April 22, 2008: It's Tuesday, and that means new things for your ears (CDs) and your eyes (DVDs).

For your ears, I can recommend the following:

- Billy Bragg: Mr. Love & Justice (great acoustic bonus disc, too)

- Flight of the Conchords: Flight of the Conchords

- a re-release of four Replacements albums, including my favorite, Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash

For the eyes, I'm putting Cloverfield in my NetFlix queue, but urge you to check these out:

- Friday Night Lights: The Second Season

- The Orphanage

- The Savages

Until next time . . .

April 21, 2008: Not a whole lot happening here at the PSB this week.  Three mainstream films opening (Baby Mama, Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, and Deception) and none of them are being screened in my market.  There is one scheduled screening, for the documentary Young At Heart, but that's something I'll catch and review it next week because of a conflict.  Since there's nothing to gab about on WBER's Friday Morning Show, I'll probably skip it and sleep in.

Nothing scheduled for Iron Man, either.  Not cool.  Not cool at all.

April 18, 2008:

PS-B RATING -

There's only a little of it out there, but the backlash against all things revolving around the cinematic universe created by Judd Apatow is enough to blind me with rage.  That one nerdy man and a revolving troupe of actors can release comedy films -- the most difficult genre to continually master -- of the quality seen in Knocked Up, Superbad, Walk Hard and now, Forgetting Sarah Marshall is the greatest thing to happen to moving pictures since the invention of sound.  That's four very funny, very well-made movies in less than a year, with no sign of slowing down.  Compare Team Apatow to, say, the Farrelly brothers, and think about how disappointing their output has been since There's Something About Mary.  It ain't pretty.  This comedy thing isn't supposed to be as easy as these guys make it seem.

In Marshall, yet another Apatow protégé is responsible for both the script and the lead role (and for writing a handful of very entertaining songs, as well), and his name is Jason Segel, best known in my heart as the lunkhead who reenacted every boneheaded guy move in the history of the world in his pursuit of Lindsay Weir on Freaks and Geeks.  Segel plays Peter Bretter, a musician paying the bills by writing music for a CSI-type show which happens to star his girlfriend, the titular Sarah Marshall (Kristen Bell).  Early in the film, Sarah dumps Peter to be with a Brit pop star (Russell Brand), and after some very awkward one-night stands, our super-depressed protagonist decides to drown his sorrows in the beauty of a Hawaiian resort.

If you've seen the trailer, you know Peter ends up in the same resort where Sarah and her new beau are staying.  It's awkward at first, but then Peter gets friendly with a hotel staffer (Mila Kunis) and, well, if you've ever seen a romantic comedy, you can pretty much tell how the story ends.  And that's the beauty of Marshall -- it's basic structure isn't any different than a typical chick-flick (aside from having a guy as the lead), but the moments that take Peter from Point A to the inevitable Point B are what you're turning out to see.  The moments that involve Apatow regulars, like Jonah Hill and Paul Rudd, which blend in the newcomers without missing a beat.  I would have liked to have seen a little more from the insanely funny Brand, the former host of Big Brother UK's who was very good but capable of more off-kilter humor than displayed here.

April 17, 2008:

PS-B RATING -

It takes around 720 seconds to figure out that 88 Minutes is going to be an enormous soul-sucking flop, and not much longer to figure out whodunnit.  Sometimes, you just know a movie is going to be awful before you even lay eyes on it, but it takes a special picture to blow so severely, even a viewer with incredibly low expectations will be staggered by its badness.  This is an impressively horrible film.

Al Pacino plays Dr. Jack Gramm, a forensic psychiatrist (?) and noted Seattle college professor who, so far as I'm able to gather, spends his time drinking and getting deeply involved in the lives of his hot female students and peers (Alicia Witt, Leelee Sobieski, Amy Brenneman, Deborah Kara Unger, Benjamin McKenzie).  Nine years ago, his expert testimony put away a serial killer called "the Seattle Slayer" (Neal McDonough), but a string of recent murders is making it look like Gramm might have been dead wrong in his assessment of the accused.  To make matters worse for old Gramm, the murders start to hit closer and closer to his insulated world of nubile females.  And, as if that weren't enough, he also gets a strange phone call, telling him he's only got 88 minutes to live.

The rub is that, from this point forward, the film plays out in real time, almost as if nobody saw or was the least bit excited by Nick of Time.  Gramm bounces around to various locations around the city (played mostly by Vancouver), which is funny because anyone familiar with Seattle knows traffic would have kept him from getting anywhere on time.  He also starts to look at everyone he encounters with a fairly high degree of suspicion, since he's not sure who's setting him up.  This means the supporting cast is all forced to act guilty, which is the equivalent of watching student in a high school play trying to act.  It's unbearable, but nearly as much so as Pacino's hair, which ranges from "normal" to "Almodóvar" in any given scene, despite the action taking place in one 90-minute window.

My two favorite parts of Minutes were completely unintentional.  In the background of one exterior shot, there's a poster in the background, trumpeting the release of McSweeney's Future Soundtrack of America, which came out in August 2004.  This means Minutes has been kicking around an awfully long time, while studio flacks try to figure out what the heck to do with the smelly hot potato.  Then, in the last reel, right when the big (obvious) reveal occurs, something went wrong with the projector's framing, resulting in the top half of the picture being on the bottom half of the screen (and vice-versa).  Clearly accidental, but it was the artistic highpoint as far as Minutes is concerned.

April 16, 2008:

PS-B RATING -

We're gearing up for the Summer Olympics, the European soccer championships, and a presidential election, and just like four years ago, there's a new documentary in theatres, showing a fu manchued fella named Morgan Spurlock putting his life on the line for your entertainment.  Unlike Super Size Me!, Spurlock isn't trying to gorge himself to death on fast food this time, but the danger isn't any less in Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden?.  That's because Spurlock (and his unlucky crew) go to the Middle East to try to hunt down Binny L. on their own.  The Middle East!  It's full of freedom-hating insurgents who hate your way of life!  For reading this, especially!

Actually, the hunt, which is rooted in Spurlock's desire to make the world a safer place for his unborn child, is kind of a ruse to find out what regular citizens of Egypt, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Palestine and Afghanistan feel about things like bin Laden and our War on Terra.  Turns out, they don't really care for either.  Whoops!  Hope I didn't ruin the ending for you, although I always wonder about movies like this that preach to the choir.  Most anti-war people are intelligent enough to realize that, like in our own wonderful country, only the complete whack-job zealots get attention in the media.  Everyone else is smart and collected enough to differentiate America's people from her barking mad foreign policy.  I can't see the War Hawks lining up to see World *and* having their minds changed because of its content.  So what's the point here?

Like his previous film (and television show, 30 Days), Spurlock loads the film with funny graphics and animation, including a killer Mortal Kombat-type videogame spoof during the opening credits.  These, along with some extraordinarily long closing credits, helps to flesh out the meager 93-minute running time, but it won't make you feel any better about his cop-out of an ending.  But maybe you'll be too distracted by Spurlock's transformation into Merlin Olsen as the months pass and his beard (practically a requirement blend in for some of these countries) fills in to notice you're being short-changed.

April 15, 2008: Happy Tax Day, suckers!  It's also the day new CDs and DVDs hit shelves and virtual shelves around North America.  Here's what I'm looking forward to jamming into my ears:

- Air: Moon Safari (a special three-disc version in honor of the album's 10th anniversary)

- Robert Pollard: Weathermen and Skin Goddess

And here's a couple of lukewarm PSB recommendations of discs already procured by the internets themselves:

- The Kooks: Konk

- R.E.M.: Supernatural Superserious

For the eyes, the pickings aren't quite as slim, the highlights being three PSB favorites from 2007:

- Before the Devil Knows You're Dead

- Juno

- Lars and the Real Girl

And, for fans of the flick Once, there's something titled The Swell Season: Live from the Artists Den.  The Swell Season being, of course, what Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová call themselves when they're not starring in movies or winning Oscars.  There's also The Minus Man, which was the first film that really made me think Owen Wilson had something going on behind that distracting penis-shaped nose of his.  Wilson plays a mild-mannered serial killer, and the picture was written-directed by Hampton Fancher, the actor-turned-filmmaker responsible for adapting Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? into the film we all know as Blade Runner: The Ultimately Final Director's Cut: Special Five-Disc Collecter's Edition (Remastered).

April 14, 2008: It's Monday here at the Planet Sick-Boy world headquarters, and there's talk of formulating some sort of weekly game plan.  Maybe Mondays will be the days where intentions are given.  Intentions regarding what to expect for the rest of the week here on the PSB.  Maybe Tuesdays, you'll hear about CDs and DVDs hitting the market.  Wednesdays?  Let's just call 'em "Wacky Wednesdays."  Not because they're going to be wacky so much as you're probably wacky for coming here to read this stuff.  Thursday and Fridays, there should be a heavy concentration on that week's theatrical releases.

This week's intentions:

- On Wednesday, you're probably going to get a little something about Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden?

- On Thursday, you'll either get the scoop on 88 Minutes or The Forbidden Kingdom, each of which looks fantastic, assuming you mean fantastic to mean the opposite of fantastic.  They're both being screened at the exact same time.  I'm seriously considering watching the first half of one and the second half of the other, and reviewing it as one film.  I'll probably just end up seeing whatever is shorter.  And if 88 Minutes is longer than 88 minutes, I'm going to sue somebody.

- On Friday, it'll be Forgetting Sarah Marshall time.  But who could ever forget her?

SPECIAL MONDAY BONUS: Photos from last night's New Pornographers/Okkervil River show at Ithaca's gorgeous State Theatre (taken with no flash, from the back of the house, with a camera I'm still not sure how to use):

Okkervil River

.

Neko Case of the New Pornographers

Will Sheff was just as yelpy and gangly as he sounds on the records, as Okkervil River banged out great versions of PSB favorites like "Our Life Is Not a Movie Or Maybe" and "John Allyn Smith Sails," the latter of which is sort of a half-cover of the Beach Boys' "Sloop John B."  The ill Neko Case barely had a speaking voice, yet somehow managed to belt out the bulk of her duties during the Dan Bejar-less NP's set (including "Mass Romantic") before throwing in the towel and letting Kathryn Calder take the reigns for the killer finale of "The Bleeding Heart Show."  Heck, she could have just stood there, and I would have been happy.

Free MP3 files, which may have really old links:

- The New Pornographers - "Myriad Harbour"

- The New Pornographers - "My Rights Versus Yours"

- Okkervil River - "Our Life Is Not a Movie Or Maybe"

April 11, 2008:

Here's the deal.  This site, as you might have noticed, hasn't been updated in a while.  There are a lot of reasons for this.  Reasons like the following:

1. Movie distributors screening less films, in general, across the country.

2. My particular market getting even fewer of what might be screened in other cities.  This is due to the retirement of the film critic from our daily newspaper.

3. The handful of screenings that have occurred here have been so awful, it hurts to write about them while wishing you could have, instead, seen some of the un-screened offerings.  We're talking about the difference between Untraceable, Fool's Gold, and Vantage Point versus pictures with actual pedigree, like Cloverfield, Jumper, and Be Kind Rewind.

4. General laziness.

Take this week, for example.  Two mainstream films are opening: Prom Night and Street Kings.  No screenings for either of them.  Doesn't exactly make this gig any easier to pull off.  I've even had to illegally download movies from the internets just to have something to discuss on my weekly radio gig.

So, I'm going to kick this blog-style for a while, just to see how it goes.  Theoretically, it should inspire me to update the site more frequently.  And you, the precious reader, will get to know what's happening in my movie world, instead of just thinking I'm dead, or in jail, or handcuffed to a radiator in a seedy motel.  There's a chance topics could stray away from films, too.  Yeah, it's going to be nuts.  I'm talking about cranking this thing up from, like, a six all the way to around a seven.

There might even be a "Reader Mail" section, which will be interesting, since there isn't going to be any way to actually send messages to me.  Hey, here comes one right now:

"I don't get it -- why does it matter if films aren't being screened for you?  Can't you just go to the theatre after a movie opens and see it with the rest of us slobs?  Are you too precious, or something."

Great question.  I am precious, but that's only about 10% of it.  The bulk of the issue, say 80% or so, has to do with the relevancy of running a review for a film that's already a) opened, and b) been reviewed by hundreds of other critics.  I could have caught Nim's Island this week, but at this point, in this age of movies having one big opening weekend and then disappearing, would anyone really care?  Unless you're talking about a smaller flick with a platform-type rollout, people are only concerned about reviews of films before said film is released.  Right?

For the remaining 10%, see #4 above.

Oh, and if you live in a bigger city, there's a nice little film called The Visitor opening today.  The fella who made it, Thomas McCarthy, played the crooked journalist in the final season of HBO's The Wire, and it stars the great character actor Richard Jenkins.