My crisis of character: I really want to see Shoot 'Em Up

Those who know me well know my spiel against movie violence. A thousand times (and in print) have I rallied against violence being an aesthetic as opposed to a device, and argued that overexposure to violence adds to our violent sensibilities rather than comments on them (I even scooped A.O. Scott). Yet, here I am, four months later, faced with a movie whose motto is "Violence is one of the most fun things to watch" that features violence as ridiculous as shooting an umbilical cord and shooting while jumping off helicopters. Yet, I'm...strangely...fascinated.

Shoot 'Em Up plays to a lot of my sensitivities. It has two of my favorite actors starring (and I'm not the only one with crush man-crush on Paul Giamatti and Clive Owen). The director Michael Davis, best known for straight-to-DVD stinkers, claims Looney Tunes as his main influence, including Owen eating (and killing with) a carrot and Paul Giamatti doing his best Elmer Fudd, all the way down to his cellphone's "Kill the Wabbit" ringtone. You don't have to attach much to the words "Looney Tunes" to capture my interest.

But still, this is exactly the kind of movie I've opposed, and I'm in all likelihood still going to see it on Friday, possibly at midnight. I know Walt Whitman said "Do I contradict myself?/Very well I contradict myself/I am large, I contain multitudes," but I'm too Jewish not to struggle with this. If I look for a close comparison in my taste, I'll look to 300, which I loved, and thought and thought got misguided criticism. I suppose more important to me than violence as an aesthetic is how true a movie is to what it claims to be, and both Shoot 'Em Up and 300 never claim to be subtle, despite what Mr. Scott says.

It'll be interesting to see how the critics respond to this movie, and whether they will backtrack on their 300 stance and call it "fun" or will start another national controversy. It consoles me a little that critics have been proven to contradict themselves from time to time, but it consoles me less that the freshest example in my mind is my arch-nemisis: David Denby.

Burying CBGB even further in the grave: R.l.P. Hilly Kristal

Not even a month after punk rock lost one of its finest facilitators in Tony Wilson, an equally influential personality on the west side of the Atlantic has also passed. Hilly Krystal, the hobo-looking dude who founded a club for “country, bluegrass, blues and other music for uplifting gourmandizers” (better known as CBGB & OMFUG) died on Tuesday from lung cancer at the age of 75. Krystal didn't plan on pioneering punk, he didn't even like the music, really, but his insistence on original material and open-door policy with bands like Television and the Patti Smith helped provide the bedrock of New York punk.

Krystal had been talking about opening up another version of CBGB in Vegas, but I suppose that idea will never pan out. It's for the best, I suppose, as people have pilgrimaged to Bowery and Bleeker even without the club there, and I suppose they always will. No need to turn it into another House of Blues.

Chicago Rock & Roll: Not even Sufjan can save it

I am a native New Yorker, yes. Yes, I still think of Chicago as the second city. But over my 3+ years of intermittent living in Chicago, I have developed a sense of pride in the city. My growth in music taste overlapped my time in Chicago, and it's no coincidence that I now count the Big Black, the Effigies, Naked Raygun and the Ponys among my favorite bands. But although Chicago's music scene is creatively thriving, financially it's not milking that potential for what it could be.

That's bad even from a punk standpoint: it means that local bands are not getting the support from the city they fully deserve. According to The Trib, despite being home to 10 times as many musicians as Austin and more vital than cities like Nashville and Seattle, Chicago is lacking in its reputation as a major American music hub, according to researchers at our very own University of Chicago. The study blames the small, spread out nature of Chicago nightclubs as the main reason for a lack of support.

There's a lot of silver lining to be had, however. There are now two major American music festivals each summer at Chicago, though one has to wonder if their proximity to each other dilutes/ their audience a little. Also, this is the first time a major study has been conducted from an economic standpoint, so now that it's been presented to daily and featured in the press, we will see some blowback. This time, not all the blowback will be coming from Steve Albini's mouth.

She Blinded Me with Science: Empirical tests of critical buzz

What makes a good movie? Ask any critic, and they're opinion will go back and forth. No critic will say one type of movie is better than one another, though in most cases, they have a paper trail to prove they're wrong.

Now, we have an academic study showing how critics generally respond to movies. This is not from a film studies professor (heaven forbid the imperialist, racist, modernist social sciences impinge on the purity of the arts) but from a psychologist at UC Davis named Dean Simonton. Simonton argues that R-rated dramas, movies adapted from revered books or plays, and movies with good scores are most likely to be praised, while sequels, summer blockbusters, and comedies are less likely to win praise.

Simonton put thousands of movies under rigorous statistics tests to essentially tell us what everyone already knew. So for every Proof and Knocked Up that bucks the trend, there are many more like Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo and Children of Men to cancel it out. I'm all about applying science to the arts, especially in ways that don't apply to money, but something tells me the economists will get a hold of this sooner or later.

Oops I did it again...Zuckerberg, Facebook apologizes for leaking code to enemies of freedom

So for what seems like the bajillionth time in the last few years. Mark Zuckerberg finds himself apologizing to his users. This time, it's a "bug" that leaks some of Facebook's code out to the public, thus increasing the opportunities available to hackers and identity thieves. Granted, it's no more of a threat than when a friend of mine created the now-defunct theassbook.net but that was back in 2005, during the old, unregulated days of the Wild Wild Web 2.0, when Facebook was limited to a couple of hundred colleges, and YouTube was nothing more than a gleam in our eye.

When you're about to be a billionaire, however, you can go the Bush route and have a spokesperson deal with the fallout for you. Enter Facebook spokeswoman Brandee Barker (as fitting a name for Generation Y as I've ever seen), who assures us that ""It was not a security breach and did not compromise user data in any way." Tell that to the 12 year olds who still use their birthdays for their passwords.

All in all, it basically amounts to an increase from a yellow to an orange threat level for Facebook users, but it's just another case of egg somehow managing to fall on Mark Zuckerberg's face.

R.I.P. Tony Wilson 1950-2007

The world lost one of it's best cultural impresario's today, as Tony Wilson died of cancer at the age of 57. Tony Wilson's impact on the cultural of the last 30 years is incalculable. The founder of Factory Records, he was one of the main facilitator of both punk's Manchester origins, and especially, post punk with the likes of Joy Division, the Happy Mondays, and the Stone Roses. With the latter two bands, as well as the Joy Division offshoot New Order, he helped found the Madchester scene that would dominate the music world in the '80s and early '90s, all centered in the Hacienda Club, which Wilson also recommended.

If you care, you know all this. What I would recommend you do is rent 24 Hour Party People, a brilliant portrayal of Wilson and the Manchester he helped create, with a career-defining performance by Steve Coogan. Here's the final scene from a film, which seems so wonderful at this moment right now.

Jack White thinks music critics are lazy, Jason Gross agrees

In a relatively fair recent NME article, Jack White criticizes the music press for being lazy and inaccurate, and even as a music critic I tend to agree. Anyone who's mislabeled a photo or forgotten which song was original and which was a cover (not all that hard to do in the music criticism world) knows that accuracy is a serious problem in entertainment press, even when information is readily available. Over at crazed by the music Jason Gross admits that it's a hard statement to swallow but agrees that it's a fair argument. Gross's blog is excellent, btw, and he's one of the best voices of reason in the music blogosphere. Kudos to him for not taking the bait and getting defensive. No need to launch an A.V. Club-style roundtable discussion.

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25 Best Opening Lyrics of All Time

Spinner came out with a list of 25 best opening lines. It's a pretty pop oriented list—"Superfreak"'s "She's a very kinky girl" ranked #1, which is debatable, but I'm mildly annoyed by the inclusion of "Buddy Holly" and "In da Club" over some more obscure, but better opening lines. My fanatic love of Wire leads me to be partial to "Our own correspondent is sorry to tell, of an uneasy time, that all is not well" from "Reuters," and what about "I'm a street walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm" from "Search & Destroy"? Though I suppose with Patti Smith, the Sex Pistols, the Ramones and Elvis Costello included, there's enough punk to go around. Thoughts?

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Bratz for teh suck!

Looks like we have an early Razzie favorite, folks. While potential Razzie candidates have been in no short supple as of late with the likes of Who's Your Caddy and I Know Who Killed Me, very little has gotten the vitriol Bratz, that other toy-based movie. Every critic savors a moment like this, where they can let their inhibitions go and completely slam an undisputed piece of crap, and know they won't really face any slack for it. What they don't savor, however, is the 2 hours they have to spend waste watching the piece of crap. According to the Bratz review at Cinematical, piece of crap may be an understatement, as Scott Weinberg repeatedly stated would prefer to jam is $10 in a "poop-filled blender." Seriously, check out the Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic pages of these movies if you're feeling like a little spite for your Saturday afternoon.

People blame the media for giving them the celebrity gossip they so desperately crave

THR's brilliant headline yesterday was on a report by a Pew Research center study that says that the vast majority of Americans (87%) blame celebrity culture on the media, as opposed to themselves. Cable news is hit particularly hard, but network TV, newspapers, and of course, the iintarwebs, are also to blame.

What people don't seem to realize is that viewers are in more control of what they watch than ever before. What determines what the media covers is no longer conniving journalists in a closed door room, but in fact, one website Google Trends. Google Trends and especially its Hot Trends feature monitors the highest risers in search queries for a given day. I've watched it nearly every day for the past week, and I will say that either the 25% of people who said they closely follow the war in Iraq are either lying, or haven't been near a computer in the last few years. In almost any given day, the report will be a mix of trivia answers, sensationalist murder cases like those found on local news, or the latest major scandal, be it Lindsey Lohan's second DUI and possession charge or the Michael Vick dogfighting scandal. You'd be hard pressed to find much related to Gonzales, troop increments, or mostly anything in the national political realm. In fact, the biggest politics-related phenomenon I've seen skyrocket on google trends is not a news story, but a publicity campaign related to pop culture: Hilary Clinton's Sopranos finale spoof.

Not unrelated is another Pew Center study that Wired reported on recently. The fact is, despite the unprecedented amount of available information to American youth, they are even less informed than they were 18 years ago. The amount of youths who could name the Vice President dropped from 74 to 69 (think about it: that's Dan Quayle vs. Dick Cheney), and only 36% of the country can name Vladimir Putin. The information is there, but people just don't want to hear it.

iHistory of Violence: Apple goes fascist

Most people know about Apple's 1984 ad. It's considered to be one of the most important ads in television history, and it was even spoofed on Futurama. But recently I discovered another foray into sci-fi circa 1999 that's even more frightening. A mix of a disturbing movie reference, the fear of Armageddon, and portraying it's rivals as some sort of evil, humanoid monster.



I guess there is some correlation between Mac geeks and Kubrick geeks, which is fitting, since I am reluctant consumer of both.

Here's the 1984 ad: