July 2006

It’s been a busy few days.

Thurs­day: we went to Super­man Returns. The movie was okay, but I think it could have been a lot more fun. Super­man was dull and flat, and Lois was just depressed. For­tu­nate­ly, Lex Luthor was a show-steal­er, and pro­vid­ed most of the laughs (though there were moments where Jim­my Olsen’s imper­turbably pos­i­tive world­view made me think of Will Fer­rell, in a good way).

Fri­day: I bought Clone Wars Vol I and II and Mike Pat­ton’s lat­est project, Peep­ing Tom.

Peep­ing Tom is an eclec­tic mix of tunes. Mike Pat­ton (lead singer for the now-defunct Faith No More, among oth­er things) teams up with a bunch of dif­fer­ent peo­ple. Appar­ent­ly the sound files were trans­ferred via email between the var­i­ous par­tic­i­pants dur­ing the album’s ges­ta­tion peri­od. I enjoy the tunes; some­where online I read that the project is “pop music as Mike Pat­ton would like to define pop music”.

Giv­en that Pat­ton’s voice is one of the rea­sons that I liked Faith No More so much–he’s got a range from gut­tur­al, death-met­al low reg­is­ters, all the way up to a nasal falset­to, and he sounds par­tic­u­lar­ly nasty when he’s stage-whispering–it seems nat­ur­al that I would like this album. And I do.

Inter­est­ing note: One of his co-con­spir­a­tors is Norah Jones. And she swears.

Peep­ing Tom on Conan O’Brien, per­form­ing “Mojo”, the album’s first sin­gle Tak­en off of YouTube due to copy­right violations.

We also rent­ed Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, which was a fun, vio­lent, swear-filled romp. It was a lot of fun to watch, sort of in the Pulp Fic­tion vein (in more ways than one, really).

And tonight I watched Vol­ume II of Clone Wars (I’d already seen Vol­ume I at my sis­ter’s place, cour­tesy of my bro-in-law). Vol­ume II was just as well-done as Vol­ume I. Why o why could­n’t the pre­quel tril­o­gy have been this good?

One of the extras on the DVD was a short film called Revenge of the Brick. It’s bril­liant. Espe­cial­ly the orches­tral bit at the end. Enjoy!

Oh, one more sort-of Star Wars relat­ed item. A cow-ork­er for­ward­ed this to me, and now I’m con­tem­plat­ing buy­ing the album. It’s a song called “Crazy”, by a band called Gnarls Barkley.