Christina Amphlett has died

If you were ever into 80s pop, you’d know Christina Amphlett, the lead singer of the Australian band, the Divinyls. She’s had some rough years since, dealing with breast cancer and multiple sclerosis, which finally did her in this past weekend, at the too-young age of 53. (Cancer sucks, and so do progressive neurological disorders, and she suffered through both.)

Americans mainly know her for just one song, “I Touch Myself,” but she actually did a number of successful albums in her own country, so I thought rather than playing the most obvious one, I’d put up a different song.

Nothing accidental about it

Brad Paisley is just a plain ol’ straight up racist.

He’s trying to defend Southern pride with sentiments that are almost reasonable.

I’m proud of where I’m from but not everything we’ve done

Which is fair enough — there’s nothing wrong with being from the South. But the beginning is about flaunting the traitor’s flag: the confederate banner which wave to defend slavery. Guy, if you’re looking for vestiges of the Southern past that you’re not proud of and that you’re willing to reject, start with that flag. It’s not hard.

Even more bewildering, though, is that LL Cool J joins in late in the song.

If you don’t judge my do-rag
I won’t judge your red flag
If you don’t judge my gold chains
I’ll forget the iron chains … Let bygones be bygones.

WTF? He’s equating wearing a scarf on your head with waving the Confederate battle flag, and worse, comparing a fashion choice with slavers shackling people in iron chains?

That is about the most screwed up song I’ve ever heard. Not to mention that it’s boring derivative C&W.

Maybe if they sink a lot of the budget into special effects…

There is no accounting for taste or credulity. Universal Pictures is planning to make Eben Alexander’s book into a movie. You remember Alexander; the Proof of Heaven guy, the surgeon who ‘died’ on the operating table and claimed to have visited heaven?

It might be interesting to see the effort. The whole tone of Alexander’s fantasy is one of vagueness, ineffableness, incomprehending awe — he talks about seeing indescribable beings like birds or angels that he can’t do justice to in words, for instance…I don’t think crisp CGI is exactly going to work in his favor.

Les Misery

Oh, yay, someone thinks the same way I do. I saw Les Miserables this week, and let me just say…it was the worse movie experience I’ve had since The Expendables (but for completely different reasons, of course). And just to put it in perspective, I watched Warning From Space with the @MockTM gang last week. It didn’t make me moan in pain as much as this movie did.

Anyway, the review is spot on.

At 158 minutes, this is a long musical film (it’s was a long book, and I’m talking about Victor Hugo’s, not the libretto) but I was shocked to find that it has only one song, and that’s the "Dream-de-Dream-de-Weem-de-Weem" song. The other musical numbers seem to draw their melodic inspiration from the recitatives, the kinds of tuneless tunes you might absent-mindedly whisper under your breath while you vacuum — only here, of course, they’re belted out at the tops of the actors’ lungs.

Yeah, they made a ‘musical’ with only one song, and they slugged it out early in the movie so we could spend the next two hours wondering when there was going to be some more music.

Here’s a deeply flawed parody of that one song.

It’s missing a few key pieces, like being in really intense closeup so you can see every pore and the hideous blotchy mottling of poorly applied excessive makeup splattered on a 19th century French prostitute. Also, she’s not emotional enough: you need to be able to see the watery mucus pooling in her nostrils, so you can sit on the edge of your seat through half the number wondering when it was going to flood onto her lip.

One star. In extreme closeup. With swarms of sunspots like rot corrupting the surface.

I shoulda checked the reviews first

I watched the movie Red Lights last night on Netflix. The first part of the movie was strikingly familiar: it practically stole the life story of James Randi. There was the Peter Popoff exposé, the psychic surgery stunts, the usual whirl of frauds and fanatics, all under different names with different details, but the same general stories about exposing flim-flam. And then it had a marvelous cast: Sigourney Weaver, Robert De Niro, Cillian Murphy. The whole movie is following a good ol’ skeptical trajectory…and then, the ending. Oh, jebus, I have never seen a movie so thoroughly implode as this one did with that ending.

Stop here. Don’t read further, unless you want to know how it ends, because I’m going to give it all away. Completely. This isn’t just a spoiler, it is full disclosure.

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