James Blake's album works SO much better if..

...you erase from your mind the idea that it's a dubstep record.

It really isn't.

I admit I was pretty surprised to find that it's mostly sort of quite polite electronic folk-soul.


It's this




plus a dash of this





Nowhere near as good as either of course.

A few of the tracks are actually quite insipid, much more anaemic than expected, and the dreaded glottal stop of Blake's delivery renders at least one track virtually unlistenable.

BUT

At its best it suggests a true, emerging artist experimenting with dynamics and sonic space.

And this is great. In the air tonight for the blubstep generation.

February feeling

five for feb


This track is just so ferocious and evil. It cannot be stopped.





The ghost of some 50s doo-wop band played through an electronic noise box. Underwater.




Toro Y Moi is spring sex music




White-powder soul whose individual elements; an impossibly sunny, smothering sax, New Order-ish guitar lines, vaguely prefab-y vocals, shouldn't really work - but they do. And how.




Teenage girls playing the music of 40-year-old Mojo readers sounds all kinds of wrong, but this is so lovely and timeless, it's hard to resist.



bonus:

hurry up summer



white and nerdy. And brilliant. And also kind of horrible.

sex, sleaze and style

Couple of recent pieces by me over at Chris and Phil.

Why Amer succeeds as art installation but not giallo cinema





the grotty bare behind bars and why I don't dig the 'chicks in chains' genre very much.

Jaws and jugs

'gleeful, hilarious trash'

my review of PIRANHA 3D over at podcastdoors

Sion Sono: out there

Two of the most interesting films I saw this year were by Suicide Club and EXTE director Sion Sono.

I can't say either of those films blew me away, although they did have points of interest.

But nothing in either could prepare me for this...



Mind-boggling stuff, utterly demented. And it's four hours long?

It's actually a couple of years old now, but I caught up with its giddy charms just a few months ago.

Here is the trailer for a brief flavour...



and this, which I saw at the London Film Festival, is pretty damn good as well.



Very strong stuff though, with the customary horrendous sexual violence that the Japanese do so, er, efficiently.

Depressingly, the LFF crowd, who I would expect more of, contained a few soap-avoiding, basement-dwellers who chuckled throughout some utterly wincing sequences.

Anyway, it ends on a very adolescent, downbeat note, but up til then it's like a Miike film with discipline.

most utterly horrible thing of 2010

in film terms anyway.

Not just Depp, the whole thing.

I normally can't be bothered to write at any length about films or music I hate but I have to make an exception for this.

This film utterly depressed me.

Burton, a brilliant talent whose early career contains at least two near masterpieces, is seemingly intent on wiping out trace memory of those early, unique films. This is cinematic fraud, a cash-courting atrocity.

He's managed to take one of the weirdest and wildest of all children's tales and make the least interesting version of it ever. The maligned 1972 Alice, while stilted and often cinematically static, at least has some imagination and a lovely John Barry score. It also strives for a sense of wonder, something completely lacking here.

It’s a relentlessly ugly, shrill, atrocious piece of whimsy that annoyed me from start to finish and contains an end scene (with Depp, mugging gracelessly throughout) that made me want to set my own face alight with rage and despair. Even the kids in the cinema were clearly bored and restless by the end.

The fact that Burton bases his snow queen (Anne Hathaway with white hair - continuing Burton's odd obsession of taken beautiful raven-haired actresses and putting them in horrendous blonde wigs) on Nigella Lawson(?) tells you everything you need to know about where this ‘dark visionary’ currently is. He’s now a bogus outsider, a perpetual grumpy Goth kid who thinks he’s ‘weird’ but is in fact utterly, utterly conservative.

There are so many interesting, freaky and unique versions of this tale.

That said, if you judge good cinema by the dollar, this is up there with the best of them. It's already made about 800 million dollars worldwide - so what the fuck do I know?

Perhaps Burton might use some of the cash to go back and make a good - or at the very least interesting - film again?

other horrible films from 2010

The Lovely Bones
Whatever Works
Nowhere Boy
Tamara Drewe
The Tourist
The Kid
Micmacs
Green Zone
Kaboom!


disappointments
Scott Pilgrim
Never Let Me Go
Somewhere

two zero one zero: films

turned out to be a pretty good year in the end.

absolute fave



next absolute fave



revelation (for me, as a non-Leigh fanatic)



these two would make a great future double-bill...






three I saw in 2009 but they came out in the UK this year, and I didn't have a blog a year ago, so...







whereas this came out in 2009 but I didn't see it til THIS year. It's my blog, my rules. Also, yes I really liked this...



Sublime stuff



dreadful year for horror. This was great - and timely - though



this will most likely go straight to More4 or storyville. Please watch...



not just another 'safe' choice oscar foreign film winner...



2010's hidden gem