Jackassalope Reviews in 3-2-1

Allow me to briefly review three CDs, two movies, and one book.

3 CDs

Emily bought the new U2 and Modest Mouse CDs. I really like the two Modest Mouse songs they play on the radio. The album is a bit more ecclectic and bitchy than their two singles. Modest Mouse to me is like a mix between Everclear and The Cure. Like Everclear, many of their songs piss and moan quite a bit about, well, nothing besides that it sucks to be a grown-up with a little baggage. And I don't think this is a bad thing. It's something we can all idetify with. And I imagine Modest Mouse is what of The Cure would sound like if The Cure didn't take itself so damn seriously. And again, this is no knock on either band. The Cure has a very special place in my heart. I think they're a great band. But it probably wouldn't kill them to loosen up a bit.

U2's How to Dismantle An Atomic Bomb is a solid very buyable album. It feels more sterile than their last album, but you have to give them credit for staying relevant through three decades. I have written before that REM is the band I hold closest to my heart, but U2 is a pretty ubiquitous part of anyone from my generation, whose pop culture awareness began about 25 years ago. Pretty amazing.

But the best album I have bought lately is Steve Earle's The Revolution Starts Now. It is already a dated album in some regards since he wrote it with 2004 Election consuming his frontal lobes. So it may be depressing to some to see such energy gone to waste. But I am inspired that there are musicians and writers out there who can express some of my views more succinctly and with more eloquence and melody than I can.

Two Movies

We rejoined Netflix, which is a good thing since our local $2 movie theater is now a $4 movie theater. This means that whatever movies I see will be very, very dated.

We watched Shrek 2 last night, which should, not very cleverly, be called Shit 2. It reminded me of Back to the Future 2 quite a bit. A lot of clever one-liners and gimmicks, but absolutely no attention to storyline. I was hoping Shrek would lose his moral compass and would chase after fame, fortune, and looks. He'd lose his way until almost losing Fiona and his loyal donkey friend. This would be the epiphany he needs to re-discover that beauty is indeed skin deep. That would have made for a much more believable movie and it wouldn't hurt to give Shrek a little complexity. But instead we were subjected to Dreamworks patting itself on the back for how clever it could be for 100 minutes.

So instead of Shit 2, go rent Supersize Me. You'll be glad you did in a Fast Food Nation, I'm-Never-Going-to-McDonald's-Again sort of way.

And now for a book review. I just finished The Fourth Hand, by John Irving, so you don't have to start it. I had to remind myself easily 50 times that this was indeed a John Irving novel. How could this be the same guy who wrote Owen Meany, Garp and Hotel New Hampshire? He developed a storyline about a hand surgeon a good 60 pages and then he just dropped the guy altogether halfway through the book. It's like he forgot all about him. This book is remarkabke in that it is the biggest gap between an author I admire and a book that I disliked. And it is a tribute to John Irving that he wrote this thing well enough to keep me reading it to the end, when I didn't give a rat's ass about any of the charachters and nothing thought-provoking happened to any of them. The one charachter I did like was dead before the story even really got started.

So there.