Category: Tom

Want to get a head-start on next year’s holiday shopping and get the hot gift for Xmas 2010 now? Well, you’re going to have to wait a couple weeks because it says here that it’s going to be the new Apple tablet computer (reported to be called the iSlate). Uncle Tom, who consistently scores highest marks among the Rectorati for finding kool stuff on the web recently sent out this link to a demo of things to come for mags and newspapers once the new tablets come out later this month.

But wait, don’t tablet computers already exist? Well, yes, tablet PC computers exist but if a quick perusal of tabletpcreview.com’s most recent “best of” list is any indication, they’ll soon look about as attractive as an old flip-fone in today’s iFone age. Assuming that tabletpcreview.com knows a thing or two about tablet PCs, comparing the state of the art in that category (and “still #1” according to their rankings) to what is shown in the Time magazine clip is like comparing apples to Calvados.
Continue reading “The Tablets Are Coming!” →

This morning I downloaded a list of critically acclaimed films from 2009.  First on the list was Summer Hours. HUH? I looked it up and found it was released in France in late 2008, and in America this past year. I don’t recall it ever playing in ATL, so I went to Netflix to see if they had it. But of course! Not only that, but it was available as a streaming INSTANT selection. So I watched it this afternoon…

What a simply charming and mesmerizing film! Oh the country estates! The wine! The smoking! The art! The great old Paris buildings! A film about families and life — so typically French — where you are immersed into the pure art of the film, never certain where it’s going, and often unsure even after it’s over. It’s a film where you can easily imagine yourself as one of the characters, enjoying life and family as we often never do in the same way in the US.

I can’t say I would place it as FIRST in a list of the best films of this year, but it would certainly be in my top 10. I suspect most (or all) of you have Netflix so I highly recommend you watch it. Or put it in your queue for the DVD when it is released this year. I am confident you will enjoy it.

    

A rainy, cold holiday weekend gets one thinking of the multiplex, and the ATL Rectors are not immune.   We hit three interesting — and quite diverse — flicks over the four-day escape:
Continue reading “BUTTON, BOWS, and BOOMS” →

The stage was dark, with only a massive drum set on a riser at the back.   Amazing, considering the amount of equipment used by the previous band, Gym Class Heroes.   A single spot glowed on the giant ROOTS tapestry at the rear of the stage.   There was only the dull background noise from the sold out crowd waiting for the headliners to appear.

An incredibly deep base thumping began,not a bass guitar, but resonating on such a low register as to vibrate the brass handrail in front of me in the loge (first row-center, I might add).   What the hell was that?   It played music, but,the glint of a huge horn bell emerged from under the tapestry at the back of the stage, and a shiny silver Sousaphone appeared, playing a signature Roots hip-hop beat.   Quickly following was ?uestLove, climbing immediately into the vortex of his drum set.   The rest of The Roots ensemble followed from behind the tapestry, joining Tuba Gooding, Jr.’s beat:   F Knuckles (percussion), Capt. Kirk (guitar), Kamal (keyboards), Owen (bass), followed by the lead vocalist and one of the originators of the Roots (with ?uestLove) Black Thought.   A very cool way to do a show lead-in, Continue reading “EVIL (GOOD) ROOTS” →

Your plucky narrator went to see the Raconteurs with the Kills last night.

Who? Do you know the White Stripes? Well, the Raconteurs are Jack White’s latest band, after his sister Meg—the drummer in the WS duo—wigged out and “went away” (from which she has yet to return, apparently).
Continue reading “WHITE BOY, KILLS” →

Lou Reed was in Asheville NC last night,and I was there to see him.   A jaunty little 220 mile ride up I-85 and I was there.   (The bitch was the drive back at midnight,UGH).   What an astounding little town,not unlike a little Berkeley: protesters, hippies everywhere, weird little shops selling organic tools and macrobiotic nail clippers.   A perfect place for the king of cool to land.

And there’s that:   He played at The Orange Peel: a venue named by Rolling Stone this month (in their Best of Rock 2007) as the “best rock venue in the US”.   An open, standing room only theatre that allows you to get right up at the edge of the stage, just a few feet away from the performers.   I came early and was stage-right/center, no more than 10 feet from Lou’s mike stand.     The sound levels were perfect (they must have theorized that there would be a slightly older crowd,and they were right).   It was a brilliant night of art-house cool music with a slightly sinister allure.    

Reed was cool before we knew what it was, with his Velvet Underground, Andy Warhol, Nico days in 60’s lower Manhattan.     VU broke up around 1970, though he never stopped playing and evolving thru more than two dozen albums, not all of them gems.

His musical and romantic collaboration with Laurie Anderson (another avant-garde performance artist) has positively affected his music over the last 15 years they have been together (they married just this year), mellowing it and giving it a softer edge, yet still very Lou.

He showed that side last nite in his playlist: a mix of some of his classics (Ecstasy, I Believe in Love, Dirty Blvd) mixed with some newer pieces like Call on Me, A Thousand Departed Friends (his screed against AIDS), Guardian Angel, I Wanna Know, and Tell it To Your Heart.   His accompanying band included legendary guitarists Mike Rathke and an old guy named Dan ‘something”.   I know that Dan is legendary not only because Lou introduced him that way, but by the way the guy played.   Incredible: A blend of Jimmy Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughn, with a little John Butler mastery in evidence.  

For an old guy (65 and addled a bit by his decade of heroin addiction in the 60’s) he still has a clear voice and can still make the guitar sing their unique LOU sounds.  

Perfect Day, an interesting ballad from his 1972 Transformer album was their encore.   A fitting way to end what I felt was MY PERFECT DAY with Lou Reed.  

Paul Thomas Anderson’s sprawling—yet austere—film SEEMS to be an epic masterpiece. But as the final credits rolled and I filed out of the theater, I was confused. Was it in fact a masterpiece? Or was I reacting to the incredible hype that preceded the film’s opening? Reflecting on it now, I realize it was both.

The story goes that Anderson stumbled onto a copy of Sinclair Lewis” early 20^th century novel “Oil!” in a dusty London bookshop, and immediately saw it as a film. That’s a lovely bit of lore, a poetic scrap of evidence of the way a book can seduce us with something as superficial as cover art and then draw us inside toward something deeper. Anderson — who adapted the story himself — may have loved “Oil!” but some say his love for the book doesn’t burn in the picture he’s made. “There Will Be Blood” is set in California in the same period as the book; its landscape suitably bleak to elicit a time and place foreign to most of us. (The Marfa, Texas area stands in for California in this case, ironically the same area where “Giant” and “No Country” was filmed.) Cinematographer Robert Elswit succeeds in turning this world of scrubby, modest bushes and rickety oil derricks into a visual tapestry that properly sets the scrappy mood of the film.
Continue reading “Magnificently Strange” →

I recently went to see a special screening of Ridley Scott’s newest version of Blade Runner, recently released as THE FINAL CUT. I am a huge fan of BR since it was released in 1982, and have the original version on both VHS and DVD. I have seen the studio release at least five times in a theatre, and countless times on video. I consider it one of my all-time favorites, though I last viewed over a decade ago.

I was excited when I saw that his “definitive” BR: FINAL CUT would be playing a limited engagement in Atlanta. I even considered watching the original again before going, but simply didn”t have the time.

As the theatre darkened (a bleak and threadbare movie house in Little Five Points that is often home to retrospectives and old horror marathons), a ball of fire erupted as the camera pulled back on a view of Los Angeles in 2019. The Vangelis soundtrack came in and my first thought was “Christ,that music is ghastly,did I actually like that stuff?” That aside,

The gravel-toned voiceover by Harrison Ford is gone (an addition that Warner Brother’s insisted upon for the hard-of-thinking). Now Rick Deckard keeps his thoughts to himself and both he and the film are infinitely more interesting for it.

This simple change creates a colder and lonelier place. Continue reading “Blade Runner: The Final Cut” →

I think those of you who are true film buffs probably already get the IndieWire film feed, but if not, here is a link to their latest blogger’s Top 10 lists: http://www.indiewire.com/movies/2007/12/indiewires_top_3.html

These particular lists are a bit out of the mainstream (at least some of them), yet I have (for once) seen nearly ALL of the films outlined on most of the lists (the exceptions being the Sundance offerings that have yet to be released).

This prompts me to generate my OWN list of picks for the year:
1. “No Country for Old Men, directed by the Coen Bros

2. “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” directed by Julian Schnabel

3. “Into the Wild,” directed by Sean Penn

4. “Eastern Promises”

5. “Lust, Caution,” directed by Ang Lee

6. “The Lives of Others,” directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck

7. “La Vie en Rose”

8. “Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead”

9. “The Savages”

10. “The Darjeeling Limited” directed by Wes Anderson

Honorable mention: Continue reading “Let’s All Go To The Lobby…” →