Oh Journal...

Saturday, August 22, 2009

Top 20 Songs of the Millenium...

Inspired by Pitchfork... maybe.

Obviously a work in progress...

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Oh Best of the Decade Project...

Another retarded list thing. This time I'm keeping a list of what I consider the best films of the decade and I will seperate them by categories: definitely, probably, and maybe. Definitely means that they would definitely end up on my "official" best of the 2000's list, while probably is less likely, and maybe is even more less likely. Here we gooooooooo.

Definitely
I Don't Want to Sleep Alone(dir. Tsai Ming-liang)
Mulholland Drive(dir. David Lynch)
Reprise(dir. Joachim Trier)

Probably
Don't Touch the Axe(dir. Jacques Rivette)
Fay Grim(dir. Hal Hartley)
Femme Fatale(dir. Brian De Palma)
Marie Antoinette(dir. Sofia Coppola)
Miami Vice(dir. Michael Mann)
Minority Report(dir. Steven Spielberg)
The New World(dir. Terrence Malick)
Pistol Opera(dir. Seijun Suzuki)
Punch-Drunk Love(dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)
Platform(dir. Jia Zhangke)
Rachel Getting Married(dir. Jonathan Demme)
The Royal Tenenbaums(dir. Wes Anderson)
Talk to Her(dir. Pedro Almodovar)
The Virgin Suicides(dir. Sofia Coppola)
The Wayward Cloud(dir. Tsai Ming-liang)

Maybe
2046(dir. Wong Kar-Wai)
The Black Dahlia(dir. Brian De Palma)
Donnie Darko(dir. Richard Kelly)
Flight of the Red Balloon(dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien)
Friday Night(dir. Claire Denis)
George Washington(dir. David Gordon Green)
The Girl From Monday(dir. Hal Hartley)
Golden Door(dir. IDK)
Goodbye, Dragon Inn(dir. Tsai Ming-liang)
INLAND EMPIRE(dir. David Lynch)
The Intruder(dir. Claire Denis)
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou(dir. Wes Anderson)
Little Children(dir. Todd Field)
Offside(dir. Jafar Panahi)
Public Enemies(dir. Michael Mann)
Speed Racer(dir. Wachowski Brothers)
Synecdoche, New York(dir. Charlie Kaufman)
Tropical Malady(dir. Apicha...)
Twentynine Palms(dir. Bruno Dumont)
War of the Worlds(dir. Steven Spielberg)
What Time Is It There?(dir. Tsai Ming-liang)
You Don't Mess with the Zohan(dir. IDK)

Need to watch/rewatch:
Bad Education
The Beat That My Heart Skipped
Birth
Cache
Che
A Christmas Tale
Collateral
The Company
The Death of Mr. Lazarescu
Esther Kahn
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Far From Heaven
Gommorah
In the Bedroom
In the Mood for Love
In Praise of Love
Kill Bill Vol. 1 and 2
Lord of the Rings Trilogy
Manchurian Candidate
Ocean's Eleven
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End
Pride and Prejudice
Requiem for a Dream
The Science of Sleep
Sparrow
Syndromes and a Century
Trouble Every Day
The Truth About Charlie
Volver
Zodiac
and more...

Saturday, January 24, 2009

Oh Speed Racer: The Missing Link?

Friday, January 23, 2009

Oh Music: The Masterpieces...

Blue Lines by Massive Attack

Doolittle by The Pixies

In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel

The Magic Position by Patrick Wolf

Richard D. James Album by Aphex Twin

And the beat goes on...

Thursday, January 01, 2009

Oh The Wrestler...

The Wrestler(dir. Darren Aronofsky)
Maybe I spoke too soon when I declared this would probably be my favorite film of the year and if I learned anything from last year(and this year as well) is that you can't judge a film by its trailer. So when this movie turned out to be a disappointment, it was perhaps unsurprising. The film's major problem outside of Aronofsky's intentional downsizing his role, at least visibly, is the script. The characters outside of Randy are pretty much cardboard cutouts including his moody and bitchy estranged daughter played by Evan Rachel Wood almost too well and Marisa Tomei's stripper with a heart of gold. Even Randy is something of a joke with the script constantly positing him as something of a saint that wears spandex with young children and essentially everybody involved in the wrestling district being enraptured with him along with his disinterest in T&A during his repeated strip bar visits(he's just there to drinkkk man). Since he's such a great guy, we're supposed to feel really bad when he has to work behind a deli counter instead of being involved in wrestling events where he gets stapled and torn the hell up by barbed wire. Also, all the drama that is generated within the film comes across as a screenwriter's hollow attempts at drama as we're treated to a predetermined fucked subplot with his estranged daughter that I'd immediately write off if it didn't contain one of the best moments of the film and some relationship drama due to Marisa Tomei's character's policy of not dating customers. The crucial heart attack itself is also something of a plot contrivance. Mickey Rourke can be disarmingly sweet throughout the film and I'd understand the praise he's been receiving if he was given some better material.
** out of ****

Sunday, November 23, 2008

Oh Prediction...

I'm calling it. This will probably be my favorite film of the year.

Monday, October 13, 2008

Oh Games: 360!

Now that we got Macho Man Randy Savage doing a 720 instead of a 360 out of the way, let's talk about 360 gamezzzzz.

IGN recently wrote a top 25 games for Xbox 360 and in usual IGN fashion, it completely baffled me. Maybe because I usually don't understand why most game sites go hog wild for certain games like for instance:
Halo 3
I know that this had to have some place on the list since Halo is pretty much thee Xbox exclusive, but over Grand Theft Auto 4? As I've been told, Halo 3 is pretty much Halo 2.5(never did play Halo 2), which I'm sure a lot of people are completely happy with, but I find it particularly odd that a game that legitmized the idea of storytelling in video games to me would be placed below this. I've never played through a Halo campaign so maybe I'm just ignorant of the fact that the Halo games have a totally awesome stories(I highly doubt it), but it's multiplayer is some of the most lifeless sci-fi shooting nonsense I've ever had the opportunity to play. That's not to say that the game doesn't have good production values because it does, but that's all there really is to praise with the game. Getting a multiplayer game is also a borderline braindead process since the developers decided to make it completely random, meaning that you'll have to play on a lot of maps that aren't particularly good. There is a veto feature that randomly gives you another map instead so there's always that possibility that you'll veto a certain map that you're not particularly fond of and end up with an even worse one. Oh joy!

Call of Duty 4
Yes, this is one of those popular multiplayer shooting games and I'll be the first to say that it's leaps and bounds better than Halo 3, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have the generic feeling that every other modern war game on the market does. To describe the multiplayer experience in a cute way, it's basically Battlefield 2 minus vehicles and with better gunplay. The gunplay is fast and furious at first and then eventually it becomes numbing. Even if you're kicking ass, it's not particularly rewarding probably due to the fact that most of it has to do with being lucky. A lot of the times when you kill someone, it's because the other person doesn't know where you're at, meaning that there's usually never a 1-on-1 firefight that lasts long. People are disposed of so quickly that it's kind of hard to cherish any of it. Picture trying to cherish the images in a film with rapid cutting the whole time and you get the picture. The campaign isn't anything to write home about, either. I find it progressively hard to play videogames that have a jingoistic atmosphere about them. I know this game attempts to make the morality murky, but I don't really buy it. You never really learn why the enemies are doing what they're doing so it's kind of hard to really give a shit about what you're doing. Of course, I wouldn't be complaining about things like this if the gameplay was fun, but it's not really. It might because the whole theme of modern warfare to me isn't a very interesting one, especially in regards to first-person shooters. I played enough Counter-Strike and Battlefield 2 already. I want something new.

Bioshock
Spoilers coming up!
Bioshock placed behind Grand Theft Auto 4 and thank goodness for that. Bioshock was a game I loved when I started, but as it went on, I become increasingly underwhelmed. It's probably because the facade of the whole enterprise kept getting peeled away as it along. I started to realize more and more that this was not a particularly inventive game that has some incredible audio and visuals. There's the whole moral quandary nonsense with the little sisters that everybody loves to praise, but it's not much of a quandary since it's so black and white. The story is not anything to write home about either since it basically boils down to The Usual Suspects under the sea. The game, at first, is spooky and then you realize that all these splicers that are supposedly scary are easy as hell to kill. I spent most of my time in the game just using the shock plasmid and the wrench. The only time the game really got challenging was when you fought Big Daddies, which were pains in the ass, and portions near the end, but the game's respawn system makes the game as forgiving as humanly possible. That's not to say that the game would have been better if it didn't have that respawn system since it would have been probably frustrating as hell at given points like fighting Big Daddies. The game's pretty much the poster child for all this "games are art" madness, but I don't know if it's particularly a good one to latch onto. There's nothing really extraordinary about it other than the world it creates, but even that becomes kind of flat when you realize how linear the game is and how limited the scope of the art style really is. Some of the audio logs are actually intriguing and if only you got to see the events described play out instead of having to trek through this "nightmarish" and "wondrous" environment in such a repetitive fashion, it could have amounted to much more.

I'll probably add games that I really enjoy on the 360 later...

Monday, September 08, 2008

Oh Modern American Cinema...

Being a cinephile, specifically an American one, makes me naturally interested in my country's modern cinematic output. Even if my interest lies in other countries' films, I'll always have a place in my heart for my homeland's because I'm proud to be an American....
...Here is a list of films that were released in 2000 or later that I think are some fine pieces of work from the motherland.
Death Proof