"Wait, I wasted 3 hours of my life on THIS?!"

K and I went to see Watchmen, Zack Snyder's adaptation of the popular comic books, on Tuesday night, because she was excited about it and I was willing to go despite the hashing that the film's been getting from all the critics. After all, we have this great moviehouse (I'm calling it a "moviehouse" because it feels very quirky and '30s of me to do so) downtown where you can see first-run films for only $3.50 ($2.50 for matinees), and also, I figured that since Snyder is also responsible for 300, it would at least be a great-looking movie: Worst case scenario, I could sit and zone out to bright colors and stunning cinematography for three hours.

Dude, I was so wrong. Watchmen is a huge, lumbering mess of a movie, a leviathant whose flashy, big-budget special effects can't reconcile themselves to the BIG, DEEP, MEANINGFUL THEMES portrayed in the comic; in fact, the two often seem at blatant odds with each other. Plus, there's simply too much of everything in this film for any of it to have an impact.

Watchmen takes place in the year 1985, only it's an alternate 1985 in which Richard Nixon has just been elected to his third term and the US and USSR are perilously close to all-out nuclear war. The whole shebang is narrated by Rorshach, who's a superhero of your "I'm crazy, and that's what makes me super!" variety, a raspy-voiced, sweat-sock masked, conservative-minded vigilante whose "journal" is filled with dead dogs in gutters, lamentations on humanity's filthy and unworthiness, et al. He's also bitter as hell that he's the only one still keeping up with the superhero thing; it turns out that Rorshach was part of a group called Watchmen, a coalition of heroes dedicated to keeping the world from going entirely batshit. Now, somebody's launched a plot to take out the remaining members of this coalition.

And that's really about all I got out of the plot, per se: This movie is so jam-packed with plots and subplots and backstories and commentary on current politics, that it's hard to see the main plot, let alone figure out who the characters really are or care about them, for that matter. It's epic but not meaningful, splashy but without real impact, and comes across as being jumbled and disjointed. Case in point? The film's score utilizes songs from Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, and Simon & Garfunkel, which I'm sure is supposed to "mean" something but mostly just makes you wonder: Do Hendrix and Dylan actually exist in this parallel world, or are we breaking the fourth wall, here?

Also-- if you're offended by repeated full-frontal shots of nuclear, possibly cancer-causing blue dick, definitely don't bother seeing this movie.

L-Scale Grade (out of a possble 5 Ls): L 1/2

The New Regime, "Coup"

Confession time: I didn't actually have high-speed internet until last June, so I was a bit late in getting into the whole downloading music thing. Once I got into, though, I never got out: Probably half my iTunes library consists of songs that I've downloaded from the internet, and the last time I actually bought a physical CD was when NIN's The Slip came out in May of last year.

I was reminded last night, during a trip to the mall, why it is that I download instead of buying physical CDs: A, there's a nearly-infinite selection of music available for download via retailers like Amazon, and B, downloading an album is usually about $3-$5 cheaper than buying the same album from a brick-and-mortar store. FYE, the store in which I was browsing, had a very limited selection, and the average price of a CD was $15.99. Ouch! It's no wonder that the big labels are hurting!

And wow, that introduction turned out to be a lot longer than I had originally intended. You're probably looking at the title of this right now and going, WTF? Is this a review or another long-winded rant about the decline of the music industry, which has already been done to death by smarter people than you? No, really, this is supposed to be a review. That long-ass intro was supposed to be a short paragraph saying how my preference for downloading music rather than buying it has led me to discover artists who offer digital releases of their albums but not neccessarily physical copies of them, such as New Regime (I hate Myspace, but this is the only website for the group), Ilan Rubin's project, who just released his debut album, Coup, via iTunes and Amazon.

Rubin, a 20-year-old drummer from LA who has worked with Lostprophets and is currently the touring drummer for Nine Inch Nails (you just knew this would circle back there somehow, didn't you?), wrote all the songs and recorded all the vocals and instrumentation for Coup himself, during Lostprophets' hiatus-- no small feat, considering that the album features a dizzying array of different styles and influences.

Clearly informed by artists like Queen and the Beatles, Coup is a diverse, ambitious effort. Opening track "The Collapse" begins with a piano-and-drum stomp that quickly leads into a "Bohemian Rhapsody"-style lamentation on "what you've become", while a few tracks later, "Haunt My Mind" employs some nifty electronics and a spare piano line in its intro. "The Credit 'We' Deserve" is an airy, acoustic-guitar-driven jaunt that features Rubin harmonizing with himself (yeah!) and a well-crafted, Beatles-esque melody.

Sometimes Rubin gets a little too ambitious-- too many tracks follow the same formula of "quiet intro, then explode into rock god bombast, fuck yeah!"-- and his singing is a little dodgy, especially when he's trying to channel Muse frontman Matt Bellamy (who, if you ask me, usually vacillates between channeling Freddie Mercury and Thom Yorke, so I don't know what that means), but these problems are easy to overlook. A more noticeable flaw in Coup is its overwrought lyrics, but after all, Rubin is only 20 FREAKIN' YEARS OLD, so "melodramatic" is the name of his game.

Overall, however, Coup is a solid effort from a talented up-and-comer which anyone who enjoys Queen and/or Muse should check out.

Essential tracks: "All These Changes", "The Credit 'We' Deserve", "Haunt My Mind"

Rating: LLLL (out of a possible five Ls)

Woohoo, first official IDLWTIG music review!

Dear Lord help me; I'm listening to Britney Spears and actually sort of liking it. A friend of mine made me a copy of her latest album after I brought up a news story about la Brit sharing rehearsal space with NIN, and I must say, I am eternally grateful to her. Don't get me wrong; pop is still pop, and la Brit's little-girl voice gets grating at times. However, with Circus, Spears seems to be out to prove that she's not just the next has-been psych-ward case, and she's lined up a set of expertly-crafted, adventurous club bangers to accomplish that feat.

The album kicks off with the one-two punch of “Womanizer” and “Circus”, two dancey, single-worthy tracks which provide a jarring contrast to “Out From Under”, a Max Martin-penned ballad that could hold its own in a grudge match against any pop song currently on the radio (and which would actually demolish the latest entries from Beyonce and the Killers, if you ask me). “Kill the Lights” is yet another “Brit vs. the paparazzi” journal entry, albeit one that documents the battle with bitchy tongue-in-cheek humor and impeccable beats, while “Unusual You” seems to channel Depeche Mode, with its blippy synths and keyboard line. “Blur”, produced by Timbaland acolyte Danja, is a woozy account of the morning after-- a subject on which la Brit is undoubtedly an expert.

There are two or three duds-- notably, “Mmm Papi”, which is just creepy, and “My Baby”, whose melody and lyrics are so cloying and trite that you'll probably end up with tooth-decay after too many listens-- and the last third of the album is fairly forgettable, save for “Leather and Lace”, which is a fun romp through every musical style of the 80s; however, Circus is plainly the work of a pop goddess who is finally back at the top of her game.

Essential tracks: “Unusual You”, “Circus”, “Kill the Lights”

Rating: LLLL (out of a possible five Ls)