What they don't want you to know

The state of music today is simply put chaos. Economically and artistically it is all going down the drain. I don't know if that is the reason for it, or if there is something else going on but the decline of musical quality have been severely lacking for some time. Personally i believe it has to do with a fixation with image and a dull crowd. The problem that rises from all of this is a concerning loss of identity. Naturally i am not speaking about the really commercial stuff because that is simply put without any sort of merit orquality per definition. What i am talking about are the little smaller acts that play at festivals etc... I am talking about all the fleet foxes, Arcade Fires of the world. All those acts that have been praised about their smarts, social conscious and just general ''cleverness''. Problem is, it is not proper art, or rather it is not music as an art form. There is too much from the brain and too little from the heart and soul. Maybe they're just afraid?

If you have listened (not heard) to a bit of music, what you start feeling is the decline of real honesty in the craft and art. Just because you have a nice melody line to go with those chords doesn't mean you should. Music is a language and what you feel today is that you have already heard all the arguments, or rather, no one is actually willing t

o have an argument. People are only interested in having nice discussions about the general beauty of nature or something along those lines. Listening to the wonderful Michael Gira, what i feel is that personal expression is dead. No one is willing to take a risk and do something different. It is a bit like movies, all the best ones are about humans and ideas. Without those, you would just get an empty shell.

I think most good artists hear a lot of stuff they love, and all the good ones pick from a lot of varied places and spaces. Take all your influences and ask yourself what do I want to do? How can i make noise that sounds distinctly me? And most importantly, w

hat do i want to say?

If you listen to a lot of music you should naturally feel pretty much at home in a number of different genres. Take all those and ask yourself how you can combine the different parts you like into something interesting. What is it that you enjoy about metal and what is that you enjoy about dubstep? Distill those down to their essence and you will be able build something.

What I am looking for when i hear an album. Three easy points:

1. What are you trying to tell me about?

2. How are you telling/showing it to me?

3. Why are you trying to tell/show me?

These three points show clearly how a popular group like The Police had moments where they could genuinely transcend into something far greater than just pop music. It combined genres and was actually about something. Sting once upon a time actually wr

ote tunes with really interesting content and mood and all the members of Police brought it their personal touch. It was genuinely about music as a means of communication.

The explanation to why almost all of the good music is a bit odd is quite simple. We are all human beings and therefore we are all different. We all have a unique identity and personality and if you are truthful in the music you make, that will be reflected. Hence to a start, people will see it as sort of weird because it is you. The beauty of other people lie in their personality and you can't truly love another human being until you've spent a considerable amount of time with them.

See what I am getting at?

People

The spotify playlist above have bands that are connected and sound sort of similar, but the more you listen to it the more you feel that they are all truly individuals. It may sound weird at first, but that is because you are listening to the stuff of people, not accountants.

then again, guys like Richard D. James can get a bit overkill...

More human than human

Splice Review

Vincenzo Natali is definitely one of the most interesting directors working in ''mainstream'' cinema today. With pictures such as Cube, Cypher and Nothing he has proved himself to be a proper original who's at the end of the day simply put is extremely interesting. This is for me an important point to make with splice for whatever you may call it, it is just not dull.
Splice is basically about two young and sort of perfect hollywood scientists who go a wee bit too far by splicing animal and human dna they manage to create an entire new species. Of course the creature isn't just going to stay put and be nice, or is it? The two protagonists are played by Sarah Polley and Adrian Brody, who also just happen to be a couple. Adrian Brody in my opinion is a wonderful actor and Predators was in some ways the last piece of a puzzle that really did show that he can pull off any sort of role effortlessly. Point being: name me three actors that believably would be able to do both Szpilman from the wonderful Polanski movie the Pianist and Royce from Predators. Sarah Polley is someone i really haven't seen before and i felt she didn't really manage this piece. It is probably because there are some quite striking problems with the script concerning the characters and partly because of the fact that she didn't made me buy into everything her character felt, and that is very much the main flaw the movie. Some parts didn't feel properly written and i thought the motivation and explanation for what the characters feels etc... weren't really shown. at all. Secondly, and it's very simple, they should have went with the strength of their convictions and gone all the way with the story because unfortunately, the final 10-15min of the film are just klisché horror movie stuff, and it had until then been too interesting and too gripping to justify bailing out.
What really worked with the movie though was the mood and story. Simply put it is actually quite good and more of a psychological and twisted drama/thriller than a dull slasher or horror film. What the movie has at it's best is a sort of twisted Polanski and Cronenberg vibe going on, you know, bits of psychosexual and bits organic horror.
In any creature sci-fi/fantasy type of film an important part are the creatures. Looking at both the design and the technical elements Splice definitely excels. The cgi is very good (and not overdone), the props look very ''nice'' but where the actual magic happens is in the design department. The main creature (which they name dreN) which is something they created by splicing both human and animal dna. It is a wonderfully weird affair, never knowing which animals they used you are constantly a bit nervous about which properties and abilities it has.

I want to conclude by saying this: Splice is not a a flawless affair, but it has a properly interesting mood and the ideas within are very interesting and gripping. It is something different and that is always worth celebrating.

And all that could have been

Inception Review

After all the hype, Nolan's latest picture has finally arrived, but what has me scratching my head is as to what it actually is. Speaking from a pure technical view it is more or less perfect. It has been gorgeously shot by Nolan Regular Wally Pfister who once again proves he is an excellent craftsman by giving the most intense scenes space to breath and framing the shots in cool poster ways. The special effects are nothing short of a triumph, proving beyond any doubt that less cgi is more. In choosing to make the most of the special effects mechanical i.e putting something physical in front of the actual camera and shooting it, Nolan shows us that cgi will probably never look; or feel as real as something that is actually real. Sure towards the end there is a fair bit of cgi but it is never there just for the sake of it or because they have an awesome special effect that can do this or that. From an objective view, the worst thing about the movie is the soundtrack. I honestly found that it was outright pretty bad and very uninspired and that Hans Zimmer could very well have fundamentally been the wrong choice. This critique is grounded in the fact that the soundtrack is just too common and lacks any distinct or specific ideas. For me there are two important things to say about this. First of all i come from the view point of David Lynch in this regard, this is not meant in a stuck up way, but i will let him speak for himself; for what he said was this: ''Cinema is sound and picture moving in time''. What he is saying here is that sound is a very important and an integrated part of a film. Now considering this is true, what happens when the soundtrack is truly subpar? It effects the movie greatly and that becomes a quite important problem of Inception for it is scored in such a way that you would be hard pressed to find a single second without something in the music department going on and it is truly suffocating.

In the acting department Nolan has once again brought together a great ensemble of actors (see, i avoided the word characters because this movie is seriously lacking in that department, but more on that later) with Leonardo Di Caprio, Ellen Page, Ket Watanabe, Michael Caine, Tom Hardy Joseph-Levitt Gordon, Marion Cotillard and the wonderful Tom Berenger.

Di Caprio is for me not the prominent actor he has been made out to be and here it becomes fairly obvious when he (despite being the lead and so called emotional core of the story) is the least interesting character in the movie. Ken Watanabe basically does what he can with the little he has and so does the rest of the cast. This is where the movie stopped working for me, we have no characters. I didn't feel like i truly got to know anyone which becomes a problem when the movie is drowned in action sequences. In all the great action movies you've had great characters, that is what makes them work. In The Rock we had Cage and Connery, Die Hard has Bruce Willis and so on... What a great character gives you is sympathy, whatever they do you care and you want to be in their company. Mind you, these could be anti heroes or villains that you are fascinated by, but at the end of th day they are great characters. In Inception all the characters are more or less only the sum of their parts, which in the Joseph-Levitt character means he protects other people, and that's it.

What is faultless however (i believe) is Christopher Nolans direction. He takes us into this world and shows us this world of ideas and makes us believe that the impossible is possible. He directs the action sequences very well and truly makes us feel the large set pieces. Also, despite the script being fairly complex, for example when they start being in a dream within a dream etc..., Nolans direction makes it crystal what is going on and where we are so that we never become lost. The big issue with the movie however is that sort of classic parental mood. ''Chris, i'm not angry at you, i'm disappointed''. What Nolan has set out to do is a massive intelligent action blockbuster, in which regard he succeeds. This is where my disappointment originates from. Inception has been made out to be more than just a very well made action picture and it was certainly time for Nolan to show us that he could combine the cinematic and expansive vision of Dark Knight with the substance of Memento or Insomnia. In other words the movies faults doesn't lie in the execution but rather in what is actually executed. Inception is full of wonderful sequences, but these are only sequences and scenes that are awesome in their own right, but they don't really add anything to the whole.

I had personally hoped for a more provocative and mysterious experience but Nolan's dream world is anything but.

As a popcorn flick it is about as good as it gets this summer and it beats its contenders to dust. Only problem is that the movie it rivals are Prince of Persia, Twilight, Predators... while i was hoping for something along the lines of a new Blade Runner.