Culture from the darker side

There are very few studios these days in Hollywood that people trust blindly. Pixar so far has been the one that had delivered quite well over the years. Pixar’s latest “Cars” isn’t an exception.

As common for most Disney movies the story itself is rather simple. It’s a morality tale and a love story. I can imagine how the pitch session must have gone at Disney:

Writer: “Well, it’s a love story and we have a morality tale in it as well.”
Suit: “Again? What’s the hookup?”
Writer: “Well, it’s cars who do the story.”
Suit: “Cars? You mean people in cars?”
Writer: “No, cars.”
Suit: “I don’t get it….”
Writer: “CARS!”
Suit: “…. but you are Pixar, so I am sure you make it work.”

I am not quite sure what to make of it. Gasoline is not running in my vains, and NASCAR is not something I am following, so a lot of the inside jokes are probably going past by me. The story itself is straight forward, so what is left is the dialogue and the amazing graphics. A scene in which the cars “chase” each other through a wooden stretch and drive through water looks utterly amazing.

Car is an entertaining movie, no question about it and for car aficionados it clearly is something to enjoy. For everybody else there is the goodness of a Pixar Story and beautiful pictures and some more general inside jokes.

Rating: 3.5/5

In 2003 Billy Talent released their first album, which was self titled. Now, three years later it seems that they didn’t spend a lot of time trying to come up with a snazzy name for their second album, instead they just slapped a “II” behind it and where done.

While this sort of minimalism has to be applauded in a way the album itself is clearly a step forward from the first release. Surprising enough though the band hasn’t gotten slower, if anything it has gotten harder, if not angrier.

The first single and first track of the Album “Devil in a midnight mass” takes the abuse of young altar boys on and does so with an anger that clearly is reflected in the music. In fact using this album while doing a slow run outside has proven hazardous as I tend to go way way way faster than I should.

This in itself is a good indication on just how energetic the album is, even slower songs like “Worker Bees” still has a lot of raw energy to put out and it is seriously entertaining.

Rating 4.5/5

Sometimes you just want to have loud music, if it has some good lyrics too it’s just a bonus.

Billy Talent is a good example on how you can combine both. I admit, I have a hard time “classifying” music. There are so many Genres and Subgenres these days (heck, almost any band invents their own) that it is hard to keep track of it. Billy Talent I would throw into the Punk genre though and their debut album clearly had me bobbing my head, not to mention endangered my hearing by my desire to just crank it up one more. Yes, they are that energetic.

Billy Talent (the album) was first released in 2003, but as I pretty much gave up on Radio and Much Music since 2002 it didn’t show up on my Radar until last week when someone gave me the CD. The album overall is energetic, lyrics aren’t stupid and you can listen to it from end to end if you need / want a “pick me up”. It clearly must have been a good album back in 2003 and even now, three years later and the release of their new album just around the corner, still rocks.

Rating 4/5

It has been a few months since the last book in the DarkAge series. The last book was a bit unusual in the series as it centered more about a crime story than the “broad canvas” kind of story that has been the hallmark of the series since it’s inception.

In “Trial By Chaos” we are getting a bit back into the swing of things. The story centers around the planet Vega which is the first step in an attempt to rebuild the republic, lead by a Galaxy of the Raging Bears, the former class Ghost Bear.

What makes this installment a bit more unique is that the author, J. Steven Jork, decided to have the commander tell roughly half the book by “diary entries” of one of the main characters. This is interesting to get some background info on the clan as well as the situation, but in my opinion breaks the flow of the story, which made me skip parts of it.

The story, once again, does not really play into the “large canvas” of what is going on. The last insight we got into the Republic of the Sphere was when two books ago they “drew up the bridges” but we have not been told what is going to happen since then, and this book does not give us any more indication.

In a way I was a bit disappointed, I cannot see how it fits well into the canon of the universe, but maybe the next book will give some more reference this and then the book makes more sense…..

Rating 3/5

1491 has the potential to be either loved or hated by it’s readers. A fact that is shown in some of the commentaries on the Amazon website.

In 1491 Charles C. Mann goes back in time and explores the Americas before the white man came in, before the picture of the hapless indian that needed saving by the white man became pop culture. He uses modern archeological finds as well as accounts from historical witnesses to paint an entire new picture of the Americas in a time when we still consider it wild and undiscovered, and what he finds is anything but.

1491 in part is an archeological book about the America’s past as well as a science thriller about the modern western science hard grasp with the fact that we may not have been the domineering culture in the world in 1491. Outright denial reaching late into the 20th century.

What to make of this book? The book dedicates almost 1/4 of it’s 465 pages to references, to say Mann didn’t do due diligence is out of the question. His writing is mostly engaging, though at times I had wished he’d be a bit fast, while at other times I wish he’d gone more into detail. Of course this is a danger in any of these books and as he pointed out himself, there is enough material here to fill more than one book. So maybe it should be seen as a primer, rather than a full blown account of the Americas before 1491 or all of todays discoveries.

Rating 4/5