I’ve mentioned a few times here how much I love live music, and how to escape paying the music company cartels I stopped buying cd’s years ago but kept grabbing live music whenever I could find legally available options, from places like archive.org for example. I recently found the Ultimate Bootleg Experience and it’s become one of my favorite feeds – just in the past couple of days I’ve grabbed a cool Stones show from ’72 with amazing audio quality, and a decent radiohead show from 2003, and over the past several weeks I’ve found all kinds of great stuff on the site. They consistently link to excellent concerts in a variety of genres. Add some variety to your daily listening by checking out the site or adding it to your RSS feeds.

So I got a Netflix account. It’s great, as anyone who has one already knows. I added a little widget to my site down on the right, to show what movies I have or most recently had out of Netflix so you can see what I’ve been watching. If you already have a Netflix account, you can add me as a friend using one of my spam email addresses – ask me for the details so I don’t have to post them here for the spam harvesters to grab.

Hard Knocks, the HBO series that follows an NFL team’s training camp, is back after a several year hiatus. This season they’re following the Kansas City Chiefs around. It’s a really great series if you’re an NFL fan or curious about the inner workings of professional sports. They covered the Cowboys and Ravens in previous seasons. I’m not sure why they dropped it for several years but I’m glad it’s back. Check it out, 10pm wednesdays starting the 8th of August.

Wow, what great fun this movie is. Paul Verhoeven’s Zwartboek (Black Book) is a great little spy thriller of a type you so rarely see these days. The plot follows the mostly unfortunate but always thrilling escapades of a young jewish singer in the Netherlands during the latter days of WWII. The pacing is fantastic, the plot has enough twists and turns to keep you guessing right up to the end, the heroine is beautiful, knows it, and shows it, and the acting and directing are both above average. Definitely check this out if you like spy thrillers. It’s subtitled though there is occasional english dialog, but look past that because if you don’t you’re missing out on a real treat.

…great. Don’t read any further if you haven’t seen it and don’t want to spoil it for yourself.

There’s lots of sturm and drang and angry fans bitching on the net about how unhappy they are with the ending. I thought it was great – it left things open to the viewer’s interpretation, with lots of possibilities to consider, and it fit perfectly with the ambiguity that was a central theme of the show over the years. Honestly, what did people want, that Tony should get whacked and be done with it? We’ve seen that ending in any number of mafia movies and personally I would have been a lot less satisfied with that ending, whereas what we have instead is an ending that lets you imagine Tony being whacked as one possibility amongst many. I can’t imagine a better ending, and it’s left everyone talking about it. What more could you ask for?

Neil Gaiman, who produced perhaps the best comic book series ever, The Sandman, and by far my favorite fantasist, has managed to get one of his novellas turned into a feature film with some major stars attached (De Niro, Claire Danes, Ricky Gervais, Peter O’Toole, Michelle Pfeiffer, and others). It’s coming out this summer, and is based on his novella ‘Stardust’ which I read and enjoyed. Here’s the Stardust entry on IMDB – this is definitely worth watching for when it gets to theaters later this summer.

Also as an aside, if you enjoy fantasy you owe it to yourself to check out The Sandman series Neil wrote. This is not men in tights comic books, this is fantasy on a grand scale with superb storytelling and great art. If you have a conception of comics as something kids read, this is the series that can change your mind. The first book is a bit uneven but 2-9 are just completely awesome. Check em out!

Fancy a tale of terror delivered to your podcast client every so often? Check out Pseudopod, a horror themed short fiction podcast. It’s very similar to Escape Pod, which I mentioned a while ago (I think they’re affiliated somehow) but focusing on a different genre.

Check out couchville, a new tv listings site that distinguishes itself with a novel click and drag interface for listings. I’ve been using titantv ever since yahoo’s tv listings ‘upgraded’ themselves and have been very happy with them, and really titantv has a number of features over couchville that will keep it as my primary tool for listings, but couchville is still in development and shows promise, and it’s worth checking out for the interface alone. It’s also worth noting that it’s produced by the BeyondTV folks, who are the developers of the BeyondTV PVR software I’ve been using for the last 3 or 4 years. The site incorporates statistics from the users of the software, which is either a plus or a minus depending on your take on the wisdom of crowds

Wow. Couldn’t be more please or surprised. HBO has picked up the rights to George RR Martin’s Fire and Ice series of novels and is going to produce at least one tv series out of it. HBO has been producing excellent episodic television for over 10 years now, generally much better stuff than the broadcast networks, and the Fire and Ice series’ gritty, hard core take on an authurian-themed medieval kingdom is perfect for HBO. I’m really looking forward to this.

The details can be found in this Variety piece.

Goodfellas, Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Casino, Raging Bull…Martin Scorsese has produced some of the greatest films of my lifetime, and even his ‘failures’ are worth watching. He has a new movie out, The Departed, that’s getting almost universal praise (an almost unprecedented 95% score on rottentomatoes.com, for example). The dilemma is this – the film is an english language remake of a widely praised hong kong movie, Infernal Affairs, which I happen to have sitting in my DVR. Were you me, would you watch the original or the remake first? Were it anyone but Scorsese, I’d watch the original first but in this case I’m torn.

All The Trees Of The Fields Will Clap Their Hands and The Transfiguration are currently getting constant play by me. Here’s a link to the amazon.com page for the album those tunes are on in case the direct links to the songs don’t work. One of the reviewers on the amazon site summed up my feelings for his album perfectly, which I’ll paraphrase – ‘a perfect blend of melody and haunting, sad optimism.’ I mentioned earlier how an old flame found me through this site (the good sarah, for those of you who remember her) and she and I have been trading emails, kind of working our way through old baggage. It’s been simultaneously fun and depressing, with just enough, oh, soul cleansing I guess, to make the depressing bits worth slogging through. Meanwhile I got surprised with a major life changing dilemma that I had basically known was coming, but it was one of those cases of pretending the future wasn’t looming. I’ll talk about what I can of that over the next few days, but anyway the upshot of all this is I’m in one of my rare melancholic fugues and I happened across Sufjan’s music at just about the perfect time.

So I happened across an absolutely perfect sci fi movie about a month ago that I keep forgetting to blog. I’ve finally remembered. This is sci fi in the sense of ‘speculative fiction that makes you think’ and not in the sense of ‘light labers and exploding wookies and spectacle, grand spectacle, oh my.’ I’m a big fan of the former. The latter I can still enjoy but it doesn’t really do it for me the way it did in, say, my 20′s. Anyway the movie in question is a New Zealand movie from 1985 called ‘The Quiet Earth’. Normally I’d link over to the IMDB entry for the film but this is a movie that challenges you to think about what’s happening and the comments there or anywhere else will spoil it for you. I’d strongly encourage you to NOT look into the film – just add it to your netflicks list and watch it when it shows up.

That being said, I’ll observe that while the movie has a decent imdb rating (7.0 at present), it’s not for everyone. It has the laconic pacing of a movie out of the 70′s, and the story, which involves the experiences of a scientist who wakes up one morning to discover he’s the last living thing on earth, develops slowly. Still if you’re a fan of sci fi, you simply have to check this out, I’d give it 9 out of 10. I’ll also offer this up in lieu of the comments on IMDB – after you’ve watched it, ask yourself this question: was this a sci fi film, or a film about one man’s religious experiences?

If you haven’t seen it before, give The Shield a try tonight at 10pm on the FX network. I had no idea how great this show is until I caught a reference to it one night (on the screensavers of all places), which led me to the reviewer’s weblog. Long and short of it is that it’s a great show – if you enjoy the Sopranos or The Wire on HBO there’s more than excellent chance you’ll enjoy The Shield.

..with a whimper. I was one of the few folks I know who enjoyed the second one – ultimately pretentious but still interesting and visually compelling. I went to see the finale to the trilogy this weekend and left….underwhelmed. It didn’t out and out suck, the effects are still fun to watch on the big screen and the movie has the best punch in the history of cinema (I laughed out loud when I saw it), but the plot is basically a big let down and the dramatic, supposedly poignant scene near the end was dreadful. The secondary characters can’t act and the centerpiece of the film, the huge defensive battle at the heart of zion, took too long to get to. If you dig the effects and can stand bad acting and a poor resolution to the central story, it’s worth seeing on the big screen, but if the second one pissed you off the third one’s likely to do you even worse.

I finished watching this last night while exercising. I give it three stars. It’s a well acted, well directed and reasonably entertaining film that’s based on a true story about a teenager who runs away from home when his parents split up in the early 1960′s. He becomes the most notorious check kiter in the history of the country, racking up something north of $4 million in bad checks. Leonardo Dicaprio plays the kid and Tom Hanks plays the good hearted but bumbling FBI agent trying to catch him. The movie is a little on the dry side and I thought they pushed the ‘it’s all because of the tragedy of his parents splitting up’ angle a little too hard, but all in all I enjoyed it.

I find it interesting that Hanks chose to play the role of the FBI agent in this movie. He plays it very low key and there’s not much for him to work with. Because of this I would have expected a less prestigious actor in the role. He does a credible job, it’s just like…his talents are wasted here.

Narc is the best movie I’ve seen in at least a year. Compelling, gritty, complex, thought provoking…it’s almost perfect. This is not a movie for the faint of heart though, and it’s not a casual experience – you need to pay close attention and you should prepare yourself for violence in its worst forms and an absolutely devestating ending . It’s so damned rare for hollywood to put out a movie like this – it’s a throwback to the 70′s, a movie the challenges you to think about what you’re watching instead of just overwhelming you with visual effects.

The plot follows a detective who has lost his place on the force due to a bust gone bad who is coaxed back into work to help solve a cop killing. Things turn out to be more complex then they seem and clues to the case end up involving his partner on the case, played by Ray Liotta who does an awesome job.

Don’t miss this movie, it’s that good. But don’t watch it with your girlfriend either

Brief and to the point on this one – it pretty much sucked. Check out reviews on the IMDB site, but take it from me, aside from excessive gore (assuming thats even your thing, it’s not mine) and a scantily clad Milla Jovovich, this movie has nothing going for it. The plot follows the adventures of a team of commandos sent in to investigate what went wrong at the top secret research labs of a mega-corporation. Turns out evil brain sucking zombies is what’s gone wrong, along with a possibly evil supercomputer and genetically mutated killer zombie bunnies (I kid you not). Actually now the movie sounds like more fun than it is. I guess it would be ok for a ‘oh look what’s on HBO tonight’ kinda thing, but I wouldn’t waste time renting it.