prevalent would have to be that out of everyone I’ve ever lived with at college, Ryan superficially seems like he resembles me the least in terms of personality and lifestyle. Regardless, I’ve had the opportunity to spend these last 5 years to really approximate the depth of the overlap of our interests and tastes (especially with music and comic books), and the results have been pretty astonishing. That’s not to imply that we necessarily like all the same things. On the contrary – it seems like we butt heads more often than not when we start dissecting the minutiae of certain segments of the arts. What’s important, though, is that we both tend to approach art criticism with a similar, analytical (although some of our friends might accuse of being overly so) frame of reference.

Currently, we have chosen to tentatively title the blog "Best of Both Worlds" for our first few trial entries. It’s an inside joke referencing a particularly terrible superstar collaboration between Jay-Z and R. Kelly from a few years ago, but we’re hoping to cultivate some sort of readership by playing off any inherent difference in opinion we might have. I suspect Ryan and I will be dealing with film, music and comic books primarily; I don’t dedicate blocs of my spare time toward non-fiction like I used to, so Ryan will probably take up the bulk of any existing book commentary. We’ll see how this plays out in the coming months.

This blog opportunity also doubles as an outlet to get my writing out to more people. Until I see exactly what this new revamp of Last.FM spells for the future of journal connectivity between users, spending on average 3-5 hours on an entry only to have 2 or 3 people read it just isn’t cutting it for me anymore. Plus, I’ve discovered that dedicating this space to free-associating with various other things knockin’ around in my head goes a long way with keeping my fluctuating interest in music invigorated – even if no one here is particularly interested in what I have to say about politics or the latest box-office powerhouses.

My roommates and I finally had the opportunity to catch a 7:00 PM showing of The Dark Knight last night, so I'll be posting my first official review on here posted in the next couple of hours or so.

Best of Both Worlds

It's more than just a landmark album by two of the world's foremost musicians, it's a pillar of sonic perfection that shows mankind what they should strive to be. So maybe that's a bit over the top, but it's a great catch phrase to yell out at parties and such and it works for what this blog is all about, writing reviews over the best, or worst if I feel something needs to be called out for sucking ass, that music and comics has to offer.

The idea here is going to be pretty simple, at least in my vision. I actually have no idea what Hanson is planning on putting together for his first post. The way I see it working is that I will be posting a goodly amount of comic reviews and a few music reviews and of course my hilarious observations about life will be thrown in there from time to time as well. Hanson will most likely be posting mostly music reviews using words that he learned from "Word a Day" emails, so bring a thesaurus. Of course I only make this unfair jab because I know my writing is going to be severally lacking in comparison for a while due to a lack of practice and my distaste for proofreading.

But that's enough musing for now. I'll get to my first review, which is completely biased, unfair, inaccurate and under researched.

Final Crisis #2:

Written by Grant Morrison
Art by J.G. Jones
Spoiled by A bunch of hack writers that DC apparently has no control over

This issue is definitely better the more I read it, I figured that might happen since it is Morrison and I really have to let a lot of his ideas rattle around in my head before I am able pull them all together and enjoy them. I remember reading the Filth, an excellent maxi series by Morrison which I might write more about later on, and having to force myself to take it slow so I could really enjoy the twists as they came about.

Final Crisis will probably be the best major event that DC has had in awhile, but honestly, that is not saying much. The last one I really enjoyed was Identity Crisis and that was because it was a great story driven by well established characters that Brad Meltzer did a great job of making you empathize with. Every major event since then has been a cluster fuck filled with more double spreads of D list characters locked in a pointless battle then actual good storytelling. That's more of less why I'm constantly amazed by Dan Didio terrible decision making ability. Here is a company that is continuing to lose major market share to Marvel and has some of the most iconic and well established characters in comics and yet DC ends up bringing in more and more throw away characters to fill in the stories instead of focusing on the heroes that fans buy the books to read about. I do admit that there is a certain amount of joy to be had in learning about where all these random characters came from, but at a certain point I don't give a shit and just want to see Batman batarang somebody in their fucking head.

Final Crisis is finally starting to address some of these concerns by bringing in characters that a lot of readers may not be too familiar with but still having a healthy amount of the story focused on the heavy hitters. My major concern with this issue is the reappearance of Barry though. I'm not sure if this was Morrison's decision or not, as I haven't had the chance to read the 1,001 interviews he has done about Final Crisis, but I would be inclined to say it wasn't. He is almost mocking the state of superhero deaths by throwing in the "Hope for a resurrection" line that Superman uses at the funeral of the Martian Manhunter. I just don't see how bringing Barry back is relevant anymore. Close followers of DC comics would probably be able to list the myriad of ways that Wally and Barry are completely different characters, but the average person who picks up a comic won't care because they wear the same costume and can both run really fast.

So that's a lot of words to finally get to the actual issue, which is actually quite good. If you have the patience to put together the puzzle that is going on here, the payoff is pretty sweet. I don't know if I will care enough to read any of the other mini series, but I'll keep my eye out for this one for the time being.