The 1967 coming of age story falls down once the Benjamin Braddock's upper middle class claustrophobia wears off, but the beginning of Mike Nichols social farce is both funnier, wittier, and less crass than any imaginable modern take on "cougars" - see Matt Damon's scene in Ocean's Whatever. While it's hard to imagine any young college graduate as naive as Ben, Dustin Hoffman, very fresh faced and handsome, plays the discomfiture perfectly. My favorite scene? The one where Ben is shoved unceremoniously into the pool by his father while sporting $200 (that's $1470 according to Dollar Times) worth of scuba gear, a potent image of man drowning in expectation and materialism.

Mr. Braddock: Ben, what are you doing?
Benjamin: Well, I would say that I'm just drifting. Here in the pool.
Mr. Braddock: Why?
Benjamin: Well, it's very comfortable just to drift here.
Mr. Braddock: Have you thought about graduate school?
Benjamin: No.
Mr. Braddock: Would you mind telling me then what those four years of college were for? What was the point of all that hard work?
Benjamin: You got me. 

I just bought this iron at Joann's based on brand recognition among sewing circles. The Rowenta Power Duo 6650 is fairly sturdy, feels nice when pressing and the buttons are smooth. However, since the iron doesn't have an auto-off feature, I find it very curious that there isn't even a basic on/off switch. Instead, you have to plug and unplug the cord whenever you want a break. Furthermore, the thing doesn't seem to stay on continuously nor steam on command - horizontally or vertically. After one rotation, the iron clicks a couple of times and the light near the cord goes off. Finally, the twisting fabric dial is beneath the handle so it's annoying to adjust.

What I should have gotten is the Black and Decker iron Canada Community College uses for sewing classes. All the same features plus, the controls are on top, along with the digital fabric window, so adjustments are easy to monitor. Although the iron has the auto-off feature, at least you can always tell if it is sleeping or ready to use. The caveats; the trap door is chintzy and the cord doesn't swivel. The pros; the auto-off feature seems to have a longer shut down period then other irons.

Sleeping Beauty Disney Castle, Tron-ified




Joseph Kosinki, Architect of the New Tron Film

RRROCK REVELATIONS

Life and Time - The Great Deep, "Deep"
I play this EP in entirety a lot. A lot. The quirky vocalist, the hip but not overly kitschy production (so many tracks smothered by reverb!), the math rocky, Zazen Boys surf punk vibe deserving of standalone post. Fortunately, Korean Indie has a great writeup, so I don't have to.
See also: single "Tiger".


Royal Pirates - "Fly to You"
Unfulfilled 2nd EP but deliriously good first, with this song rising to the top over the course of the year.

CNBLUE - "Can't Stop"
And the album. And the Japan releases too. And...

YG DOMINATION
Melancholy songwriting defines compelling identities for new acts at YG of late.

TaeYang - "Eyes, Nose, Lips"

Winner - "Empty"
HONORABLE MENTIONS:
YG TOTAL DOMINATION... and SM

Akdong - 200%
These two just being themselves - BFF conversational, candid and comforting, composed and well executed - is more than enough personality needed. How cute are they?
See Also: "Melted"

I finally betook myself to the allergist, a visit to which confirmed certain suspicions regarding my symptoms, mainly that all things green and growing, particularly grasses and elms, are nasal kryptonite along with the usual suspects such as mold, mildew, dust mites, etc. But there were also a few surprises in my bill of health, namely that I'm actively allergic to tobacco, and not, in fact, allergic to wheat, honeydew, or walnuts. Unfortunately, many types of nuts and grains are often manufactured in the same place, so cross contamination is a factor. Perhaps my aversion to honeydew was because kitchens often serve it with canteloupe? Furthermore, milk or wheat intolerance is a separate issue and those need to be diagnosed through a battery of blood tests. For now, it looks like I can still have my baked goods, made with eggs, milk, wheat and the like. However, being allergic to corn and soy is very troublesome. Corn syrup flavors countless products, soy lecithin is a common binder, and common baking powder is a mix of leavening and corn starch. Buying any bread, ice cream, snacks, and drinks were a task last night at the grocery market. Lucky me though, I now get to have organic apple juice and make food from scratch 24-7.

In the interest of health, a list of things I will be eliminating from my diet this next month.


Almond
Avocado
Barley
Bean, Lima
Black Bass
Blueberry
Brazil Nut
Broccoli
Buckwheat
Cantaloupe
Cashew
Catfish
Celery
Codfish
Corn
Flounder
Green Pea
Halibut
Hazelnut
Lobster
Mustard
Peanut
Pistachio Nut
Potato, Sweet
Pumpkin
Sesame
Shrimp
Soybean

Wiki has removed his entry so there isn't much info out there in English except perhaps a small ode on Soompi but Yoo Young Jin is a man of many talents. Musician, performer, composer (producer in our modern American lexicon), and lyricist extraordinaire, this lanky haired professional has served up countless Korean hits for SM Entertainment and Avex Trax. He rocketed mega groups such as H.O.T., Shinhwa and S.E.S. to number 1 and proteged some of the best Korean vocalists - Fany, Boa and DBSK/TVXQ. Over time, his production has only gotten more sophisticated, penning songs for Super Junior and Shinee, and writing material for Kangta, not to mention his own solo albums.

Pedigree aside, Yoo Young Jin, has a specific knack for creating the most bombastic of boyband club blockbusters like The SHINee World - Shinee. He often lays massively thick basslines beneath dark monotone verses, contrasts that with soaring romance, then playfully intersperses ethereal bridges and explosions in between (Don't Don - Super Junior). Unusually dynamic song structures (O-DBSK) appear as mini switchups, double bridges, and epic compositional changes that are de rigeur today in America's more progressive producers.

At his best, Young Jin adeptly transmogrifies his sources into narrative epics. Take a closer listen to more than 1o years worth of chart toppers and You Young Jin's Tracks jump out as a relatively distinguished pop with sophisticated stuff going on in a veritable sea of copyright infringement. Yes, a lot of those sounds were foraged from the American back catalog of House of Pain, rave massives, nu electro and Timberland/lake canoodling, and some of it is leaden cheese. Indelibly though, the fingerprint of Yoo Young Jin marks Korea's pop landscape. Hate it or love it, he has shaped our taste for the cream of Korea's pop culture. No one could have lived through any kind of asian scene in the 90's without fingerdancing to seminal H.O.T. I mean... who can forget the bouncy insouciance that was Candy? Meanwhile, he's rhyming "sorry sorry" with "shawty shawty" over dirty synth and hypnotic bubbles. Like, What?!

Realist writer Moravia, lays down the truth bomb on a tortured relationship in, Contempt, and fascism in, The Conformist, both translated into film by Godard and Bertolucci respectively. The writer is intensely interested in misrepresentation, the point at which projection becomes invisible or decadence begets a need for order, and thus, the cinematic interpretations accurately depict tenuous idylls ruptured with a kind of paradox.

As incisive as McTeague, by Frank Norris, Moravia performs a dissection of human fallibility within the framework of external pressures. In the novels, though the object is always meaningfully and maddeningly obscured, the drive for clarity is precise. When the omniscient narrator is removed, complicated internal dialectics become flattened and baffling on screen. Instead, the audience needs to succumb to the aftereffects, pure visual interpretation, become mere humans wallowing and wading through the muck as best we can. Remarkable how much gets lost in and without language.

'What the 70s really looked like' goes the tagline for "The 70s Dimension", the idea being that the utter marginalia of a time (the disc compiles inane TV commercials) speaks more truthfully than a run-through of iconic images. The DVD is a release off of Craig Baldwin's label - Other Cinema - and these are indeed the very frequencies of Other Channels, the same broadcasts of memory & archival delirium. Channels, as in changing by remote, heading into an unreliable past left indistinct & disproportionate. Childhood here is diffuse and roaming - a string-section swoon (equally applicable to spy romance or an ad for a furniture sale), might be followed by oscillators and blown bottles (i.e. John Barry *click* John Baker). Fixations of prequel EP Mind How You Go also get a renewed season: those public information films - here the disquieting "Frozen Ponds PIF" - and a lot of Roger Roger style library synths. Probably the most diverse Ghost Box record so far, maybe even the first in a marked departure w/ its Penguin book-cover traded in for a polychromatic 16mm dissolve. What would a widening spectrum imply - examination of a less specified collective unconscious? Or maybe just a later one, w/ a vague chronological drift forward/backwards alongside present time. A speculation is haunting me.

Subtle movies that explore "big issues". That's where the weight of my favorite films of 2008 seem to be thrown. From obvious topics like the Three Gorges Dam to lesser known ones like Argentinean Patrimony, these films seem to teeter in no man's land of fact and fiction. But unlike My Winnipeg, where fact and fiction stand in contrast to each other, or hard sap, like March of the Penguins, these films refashion reality from fictional stories and fictional stories through truth telling so that the greater narrative is eventually seamless, on the verge of crux.

7-8. A moralizing typical film takes the propagandist stance about "issues" and incites a self congratulatory response over our hypocritical bourgeoisie responsibility to solve them. However, neither Encounters at the End of the World or Still Life are satisfied with totalitarian definitions or answers, simplistic views of apocalypse. And both Herzog and Zhangke absolutely refuse to settle into straight pedagogy about the Global Warming Crisis or Destitute Modernization. Rather than dramatizing the Antarctic or Chinese "problem", the directors complicate the ultimate scenario to draw out a universality of underlying hopes and fears. Herzog reintroduces his audience to limits of the human relationship with nature, while Zhangke illustrates a melancholy richness left behind in the wake of undeniable beurocratic desolation, to teeter at the very edge of an awareness, half in and half out of "real life" and yet more "true" than any documentary or dramatization. Through, deft handling, the images meet at some ordinary yet fantastical shore where black and white differences are erased, perhaps instilling perhaps a more fundamental desire to make a difference.

6. On a similar note, The Sun Also Rises, by Jiang Wen, is a fictional, seriously fantastical film about China's uncomfortable relationship with its own cultural and social transformation. Told as an interwoven epic in multiple parts through the lens of three cinematographers, the film reminds me very strongly of Hemingway's book by the same name, where the characters are expatriates in a strange land, lost in haze of debauched hallucination, absurd events occurring from almost nowhere to incur violent reactions. However, in the case of 太阳照常升起, the Chinese are strangers in their own land, and thus the series of surreal displacements become an act of conflicted remembrance for old worlds that barely exist or maybe never did. Jiang Wen plays those interruptions of the Chinese myth as a sense of uncertainty that can never be truly allayed. It is probably telling that images from this film continue to float up from my subconsciousness to haunt me from time to time: a pair of twinkling embroidered shoes, floating on a patch of grass on a glittering river, the wide eyed barely contained hysteria of Joan Chen confronting/seducing/disgusting Anthony Wong Chau Sang in a dank backwater hospital bed, the vaguely Wuxia ghostliness of a gnarled tree twisting through a fog that hides many secrets.

5. Apparently, many critics found The Headless Woman bafflingly cryptic. The unusual style of editing: images with extremities chopped off, shadowy figures out of focus fore and aft, mysteriously off camera chatter, creates disorientation about characters and plot. Who are they? What are the relationships? I found the film dreamy and repressively terrifying because of these omissions. But the purposeful sense of confusion is director Lucrecia Martela's technique of structuring the oblique narrative (Vero, the central character, may have killed a boy with her car) through pure imagery. The direction plays out as visible representation of Vero's inner shock and her willingness to elide any error. Each carefully composed frame is imbedded with importance that builds almost invisibly to the film's topical resolution. In fact, Vero's visual story of trauma and guilt is evenutally reclaimed by a subtext of privilege and class, latent patriarchy and gender. Don't let the heady cinematography and meandering staging deceive you, the film has a story and a reason.

4. Wendy and Lucy is a hard-luck story and an obvious tearjerker about a girl stranded in podunk, Oregon whilst on her big escape to Alaskan salvation. When a series of small happenings play out badly, Wendy loses her best friend Lucy - a cheerful golden yellow mutt - and has to find her again. Clinging to normality with spent perseverance, Michelle Williams, as Wendy, embodies the quiet eloquence of a person's desperate isolation and the indifference of people around her as they live their lives towards dead ends. I admit, I cried harder than any other movie I've ever watched probably, but Director, Kelly Reichardt, earns those tears because the film isn't just a cute weeper, but really a frame by frame account of a person's dissipating self worth. An indie age tragedy. Steinbeck for our recessionary times.

3. On the lighter side, but by no means less important in a year of competently illustrious and agreeably well received comic book Blockbusters (Hulk, Hellboy), the winner is... Iron Man. No contest. "Why not Batman?!" you ask, despite more solid performances, tight storytelling, cinematic beauty and great action coming together in one better-than-those-other better-than-real-dreck superhero movies. Well, despite some glitches, Iron Man has all of the above Plus...

Robert Downey Jr's unconventional yet very convincing take on Anthony Edward "Tony" Stark, a nuanced, what some would say, an even three dimensional character. Granted, you have to like RDJ's riffing and broad physical tics, but I do, so Downey's Stark is believable as a charismatically self involved, emotionally crippled genius that tries too hard, but is a real treat to watch. Honestly, he's a little pathetic. But a "vulnerable super-hero" movie which lets the superhero be Vulnerable? Ding!

Plus = Gwyneth Paltrow's understated, charmingly credible treatment of what is traditionally a passively blank female lead. Her Pepper Pots, neither femme fatale or damsel in distress, brainiac or butch, has a world outside her man. Some forgotten critic (sorry) said Downey and Paltrow in Iron Man heat made probably the best romantic comedy since Annie Hall and I would have to agree. Ding! Ding!

And even though I like the inside of a well organized gun locker as much as the next gal, Iron Man slightly sidesteps the convention of "here's the microscopic super duper ray gun, heatseeking latchhook gizmo, and the new boat/helicopter/bike/mobile". Ding!

Obviously, all these perks of the film are part and parcel of Iron Man's inherent character - he makes his own toys, he doesn't get the girl, he's really an alcoholic - but I think Jon Favreau did a bang-up job turning those quirks into a new look for superhero films.

2. Finally... well, my explanation for this film is a little complicated and goes back to a rousing yet not-very-well-thought-out response to Stephanie Zacharek's review of Pixar's Cars in which she scoffed at anthropomorphized vehicles and tired of Car's "red state-blue state divisions". Now... first off, I would have to argue that anyone who thinks a foodie rat who mind controls a human puppet through some major hair pulling in order to make exacting french bistro cuisine is actually any more HUMAN than a city mouse Porsche with serious Fahrvergnugen, is a little less than exacting, or doesn't know how to operate a clutch, or at the very least, has popped a belt in an uncanny valley somewhere North of La Cienega. Thinking that a machine is cold, hard, emotionless is already to anthropomorphize them. An anti-anthropomorphosization, if you will. I admit that Cars was stretched a little thin, but having done a few Republican cowboy jaunts, I'd have to say that vibe was right on the mark (maybe too many marks but generally on. On that note, I have to yield to Manohla Dargis' discomfiture over racial stereotypes in children's animation films. Did anyone else notice that the short stubby, love making penguins in Happy Feet were Mexican?) And yet, as critics - self proclaimed to stand outside the realm of identity making - who soapbox about automobile sprawl from high castles while extolling 'Where's the Prius?', I'm not sure they have a right to criticize "country values" with their very liberal notion of route 66's colorblindness. Cities and suburbia have The Incredibles. Rodents, after all, have that damnable Ratatouille. Why can't Nascar/Low Rider/Cadillac Records fans have Cars? But I digress.

I believe in the circle of life and that animals have feelings. I grew up with Data as a role-model and Transformers for entertainment. So I might be what realists call an anthropomorphic nut-job. In any case, because of my mental setbacks Wall-E takes the silver medal on this lineup. Wall-E isn't really an issue movie despite minor stabs at the hegemony of the iPod aesthetic, fast-food nation, consumer culture, and the media. Bird balances the Buster Keaton-esque humor, the Space Odyssey references, and the Johnny 5 rip-off, with the "thinky" stuff admirably well. But underneath it all, Wall-E is a pure gem of anthropomorphic wit. The kind that Pixar is famous for. Relatively free of dialogue, the charming love story is one completely made up of tiny zips and zings, physical gaffs and still life moments. There's no way you can't feel for this ragtag collection of little robots, but if you don't, well... you just might be human after all.

1. Despite my reservation about the neatly tied psychodrama of the rushed ending, Kaiba is probably, nay, is definitely the most original anime series in recent memory. With the melancholy soul of Cowboy Bebop and a bubbly anime style that looks too easy, almost crude. Kaiba is hard to describe because most of the joy is a wonky world of objects moving in unnatural ways and behaving surprisingly, even to our already sci-fi, anime laden minds. But this isn't a mecha flick, or just another philosophical inquiry - a la Ergo Proxy. Each episode of Kaiba has a plot, albeit moody and mysterious, but one with definite resolutions. The series never feels the need to completely demystify things for the audience (making the larger story arc an adventure), but leaves plenty of hints on the central motifs of death and memory while opening lots of queries on love and identity. Explaining that Kaiba is both an amnesiac man who has a hole in his chest as well as a memory eating plant that devours entire planets isn't really going to cut it. Telling you that the director, Masaaki Yuasa, produced and wrote the script for Cat Soup may help a little. But I think you really just have to watch the series yourself.

Nadia Rose - "Skwod"
Speaks for itself really...


Laura Mvula - "Phenomenal Woman", "Overcome", "Show me Love", "Ready or Not"
Celestial rays of angelic sound bathe earthy vocals in extraordinary compositions of empowerment and joy.


Adele - "Send My Love (To Your New Lover)"
I love Adele best in her cheekiest ("Right as Rain") rather than moodiest ("Rolling in the Deep") modes, and "Send My Love" is really the former in the guise of moody confrontation. A spare confessional blossoms into harmonic overdub, each added voice a layer of regret, coalescing into an insistent clamor of resolve, perhaps closure


Solange - Don't Touch My Hair (album)
Solange's emotive territory is much more intimate and mysterious space than Beyonce's public autobiographies. If Beyonce sort of Represents for the Other through the self, than Solange blurs the line between self and universal, Channeling .


Little Mix ft Sean Paul - "Hair" 
Overcoming Shitty Breakups through Female Solidarity and Makeovers!


Kacey Musgraves - A Very Kacey Christmas (album)
Christmas in 50's Hawaii, where Willie Nelson meets tropicana.


case/lang/veirs - "Honey and Smoke"
"Honey and Smoke" sounds like something David Lynch would like. Creepy and plaintive.


Drake - "Hotline Bling"
Not a Drake fan, but the combo of sad sack/Cosby dancing/Casio presets won me over hard.


Domo Genesis ft Anderson.Paak - "Dapper"
Remember Faith Evan's "Love Like This"? Well I'm pretty sure these guys do too. Domo Genesis' Mace impression provides the perfect half-baked counterpoint to Anderson.Paak's raspy feel good sing song.


Yemi Alade - "Ferrari"
Warm, afrocentric afropop.


Justin Bieber - "Company"
Easy, breezy tropicali put Beiber on the map, but "Company" is the easiest and breeziest.