Results Are IN! (Kinda) And Yet More Random Stuff.

Alright, even though there's like less than 24 hours left to go in the poll, considering the fact that the Mega Movie Review is leading the pack and no one has bothered to vote in the last couple days, I'm just gonna say that Mega Movie Review is the winner.  It'll be interesting to see how it turns out as I'm going to be doing this kinda like an experiment, seeing if this sort of format would work well with future reviews.  It might take a little while to do as I have to get reacquainted with the movie (of which I'm keeping a surprise), get screen caps (and possibly .gifs) and hopefully make it funny and enjoyable (and spend more time trying to get things into parentheses) so I have to have it done within a week (PARENTHESES!  DO IT!).  Thanks for voting!

Apparently I wasn't quite done with my movie watching as I totally forgot a few burnt DVDs that one of my friends lent me.  First of which being RocknRolla, directed by Guy Ritchie who I've wanted to see return to form after the dreaded "Madonna Years".  But while the movie was solid, it was a bit too close of a return to form as RocknRolla is basically Snatch.  Same intersecting storylines having to do with gangs of thugs and underworld dealings, same camera gimmicks, same morally ambiguous characters.  That's not to say it's a bad movie but if I wanted to see Snatch again, I'd go watch Snatch.  I was pretty impressed with Ludacris' role as a music producer, mostly since he acted like a normal person and not like a rapper.  And the "RocknRolla" in question, the drug-addicted rock star son of a crime boss, was pretty cool but not quite as cool as Brad Pitt in Snatch, which I'm sure you could draw plenty of parallels to.  After that, there was Defiance, starring Daniel Craig and Liev Schriber in a true story as Jewish brothers who foster Jewish refugees in a forest camp during WWII.  I'll be honest, I still haven't finished the movie as I watched it before bed last night and the 2:15 runtime would've had me staying up late.  But what I did see I liked very much.  Normally I'm not much of the war movie type but the performances carried Defiance.  Plus, there's plenty of "Nat-zee killin'" just in case you didn't get enough from Inglourious Basterds.  Also my friend lent me Slumdog Millionaire but I probably won't watch it, just because I'm not really interested in it.  People tell me it's good and I'm sure it is but it's just one of those movies that I won't lose sleep over if I never see it.

In other movie news, I got the Netflix disc for the Wii in the mail today.  My roommates were gracious enough to request a disc and let me use their Netflix account.  I tried it out a bit and the first thing that caught my eye was that the streaming selection was kinda lacking in my opinion.  Sure, there's quite a bit there but not really a lot that I want to see, mostly stuff that I wouldn't mind seeing.  I'm wondering if there's some differences in selection between the Wii, 360 and PS3 as I've noticed the 360's selection being far wider.  Of course, I'm sure there will be more added to the Wii as time moves on, considering the service just went live a few weeks back.  So to test it out, I first queued up Akira Kurosawa's Sanjuro.  But the picture was a bit choppy, not so much due to a faulty connection but that it very well may have been filmed that way.  Even so, I got a bit paranoid and considering I still haven't seen Yojimbo, I decided to use something else as my first test subject and brought up the Korea episode of Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations.  It was an episode I've seen before but they only had one season up and I had already seen most of that season's episodes anyway.  I really wish they had the Japan episode from an earlier season but oh well.  Anyway, despite that the Wii is nowhere near HD (even though technically Netflix doesn't stream in HD on the other consoles anyway) and that I'm also using the standard A/V cables as opposed to the Component cables, the video quality is still rather good.  Of course, I do most of my DVD watching via my PS2 and its S-Video cable so anything at this point is a step up.  But to anyone who's on the fence about streaming Netflix via the Wii, I recommend it.  Just don't expect a ton of variety right out of the gate.

In music news, I got my copy of Bleeding Through's new album yesterday, a full day before release.  Because I'm awesome?  Nah, I just pre-ordered through MerchNow  I've done this a few times but this has actually been the first time that MerchNow has come through, though usually it's due to the fault of the mailman.  I did it for Mindless Self Indulgence's "If" album because it came with a limited-edition shirt but I ended up getting it a few days after release, plus the shirt kinda sucked.  Then I did it for It Dies Today's "Lividity" album because it came with a bonus DVD but apparently their record label didn't send them the pre-order copies and I didn't get it until a couple weeks after release, which sucked because that album was pushed back enough as it is.  But with this CD, I got a sweet t-shirt and a poster (which got crinkled due to my mailman being a dumbass and cramming the package in my tiny mailbox) for $18.  I also got a DVD but I'll get to that later.  As for Bleeding Through's new self-titled album, I've only listened to it about twice now but I like it.  It's definitely heavier than previous albums though I said that about their last album too, so it's a natural progression.  The band is on their third guitarist in as many albums (Dave Nassie from No Use For A Name) and the overall sound is definitely more thrash oriented because of it.  Also, the keyboards are growing even more haunting, to the point that the first couple of songs would fit on a Dimmu Borgir album if it weren't for the vocals and the hardcore breakdowns.  Overall, it's solid but I think I'm going to have to give it a few more listens to let it grow on me.  It's very straight-forward and brutal but doesn't quite have the catchiness of stuff from "This Is Love, This Is Murderous" and "The Truth".

As for the additional DVD in my order, it was Horse The Band's "We Flooded It And There's Yogurt Everywhere: 48 Hours In The Ukraine", just a mere fraction of their experiences during their 2008 Earth Tour.  Basically, the story is that Horse The Band decided that their record company was a bunch of assholes for not letting them tour where they wanted to (and where fans requested them to come play) so they booked their own tour in the most random places they could think of, ending up visiting 45 countries in 90 days.  Of course, their record label dropped them because they wouldn't be able to make money from it, but neither would the band and they didn't care, they just wanted to play for their fans.  Despite being a full-length DVD, it actually acts as a trailer for their new Earth Tour DVD set, which is a whopping 6 discs that comes in a 100-page hardcover picture book that spans across the entire tour.  If I had about $80+ to blow (plus a little extra scratch as a donation), I would totally get this.  For more information about the band and the tour itself, visit www.horsethebandearthtour.com.  Anyway, the DVD is pretty sweet, especially when you compare it to the likes of Dir en grey.  Despite being another one of my favorite bands, they basically released a slapped-together half-assed tour DVD and then said "Hey, we're releasing a 3-disc set for like $150!" where as Horse The Band slapped together a whole-assed DVD about two shows and said "We'll do double the discs for half that!"  Of course, Dir en grey are Japanese and you have to factor in import costs and such but still.  Anyway, 48 Hours In The Ukraine goes like this: To make it to their Ukraine show, the band drives through the most backwoods of roads and almost passes through a totalitarian state that isn't even shown on any maps.  Unfortunately, the band is a few hours late and the show is postponed to the next day.  After the show, the singer (who looks like someone's dad) and the keyboardist (who looks like Napoleon Dynamite) get super drunk and shenanigans involving yogurt, male nudity, electric fans and bathroom raves abound.  The next day, they headline a "goregrind" festival along with bands with names like "Painful Defloration" and their set ends up being like 3 hours due to every technical hangup known to man.  It's actually pretty funny to see them get to the point of not-giving-a-fuck and just ranting and raving on stage.  And that's about it.  But it's still pretty great to see a band willing to go to such lengths to visit their fans and play their music, even if it means getting dropped by their label, running up massive credit card debt and possibly getting detained in a military prison.

Anyway, after Bleeding Through's new album, it didn't look like there would be much more in the musical pipeline that would be interesting.  But it looks like an album from the band Ov Hell came out today as well.  Apparently, Shagrath from Dimmu Borgir and King ov Hell from Gorgoroth (who have split up into separate camps due to breaking up and band name issues and etc.) decided to team up and make an album.  It sounds basically like the guy from Dimmu Borgir singing for Gorgoroth...and it's freaking glorious!  Not only that, but they snagged a few guys from one of my other favorite black metal bands, 1349, to fill out the rest of the group.  I know there's a lot of intermingling within the black metal scene but, to me at least, this is pretty much the closest thing there is to a "black metal supergroup".  If I have any spare cash and if anyone around me is carrying it, I might have to pick it up.  Also, 1349 themselves are also releasing a new album on April 27, but I still have yet to pick up their last album.  But beyond that, there's not really a lot left catching my eye. 

Ok, before I go off rattling off more about bands you don't care about, let me end with this.  A few days ago, I finished reading Less Than Zero and though it finally picked up at the end, I was Less Than Impressed (see what I did there?).  The last fifth of the book goes like this: Clay, the lead character, goes to a party with friends where they watch a snuff film.  Then he finds his friend/drug dealer Julian, who owes him money, and finds out that he's been working as a male prostitute for other men.  Then he finds out that his other friends have kidnapped, drugged up and raped a 12 year old.  Then, before he heads back to school, he tells his girlfriend (who he's treated like crap through the entire book) that he never really loved her.  And that's the end.  Yeah, that's a lot of stuff to go through all at once but the lead-up to it was uneventful.  I'm not saying that all of this should've happened right away or taken the entirety of the story but really, give us something interesting throughout.  Even though Clay doesn't take part in these events, showing that he's not completely reprehensible, he doesn't really do anything to stop them either.  And it's not like he has an epiphany where he realizes that he should clean up, take school seriously and make something of himself.  He's just like "Well, L.A. kinda sucks" and that's it.  But that's not what I wanted to finish this up with.  I wanted to leave you with the longest run-on sentence I've ever seen.  Here we go, verbatim, Clay's account of him reconciling with and making love to his girlfriend Blair:

"And at Kim's party that night, while everyone plays Quarters and gets drunk, Blair and I sit on a couch in the living room and listen to an old XTC album and Blair tells me that maybe we should go out to the guest house and we get up and leave the living room and walk by the lighted pool and once inside the guest house we kiss roughly and I've never wanted her more and she grabs my back and pushes me against her so hard that I lose my balance and we both fall, slowly, to our knees and her hands push up beneath my shirt and I can feel her hand, smooth and cool on my chest and I kiss, lick, her neck and then her hair, which smells like jasmine, and I rub against her and we push each other's jeans down and touch each other and I rub my hand through her underwear and when I enter her too quickly, she breathes in sharply and I try to be very still."

Yup.  One sentence.  Who the hell writes like that?  Who the hell talks like that?  Who the hell thinks like that?  And most of all, who the hell fucks like that?