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Bitchin Bajas "Bitchitronics" Is a Mesmerizing Head Trip

Jon Young — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 10:20:30 +0000

Track 4: "Turiya"
From Bitchin Bajas' Bitchitronics
Drag City

Liner notes: Looking for a safe, legal head trip? Take a journey through the canyons of your mind on this mesmerizing 16-minute epic, which finds surprising variety in oozing synthesizer sounds.

Behind the music: Originally a solo side venture of Cooper Crain from the rowdier Chicago band Cave, Bitchin Bajas became a duo with the addition of Mahjongg's Dan Quinlivan. With four tracks spanning 44 minutes, Bitchitronics was recorded primarily in a house in Fennville, Michigan.

Check it out if you like: Brain-melting electronic pioneers such as Brian Eno, Tangerine Dream, and Can.

"Veep" Creator Armando Iannucci on Why He'd Never, Ever Allow Joe Biden on the Show

Asawin Suebsaeng — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 10:25:04 +0000

Armando Iannucci, the acclaimed satirist and creator of the HBO comedy Veep, is a self-described longtime politics geek. When he was growing up in a Scottish-Italian household in Glasgow, he stayed up late to watch American election results—the first US presidential election he watched with a budding fascination was in 1976, when Carter trumped Ford. His childhood attraction to observing UK and US politics evidently carried over into adulthood. The 49-year-old writer/director has a number of well-regarded political satires under his belt, and he's influenced such comic darlings as Sacha Baron Cohen, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and Ricky Gervais.

Since the mid-1990s, Iannucci has been noted for a patented mold of rollicking commentary—a brand of comedy that takes mischievous deromanticization of political elites, and filters it through his rapid-fire sardonicism. (Prime examples are his work in British television including The Day Today and The Thick of It, and the latter's brilliant 2009 spin-off film In the Loop.) Many of his scripts are famous for their blitzes of carefully constructed, linguistically acrobatic profanity that's acidic enough to qualify as minor human rights abuses.

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How The National Guard Is Using "Man of Steel" To Recruit You

Asawin Suebsaeng — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 10:05:07 +0000

Man of Steel (Warner Bros., 143 minutes) is a commendable, if patently flawed, summer blockbuster. The highly anticipated Superman reboot, starring Henry Cavill and Amy Adams, merges the strengths and styles of its director Zack Snyder and its producer Christopher Nolan with mixed results. But the parts of the film that are exhilarating roundly compensate for the many parts of the film that are boring as all hell (dulled passion, bland dialogue, blander interactions).

Putting all that aside, one of the most fascinating things about this movie is how blatantly littered with product placement it is—roughly $160 million in product placement and promotions went into its makers' coffers. Man of Steel has over 100 global marketing partners, surpassing Universal's 2012 animated flick The Lorax, which reportedly had 70 partners. So if you have forgotten recently to eat at IHOP or shop at Sears, this film will remind you to do so in big letters.

But the film also doubles as advertisement for an employer arguably more noble than IHOP: The National Guard of the United States.

Here's behind-the-scenes footage released in May by the National Guard regarding their work with Snyder and Warner Bros.

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Why Is Gay Porn So Popular in Pakistan?

Alex Park — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 18:47:31 +0000

Earlier this month, the Pew Research Center published results of a public survey of gay tolerance in 39 countries worldwide. The numbers are fairly unsurprising: While a high proportion of respondents in Western Europe and North America answered "yes" to the question "Should society accept homosexuality?" few respondents in the Middle East and Africa agreed with them.

The Washington Post / Pew

Among the least tolerant nations surveyed was Pakistan, where only 2 percent of those surveyed said society should accept homosexuality. That statistic might be unsurprising, considering that gay sex is illegal under the Pakistani penal code. But what is surprising is how those views compare to Pakistani search traffic around gay-porn-related terms.

As of this writing, Pakistan is by volume the world leader for Google searches of the terms "shemale sex," "teen anal sex," and "man fucking man," according to Google Trends. Pakistan also ranks second in the world (after similarly gay-intolerant Kenya) for volume of searches for the search term "gay sex pics."

In its report, Pew noted that countries exhibiting the highest levels of gay tolerance are largely secular, whereas nations where religion is central to public life—such as Egypt, Nigeria, and Pakistan—tend to reject homosexuality. But in Pakistan, what's even more peculiar is that the highest number of hits for some of these terms, including "shemale sex," come not from Pakistan's cosmopolitan centers, but from Peshawar, a bastion of conservative Islam, lately known in the West as a counterterrorism frontline.

Farahnaz Ispahani, an expert in Pakistani minorities at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and a former member of Pakistan's parliament, says that homosexuality is a taboo subject throughout the country. In major cities such as Lahore and Karachi, gays can develop a network of allies outside their tribe or family, but in conservative Peshawar, gay identity is more complicated. Part of the popularity of gay porn could stem from the fact that even highly observant Muslim males often have physical relationships with men without considering themselves gay, she says.

"The real love they can have that most of us find with a partner, they find with men," Ispahani says. "They mostly see their wives as the mother of their children."

At the same time, she says, persecution of minorities, including gays, has reached an all-time high in Pakistan, and discussing homosexuality openly in public is virtually forbidden. "Religious extremism is at a height today," she says. "Hindus are being forced to convert, Christians are being burned alive—there's very little personal safety for those seen as 'the other.' So what do [gay Pakistanis] do? They turn to pornography because they can't live their lives openly."

Shereen El Feki, author of the recent book Sex and the Citadel: Intimate Life in a Changing Arab World, says the discrepancy between perceptions around homosexuality and its apparent reality in Pakistan is consistent with her own findings in the Middle East, where, in recent years, the dialogue around sexual identity has been co-opted by fundamentalist clerics.

"Islamic conservatives, whether they're actually in power or the governments in power are trying to placate them, they will tend to go to very narrow definitions of Islam," she says. "One of the easiest ways to do this is to come down hard on the role of women, and particularly around sex and homosexuality."

Long before the rise of Islamic conservatism, El Feki says, the Middle East and India had a literary tradition that celebrated gay love, but in recent years, that openness has been forgotten.

"You find in most civilizations in the Global South a much more open approach to homosexuality—irrespective of its status in religious and theological doctrine—than you find today," she says. "So very often, any attempt to open a dialogue in the Arab region is branded as some 'Western conspiracy' to undermine traditional Arab and Muslim values. The reality is that long before the West was talking openly about homosexuality, Arabs in particular were writing about this very frankly. Our history has come to be rewritten by Islamic conservatives."

"This Is the End": It's "Left Behind" for Potheads

Asawin Suebsaeng — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 21:18:36 +0000

This Is the End
Columbia Pictures
85 minutes

You remember Left Behind, don't you? It's the Christian-apocalypse film series (based on the books) starring conservative activist and former Growing Pains star Kirk Cameron. The three film adaptations are critically panned train wrecks that portray the Rapture by casting a fictional United Nations secretary general as the Antichrist.

There is quite literally no fathomable reason for you to watch the Left Behind movies. But do go see This Is the End, which is essentially the same thing, only instead of bizarre and awful politics, there's Emma Watson brandishing a gigantic ax.

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Sonny Smith's Afterworld Connection

Jon Young — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 10:00:11 +0000

Sonny & the Sunsets
Antenna to the Afterworld
Polyvinyl

San Francisco native Sonny Smith, who sings like he's just woken up from a long nap, deserves more than cult acclaim. The captivating Antenna to the Afterworld adds a scruffy techno-sheen to his down-home garage rock, but lucky fans who already know his work will recognize Smith's usual inventive blend of rueful humor, absurdist detours and aching undercurrents of longing and existential dread. "I come from a planet of dogs," he murmurs placidly on "Dark Corners," only to conclude, "I see dark corners in your weird world," while "Void" finds him observing, "When I look into your eyes / I see the void," adding, "It's a funny kind of sad joy," which neatly sums up Smith's intriguing style.

For more Sonny, check out the recent 100 Records Vol. 3 (Polyvinyl), a fake various artists compilation, where he portrays such varied fictional performers as soul providers Little Antoine & the Sparrows, The Wayward Youth, a reggae band, and rockers Zig Speck & the Specktones. It's irresistible.

Ain't It About Time for an Epic ZZ Top Marathon?

Jon Young — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 09:55:06 +0000

ZZ Top
The Complete Studio Albums 1970-1990
Warner Bros.

Anybody who knows ZZ Top mainly for snazzy '80s hits such as "Legs" and "Sharp Dressed Man" is only getting part of the story. Long before the bearded trio became an MTV staple via exuberant, cartoonish videos and a crackling fusion of synth-pop and bar-room boogie, "That Little Ol' Band from Texas" (as they call themselves) was a premier blues-rock outfit, devoted curators of the legacy of Howlin' Wolf and John Lee Hooker, but never slavish imitators.

This greasy 10-disc set, touted as featuring the original album mixes (for you record geeks), offers a terrific excuse to binge, ranging from sleazy early favorites like "Cheap Sunglasses" and "Tush" to their improbable mainstream success. Billy Gibbons and company continue to make tasty albums—most recently, 2012's La Futura—though today they sound as anachronistic as the artists who inspired them.

"The Purge": A Horror Flick About…Income Inequality?!

Asawin Suebsaeng — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 23:56:54 +0000

The Purge
Universal Pictures
85 minutes

The Purge, a bloody horror movie starring Ethan Hawke and Lena Headey, has as much to say about income inequality in 21st-century America as it does about triumphantly swinging an ax into the spine of an amoral, wealthy college kid who's trying to kill your family.

The film takes place in 2022. An unseen cabal known as the "New Founding Fathers" rules over America. The main plank in their party platform is the institutionalization of "The Purge," an annual night during which all illegal activity—murder, rape, robbery, jaywalking, you name it—is legal for a 12-hour stretch. The Purge was made official policy by the New Founders following a quadruple-dip recession that led to skyrocketing levels of crime and poverty. The idea was to give naturally violent human beings one night to vent their bloodlust and wrath. Cable TV talking heads claim that the annual nationwide orgy of violence and lawlessness has indeed brought down crime for the other 364 days of the year, and the New Founders brag of a flourishing economy and record low unemployment.

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Spy Kids: The NSA Is Looking for the Next Generation of Sneaky Geeks

AJ Vicens — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 21:54:47 +0000

Although the National Security Agency is incredibly secretive and could probably care less what you think, it does have an interest in helping our kids become great mathematicians. The NSA is the largest employer of mathematicians in the country, so, the agency explains, it is "critically dependent on the continuing development of first-class American mathematicians."

Enter the CryptoKids, the NSA's band of codemaking and codebreaking cartoon characters. There's Cyndi, one half of the CyberTwins, a cat with braces, two-tone hair, and what may be Google Glass. Her advice for online-savvy kids: "Mom says that once something is out on the Internet, it will be there forever, and 'might come back to haunt us one day.'" Her brother Cy, a malware victim, also values his digital privacy and security: "The stuff on my computer is really important to me, and I don't want anyone getting in and messing it up again!"

The CryptoKids. NSA

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"The East": How Two Filmmakers' Freegan Summer Road Trip Became a New Political Thriller Starring a "True Blood" Vampire

Asawin Suebsaeng — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 18:27:22 +0000

The East
Fox Searchlight Pictures
116 minutes

The East, a new thriller directed by relative newcomer Zal Batmanglij, follows an eco-terrorist collective that finds elaborate ways to punish CEOs and pharmaceutical companies for committing "worldwide terrorism." The eco-terrorists, who call themselves The East, are infiltrated by Sarah Moss (played by Brit Marling), a former fed who works as an undercover operative for a private intel firm that looks out for rich polluters. A morally conflicted Sarah quickly comes to sympathize with East members including Izzy (Ellen Page), and grows increasingly attracted to their ringleader Benji (Alexander Skarsgård, of True Blood vamp fame). Bullets fly, sex in the woods occurs, and alliances are tested.

This political thriller is technically based on a true story. But the real-world inspiration for the script didn't involve any shoot-out or corporate espionage; it started with a rather unusual summer road trip.

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"Arrested Development" Creator Explains How Herman Cain Inspired Season 4—and Cain Responds

Asawin Suebsaeng — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 20:40:22 +0000

The new season of Arrested Development has a sharp political edge that should feel familiar to fans of the show. The series' original three-season run on Fox, which aired between 2003 and 2006, contained some of the richest TV satire of the Iraq War and Bush years (bad WMD intel, "Mission Accomplished," "preemptive strike," Abu Ghraib, CIA dysfunction, war protests, and so on). The fourth season, which debuted on Netflix in late May, depicts the infamous Bluth family in the context of a new political era, one defined by the American housing crisis, economic collapse, and out-of-control drone warfare. But of all the political elements of this long-awaited season, arguably the most important—or at least most visible—real-world inspiration for this new batch of episodes is Herman Cain, the one-time 2012 GOP presidential front-runner and former pizza baron.

One of the fourth season's central story arcs involves an illicit sexual relationship between Lindsay Bluth Fünke (played by Portia de Rossi) and Herbert Love (played by Arrested newcomer Terry Crews), a charismatic, philandering California Republican congressional candidate explicitly modeled after Cain. Both are black, bespectacled, and intensely conservative and anti-Obama, and Love's "low-high" economic prescription sounds an awful lot like Cain's widely blasted 9-9-9 tax plan. (Furthermore, both men use Krista Branch's song "I Am America" in their campaigns, and Love's campaign manager looks, acts, and smokes like Cain's 2012 chief of staff Mark Block.)

Cain is well aware of this satirical, comic rendering of his 2012 "Cain Train"—he just couldn't care less about it. "I heard about it, haven't seen it, and I'm unfazed by it," Cain said in a statement sent to Mother Jones. "In the vernacular of my grandfather, 'I does not care.'"

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REVEALED: New York Mag's Beloved "Approval Matrix" Is a Fraud

Sarah Zhang — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 10:00:12 +0000

While high school math teachers go to great lengths to explain why their class is useful, college math professors don't even try. That because college-level math isn't useful—to me, at least. Once math progressed from numbers to letters to Greek letters, I no longer had any hope of applying it to my everyday problems. So I was a little surprised when my college linear algebra class came in handy here at work.

As a fact-checker at Mother Jones, I get to be very precise and a bit too literal and sometimes annoying. That's why, when we started plotting political scandals and Major League Baseball owners in the style of New York magazine's Approval Matrix, I started feeling uncomfortable. Okay, I'm just going to come out and say it: This is not a matrix. It's a Cartesian coordinate plane!

(P.S.: Here are those brilliant, lowbrow Game of Thrones attack ads it mentions.)

This is not a matrix either…

Nor is this…

(I helped produce this last graphic and actually wrote "matrix" into the slug, so I'm not coming off clean here.)

So, if you remember back to your own algebra class, matrices are an array of mathematical elements such as numbers, expression, or symbols. They look something like this:

Both our and New York's "matrices" are actually Cartesian coordinate planes, which you may also remember from algebra. The x and y axes represent different values that increase as you move away from the center. Simple, really.

But don't take it from me. Linear algebra is the reason I spent hours drawing matrices back in the day, so I decided to email my college professor. Once the youngest tenured professor at Harvard, Noam Elkies is a pretty brilliant mathematician. (Far too brilliant to be teaching the standard linear algebra class I took for my major.) He confirmed that, yes, this was certainly not a matrix you'd encounter in linear algebra, and could more accurately be called Cartesian. However, he added, "You can think of it as a mathematical matrix in the trivial bookkeeping sense that any spreadsheet is a matrix, even though hardly any of the mathematical structure of matrices is relevant. It hardly seems worth making a fuss over this."

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Enthralling: Camera Obscura's "Desire Lines"

Jon Young — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 10:00:10 +0000

Camera Obscura
Desire Lines
4AD

Scotland's Tracyanne Campbell has a voice that could break your heart. Sad, sweet and serene at once, she's in peak form on the enthralling Desire Lines, Camera Obscura's fifth album and first in four years.

While her elegant pop melodies could be repurposed as '60s girl-group sounds or '50s doo-wop, Campbell's deceptively complex lyrics offer a more nuanced look at relationships than traditional mainstream melodramas usually provide. "You say honesty has made me cruel," she sings gently in the tender "William’s Heart," adding, "I say you're soft and made of wool." On "This Is Love (Feels Alright)" Campbell exclaims, "When I found your girlfriend crying / I could have slapped you in the face," in sharp contrast to the song's comforting textures.

For those who care about such things, Neko Case and My Morning Jacket's Jim James show support by adding backing vocals, but Desire Lines is its own nonguilty pleasure, soaked in romanticism—yet bracingly smart.

M. Night Shyamalan: He Who Must Not Be Named

Asawin Suebsaeng — Fri, 31 May 2013 21:07:21 +0000

If you're surprised to hear that M. Night Shyamalan has a new movie out this week and wonder why you hadn't heard about his return to the director's chair, it's because that was precisely the idea. His new film After Earth (released on Friday) is a soul-smushingly boring sci-fi flick about a monster-infested future Earth that stars Will and Jaden Smith. The fact that the marketing department of the project took great pains to downplay Shyamalan's role is the only interesting part about it.

There was a time at the tail end of the '90s that gun-jumping critics and fans hailed Shyamalan as the "next Hitchcock." 1999's The Sixth Sense was borderline classic. Unbreakable and Signs also showed his promise as a director who could deliver thrills and dark drama. But beginning with 2004's The Village, Shyamalan embarked on a road to acute mediocrity, which then merged onto a highway of insipid aimlessness, which then plummeted off an unfinished overpass of "Why Are You Still Here?"

This rapid degeneration has made him into a critical and pop-cultural punchline, which was apparently not lost on the the people marketing his new film. The AP reports:

While Shyamalan's name is the first to pop up in the credits at the conclusion of the Sony Pictures film, it's been notably missing from trailers, TV commercials and marketing signage—a stark contrast to his previous films like Unbreakable and Lady in the Water, which were prominently billed as being "from writer-director M. Night Shyamalan."

Much in the same way that a marketing campaign will go out of its way not to use the word "gay" when promoting a film about two despondent gay cowboys, the marketing campaign for After Earth has gone out of its way not to mention the words "M. Night Shyamalan." That sort of tells you everything you need to know about how highly Sony thinks of the 42-year-old director and his current standing. Ditto the movie.

How Jesse Eisenberg Disappeared Into His Latest Role

Asawin Suebsaeng — Fri, 31 May 2013 17:47:07 +0000

Jesse Eisenberg prepares for his roles the same way just about any other responsible actor would: He does his research.

In 2007's The Hunting Party, Eisenberg played a TV news reporter and wannabe war correspondent. The film, also starring Richard Gere and Terrence Howard, is loosely based on an Esquire article from October 2000 that tells the true story of how three American and two European journalists accidentally set off an international incident after drunkenly deciding to hunt for a fugitive Serbian war criminal hiding out in Bosnia. To prepare for this role, Eisenberg hung out with members of the real-life "party," which included author and war correspondent Sebastian Junger (whom Eisenberg calls a "total badass").

In 2010's The Social Network, Eisenberg played Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, a role that earned him his first Oscar nomination. To prepare, Eisenberg "read everything [he] possibly could" on Zuckerberg and activated a phony account on Facebook—a website he claims he had never seen before gearing up to play Zuckerberg.

His latest film, released on Friday, is action director Louis Leterrier's Now You See Me (Summit Entertainment, 116 minutes). Eisenberg plays J. Daniel Atlas, a cocky Vegas illusionist who steals from the wealthy and wicked and then literally showers the money onto his working-class audiences. Eisenberg teams up with Woody Harrelson, Isla Fisher, and Dave Franco as a band of Robin Hood-like criminals who routinely outsmart and mystify an FBI agent played by Mark Ruffalo and an Interpol officer played by Mélanie Laurent.

To prep for this "intense character," as he put it, the 29-year-old actor became an amateur magician.

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Meet Lucy Schwartz, The Artist Behind The Awesome Song at The End of "Arrested Development"

Asawin Suebsaeng — Fri, 31 May 2013 10:05:32 +0000

The new season of the critically acclaimed cult comedy Arrested Development finally happened (on Netflix in lieu of Fox). And for those who have already made it to the end of the fourth season's 15 episodes, you heard this new, and most likely unfamiliar, pop song play over the final episode's end credits:

The song, released as a single last week, is "Boomerang" by Lucy Schwartz, a 23-year-old Los-Angeles-based pianist and singer/songwriter. The tune will appear on her next album, Timekeeper, which comes out August 6.

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Laura Marling's "Once I Was an Eagle" Explores the Heart's Colder Recesses

Jon Young — Mon, 27 May 2013 10:10:05 +0000

Laura Marling
Once I Was an Eagle
Ribbon Music

Is Britain's Laura Marling the modern Joni Mitchell? Her stellar fourth album underscores the similarities, among them ringing acoustic guitar, insistent vocals that linger on high notes, and cliché-free songwriting rooted in folk-music traditions.

But Marling is nobody's disciple, and the hour-long Once I Was an Eagle takes its own distinctive head trip in the course of 16 bracing tracks. Songs flow from one into the next like movements of a single suite as she reflects on desire, loneliness and the impulse toward self-realization that inevitably reinforces isolation at the expense of connection. "We are so alone / There's nothing we can share / You can get me on the telephone / But you won't keep me there," she sings in "Master Hunter." On "Pray for Me," she declares, "I will not love, I want to be alone."

While such sentiments might seem self-indulgent in lesser hands, she's a reliably stirring chronicler of the heart's colder recesses.

Listen...

Soderbergh's "Behind the Candelabra" Is on HBO and Not in Theaters Because It's Too Gay

Asawin Suebsaeng — Sun, 26 May 2013 10:00:14 +0000

Behind the Candelabra
HBO Films
118 minutes

Steven Soderbergh's Behind the Candelabra (which premieres Sunday, May 26 at 9 p.m. EDT on HBO) is as good as you've heard. It's a moving and beautifully made film that traces the clandestine half-decade romance between Vegas showman and pianist Liberace and his much, much younger live-in boyfriend Scott Thorson, who cowrote the 1988 memoir on which the film is based. (My colleague Maggie Caldwell has a good reflection on, among other things, meeting the flashy and famous entertainment icon when she was a baby here.)

The whole cast does a superb job; as Liberace, Michael Douglas crafts a portrait of celebrity isolation and capriciousness worthy of an Oscar nomination—if only he were eligible.

The reason he is not eligible is because Behind the Candelabra, despite competing in the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, will not be released in US theaters. And the reason you will be watching this film (which could very well be Soderbergh's last before he retires from movies and moves on to making TV shows full time) on cable television instead of at your local multiplex is because of its conspicuous gayness.

During a press tour in January, Soderbergh explained how he was turned down by every studio he approached with his Liberace project because executives deemed it "too gay" to turn an acceptable profit:

Nobody would make it. We went to everybody in town. We needed $5 million. Nobody would do it…They said it was too gay. Everybody. This was after Brokeback Mountain, by the way. Which is not as funny as this movie. I was stunned. It made no sense to any of us…[The people at HBO are] great and they're really good at what they do, and ultimately I think more people will see it, and that's all you care about. Studios were going, "We don't know how to sell it." They were scared.

The film does indeed have its share of gay love and intercourse, including a sweaty, grunting sequence in which Scott (played by Matt Damon) is taking Liberace from behind while the aging performer offers him drugs to take during sex. But the Hollywood rejection shouldn't have been all that shocking to Soderbergh and company. Hollywood and mainstream cinema have a long and well-documented history of not "knowing" how to "sell" and market movies featuring explicit gay sex to a wide audience.

Films starring big names that also deal with gay sexual content—such as the sweet 2009 comedy I Love You Phillip Morris starring Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor as prison lovers—typically do not fare too well at the box office. (It's worth noting that Brokeback Mountain, the 2005 Oscar-winner that Soderbergh referenced on his press tour, included a marketing and publicity strategy that went out of its way not to mention even the word "gay.")

Again, nobody should be too surprised. This is the same Hollywood and big-money film industry that still hasn't come to terms with showing a black man and a white woman having passionate sex or dating on-screen.

But if you personally are cool with watching a very good movie that is also supposedly "too gay," then Behind the Candelabra is definitely one to check out. Here's its trailer:

Click here for more movie and TV coverage from Mother Jones.

To read more of Asawin's reviews, click here.

To listen to the movie and pop-culture podcast that Asawin cohosts with ThinkProgress critic Alyssa Rosenberg, click here.

The Canary Islands Government Allowed "Fast & Furious 6" To Destroy Their Highway With a Tank

Asawin Suebsaeng — Fri, 24 May 2013 22:43:42 +0000

Fast & Furious 6
Universal Pictures
130 minutes

Hands down, Fast & Furious 6 is by far the best movie ever made to feature Ludacris and Tyrese trapped in a Jeep dangling inches off the ground from an imperiled cargo plane.

And there is so, so much more to cherish about the film.

The Fast & Furious franchise has become genuinely fascinating over the last couple of years. One of the most fascinating things about the series is the addition of Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson as the ultra-brawny Diplomatic Security Service agent Luke Hobbs, a character who seemingly cannot go ten minutes without torturing somebody for information. Another fascinating thing is that after a long stretch of churning out barely passable B-movies, the series somehow managed to produce critically acclaimed entertainment, starting with 2011's Fast Five. (The sixth film has received similarly high marks.) Credit for the newfound critic-and-crowd-pleasing goes to Taiwanese-born American filmmaker Justin Lin, who initially demonstrated the full extent of his directorial talents with the stereotype-subverting independent film Better Luck Tomorrow in 2002.

But the single most fascinating thing about the series so far is the enormous tank in Fast & Furious 6. The tank is arguably the main character in the movie.

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"Arrested Development" Was the Best TV Satire of the Bush Era

Asawin Suebsaeng — Fri, 24 May 2013 10:00:07 +0000

Arrested Development is finally (for real this time) coming back. On May 26 at exactly 12:01 a.m. PDT, the series' fourth season will debut exclusively on Netflix, the on-demand streaming service that on any given weeknight accounts for nearly a third of internet traffic in North America. It's a hotly anticipated premiere that fans are praying will not crash the website.

This TV series—about a spoiled family wading through a glut of personal, financial, and international scandal—occupies a place in popular culture that few other shows have managed to reach. Fans have even witnessed Arrested Development burrow itself into Western politics. In March 2011, before NATO forces launched an air war that would help topple Moammar Qaddafi's mass-murdering regime in Libya, The New Republic ran a fantastic slideshow comparing the notorious Qaddafi family to Arrested Development's Bluth clan. During a speech this month in the House of Commons of Canada, opposition leader Thomas Mulcair quoted a famous episode of Arrested Development while criticizing the prime minister for over $3 billion in unaccounted anti-terrorism funding. And as the series revival neared, Republicans started dropping Arrested Development references to ridicule the Affordable Care Act, Democratic leadership, and the Obama administration.

The series has also found its way into the syllabi of college courses, and onto the pages of academic essays. "The writers worked miracles addressing philosophical and social issues," says J. Jeremy Wisnewski, an associate professor of philosophy at Hartwick College who served as a volume editor on the book Arrested Development and Philosophy. "To see the way race, gender, sexual orientation, and class are handled in the show is to witness genius at work."

There's something else the show handled so well that's often taken for granted: During its original run on Fox from 2003 to 2006, the series delivered what was arguably the sharpest satire of the Bush era and the Iraq War that has been broadcast on television.

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The NRA's List of "Coolest Gun Movies" Is Astoundingly Dumb

Asawin Suebsaeng — Wed, 22 May 2013 17:51:54 +0000

When conservatives try to list their favorite pop-culture items to make a political point, the results are often baffling. In 2005, Human Events released the list of "Most Harmful Books" written in the 19th and 20th centuries (Charles Darwin and John Stuart Mill are put in the same league as Hitler and Mao). The following year, National Review compiled a much-discussed "50 greatest conservative rock songs," which for whatever bizarre reason included Aerosmith's "Janie's Got a Gun." In 2012, the Telegraph declared their brazenly idiotic "top 10 conservative movies of the modern era." And just over a week ago, the American Enterprise Institute posted the "21 greatest conservative rap songs of all time," which prominently features Justin Bieber.

And now American Rifleman, the National Rifle Association's shooting and firearms consumer magazine, has published its official list of the 10 "Coolest Gun Movies." Writes American Rifleman blogger Paul Rackley, "Many of these movies also take us back to simpler times, when dreaming of saving the day got us through that oh-so boring class." Here's his list:

Red Dawn (1984)

The Terminator (1984)

The Alamo (1960)

Die Hard (1988)

The Godfather (1972)

Zombieland (2009)

The Matrix (1999)

The Delta Force (1986)

The Road Warrior (1981)

Tremors (1990)

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Review: Radiation City's "Animals in the Median"

Jon Young — Mon, 20 May 2013 10:00:05 +0000

Radiation City
Animals in the Median
Tender Loving Empire

Dreamy and wistful is the default mode for plenty of modern bands that haven't figured out who they want to be when they grow up, but the striking Portland, Oregon quintet Radiation City shows how to do it right. Their second album, Animals in the Median, shimmers like a unearthly mirage, weaving together misty melodies, analog electronics and the siren vocals of keyboardist Lizzy Ellison to create a poignant sense of faded optimism and missed opportunities. Hazy gems such as "Wash of Noise" and "Lark" echo the melancholy retro-futurism of Stereolab, albeit with a more delicate touch, while the gauzy "Wary Eyes" evokes the gently eerie sensation of hearing soft music from another room at 3 a.m. Ellison and company could create a great soundtrack for David Lynch.

The National's "Trouble Will Find Me"—Place on Repeat

Brett Brownell — Mon, 20 May 2013 09:30:06 +0000

Photo by Deirdre O'Callaghan

You know how when you get a song stuck in your head, you're not always sure how it burrowed its way in there? Well, people who attended The National's May 5 performance at New York's MoMA PS1 museum can be pretty damned sure. Over a six-hour period, the band played "Sorrow," off its 2010 release, High Violet, 105 times in a row.

The special performance, aptly dubbed "A Lot of Sorrow," was technically a work created by the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson as part of his ongoing "explorations into the potential of repetitive performance to produce sculptural presence within sound."

The following clip, supposedly starting around 2 hours and 40 minutes into the show, includes three of the repetitions.

During a Reddit AMA three days later, a band member reflected:

Actually as the hours went on I think we all realized that this experience was something special for us—there was a weird hypnotic resonance and spirituality to repeating the song over and over. We almost didn't want to stop and we learned something about our capacity for endurance and the song opened up in surprising ways...By the end it didn't feel like we were playing it anymore. We know the idea seemed pretentious in some way, but Ragnar has this mix of humor and sadness that feels quite similar to what our songs about...We're very glad to have done it.

This week, The National, follows up its hypnotic performance with the release of Trouble Will Find Me, their sixth studio album, on the 4AD label.

Trouble Will Find Me

Trouble... is replete with the usual mix of sorrow, longing, depression, and nearly infrasonic tone of singer Matt Berninger's voice that fans of The National have come to know and love. But some of the tracks still provide you with the opportunity to rock out, lest you need a break from your whimpering.

For example, there's "Sea of Love," the video of which the band premiered during its AMA. A fan had asked, "What is your guys' favourite music video?" Whereupon the band replied, craftily, "Actually there's one video that we all really love, so we made this homage." They revealed the link to the new video. And the sleuthing promptly began for the original.

A single-take shot in a sparse, nondescript room, with nothing but a dangling microphone, air-conditioning unit, and boy wandering in from off-screen: It didn't look familiar.

Nor should it. It mimics a video for a song first released in 1995—in Russia—by Soviet-era punk band Zvuki Mu. The song title, "Grubiy Zakat," means "Rough Sunset." Check it out:

Bryce Dessner, who plays guitar for The National, told PRI's The World that he "fell in love with it immediately" when he first saw the video on YouTube. "We have to do something like this," he told his bandmates.

They reached out to Zvuki Mu, but were unable to track down any of its members. Obviously, that didn't deter them from making their own version.

Next up for The National: a vinyl version of their six-hour MoMA performance for charity. Seriously.

If the new album, epic vinyl repetition party, and homage to a Soviet video aren't enough for you, you can get more of The National in movie form. Singer Matt Berninger's brother Tom was brought on tour as a roadie and ended up making a haphazard documentary about the band called Mistaken for Strangers. If you can make it to Australia by June, you can catch the next screening at the Sydney Film Festival. I'll leave you with the trailer.

Spock and Awe: How 4 Lucky Post-9/11 War Vets Landed Roles in "Star Trek Into Darkness"

Asawin Suebsaeng — Thu, 16 May 2013 23:05:14 +0000

On April 24, 2005, US Marine Corps lance corporal Adam McCann was on patrol with his fire team, as he had been on many other occasions. His team was inspecting a weapons cache discovered in the city of HÄ«t in Iraq's Al-Anbar province. As they prepared to head back to base, they were met with a hail of mortar fire launched from the other side of street. The entire team was injured, and McCann sustained shrapnel wounds to his neck and both legs. But all escaped with their lives.

Eight years later, on May 14, McCann, who is now 27, attended the star-studded Los Angeles premiere of Star Trek Into Darkness—in which he plays a minor role. "Seeing my name in the movie credits was pretty nice," McCann told me. "And the after-party was pretty amazing as well."

McCann is one of four post-9/11 American war veterans featured in the new film as the "Starfleet Ceremonial Guard." (The others are Melissa Steinman of the Coast Guard, Eric Greitens of the Navy, and Jon Orvrasky of the Marine Corps.) All have been involved with The Mission Continues, a nonprofit that awards community service fellowships to vets, and helps them apply the skills they learned in the armed forces to work and life at home. Greitens—an ex-Navy SEAL and Rhodes Scholar—founded the group in 2007, and was included in the 2013 Time 100, where he was praised by former Joint Chiefs chairman Mike Mullen as "one of the most remarkable young men I have ever encountered."

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This Film Is "Snakes on a Plane," But With Air Force One, Terrorists, and an Escape Pod

Asawin Suebsaeng — Tue, 14 May 2013 14:07:58 +0000

Hollywood megastar and snake-punching virtuoso Samuel L. Jackson is going to be President of the United States.

At least he will be in director Jalmari Helander's English-language debut film, Big Game. This is a description of the upcoming movie, via the Hollywood Reporter (emphasis mine):

The movie is billed as an adrenaline-fuelled action-adventure and tells the story of a shy, nervous 13-year-old boy who, like his forefathers, takes a test of manhood by spending one day and night alone in the wilderness of a vast local forest.

Armed only with a bow and arrow, his task is to return with a prize to prove himself. But when Air Force One is shot down by terrorists, the young man discovers the U.S. president in an escape pod, and they have to team up as the terrorists close in.

This will be the most political and presidential thing Jackson has done since last September, when he starred in a pro-Obama web ad (funded by The Jewish Council for Education & Research, a liberal super-PAC) that demanded complacent Democratic voters "wake the fuck up" before the 2012 election.