My Month of Entertainment – February 2007

Where did the first week of March go?? Usually I remember on the first or second of the month that I need to do a My Month of Entertainment write-up...and this time, the first six days of the month snuck right by. Maybe that’s because I’ve been preparing for my virgin VEGAS, BABY, VEGAS trip (we fly out tomorrow).

(And since I’m going to Vegas, don’t expect much of a Month of Entertainment for March...am thinking most discretionary funds will be cut off for the next month or two.) Anyhoo. February was a relatively unique month…had a bit of a book splurge this month, due mostly to a Going Out of Business sale for a downtown Columbia bookstore...a few of the Netflix rentals were disappointing...and the music purchases were almost nonexistent.

Books
Praying for Gil Hodges – Some nice spring training reading while I’m putting off the year’s first Tuesday Pirates Rant™ as long as possible.

1973 Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol, and the Birth of Post-Sixties America – I loved Mark Kurlansky’s 1968, so I thought I’d give this a shot. I’m willing to give a lot of things a chance when they’re 40% off.

Da Capo Best Music Writing of 2005 – You know...so I can see how my, ahem, competition is writing about music. Or something like that.

Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music – It just sounded like something I would read.

I think there are a couple others I bought that I’m completely blanking on at the moment. Oh well...your loss.

DVDs
This month’s Netflix rentals:

This Film is Not Yet Rated – Well-made documentary about the politics and inconsistencies behind the Motion Picture Association of America’s movie ratings system. The best part was where it was revealed that, if you appeal the rating your movie received (it received an NC-17 when you thought it deserved an R, for example), you’re not allowed to site precedent in your appeal. Think about that. If there was a scene in another movie where something 5x worse happened, and that movie received an R, you can’t site that in defending your movie. Precedent shouldn’t be the only way to put movies in specific ratings categories, but it has to at least be part of the process. Great movie all around.

Transamerica – The month definitely started off well with these two. Felicity Huffman’s performance was every bit as good as critics said it was, and like Little Miss Sunshine, it finds something to warm your heart within all the disfunction on the screen.

The Constant Gardener – Good movie. You make yourself dizzy trying to guess what’s going to happen next, but it was very well done. Just as Felicity Huffman’s scene peeing with a prosthetic penis fell into the “Daring Things Pretty Actresses Don’t Usually Do” category, so did Rachel Weisz’ walking around naked and pregnant. And they both got Oscar nominations (Weisz even won). Hmm.

Running With Scissors – Unlike Transamerica, there’s nothing to warm your heart amid the disfunction, nothing to pull you through. This DVD is being advertised on TV right now as something of a dark comedy. Well, it’s 95% dark, 5% comedy. There are a few chuckles, but there’s not enough of anything to pull you out from the darkness of the characters and the plot. That’s not necessarily bad, but it’s just not what was advertised.

L.A. Confidential – The Butterfly hadn’t seen this, and I hadn’t seen it in probably 7-8 years, so we picked it up. It’s just as good as I remembered.

History of the World, Part I – This movie hasn’t aged all that well. The highlight was something that didn’t actually happen—I was driving myself crazy trying to figure out who played the Vestal Virgin, and when I finally figured it out, I narrowly avoided blurting out “A ha! It’s the woman who played Dawson’s mom on Dawson’s Creek!” The look The Butterfly would have given me upon blurting that out would have been a low point in my marriage, and possibly my life. There are some things you just don’t reveal—your in-depth knowledge of Dawson’s Creek (as a married male approaching 30) is one of those things.

Run Lola Run – Visually, it’s an interesting movie. However, overall this wasn’t as good as I thought it would be. It received lots of kudos from lots of critics, and while it’s pretty creative (and I’m always willing to give points for creativity and uniqueness), it just wasn’t all that good. Quality is still relatively important.


Music
Curtis Mayfield, Honesty and Love is the Place – These albums are proof that Curtis Mayfield could make fantastic music in his sleep. The thing I’ve always loved about an album like Roots from the early ‘70s was both how great the music was and how interesting the subject matter was. With these two albums from the ‘80s, there’s absolutely no creative subject matter whatsoever, but the music is still more than listenable. In my Great Musicians Pantheon, he’s on the top level. Just amazingly underrated.

Gomez, How We Operate – Like Yo La Tengo’s I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass, this is an album that snuck up on me—it never overwhelmed me with how good it was, but then I looked up and realized that I’d given almost every song 4 stars. You know you’re dealing with a good band when they can take a song with an awful title like “Girlshapedlovedrug” and make it listenable. Power to them for that.

Ojos de Brujo, Bari – This is an E-music download I got for The Butterfly but haven’t listened to all the way through yet. We’re both huge fans of Ozomatli, and she likes Shakira too, so when I heard good things about this (obviously) Latin group, we gave it a try. She seems to like it.