The Urban Pantheist

I feel like I must have. One of my favorite blog subjects seems to be "movies that everyone likes except me." I have attempted to watch Blade Runner at least 3 maybe 4 times. I finally succeeded last night, only falling asleep in the last 8 minutes, in which (like so much of the movie), nothing happens. I watched the "Final Cut" version that director Ridley Scott endorses and over which had complete artistic control. Apparently the early DVD transfer was muddy--a serious problem in a movie that is rainy and dark for 2 solid hours--and this was fixed, and the sound was restored as well.

I get the artistic importance of this movie. I get that it was also a technical achievement. In fact, without the painfully dated Vangelis soundtrack it is amazingly ahead of its time. The art movie pacing is a serious problem; I'm surprised as many sci-fi fans worship this movie as they do. I realize that in previous attempts to watch it I had a really hard time figuring out which details were important and which were things that the camera just lingered on for no detectable reason. By now I know the backbone of the story, last night I didn't have to expend as much energy sifting plot points from atmosphere.

My current fear is that the fellow who is choosing the next zookeeper movie night is going to pick Blade Runner. He is on record as declaring it his favorite film, but is he the kind of person who will drag a whole room full of people through the soup of 2019 Los Angeles for two hours? We shall see. And I should talk: I made the same group of people watch my favorite movie, Repo Man.

I waited a while for some reason, but I recently bought the new Jonathan Coulton album. I've been listening to it almost constantly the past few days, and I just love the beautiful melodies, and I like the production values from They Might be Giants' John Flansburgh. What this album doesn't have is any explicit mention of mad scientists, or monsters, or songs sung by planets or sea creatures or odes to mathematicians. A distinct lack of geekiness.

It used to be that to explain who JoCo was, you'd play "The Future Soon," or "Skullcrusher Mountain." This new album--really his FIRST album--is much like any collection of soft rock / singer songwriter type music. Granted, there are two songs from the point of view of a murderous Artificial Intelligence, but those are previously released end themes from video games. But the title track "Artificial Heart," is much more ambiguous. The artificial heart is symbolic of detached emotion--it's not a real artificial heart. Other songs are more opaque*--in the exquisite "Today With Your Wife," is he singing to his lover's ex, his widowed sister's husband, or just a man who is emotionally absent from his family? All you know is "you should have been there."

Another songwriter wouldn't demand such scrutiny, but Coulton's earlier output was almost completely a collection of songs that told funny and/or sad stories. Even when the song didn't take place on an asteroid prison mine, it took place somewhere. His best song (in my humble opinion), "Shop Vac," takes place in the most mundane place on earth, but you know exactly where it is and who lives there. I think this is a positive development, but it is a confusing one.

It's positive because it allows him to move past being a novelty act (which I have nothing against, you should know) and show off his amazing sense of melody. I've been playing and replaying the song "Nemeses," a hopeful love song to a potential enemy, just to hear the first six notes. On this song and two others, Coulton steps back and lets other people take the lead vocal. "Nemeses" is sung by John Roderick, of a band called The Long Winters; I had not heard of the band before but I have since listened to a few more of their tracks. Roderick, I have to say, is a better singer than Coulton, but they sing together beautifully.

I suspect that Artificial Heart has already created a contingent of "I liked his old stuff better" JoCo fans.

I am sure others have written better developed, more lucid reviews of this album and what it means, but I had to get this out. Maybe I'll look around and see what others have to say.





*Exceptions to the claim that the songs on this album are opaque include "Good Morning Tucson," about a local TV anchor--like a Weird Al song without enough jokes, and "Je Suis Rick Springfield," a song entirely in French from the point of view of a guy at a bar trying to pick up girls claiming that he's Rick Springfield, and "The Stache," a respectful number about ironic hipster facial hair.

Hey! It's another fairly big budget sci-fi movie that I didn't really care for! I must be some kind of curmudgeon, I tell ya. This time it's the 2007 space disaster movie Sunshine, starring ugly heartthrob Cillian Murphy, Michelle Yeoh, and a bunch of other doomed bastards. It looked pretty cool, but I was tired of the crew's bickering by the 20 minute mark, and it doesn't stop until there's nothing but corpses to bicker with. I can't explain why Alien (which also featured a crew full of people who hated each other dying horribly one by one) was better, but it was. Maybe it was the top-quality acting and directing, not present in Sunshine.

But other people probably love the movie, its blandly hopeless tone, its hilarious spacesuits, and Murphy's wide wet eyes. To them I say, sorry. It sucked.

Read a longer and slightly less mean and funny version of this review (and understand why I asked you to post a picture of a tardigrade) at Blood Blade and Thruster!

I'm trying to submit a review to Netflix, and it keeps giving me an error message: This review contains one or more words that is larger than 25 characters. All words in a review must be smaller than 25 characters. Please change any words that exceed this length.

Am I missing something here? Here's my review:
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