Combine one part Nirvana and Foo Fighters, two parts Queens of the Stone Age, and one part Led Zeppelin (yes, THAT Led Zeppelin), mix well and serve.
You know a film's dark when the funniest moment in its cringe-inducing series of scenes is when the daughter of the main character aligns a knife point against her throat and threatens to kill herself if her Aussie adoptive parents won't let her go to Seoul with her mother.
Name: Muramasa: The Demon Blade
Developer: Vanillaware
Publisher: Ignition Entertainment
Platform: Wii
Release Date: September 8, 2009
Recently I found that I was in the mood to bash lots of things with a sword. Muramasa soon sprang into view, like a knight in shining Japanese samurai armor. A knight carrying lots of swords.
You might say it rather hit the spot.
The game puts you in the stylish sandals of either Momohime, a princess or something who has a rather rude demon/thing decide that her body would be better off with his soul in it instead of hers, or Kisuke, a ninja of sorts who managed to go and lose his memory.
Yeah, I groaned at that too. I hate amnesia plots with a fiery passion.
For those of you in need of an introduction, click here. You’re in for a ride.
This is kind of a bite-sized entry (har har), but there’s a reason. A teaser entry, perhaps? Leading into good times for the next entry, you say? Could be, could be. Read, enjoy, and discover for yourselves.
Chapter Nine
A visible warning: “‘One,’ he agreed. His lips pressed together into a cautious line.”
Is it just me, or does Edward’s entire face appear to be sentient? Every time one of his reactions is described, it’s the part of the face that’s reacting, not Edward. His lips are cautious. His eyes are any number of things. His… well, Steph really only mentions lips and eyes, but that still gives me plenty to work with.
I think the reason Edward seems to be so detached is that his facial features have been doing the work for him for so long that he’s just forgotten how to care.
How can lips be cautious? For that matter, what is a cautious line? Is there a bold, daring line with no reservations, just ready to leap into danger at a moment’s notice? How would lips even know the difference between these two lines?
So many questions.
Short-term memory loss: “‘Well… you said you knew I hadn’t gone into the bookstore, and that I had gone south. I was just wondering how you knew that.’”
Remember the part a few paragraphs ago in the last chapter where you guys were casually joking about the fact that Edward was psychic as if it were completely normal dinner conversation?
No? Oh. Ok then.
Album: Humbug
Artist: Arctic Monkeys
Label: Domino Records
Release: 2009
Quickly establishing themselves at the forefront of the mid-2000’s “British Invasion,” Sheffield’s Arctic Monkeys are an musically adept, fast-paced and aggressive band. You’d never know it though looking at them on stage before they play.
With long, shaggy hair that covers his eyes, dark sunglasses, and clothes that scream “I’ve been sleeping in these for a few days now”, lead singer Alex Turner stumbled on stage and mumbled in a thick British accent, “Hey. We’re Arctic Monkeys. Enjoy.” Read more…
What follows is not your typical concert review. It’s the result of multiple mix-ups, a writer who originally requested to cover a concert but couldn’t, another writer who volunteered to cover the event without having any idea who the artist was, and an editor left worrying about the logistics of having to clean up all the dead bodies that follow our fill-in Dave around wherever he goes. Enjoy. – Ed.
It’s a rap music night in Oklahoma City, and somehow my editor has hooked me up with a press pass to what has to be the most underground new artist ever, seeing as how even I haven’t heard of him. But the kid must have something special. My editor filled me in on some statistics for the young homie they call Owl City: over 600,000 scanned, his single “Fireflies” peaked at number one on the Billboards, and he recently penned a deal with a Universal subordinate, joining other rappers like Busta, Mobb Deep, 2 Pistols, Nas, and pretty much anybody else you can think of as members of the Universal Music Group playlist. I’m feeling pumped. First thing’s first, I need to get my look right so niggas can start hating. Like Riley Freeman says, if niggas ain’t hatin’, you’re doing something wrong.
Doors open at 6:30, but I show up a bit early to take in the atmosphere. I’ve got a Raiders Starter jacket over a Public Enemy t-shirt. I’m wearing a black bandana and immaculately white Reebok pumps. I’m still rocking my khakis with a cuff and a crease. I can’t wait for niggas to start hating, I can’t wait.
But there’s a problem. I notice it right away, but I can’t put my finger on exactly what the trouble seems to be. Something is missing. There’s nobody wearing corduroys and selling sherm in the parking lot. People are showing up driving mid-90s Chevy Malibus and Toyota Solaras instead of early 70s Impalas and Monte Carlos. Nobody is listening to Cypress Hill at a way louder than necessary volume. There are girls. White girls. Thirteen year old white girls. Lots of thirteen year old white girls.
I hate my editor. Owl City is apparently not a rapper.
Read more…
Title: 300
Director: Zack Snyder
Studio: Legendary Pictures
Release Date: March 9, 2007 (U.S.)
We manly men.
Manly men big and strong.
Manly men fight enemy.
Manly men fight many enemy.
Manly men like weapons and killing and nude things.
That, in a nutshell, is 300.
Title: Spirited Away
Director: Hayao Miyazaki
Studio: Studio Ghibli
Release: 2002
I’m increasingly wary of anime plots. Every time I sit down to watch a potentially interesting new series and end up with more mental question marks than periods I grow a little more jaded inside.
I want to like anime. I really do. But I increasingly find that more and more of them are so caught up in their convoluted world building and forced attempts to look cool that they forget to make characters you can care about, a story you can latch onto, or, in some cases, any sense whatsoever.
It was with some trepidation, then, that I watched Spirited Away. I had seen one of Hayao Miyazaki’s films before (Howl’s Moving Castle) and was considerably impressed. Surely he couldn’t pull off the same feat twice?
Happily, I can say that there’s something very special about Spirited Away. It somehow manages to erase most of my concerns with anime plots without actually fixing them directly.
Title: Daemon
Author: Daniel Suarez
Publisher: Dutton
Release Date: January 7, 2009
I’ll keep the description of Daemon’s plot short because I’m not sure I could adequately explain its complex swirl of technological weirdness anyway. The bottom line is that a brilliant/insane programmer type with an axe to grind wrote a supremely complex program that would linger after his death and kill people and stuff using the Internet as its weapon.
Pretty cool, huh?
For a glorious little while I thought Daemon was the perfect book for a guy like me – a book written to push my favorite buttons and rub me in just that special right way. (That’s all kinds of dirty – Ed.)
Album: Of The Blue Colour of the Sky
Artist: OK Go
Label: Capitol Records
Release: 2010
While the name OK Go might not instantly pop up in your directory of bands, chances are, you’ve seen these guys perform. They released their eponymous first album in 2002 to little fanfare, aside from the inclusion of a couple tracks on movie soundtracks. Their sophomore effort, Oh No, which dropped in 2005, featured two songs whose low budget, home made videos are in the YouTube hall-of-fame. The outrageous choreography of “A Million Ways” and the brilliant and quite impressive treadmill capabilities displayed in “Here It Goes Again” (which has over 49 million hits on YouTube) were their tickets to stardom. Their music is fast, loud, funky and playful, and catchiness is a huge selling point. Just try and get past the first 4 tracks on Oh No without at least one of those tunes caught in your head.
For their third record, OK Go teamed up with producer Dave Fridmann, whose claim to fame has been the production of 7 of the last 8 Flaming Lips studio albums (everything from Hit to Death in the Future Head through Embryonic…so pretty much the good part of the Lips’ catalog), and his trademark…well, weirdness. Not exactly surprising since he is involved with the Flaming Lips. This mixture of OK Go’s poppy, generally light-hearted rock and Fridmann’s characteristic feedback, fuzz and effect based production could have very easily been a disaster. Luckily, however…
From the first 10 seconds of album opener “WTF?”, the listener is quickly reminded that this is still an OK Go record….sort of. Read more…
Title: Oryx and Crake
Author: Margaret Atwood
Publisher: Nan A. Talese / Doubleday
Release: 2003
Oryx and Crake. The name alone is intriguing, no? Because first and foremost, I don’t know what those two things are, or at least I didn’t when I first read the title. A quick Google search resolved that dilemma – they’re sorts of gazelles and birds, respectively – but presented me with another. Namely, what the hell is this book about? And so, with great intrigue and perhaps a little trepidation, I read the damn thing.
Shocking development, right? Of all the things to do before writing a book review…
Splayed across the cover of this book are murmurs of prize-winningness and best-selling statuses and comparisons to Orwell. It’s a bit over the top, really, but when every two-bit author with a book to his name can claim some sort of prestige on the cover of his book, what’s a truly-talented author to do? Use THREE such declarations, that’s what.
If you don’t know anything whatsoever about Margaret Atwood, you can at least be sure that she’s fully three times better than the average author. That’s a scientific fact. Read more…
For those of you in need of an introduction, click here. You’re in for a ride.
Chapter Eight
Kill me now: “It had been a while since I’d had a girls’ night out, and the estrogen rush was invigorating. We listened to whiny rock songs while Jessica jabbered on about the boys we hung out with.”
Tell me about it, girl. Estrogen rushes are the freakin’ bomb.
I didn’t even know you could have an estrogen rush. Shows what I know. It’s certainly not a term you hear very often.
For good reason though, I think. It has an odd ring to it.
Title: Today Is Beauty’s Birthday
Artist: Oso Closo
Label: Unsigned/Independent
Release: 2009
If you’re anything like me, you probably go to concerts from time to time. I’m not talking about those massive light-shows in stadiums, but real concerts. The kind that take place in bars and other dingy locales, places with air so thick you get a buzz from second-hand smoke and a guy named Bubba checking IDs at the front door. The bands playing are usually from no further away than the next decent-size town or two over, and at most might have road-tripped it all the way from the adjoining state.
Maybe your friend’s band is playing, or there’s just some local act you enjoy hearing, but regardless you’re usually only there to see one or two bands. Every act leading up to them falls somewhere between mildly-talented-but-generic rock and I’m-just-doing-this-to-get-laid bilge. Usually that’s the case. Usually.
Cue the show I went to on January 2nd in San Antonio. I arrived around halfway through the lineup, suffered through a heavy-on-showmanship-light-on-musicianship band that will go unnamed here, and prepared to listen to another mediocre set. Lo and behold, instead I get Oso Closo. The first sign of promise I got was this: fully four out of five band members had beards. That’s the mark of quality, folks. Read more…
Title: Vanished
Author: Joseph Finder
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Release: 2009
Here is a corporate thriller to keep fans of the genre satisfied. Most chapters are five pages long or shorter, and end in a cliffhanger. Perfect for people like me with short attention – squirrel! Maybe not much to write home about, stylistically speaking, but once I got going it was hard to stop. So in that way at least, Finder’s “Vanished” is a little like cocaine. Read more…
Title: The Elder Scrolls: The Infernal City
Author: Greg Keyes
Publisher: Del Rey
Release: 2009
I’ve played a lot of Morrowind in my day. A lot. I still play it. I liked Oblivion, but it was too accessible. I was used to a game that literally did not care whether you lived or died, saved the world or butchered it. I was used to the black humor that went along with every action, every feeble attempt at taking on a Dremora Lord or a Golden Saint, the way the game laughed at you for thinking you had ever really achieved total victory.
But I loved The Elder Scrolls world, absolutely loved it. Slavery, imperialism, fraud on top of extortion on top of legalized assassination. Bodies on top of bodies accumulating like compound interest. So I immediately had to rush out and pick up the new Elder Scrolls novel, The Infernal City. Read more…
Title: Sherlock Holmes
Studio: Lin Pictures
Release: 2009
No, not the classic literature. That stuff needs no review.
For those of you in need of an introduction, click here. You’re in for a ride.
Hang in there kiddos, we’ve got a longer, epic-er entry than usual this week, featuring both the long-awaited end to chapter six as well as the entirety of chapter seven. Consider it my holiday gift (?) to you. Interesting stuff lies ahead.
Chapter Six (continued)
Bravely, after the progress-stopping stupidity that ended my foray into these dark lands, I soldier onward in my valiant attempt to make it deeper into the dank, dark territory of Twilight.
Let’s hope the going is easier from here. I’m not sure I could survive another terror of language quite as bad as “making an effort to smolder at him”.
Shouldn’t have typed that. Started laughing again. Must stop before moving on. Bear with me.
…
…
There we go. I think we’re good. Let us venture forth before I burst into another giggle fit.
Man, I don’t even have the slightest idea what was going on. Oh well. Probably doesn’t matter.
Title: Time To Die
Artist: The Dodos
Label: Frenchkiss Records
Release: 2009
Attention, alternative music snobs:
For those of you that like to critique every song you hear, the Dodos’ latest album Time To Die continues their classical approach to music. It’s constantly emphasizing different layers, so there’s plenty to follow along with while you listen. Even if you’ve never heard of the Dodos before, you’ve probably already been exposed to them on any one of the commercials last year that used their big single “Fools”.
I like music that I can listen to a thousand times and hear something different every time. With this band, that’s easy. It’s not always the lyrics that are deserving of your attention; it’s the musicianship taking place in the background that you become enthralled with. In this way of interweaving instrumentation focus and movements between voices, the Dodos are able to average 5 and 6-minute tracks without seeming to drone on. This approach to music creates a unique style to the Dodos. It’s why I’ve been a fan of them since I first heard their single “Men” on a SXSW sampler. Read more…
Ah. So. It’s been the holidays. One might even go so far as to say that it is still the holidays. As you may or may not be aware, it’s traditional at a great many publications to take the week off between Look-It’s-Baby-Jesus Day and eve of the new year. It’s a well-deserved break, a time to recuperate from the stresses of a busy year of writing and reporting and hard-thinking. How do they recuperate, you ask? Why, gentle reader, by replacing work stresses with the social equivalents that come from dealing with family members and distant relations that are otherwise-ignored during the other fifty-one weeks of the year.
Over here at Robot Bomb, we’ve taken that lovely publishing tradition and put our own spin on it. If you’re wondering what in the world that means, it roughly translates to this: we wanted to have a week off, so we took it. So far as I know, not a single one of us actually socialized with family members – bullet dodged! Writers did no writing, editors did no editing, and the PUBLISH button was only clicked a single time by a renegade who couldn’t stand a single week without his precious feature *glare*. Read more…
For those of you in need of an introduction, click here. You’re in for a ride.
All in the details: I have, to this point, managed to escape noticing that one of the group of vampires family members is named Jasper.
A vampire named Jasper. That is just all kinds of awesome.
Getting worried: I’m beginning to wonder if this book is negatively affecting my personal sense of taste. I just passed over the phrase “I couldn’t stop the gloom that engulfed me” and it didn’t even register until I looked over the sentence again.
This is not a good sign.
Title: Hello Hurricane
Artist: Switchfoot
Label: Atlantic Recording
Release: 2009
Hello Hurricane might not be the best album of modern rock and pop that Switchfoot has ever laid down, but it does include the three best songs the band has ever recorded. The triumvirate of “Needle and Haystack Life,” “Mess of Me,” and “The Sound (John Perkins’ Blues)” are simply the best songs that Jon Foreman and Co. have ever come up with. I only say this because I’ve been following Switchfoot since 1999’s New Way to Be Human, and I’ve heard almost every Switchfoot song there is.
The reasons for the triumvirate’s (and to a lesser extent, the whole album’s) success are manifold. Switchfoot demo’ed somewhere between 80 and 120 songs before committing any to the album, letting the cream of the crop rise. Jon Foreman got a lot of his mopiest ideas out with his recent Limbs and Branches solo project, as well as relegating his weirder side to the pleasantly odd Fiction Family side project. Switchfoot’s been doing this a long time, and they’re just good at it by now. Switchfoot finally has total artistic freedom over their work. All of those things tie together to allow Switchfoot to kick the Nothing is Sound/Oh! Gravity blues and write some fantastic songs. Read more…
Title: Gamer
Studio: Lakeshore Entertainment
Release: 2009
Oh my goodness oh my goodness oh my goodness. What just happened? Which hellhole did this movie just crawl up out of?
I just saw Gamer and needless to say, I feel a little violated. I’m not the type to walk out of a movie, unless I’m really bored and/or physically ill (particularly when I have a movie review to write for you, dear reader), but if I were, then I probably would have.
