My Top 20 Albums of 2013 – Young Galaxy Triumphant

My Best Albums of 2013 (for what it’s worth)

 

In a rough descending order –

 

Young Galaxy –Ultramarine

 

Arcade Fire -Reflektor

 

The National –Trouble Will Find Me

 

Atoms for Peace –AMOK

 

Momus – Bambi

 

Non – Back to Mono

 

Ministry – From Beer to Eternity

 

Pet Shop Boys – Electric

 

The Knife – Shaking the Habitual

 

Portugal The Man –Evil Friends

 

Austra – Olympia

 

Kirin J Callinan –Embracism

 

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds – Push the Sky Away.

 

SNOG – Babes in Consumerland

 

Erasure – Snow Globe

 

OMD – English Electric

 

John Grant – Pale Green Ghost

 

Polica – Shulamith

 

Pankow – And Shun the Cure They Most Desire

 

David Bowie – The Next Day

 

Depeche Mode – Delta Machine

 

 

On 12 Years a Slave – also a dud.

on 12 years a Slave. This years companion piece to The Butler is 12 Years a Slave, a sort of Django Re-Chained starring a guy whose name is almost impossible to pronounce (Chiwetel Ejiofor). Just as we get two or so big ‘Oscar Worthy’ (snort) WW2 holocaust movies each year from Hollywood, it seems we now get same about African American subjects and oppression, etc, etc. 12 Years a Slave is the latest one – and it’s a rather turgid, dull, painful to watch and pointless experience. Here the nastier aspects of Slavery are gloated over in a, it must be said, rather Sadomasochistic way by English gay film maker Steve McQueen. McQueen uses his video art stylistics to present slavery vignettes and tableaus better suited to kInk.com – that as one now tarnished New York Film Critic noted – reek of ‘Uncle Tomism’ and a sadistic gloating over the nastiness of 19th century Southern slavery. Naturally ‘White Man is The Devil’ in this movie: you get the gentle kind Slaver in Benedict Cumberbatch, you get the chip on his shoulder racist young man in Paul Dano (who get’s a good whipping from the main character in this – that was fun I will admit), you get the whitey opposed to Slavery but who works with Slaves in Brad Pitt and FINALLY you get the Totally Psychotic Slave owner in Micheal Fassbinder. The latter fucks one of the more attractive slave girls and yet beats the skin off just about everybody else in a pointless and nihilistic way to make the point about the heart of ‘evil whitey’ over and over again. You get the idea. The main problem with these type of films from Hollywood is a Nietzshean one. You are being presented with a sympathetic slave morality in these films MADE by people who clearly live by the more morally ambiguous Master Morality. So, in the final analysis this film is at it’s essence deeply inauthentic and hypocritical. You can take that to the bank and as Michael Fassbinder might say in the movie “that’s scripture!”

 

on Her – the awful new Spike Jonze film

on Her. (some mild spoilers): This vacant and deeply solipsistic movie seems like it was dreamed up inside the head of the gadget departments at Apple and Google. It feels like an aspirational style ad for a New Operating System that you can fully interact with. “Like WOW Consumers!” This is fine, sure… but pointless as a feature film. The film rolls out along these lines and then, somehow, goes awry after about 90 minutes and has a kind of soppy, bummer ending. It is in (virtual) reality the fourth film of the much lauded cinematic wunderkind, Spike Jonze. It has received much, almost universal praise from mainstream press and critics – like it is a new film from a recently resurrected Stanley Kubrick. But sadly this is not the case. It is the empty and dull story of a man called Theodore Twombly, who is a dickless nobody who writes greeting cards and letters and lives in some ‘five minutes in to the future’ version of LA/Malaysia. Ted instead of jerking off to net porn and dating a real human being gets some new OS from Apple or Google (Coming Soon for just 666.66$) and then falls in love with it. One hour of pointless navel gazing follows where you want to walk up to Joaquin Phoenix or Spike Jonza, slap their faces and demand they read the works of Martin Heidegger or Friedrich Nietzsche. Audio book versions for Spike Jonze as, apparently, he ‘doesn’t read’. Then it descends in to the aforementioned tawdry melodrama – The End. We saw this before with Andrew Nichols (flop) film SimOne from the early 00’s and this is the rehash. Has a subplot riffing on Jonze’s break up with Sofia Coppola – that seems to be about the only ‘real thing’ in this movie. The mise en scene and locations are impressive and original, that is only stand out aspect of this film I can give it praise for, but it is all just background. This film is, at it’s core, just a lame ass Romance Movie about a guy falling in love with his latest AI iPhone (available in the lobby 999.99$). That’s all. That’s it. That’s supposed to be profound. It’s not. It’s empty as the phone you have in your hand right now, and the lives many of us all revolve around it. It’s also meant to be some supposed critique of our technological isolation and loneliness. It does touch on this theme, but does so in a way that totally sells this lifestyle, also. The film is insidious in it’s embrace of this atomized lonely world of technological solipsism – even if it also acknowledges some down sides in the small print. No doubt fixable by some new individualizing app! Overall I found Her a trite and unsatisfying light sci fi romance romp for the hand gadget obsessed and alone, New Gen worker clones. Not unpleasant to watch, it washes over you in a quiet way – but a sense of cinematic dread and despair also fills you as the 2 hours of this film play themselves out, as you realize, people really do LOVE this SHIT and are that shalllow. Download that, suckers.