I’ve amassed about 70 cover CDs from about 2002 to the present day. Of those I’ve probably listened to ten of them from start to finish, and maybe another ten for a few tracks. I just don’t like cover CDs as they’re usually pretty terrible (Word Magazine CDs are a different matter and are not what I’m talking about).

So to save space I put the CDs inside the booklets and binned the cases and rear insert cards. That 12cm stack sat for about six months untouched so I decided to rip all them into iTunes. I’ve now got those 70 or so CDs on shuffle and there’s a lot of good stuff there.

If you have an unused stack of crap cover CDs you might want to try ripping them in bulk. I’m getting lots of nice surprises.

Well that was rubbish. Who knew heavy metal was so boring? A major come down from the prog and synth programmes. I get the impression it was made without as much enthusiasm. They didn’t seem to interview that many people and the archives didn’t feel half as raided as they should be. I was plain bored by it.

Roger Daltry in a DVD magazine interview once said something to this effect, "Only five British bands mean anything to the average American teenager. The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and The Who."

Do you agree? I would add Radiohead and Coldplay.

And by average American teenager I think he means someone who owns 30 CDs and is most influenced by radio when it comes to what they like and buy.

Years ago I watched and didn't like Being John Malkovich.

I then watched it again years later and I thought it was okay.

Adaptation was sort of okay. It was better on second viewing, although still not anything great.

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is perhaps one of the worst films I've ever seen with a truly hateful lead character/actor (or both?). I plan never to watch that "film" again. Unspeakably bad.

I bought the DVD of The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind on day of release and really didn't like it at all.

I dismissed Synecdoche, New York and had no interest in it.

Corinne Bailey Rae in this month's Word said she loved Synecdoche and that the critics were preoccupied with the wrong things and missed the point. Her argument was very persuasive and I decided to see the film.

I had a week or so to wait for it to arrive as I was bidding for it on eBay (£4 for a new sealed copy). Out of curiosity as I waited, I watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind again. What a borderline great film.

The problem with Charlie Kaufman's films on first viewing is that they are abstract, disjointed, seemingly random and lacking much of a plot. On the second viewing you already know the plot and can see the previously obscure structure (this seemingly random bit will tie in much later with this other bit over here) so the film makes much more sense. Fight Club (not written by Kaufman), for me, is the best example of this. Lots of random scenes and moments on first viewing. Second viewing, once you know the twist, and you find that all those random bits all serve a purpose.

So I watched Synecdoche, New York last night. The first half was a bit dull but okay. The second half was hard going as it ran out of plot and just became an endless parade of complications. I get the impression it would have made a better book than a film as it could truly penetrate the characters and let us know what they are really thinking. It's just a bit too surface level to involve us in their obscure problems.

Clearly the film is deliberately difficult and meant to be hard to take. I refuse to render a final verdict on it until I see it a second time, when all the pieces might fall into place. Since I don't yet have an opinion that I trust, I wonder what others here make of it?

I came across this yesterday before I watched the film:
"[Kubrick] always looked to achieve a type of perfection that is impossible. He took it to an OCD like degree, where he just couldn't let go of his films. By shooting gazillions of takes he was left with so many options that it made editing close to impossible. It's a common thing with artists, but Kubrick was an extreme case.

One reason I liked Synecdoche New York so much was because it was a satire on that type of artist (a theatre director here) who can never let go of his creation."

http://www.thedvdforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=589339

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0034CC2SE/ref=nosim/?tag=hotukdeals-...

The MP3 version of Harvest (2009 remaster) by Neil Young is only 69p on Amazon at the moment.

Absolutely Sweet Marie by Bob Dylan.

"Well, your railroad gate, you know I just can't jump it
Sometimes it gets so hard, you see
I'm just sitting here beating on my trumpet
With all these promises you left for me
But where are you tonight, sweet Marie?"

I taped a film on Monday called Clay Pigeons. The description was intriguing but it didn't have a review in the Radio Times. A film about a gas attendant who keeps being discovered at murder scenes was worth a shot. So I set it up and watched it last night. It had a woman in the right bottom corner doing sign language, but the start was good so I kept with it.

It's an obscure film from 1998 with a decent cast and produced by Ridley and Tony Scott. It wasn't bad and I enjoyed it while watching it. Afterwards it felt a bit pointless as the dots of the story don't really join up and the first half has little connection to the second half.

Clay Pigeons description:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118863/

It made me think two things.

1. These medium budget, non-art house independent movies (ie. not made by Paramount etc) all suffer from the same script problems. Lucky Number Slevin, The Matador, the Michael Douglas In-Laws remake, Butterfly On A Wheel, My Mom's New Boyfriend with Meg Ryan, The Whole Nine and Ten Yards are the type of films I mean. They always have strangely pointless, unsatisfying endings. It's as if the scripts don't get re-written enough and put through the generic sausage machine until they really work. As "evil" as the studio machine can be, sometimes they get it right as the generic three act structure type of thing just works better than anything else. Those independent films have a tendency to have endings that have no true connection to the start, in my experience.

2. It's amazing how many perfectly decent movies just vanish. I have a book called something like The Virgin Movie Handbook 1989. It's a compilation of movie reviews for that year. There's maybe about three movies to a two page spread. One of those movies will mean nothing to me, the other will be a half remembered thing from way back (Wes Craven's Shocker, Bob Balaban's Parents, Peter Greenaway's Drowning By Numbers) and the other will be a well known film. The number of films that just disappear into an obscure void is amazing. I also have lots of ten year plus old Empire and Total Film magazines. Similar numbers when I look through the new cinema review pages.

Any better than average, now long deleted and critically ignored films you want to big up?

Terminator Salvation seems to split people down the middle. The person I watched it with thought it was disjointed and pretty dire. One and a half out of five they said.

I thought it was a good solid war film. I'd give it four out of five and I'm the usually quite unimpressed with action movies nowadays. It's better than T3 anyway, which was really just one long chase and a great downer ending. The sequence from the petrol station to the jets being destroyed was one of the best modern action scenes I've seen in a long time.

What would you give it out of five (I don't care how unWord it is, I like star ratings)?

I watched two Scene By Scene interviews with Mark Cousins.

1998 - Brian DePalma says he hates it when the camera just sits there recording what's going on in front of it. According to him its not directing.

1997 - Martin Scorsese talks about a documentary he made about his parents called Italianamerican in 1974. He says that he loved the way the camera just sat there documenting what's going on in front of it. He then applied this to the domestic scenes in Raging Bull which are very static visually. He mentions being concerned that his constantly moving camera might be getting in the way in some of his other movies.

The best Spielberg movie is Jaws, in my opinion. Notice how little the camera movies in the first half hour when on land. The camera is almost always static. The film has a curious documentary tone to it due to this.

The point of this post? I thought it was interesting. Beyond that I can't say.

Very geeky details about producing albums.

http://www.gearslutz.com/board/q-butch-vig/

I like authors to take their time and write something worthwhile. I'm deeply suspicious of anyone who can churn out big thick books, one after the other, once a year. How can the quality control be there? How is it physically possible for Stephen King to write and revise about 1000 pages of fiction every year? How can he come up with new characters and stories that aren't just tired retreads of what he's already written? I've never read a Stephen King novel but can he really "keep it up" consistently when he's so prolific?

It's borderline "acceptable" when someone like Julian Barnes publishes a new 200-300 page book every two years. I can see how it can be done without major artistic compromise (and some of his books feel like writing done for the sake of it, Looking At The Sun being a particularly DOA book).

I feel much happier with less prolific writers. It feels right when a 40 year publishing career yields only seven or so books.

I recently read a chick-lit book called Getting Rid Of Matthew by Jane Fallon. It was a very, very good book with a well realised story and proper characters. So I got my hands on her follow up book Got You Back, published one year later. The decline in quality is shocking. It's not bad, it's just so mundane and sketchily realised with a broader, more simplistic and streamlined story and characters who are just a name, a job, a wardrobe and a physical description. It's like a cartoon bled of any hint of real life. I quit round about page 200 as it felt like a waste of time continuing, even though it was not a bad book. I assume the first book was either written, or at least gestated, over many years. Suddenly it's a success and the follow up is demanded ASAP, and so we get the half digested, half thought out paint by numbers follow up.

Have you ever followed a writer through fifteen or more books and enjoyed the majority of them? Can quantity mean quality?

This is a fascinating article about the man who uncovered the link between exercise and longer life. It was published 12/9 and he died six weeks later aged 99 on 28/10/09.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/e6ff90ea-9da2-11de-9f4a-00144feabdc0.html

An excerpt:
“The very first results we got were from the London busmen,” says Morris, in ­Glaswegian tones undimmed by seven-odd decades in London. “And there was a striking difference in the heart-attack rate. The drivers of these double-decker buses had substantially more, age for age, than the conductors.”

The data were so telling because drivers and conductors were men of much the same social class. There was only one obvious difference between them. “The drivers were prototypically sedentary,” explains Morris, “and the conductors were unavoidably active. We spent many hours sitting on the buses watching the number of stairs they climbed.” The conductors ascended and descended 500 to 750 steps per working day. And they were half as likely as the drivers to drop dead of a sudden heart attack.

How can I see your 75 minute Audience Edit of Eyes Wide Shut? Simple. Stick the usual DVD copy in your player and hit the x2 fast forward button. A much improved version if you ask me.

On release I sat through the film on DVD. It was so slow and boring that I wasn't on my knees praying for the film to end, but for each and every overlong scene in turn to finish. As it was Kubrick’s first film in 12 years I sat through it all. I loathed it. A tiny 40 minute non-story bloated out by the slowest pacing ever to create a two and a half hour monster. The uneventful story itself is also revealed to be tiny with very low dramatic stakes. What is the point of this film?

Some critics have the audacity to call it a flawed masterpiece. Flawed piece of shit is too kind.

The best thing I can say about it is that some of the lights have a nice burned into the film-stock look to them. Yes, that is literally the best thing about the film. Curiously the exact same complaints and minor praise can be applied to his 1975 historical dud Barry Lyndon. Another incredibly slow, overlong, dramatically inert monster with really pretty looking lighting created by real candles (a technical marvel at the time).

It’s astonishing to think that it took about twenty years to adapt from a novella, a year and a half to film and a year to edit (my numbers might not be super accurate). The film could easily have been filmed within a month like a normal film. When I saw the extended argument in the apartment in the film Le Mépris (AKA Contempt) by Godard, I thought, that’s it. That is how they should have shot Eyes Wide Shut. They should have just quickly and messily shot a semi-improvised deliberately pretentious film over a few weeks for less than a million dollars. As it’s so cheap who cares if no one beyond a few film critics see it and roast it? Instead they had to make a big budget production out of such slight material.

For reasons of masochism I have returned to the movie two more times over the last nine years. And it remains a colossal dud. If you accept the painful inert pacing and the tiny storyline then it’s not too painful, but it’s still far from being even borderline okay.

I decided to try something a little bit out of the box in an attempt to make it watchable for my fourth viewing today. I decided to watch the whole thing at x2 fast forward. 95% of the dialogue remained intelligible, and the 5% I didn’t pick up I either didn’t care about or I could work out the gist from the dialogue surrounding it. This way the awful draggy pace will be picked up and the running time halved to a more realistic 75 minutes.

And the film was bearable. The crap story and banal dialogue etc didn’t suddenly burst into life, but at least things moved at a reasonable non-patience trying speed.

And then the last post-orgy stretch turned up. If anything, the film SLOWED DOWN even further as Tom Cruise revisited the previous scenes. Seriously, what film slows down as it reaches its climax? A normal film is always gathering speed so that by the end it’s racing towards the end. Kubrick and the Coen Brothers are about the only filmmakers I can think of who start slow and stay at that exact same pace from start to finish. It’s just wrong.

The Coen Brothers movies used to drive me up the wall with the slow pace of all of their films until I learned to expect, and accept it. Fargo for example was such a horrible viewing experience first time I saw it as it took forever to get anywhere. Now whenever I put one of their films on I say to myself to expect that it will be slow from start to finish. If you expect it to take forever to get anywhere then it can’t frustrate you as it’s exactly what you expected (it’s not the traffic jam that’s making you angry, it’s your expectations of getting to your destination quickly that is causing you to lose your temper).

I can sit happily through almost any Coen Brothers film now, as long as it’s actually a good film, but Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut is way beyond the pale. Even at x2 speed the film drags at its climax. The story really is so small and insignificant and the pace is too patience trying. As entertainment it really, really fails. As “art” it fails because it’s rubbish with nothing to say that can be mistaken as profound, unlike 2001, which at least suggests or hints at something being said.

Some arthouse film snobs say that some films are not meant to be entertaining, and work on a different level. I don’t buy it. A film is meant as entertainment. If it doesn’t engage on some sort of entertainment level then it’s not very good. Well I’ll happily be the philistine who stands up says that Kubrick is a so-so director with a knack for finding interesting novels to adapt and then stepping back into the limelight and allowing others to big him up in order to create a legendary reputation.

FYI. It's free so why not? Click on the 12 Days Of Christmas box on the home page to get it. And when you're at it also get the free song of the week as The Plastiscines are a great semi-competent French girlgroup.