the movie/concert ketchup

kim is gone again. this time to upstate new york. she'll be back friday night i think. happy halloween. nothing going on. i've decided that they should change halloween to the last friday in october. who wants to trick or treat on a tuesday night? teachers don't want to deal with tired kids the next morning. also, classes can have their party at the end of the week. and i bet bars and clubs make more money for halloween when it falls on a weekend. it would probably take an act of congress so i won't bother trying to change it. i also have some beef with this whole daylight savings crap. seems like "they" pushed back the date this year, so when it finally changed this past weekend it was a pretty drastic change. when i get out of class at 4:45 in boulder the sun is already over the mountains. and i heard next year they want to push it back by another month. i guess that is fine. the only reason why i even keep talking about daylight savings is that i've just been used to living in utah for so long. we were in the same time zone as colorado, but were so far west, so our daylight would last longer i guess you could say. oh well.

The Prestige (2006): a dark movie about two rival magicians in late nineteenth century london (and colorado springs) who battle it out to one-up each other and steal their secrets. the intro is really good. a little confusing though. i kept thinking how all the magic was really cool to see, but then you realize it was all just movie special fx. oh well. it was difficult keeping up with all the flashbacks. hugh jackman did a great performance. really powerful. i thought the other guy was kind of weird though. and david bowie plays a very memorable nikola tesla. the pieces all fit pretty nicely by the end, but the sequence of events are still a little hazy for me. it's a twists and turns type of movie, but it's not too hard to be a few steps ahead of the story and get some of the twists figured out. there may be too many twists and turns though. too many in that for days to come you can still be thinking about it and trying to piece it all together, but still not actually have a really good understanding of it all. the one weird guy's big surprise at the end can be figured out an hour before they reveal it. jackman's surprise stuff though was really cool. batman v. wolvi: wolvi wins. it's really captivating, shows off scarlett johansson's rack (she's not really good for much else in the movie), and is definitely worth seeing.
good, B

The Departed (2006): two cops. one is a rat planted by the cops in jack nicholson's crew. the other is a rat in the police department and really working for jack. one against the other. and it's a big race for the rats to uncover who the other rat is, before the other rat finds out and kills a rat or something. spy vs. spy type stuff. it really kept me captive from the start. and like the prestige it was kind of hard to follow from the start. it was interesting seeing both storylines (dicaprio and damon) going on at the same time, but really having nothing to do with each other. then it slowly weaved together. pretty cool. and it was very fascinating how the main characters connected with one another. both damon and dicaprio are both cops (sort of) yet their personalities were on opposite spectrums. pretty complex and deep character stuff going on which i liked. it was hard to know who to be rooting for because everyone was a little shady. nice guys were bad and bad guys were likeable. jack nicholson did awesome by the way. i thought this was a really cool character for him. and actually, all of the actors were great except for the girl in the story. i didn't think too highly of her character and how she related to everything. she's also part of a really crappy love scene. and it's pretty violent of course. not the love scene, the movie. there were some characters, specifically wahlberg and sheen's top cop characters, who didn't seem real to me. personally i don't think top cops in real life police departments are acting the way they do in the movie. i'm not sure how i felt about the constant music playing in almost every scene. toward the end there is a cool shootout that nicholson is involved in and it reminded me a lot of the big shootout in heat. this was a really good movie, but i guess my problem is that these witty crime-mystery type movies are made fairly often now. just like lucky number slevin this year. and while they are still cool to watch, movies like snatch came out like six years ago. snatch was just the first to pop in my head, but i know there are plenty others. so in order for me to really think highly of a movie in this sub-genre, they would have to really go above and beyond and not just reinvent the wheel with different actors and a new twisting plot. so in that sense i was a little disappointed. i still might buy it because it's really fun, complex, and hey, it's scorsese. really worth seeing. decent plot and great characters.
memorable, B+

i have a load of crap to do this week. homework never ends. never talked about all those concerts a couple weeks back. yo la tengo was really, really cool. some songs i thought were better not live, but that was my only complaint. it was a fun time with great songs. we were able to get an awesome recording of the show too so you can't beat that. their opening band was really out there. they were called 'why' and played some really complex off the wall stuff. i probably wouldn't buy their album, but the experience of seeing them was pretty cool. oh, and joe got us crazy lost getting there and back. single file played in denver right after YLT, so kim and i and ryan and danielle and dustin and dawn and a few dozen old time standley lakers gathered for this little event. in all about 550+ people came, but there were three opening bands so i'm sure a lot of people came to see those guys too. single file did okay i thought. nothing great. they talked way too much on stage and didn't play nearly enough recognizable songs i thought from their earlier ep's. they don't seem to know how to rock out very well and lack a good stage presence. it's strange that they don't just rock out and jam together since they are all jazz guys in their previous lives. i'm still waiting to hear any kind of soloing from sloan. their songs are decent, but saves the day was doing this stuff 5 years ago. it was cool seeing a lot of people at the show, but i wonder if this will be their peak in popularity. they really need to get a new album released if they want to keep at this i think. popularity through myspace will only get you so far, but i guess is why they keep touring, but still. people want the songs. maybe they can't get signed which is why they can't get released. i don't know how all that works, but i hope they get better. i guess their crappy single about trash lids and zombies is still played on the radio here, but i can usually only stand to listen to that station for about 5 minutes at a time so it's hard to tell how they are doing as far as air play goes. but i'm glad to have gotten that out of the way. maybe in a few years if they move up and play at the ogden i will go see them again. the other shows i wanted to see were a no go. i didn't see the thermals because no one would go and i wasn't interested in the main band cursive. and the show was cancelled for ozma because of the snow. but i was all ready to go to that. there aren't any other bands down the pipeline that i know of. who do i want to see? right now led zeppelin 1972.