Month: February 2005

Constantine

Laura and I went to see Constantine this weekend, and it was another instance of my expectations working in my favor.

I was expecting the film to be mediocre at best, and, as a result, I was pleasantly surprised. I really liked it. I’ve been a fan of the character since he first appeared in “Swamp Thing” in the 80s, and was a devoted reader of “Hellblazer” for its first few years of production. Sure, there were elements of the comic missing or changed for the film, but all in all, I was pleased to see how close the final result actually managed to be—in fact, I think that if they had cast somebody like Paul Bettany or Jude Law as Constantine, you wouldn’t hear nearly as much bitching about the film from Geek circles as you currently do.

This is not to say that Reeves does a bad job–I think he manages to bring across the important bits of the character just fine–but, unfortunately, he is hampered by his very “Keanu-ness.” He’s reached the point where, no matter what role he’s playing, all you can see is him (very similar to the problems with casting Jack Nicholson in anything: you’re gonna get Jack, not the character).

It was pretty cool, though. Heck–if nothing else, it made me go home and dust off the old notes for a proposed series of noir-ish horror fiction I had worked on a while back, featuring a priest who wanders around the secret occult subculture of NYC, combatting the forces of evil while being tainted by it.

Friday Music

Here we go again, kids–the second installment of my “internet mix tape”–a handful of mp3 links of nifty stuff that I like, and hope that you like too.

We’ll get the obligatory “I made this!” self-promotion out of the way first: Al-Azif is a recent bit of my work as “@nubis”–this time around, built around Lovecraft-inspired samples. Teach them Shoggoths to dance, baby.

UPDATE: Rassa-frassa yahoo. The link appears to be all discombobulated. So, instead of direct linking it, I’ll just direct you to my yahoo briefcase. Just click on the “Music” folder, and the file’s in there, where you can download it.

Ugress is a Norway-based, trip-hop-ish electronica outfit. They’ve got a number of free downloads on their site, but my favorite is Cowboy Desperado, which is a nice bit of cinematic bombast, including some nifty rhythmical use of Merlin’s “dragon” speech from [i]Excalibur[/i] later in the track. (As a brief note: I just noticed that their site is crawling today. Since I had no problems with it yesterday, I’m assuming this is a temporary problem. If you can’t grab the song, check back again later. It’s worth it.)

The Dresden Dolls – “Bad Habit”: If you haven’t gotten this album yet, go get it now. Seriously. Self-described “Brechtian Cabaret Punk”, and not too far off the mark. “Coin-operated Boy” was a radio darling, but the rest of the album is deeper and more satisfying. Any band comprised of a woman playing piano and a guy playing drums, done up in white-face and 1930’s Wiemar Republic cabaret costumes is just too nifty to ignore.

Spillsbury Raus – “Schlagziele”: German electro-pop from the band Spillsbury Raus. Babel @ altavista translates the title as “Impact Goals”….which makes no sense to me, but whaddaya want: it’s in German. Imagine Nena (“99 Luftballons”) meets Interpol.

As the lads from Python once said, Now for something completely different. 19th-century opera different. Leo Delibes – “Duo De Flores” You all know this song, but you don’t know you know it. It’s been used in movies, and for most of British Airways advertising campaigns since the 90s. The “Duo for Flowers” is from the 1883 opera Lakmé. It never fails to affect me every time I listen to it.

…and, last but not least, Cibo Matto – “Sci-fi Wasabi”. Because if you heard Japanese women performing an electronica/hip-hop track with references to Obi-wan Kenobi, wouldn’t you want to share it?

That’s it for this week. Back again in 7.