Heroes - Season 4

I don't care if this is the last season or not. I'm done watching Heroes. Recent events have forced me to realize that I'm wasting too much of my time continuing to watch series I no longer like. Why have I persisted this whole time, as the show has done nothing but get worse? I've seen many blog posts about how a few changes could "fix" the show, but in my mind it's beyond saving. Even if they hired good writers and actors and it somehow became watchable again, I know in my heart that I will never care about this show for another second. It's like when a man cheats on his wife and that's it, she knows she doesn't love him anymore and she never will. It's over. Why was I still watching? It honestly was partly curiosity at just how bad it could be, but I think most of it was so I could write this stupid post about it. I tortured myself for 18 hours over the last few months so I could say how much I didn't like it. That's no way to live. I briefly considered stopping the blog altogether or at least only writing once in a while, but I still like doing it. I will however promise never to experience anything just so I can blog about it again. I will finish watching the current seasons of all my shows and write them up. Then I will look at all of them and decide if I actually enjoy watching them. If I do, great, see you next year if you get a new season. If I don't, that's it. I'm not wasting my time anymore.

Heroes fucking sucks.

The Big Lebowski

I was watching this again with friends last night, for the first time in too long. While there are films I would name as superior artistic achievements, I really can't think of any that I love more. Few movies hold up to repeated viewings as well as this one, and there are only a small handful of flaws that keep it from being perfect. There's something special about it, like you could try to replicate its success with the same amount of talent both behind and in front of the camera and never find the same magic in a hundred years. Instead of pontificating on why it works, I'll just start listing little details you might not notice the first couple times but help show why it's such a cult favorite. It really is the epitome of that sort of thing, failing when it was in theaters, but it's hard to find someone in my age group who hasn't seen it at this point.

- There's a lot of stuff with shirts that's fun. Most people have noticed that Donnie's bowling shirts never actually have his name on them, but fewer know that between their first and second scenes, Jackie Treehorn's two thugs decided to switch what they were wearing.
- It's fun to think about how people became friends. Walter and the Dude get along but really don't have much in common, leading us to think they were put in a situation where they were forced to find common ground, like they went to college together and were roommates or something. Neither one seems to care much for Donnie, but you can see how they saw his bowling talent and befriended him so they could use him on the team, and him being so weird accepted the only friends he could get.
- A bit more mysterious is how the Jesus and Liam became bowling buddies. The best theory I've heard is that the latter is the former's parole officer.
- Not really a fun fact, but Philip Seymour Hoffman is fantastic in this movie. And it's the only time I've ever seen something make Tara Reid useful.
- When he's discussing the toe with Walter in the diner, the Dude gets angry and dumps some change on the counter to pay for his coffee. It's easy to miss that he picks up a joint he accidentally grabbed with the money before he shuffles out of the place a bit too quickly.
- Walter's inappropriate references to Vietnam are great, but I might like his flashbacks even more. It only happens a couple times, but he'll forget where he is for a minute.
- Have you ever made note of how many times the movie could have ended if the Dude just stayed out of things? Eventually he gets in too deep, but if Walter never told him to go see the other Lebowski, or if he didn't take that specific rug from the place, and so on.
- It's gotta be common knowledge for fans at this point, but it's great how much of the Dude's dialogue is taken from what he's heard other people say and how all the elements of his dreams come from somewhere else in the film. Perhaps the best instance of this is when he tells Larry he's going to castrate him.
- How sad is it that Donnie's bowling buddies are the only ones at his funeral. Does he really have no family at all? I assume they knew him well enough to contact them if he did.
- The entire arc of Jackie's pornographic doodle is great. For one thing, it's a great drawing. For another, why is he drawing that while he's on the phone? What the Dude does is one of his smartest moments, but he gets nothing out of it, and of course it's the only thing in his pockets after he's arrested besides his Ralph's card.

I'm running out of steam here, so I'll wrap it up. Like I said, there are some issues with the movie and I'll touch on those. When the Dude gets thrown out of the cab and Bunny zooms by, the shot lasts too long and the Dude's expression of bewildered dismay ends up looking artificial. It's a very small problem, but again, we're talking about one of my favorite movies ever. Another thing is that I think there's only one scene in the movie that doesn't feature the Dude, the very brief snippet where we see the nihilists ordering breakfast. It's not really necessary because the other scene shows Bunny's toes intact, and it would have been nice if you could say there is no scene in the film without its protagonist. It's a stylistic thing, and when you're that close, you might as well go for it. These are both minor quibbles of course, small bumps in what is still one of cinema's most enjoyable experiences. I don't doubt that I like the movie just a bit too much, but I'm okay with that.

Jay-Z - The Blueprint

I'm still just poking and prodding with rap, and I decided a good next step would be what might be the most acclaimed hip hop album of the last decade. It was released way back on 9/11, the same day when the towers fell. I don't know what it means that one of New York's most prominent rappers released possibly his best album on the same day of the city's worst tragedy, but there's definitely something interesting about it. Unlike using the events of that day to make political points though, The Blueprint still feels relevant nine years later. It helped lead a shift back towards using samples in rap beats, as Jay-Z and the various producers on the album (including Kanye West before he launched his own career) took a lot of 70s R&B and soul, and even a bit of The Doors, and made it sound new, with pretty much every track having its own sound yet a consistent feel with a heavy dose of bass. Some of the vocal samples are pitch-changed, and they're all used to add depth to the sound, and the album never sounds boring. I think Jay-Z is a talented lyricist and a pretty good rapper, but the star of the record for me is definitely the music.

I still remember a couple of the album's singles from back when they were playing on MTV, though they're honestly among my least favorite songs. They're not bad, and "Girls, Girls, Girls" redeems itself a bit with the second part crammed onto the end of the twelve minute final track, but most of the other songs just seem to have more heart and more interesting moments. The content of the album is heavily autobiographical as would probably be expected, and also a bit defensive, as he was getting some backlash at the time for being presumptuous about his place in the scene, although he's still very confident in his own greatness. To be honest though, I think the single best verse on the album belongs to Eminem, who collaborates on the track "Renegade" which is apparently a remake of one they did earlier. It's overall an extremely good song, with a beat that's unique to the album and some extraordinary lyrics from both rappers. "Takeover" is another one that sounds a bit different from the rest, and features some pretty brutal disses including two bars at the end that pretty brilliantly wave aside just about everyone. There's plenty of other good songs on the album, and there's not really a point in naming them because it's just such a consistently high quality achievement.

The Antlers - Hospice

I tend not to get too emotionally affected by music, mostly because I usually ignore lyrics unless they're especially clever, and well, a lot of musicians don't try that hard. But it's difficult to pay attention to Hospice at all and not get hit by it. It figures that only a couple weeks after I wrote a "best of 2009" list which featured nothing that made a huge impact on me, I'd hear an album as gripping as anything in recent memory. The music itself is only part of the equation, and you can't talk about Hospice without mentioning its origins. From what I can tell it's more or less the true story of the singer falling in love with a terminal bone cancer patient at the hospital where he worked. You can probably guess how well that works out.

Despite the simple honesty of the lyrics, they never really hit you over the head with the message, and it's easy to ignore the content if you just want to hear a nice mix of shoegazing post-rock and indie folkiness (why isn't this a more popular combination?), though if you do you're not giving it a fair chance to do everything it can. Some people probably wouldn't want to hear an album that would only depress the hell out of them, and that's fine. But it's one of the more powerful listening experiences I've had in a while.

Despite the sorrow of the words and the sincerity with which they're sung, it wouldn't work if the music was bad, and fortunately it's not. There's a fair amount of time spent without much happening beyond ambient noise, and it's difficult to love every moment when it feels like you're being pulled out of the flow a bit. There's a push and pull with the general sound as it goes between a strumming guitar and louder noise elements, and it could have gotten bogged down in its own seriousness. Luckily it's catchy enough in places to just be enjoyable to listen to, even while they're playing songs about abortion and knowing that someone you love is dying. I don't want to name individual tracks, because it really should be experienced as a full album, and it all runs together like one long piece of music. If you just want a taste though, it's okay to look up the music video for "Two". I'm definitely interested in seeing what this group does next now that this story has been told.