» i realize this is my second post in the past week about kelly clarkson, but this is pretty funny. i love corporate powerpoint presentations.

» mountain goats download-only ep out at the 4ad website. i think it’s like 3 pounds, however much that means. crazy moon money.

» finally finished love in the time of cholera. more on that soon, putting the final touches on my review of derrida.

» long day. 4 hours sleep. tired. go.

» if i’ve said anything that discounts kanye west’s career as overblown, i apologize, because the rumors that he’s working with jon brion are pretty exciting, seeing as jon brion is the shit.

» another review i did is up at kevchino.com, this time, south san gabriel’s The Carlton Chronicles, which, upon reflection deserves more than a 7. that album is gonna find it’s way back to the player and soon as it gets warmer out. summer nights, natch.

» looking at these new (imaginary) product designs for apple products is pretty cool, but like looking at conceptual car designs, i doubt they’ll take the same form as these.

» there’s a nice article on the decemberists in the stranger this week, by sean nelson. also, picaresque is out today, so buy me a copy when you get yours.

» billionaires for bush are at it again. if you get there too late to see what it is if ebay has taken it down, they’re selling social security.

» the schiavo case is downright crazy. i went to a seminar on basic estate planning last friday and learned about Durable Power of Attorney, which designates someone to have the power to make decisions for you if you are ever incapacitated. schiavo doesn’t have one.

» how is it that every fucking person that shoots someone at school is characterized by media the exact same way every time?

“Described as a loner, Weise is reported to have expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler on a Nazi website. His fellow pupils said he was sometimes teased because he dressed in black.”

it’ll be interesting to see if this affects the administration’s views on banning guns. UPDATE: but back to the issue, shit is fucking scary (cache of the neo-nazi board weise posted to).

» no segue is appropriate: santorum re-thinking capital punishment. the best part is where he says “I never thought about it that much when I was really a supporter of the death penalty. I still see it as potentially valuable, but I would be one to urge more caution than I would have in the past,” that’s just the type of guy i want voting on issues in the senate. WHO’S THE MUTHAFUCKING FLIP-FLOPPER NOW?! anyways, he’s probably been too busy comparing gay sex to bestiality.

» oh man, i can’t wait till someone posts a video on the internet of someone using a rollercycle to grind up pavement with his face.

» mc chris is going on tour soon, and there’s a super-long interview with him at slashdot. the tussin! the tussin!

» i’m fully immersing myself in research for fantasy baseball now that i have the time to do it. you wouldn’t think i’d be so busy, but i have been. if you want to do a free online mock drafts, i found one: mlb.com mock draft. i spent a lot of time looking for it, so i figure i can save someone some time.

» my review for m. ward’s album, transistor radio is up now, go check it out.

» working on something new, going home to go design a page for it….

» quickly: the house full of friends double cd on magic marker records is out, and our old band, my little brother, is on it along with tons (seriously, there’s a lot) of great bands are on it. pitchfork even reviewed it and it got a pretty good 7.1 score. amazing.

Dir. Prachya Pinkaew | 2003
Ong Bak wavered from being surprisingly brutal to extremely cheesy to absolutely captivating. Suffering from serious lack of a decent plot, a mess as far as filmmaking is concerned, and painfully lacking good translation.

But, just like most martial arts films, that’s not why I went. Tony Jaa is indeed an amazing practitioner of Muay Thai. From the first moment I saw him use that knee (I missed the first 10 minutes or so), I wanted to see more– He tipped so far back and his knee was so high up in the air that you could feel the force it had landing on his opponents’ chest. From that moment on, there was a lot of anticipation to see what he could do.

A lot of the stunts in the film are pretty spectacular, but nothing we haven’t seen before from Jackie Chan. What separates Chan and Jaa, though, is a complete lack of comedy. Chan has a soft face and a very bright smile, while Jaa, on the other hand, is simply stone, and when you see him jam his elbow on the top of someone’s head and blood (even blatantly fake blood) spurts from the top of it, you’re a little wary that he’s going to ever be able to do something as accessible as Jackie Chan. But he’s got that other thing going for him, the thing that was missing from Chan and a lot of other martial arts stars since Bruce Lee. Tony Jaa is a bad-ass.

It’s been a long time since a martial arts star has emerged on the scene though, and as long as the market isn’t saturated (remember when Segal, Van Damme, Speakman, Norris, etc. where all competing for the same market of male audiences seeking bone-breaking action?), there will be room for some of that amazing acrobatic action and flying knees and elbows.

Bonus: Also includes some impressive Thai/French hip-hop from Koba Ali and Candy Ken. Seriously, considering other French hip-hop heavyweights like MC Solaar, France can seriously dish out the beats, I remember the soundtrack to the original French Taxi films to be pretty hot.

» from the mailbag, brl sends lucksmiths tourdates and hot new tracks from the forthcoming cd, warmer corners. listen at the matinee site to the new tracks. look down for tour dates:

Friday April 29th - Knitting Factory, Los Angeles
Saturday April 30th - Rickshaw Stop, San Francisco
Sunday May 1st - Make-Out Room, San Francisco
Tues May 3rd - Berbati’s Pan, Portland
Wednesday May 4th - Sunset Tavern, Seattle
Friday May 6th - Shuler’s Books, Grand Rapids
Saturday May 7th - PA’s Lounge, Boston
Sunday May 8th - Knitting Factory, New York
Monday May 9th - The Khyber, Philadelphia
Tuesday May 10th - DC9, Washington DC

» i just got a hold of Ghostface’s The Pretty Toney Album and must say that it’s pretty hot. right off the bat, i was bumping to “Biscuits”, but i can’t necessarily say that i’ll take it over de la soul just yet, because i’m gonna say that a lot of the derogatory stuff still turns me off. the production is very classic, if not a little thin and ghostface comes in a little loud a lot of times, which i have to say is the same thing that was wrong with his track on The Grind Date. but, “holla, holla, holla, if you want to, i’ll buzz you!” enough about that.

» the new star wars trailer. meh. i stopped getting excited four years ago.

» my god, i didn’t realize it till i heard it, but i’ve had this song stuck in my head several times over the past month or so without knowing who or what it was until today. kelly clarkson’s song, since you been gone (i must admit, i’ve been watching much more american idol than ever in my life), was covered by ted leo and he still has the meanest fucking falsetto in indie rock today. haven’t heard it? ted leo - since you been gone.

» ong bak: the thai warrior review coming on monday. have a good weekend.

» kottke.org has gone pro, and the links, articles and otherwise are fucking blowing me away; talk about endless content. if you ever want to start a blog and need a good model, take a look at kottke, then throw some money his way. links i stole just now: kottke’s business influences (tons of great businesses listed here, including textdrive, mcsweeneys, craigslist.org, and a ton of others. here’s the interview with dave eggers about the business.

» google is starting a film review search, kind of like metacritic’s, which seems to be beta right now, since i can’t find any reviews of the movie i just saw, ong bak, but the movietime search seems to be working just fine. it’s amazing how much better a google engineered product works than, say, an aol product (ahem: moviefone).

» spectacular listing of food bloggers for the bay area. i was thinking that once i got back to seattle, i’d start a food blog of my own, if only for the excuse to eat out more often, but who am i kidding, i eat out all the time anyway, even when i don’t have any money, which equates to eating alison out of house and home.

» more articles about why blogging is good.

» there’s an interesting article on using patterns in design at 37signals.com, it’s actually really old, but useful - so many people that are just beginning designing (including me) and have had no formal training forget tons of things about what makes a good design good, and this is an example of things that gets ignored, even by me. making the text look good and make sense is part of design as well as usability.

» the get up kids are breaking up. i think i see a pattern emerging, but emo-pop is finally disintegrating, for better or worse. i haven’t heard a get up kids album since “Something to Write Home About”, but i’m sure those popes will still play music.

» have you visited slatch media’s new website, tinyshowcase? it’s great for art lovers, and cheap for poor people. you’ll love it.

it’s fantasy baseball season. i’m still stick, maybe i have whooping cough. i’ll get back to writing some more film reviews soon, i’ve seen constantine and derrida recently, as well as rushmore, which i’m planning on writing something up on soon. i’m writing music reviews for another site, when they go up, i’ll let you know. the interview i did for the western fron (wwu’s paper) never ran. but nathan was on the front page of the oregonian on tuesday. i’m going to go help kids read. out.

Dir. Michel Gondry | 2004

“How happy is the blameless vessel’s lot, the world forgetting by the world forgot, eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, each prayer accepted, each wish resigned.”

I’m not going to pretend I know exactly what this means.

Good films are onions, each layer makes you cry. Eternal Sunshine is built on a simple concept, erasing memories. Pin-pointing hurtful memories and effacing them, fading them from existence is Lacuna Inc.’s business. They are purposefully low-tech in the film, completely simplistic, they use tapes and old computers that look like 386’s, helmets that look like colanders to create the gaps. And that’s all they really do, they create gaps. They can’t erase anything, because to erase it would mean you would never have to come back to get the procedure done again.

Lacuna maps the brain and then zap out a memory, and then you wake up in the morning, look in your journal, and think you haven’t written in it in 2 years. The complications of such procedure are enormous, but that’s how Kaufman works, he asks that the viewer take one or two large leaps, and he takes it from there, creating an efficient world out of his characters.

What the film tends to do, though, is work with the gaps in order to emphasize who connected everything really is. Even how connected two people can be.

After watching the movie a second time, I started wondering why Joel would want to save any of the memories that he had, why he would want to repeat what he had gone through with Clementine, because after the first 20 minutes or so, all their relationship had become were sour faces, misunderstandings, mumblings under breaths and steady repugnance of each other. Eventually though, they get to the good stuff, the parts that make it worth it.

Considering the way memory works, I then got to thinking that through the majority of the movie, Clem is just another part of Joel’s mind. Even the memories in his head are not necessarily true to life, they are exactly what we see in his head, and one of the advantages and disadvantages of memory is that one has the ability, if not more likely, tendency to editorialize the content. Everything we see from the opening titles until waking after the procedure, could have been magnified or diminished.

The best part of the film is where Joel and Clementine meet for the first time, and Clem goes into the house and Joel leaves after a while. The hindsight he experiences during the procedure just heightens the regret in having it done. In revisiting the memories lucidly and actively erasing them, Joel’s also changing them, making memories of the erasure as they happen, always and already creating a memory of the memory. The film works on a circular loop that feels far from infinite, and every cracked smile and weary eye that Joel has experienced in his life shows up in the regret that he had in having left that house before it was time. “Just come back and make up a goodbye at least. Just pretend we had one.”

Kaufmann is still one of the best screenwriters in Hollywood today, and I’m not just saying that because he won the Oscar Sunday night. He is able to create characters that are so sound, so lush, and so real that the environment they are in need not even have something close to reality. The dialogue is always mellifluous, and the plots always intricate and striking. He’s always dark, too, which is what has prevented me from actively trying to watching either John Malkovich or Adapation again, but Eternal Sunshine had two characters that were fascinating to watch and so much depth that it’s hard to understand it in one viewing.

Jim Carrey’s representation of Joel was amazing, in fact better than anything he’s ever done. He’ll always have the unmistakable physical humor and facial expressions so familiar from The Mask or Ace Ventura or even Fire Marshall Bill, but there was something so terribly uncomfortable and awkward in him in this. Nick Cage essentially played a character with similar elements, as did John Cusack, but none felt as pathetic and sad as Jim Carrey’s, and maybe it’s because we’ve never seen it from him, or because Cage and Cusack are usually either winsome or annoying, full of bravado and charm. Carrey has always been over-the-top, even in the Truman show, anger is so different than sensitivity. There’s just something in hearing him say, “Why do I fall in love with every woman I see who shows me the least bit of attention?”

As much as I admired Carrey’s portrayal, Kate Winslet’s was outstanding, her speech during what happens to be the second time Clem and Joel meet: “Too many guys think I’m a concept, or I complete them, or I make them alive. I’m just a fucked up girl, who’s looking for my own peace of mind. Don’t assign me yours.” During their second first meeting, she improvs a punch on Joel’s shoulder, and we see Jim Carrey reacting, not Joel, but not until having heard the commentary did I know that, so as far as I know, they were both acting. Every moment that Clem showed weakness was coupled with a bullish rebound of defiance, it was odd to see someone so unhappy do exactly that which would seem to make her even more so, but Winslet nailed it, every time.

In the end, how could a connection have existed between the two that was so real, though everything we saw was imagined? Joel seemed so intimately connected with Clem that even after having his memories erased, a message still came through, even his imagined Clementine in his head gave him a true message, to “Meet me in Montauk.” That is what made the film so hopeful, the “Okay”s at the end were an epiphany, learning to live with whatever imperfections that they’ve come to notice in each other were all part of the game, and deciding whether or not what brought them there or kept them together was worth it. The value that they placed on the experiences they had to get to that point was more overwhelming than what the end point had become.

All this without even considering that the film was scored by the inimitable Jon Brion, who also scored I Heart Huckabees. and whose sauntering keys were perfect; and Michel Gondry, whose direction was remarkably clean and quiet.

And the snow and Long Island and snow on the beach are all beautiful. All beautiful, I’d quite possibly consider this the best film of 2004.