Stuff I've Been Doing #3:

Here’s some stuff I’ve been reading/listening to/watching in the ever present hope of distracting myself from my onrushing mortality yet don’t have enough juice to quite get an article out of.

Movies:



And Now For Something Completely Different. This is playing at Palm Wednesday tonight (YAY WOOHOO PALM WEDNESDAY!!!) And if you have any affinity for/ curiousity about, that great group of British psychopaths that is Monty Python, you really owe it to yourself to check it out. Unlike their other movies, And Now For Something Completely Different is very closely tied to the TV show that made the troupe’s name. In fact the movie IS just a bunch of skits from The TV show, a sort of greatest hits compilation.

This makes it ideal place for beginners as it showcases a lot of the best known sketches, meaning their geeky friend’s endless quoting of them will become that much less baffling. But even for those who have watched the show so much that they know exactly when to expect The Spanish Inquistion, the film is worthwhile, the group is really on their A game here, energized by the chance to work on a bigger stage and they really tear into the sketches, casting even the oldest bits in new light.

I mean seriously did you just want us to play The Holy Grail again? You haven’t seen it enough? You know The Knights Who Say Ni bit by fucking rote! Go outside! Grab life by the balls! Kiss A Girl! Maybe you’ll meet one tonight! At Palm Wednesday! All The More Reason To Go!

All that and a kick ass trailer real! Will this make an appearance? Oh I think it will.

Books:



The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Coming out of nowhere to sell roughly fifty bajillion copies (proving that the Norse Trickster God Loki is alive and well and fucking with Publishers, by trying to prove that dark ultraviolent Swedish thrillers are the next big thing) I came to The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo with high expectations, only to have them partially met.

The set up for the book is good, a genuinely eerie “locked room” mystery, involving a disgraced journalist and a decades old missing persons case. While the opening shows promise, with it’s intriguing premise, exotic setting, and sizable villains in the horrendous family Haus Vanger around whom the mysteries revolve.

Unfortunately, the book doesn’t live up to its potential. An anticlimactic ending and an ungodly long denouement cripple it. For all the talk about the books complexity and depth it eventually devolves into an Agatha Christie novel featuring anal rape, complete with a cast of Red Herrings, and a killer who is instantly guessable by playing “One Of These Things Is Not Like The Other One Of These Things Is Not The Same.”

The book is oddly European, which isn’t usually a negative for me, but in this case it’s true. It keeps throwing out these crime statistics for Violence against Swedish woman and as screwed up as it is, all I could think of, was American Women would kill for those statistics.

The only real feature that lives up to the hype is the already iconic Lisbeth Saunders. I’ll be reading the books sequel solely for her benefit, though I don’t plan on doing so anytime soon.

Music


Captain Clegg and The Night Creatures.

I just kind of love that this album exists, for those of you not in the know, Captain Clegg and The Night Creatures are a psychobilly (Genre of Rockabilly that involves people singing songs about Russ Meyer Movies, Zombies, and keeping Jayne Mansfield’s head in a jar) band that make an appearance in the new Halloween II. They’re named after a great Hammer Horror movie and they don’t actually exist. Zombie made them up. And for reasons presumably shits and giggles related he decided to produce an album for them. It’s kind of like when Garth Brooks created Chris Gaines, except it’s not baffling and the music doesn’t cause murder suicides.

The music is actually pretty mellow for psychobilly, but it keeps all the genre’s weirdness and appeal intact. Your mileage may vary, Psychobilly is after all more or less the definition of an acquired taste, and the tracks are pretty hit and miss. Songs like Zombie A Go Go and Creeps For Cushing are genuinely good. Other’s like Dr. Demon and The Robot Girl (In which Captain Clegg moans the title of the song over and over and over again) are not.

Still the album’s fun enough, strange enough, and “wow I can’t believe this actually exists” enough for me to give it a solid recommend.