• This is a shitty remake of a shitty remake of a good story. I don’t think the makers of 2010′s Clash of the Titans even bothered to read the original Greek myth. They just skimmed the script for the 1981 flick and added more strangeness, diluted character motivation, and took unoriginal cheap shots at religion.
• The CG was less impressive than the old-school claymation.
• Pete Postlethwaite was the only dude in the flick who brought it. Everybody else was phoning in their performances, which is understandable as the movie was entirely made up of bit parts.
• I don’t understand why people cast Sam Worthington for parts that aren’t “Henchman #2.” He must have slept with the entire Church of Scientology to be able to keep landing parts in big movies despite having no acting talent whatsoever.
• That metal owl did not need to be seen on screen again, ever.
• I didn’t care about anybody. Nope, nobody. I can’t remember any of the characters’ names except for the ones I know from studying mythology. The two dudes thown in for comic relief provided neither comedy nor relief. I wasn’t sad when anybody died and I wasn’t happy when Andromeda got saved. This was a bland, dull, dazzlingly multinational cast that proved that no matter where you come from and whatever your ethnic background, anybody can be crap at acting. Now isn’t that sweet?

In short, this was not a movie I wanted to see and I hate that I was right when I did see it. There are a few ways this movie could have been something I did want to see:

• Go back to the original story. Don’t remake the ’81 flick — call it Perseus and tell his story. Also, cast somebody as Perseus who doesn’t think that acting means “saying the words written on the script without stuttering.”
• And if you really go back to the original story, you’ll note that Andromeda is the princess of ETHIOPIA. This means she should have been black. Literally every cinematic and artistic interpretation of this story has portrayed Cephus, Cassiopeia, and Andromeda as Greek and super white, and all visual representations of Andromeda seem to be manifesting some kind of bizarre fantasy about raping white girls:
  

  white chick.	white chick.	white chick.	white chick.

  So much for Hollywood being post-racial and post-gender. It would have been cool to see this set in ancient Abyssinia, with like, you know, black people. Get some Egyptian-looking duds on the multi-ethnic cast and then you’ll have a truly international epic, not just a pantheon of generic European accents.

• They should have used a scriptwriter who understands that the audience needs a reason to care about the characters, not a rookie and the idiots who unleashed Aeon Flux on us like a case of bad diarrhea. Clash of the Titans put some people on the screen and said, “This is Protagonist Man. You should care about him because he almost died as a baby, and babies are cute so you should care.” It doesn’t work that way. Even good actors like Liam Neeson can’t polish a turd, and this script was a stinky lump of number two.

I doubt the movie I’m imagining will happen because they’re letting these idiots make a second one. Sigh. I keep waiting for the day when Hollywood at large will learn, as those northern rebels at Pixar did, that commercial viability and artistic value are not mutually exclusive concepts. Until then, I’ll be over here translating this post into Latin, as it’s a lot more entertaining than most of what hits theaters . . .

For ages Danny Elfman carried the torch for macabre music with a twisted sense of humor. But as South Park so aptly put it Elfman-Burton collaborations have gotten pretty stale. The music is still pretty, but it’s been recycled. This is something entirely new.

Evelyn Evelyn, which is the name of the band, the title of the album, and the name of the metafictional characters in the deliciously melodramatic plot. The album makes vague references to September 11 and the Iraq War, but Palmer and Webley don’t use it as a political point. These events simply become part of the backdrop of Evelyn Evelyn’s chronically tragic existence. The twins are born on September 11, giving them the same pleasantly cursed fate as Butters Stotch. Everyone around them who is good dies, and they fall repeatedly into the hands of people who abuse and exploit them. As over-the-top as their biographies are, the very unvarnished picture of child trafficking painted by this album makes you stop and realize that this sort of thing happens — yes, even in the United States.

Evelyn Evelyn may rightly catch some heat for its negative portrayal of Christians. While Amanda Palmer has made no secret of her dislike of organized, politicized religion, I didn’t get the impression that this album is anti-Christianity. It’s anti-Zealot. The religious freaks that wander in and out of Evelyn Evelyn’s life are the sort of scripture-frenzied wackos that think it’s okay to impose what they think God’s will is on innocent bystanders who want nothing to do with any of it. These are people who never notice that by spending all of their time and energy combating perceived evil instead of trying to do some good once in a while, they are completely missing the point of the Christian faith. “Tragic Events – Part II” illustrates with haunting detail the two religion-crazed factions that want power over Evelyn Evelyn. One group believes it is an abomination to leave the girls conjoined, and so they must be split apart to please God. The other believes that God created them that way, and so the girls should be locked away to prevent anyone from ever parting them. Neither faction ponders whether the girls should just be left alone.

Laced between the spoken portions detailing Evelyn Evelyn’s life are songs that are as cheery as the words are glum. The musical style of the album kaleidoscopes through time, with the opening number waltzing like a broken calliope and later songs moving through jazz, folk-rock, power ballads, and concluding with a quiet nineties-style acoustic strum. The head-bopping Charleston rag “Have You Seen My Sister Evelyn” is one of the catchiest songs I’ve heard for a while, with impeccably funny lyrics. “You Only Want Me ‘Cause You Want My Sister” is a gorgeous folk song that evokes Bob Dylan-Joan Baez duets from the sixties. If this song were lifted out of context, it makes a great song about the rejection women feel when, for whatever reason, we are overlooked in favor of our friends or sisters. But listening to this song within its placement of the album, you can’t help but laugh at the inappropriateness of the lyrics as they apply to conjoined twins. “My Space” takes the musical odyssey to bad 80′s pop ballads. It’s Karaoke awful with way too much reverb, plenty of over-the-top synth percussion, melodramatic guitar solos, and over-punctuated downbeats. Awesome.

This album is very different for Amanda Palmer. While she’s the bigger name, this is a true equal collaboration between herself and Jason Webley. Her contralto blends perfectly with his tenor, and Palmer has held back on her usually hard-hitting style to create a more fragile and delicate sound than she usually does. Webley’s voice is clear and reedy, Palmer’s is throaty and brusque. Their voices mixed with their superb piano and accordion work made for an album that picks up the amazing technicolor freak flag from the bland dust it’s been rolling around in and they’ve cleaned it up, embellished it, and flown it high. This album isn’t for everyone. But if you are just twisted enough to appreciate a deliciously dark tale, enjoy.

But I just need to say: If you’re going to make a movie about a character whose most famous trait is his ability to spot every detail, however minute, you should take note of the following:

It’s three miles from Westminster to Tower Bridge. A good hour’s walk. Yet in this flick, a few minutes of tramping in the very sewers traipsed by Guy Fawkes led to a magically instant arrival on the other side of town.

Stuff like this usually irritates me in movies set in L.A., because as an Angeleno I can tell you for sure that every movie you see where somebody manages to cross huge swaths of L.A. in record time (Lethal Weapon, Point Break, 2012, every incarnation of Terminator) is nothing but a pack of lies. I never thought they’d pull this with London, although it shouldn’t surprise me too much as hardly anybody would notice/care about this egregious geographic error without being familiar with Zone 1. The only reason I can’t forgive it is that it’s in a freaking movie about Sherlock Holmes, which should inspire an OCD level of attention to detail. Bad script editor, that’s a bad boy! No snacks for you!

But honestly, apart from that the movie was great. This has been your friendly neighborhood nerdy nit picker with a useless dissection of a work of blatant fiction.

This is definitely a game worthy of the Halo franchise, and it isn’t just a reskinned version of Halo 3. The original trilogy was the story of a supersoldier; a hero and a savior. He fights in larger-than-life, mythical settings, and he plays to win. Master Chief saves humanity, but he is not of humanity. This is an all-too-human tale, taking place after the Covenant invade Earth. A team of ODST (Orbital Drop Shock Troopers, meaning elite space paratroopers) attempts to land on a Covenant ship hovering above Africa, but a terrible explosion makes them miss their mark and they land in the abandoned and mostly destroyed city of New Mombasa. (Props to Bungie for not falling prey to the oh-so-boring convention of setting a tale of massive urban destruction in New York.) The team is scattered, beat up, and helpless, and the scenery is not a breathtakingly beautiful artificial ring world, but a messy, smashed up urban environment. This is not a tale of victory. The entire plot is one long, slow retreat. It’s Bungie’s take on Black Hawk Down.

If there’s one thing that hampers me when playing Halo, it’s that I’m a little bit of a Leeroy Jenkins. I just kind of run in and shoot until I’m out of bullets and then hope I can melee everything to death before I get killed. I can tell that ODST will really only be conducive to this approach as long as I’m playing on Easy. There is not a lot of spare ammo laying around, and there are a couple of levels that are deliberately sparse of extra weapons to pick up, so using ammo wisely and saving the big guns for the Big Bads is important. Next time I play the game through, I want to see if I can cultivate enough self-discipline to play the whole thing with an emphasis on stealth.

Bungie’s legendary attention to detail The HUD is lurrrrrvely, with really helpful outline effects for night vision. The music effectively supports the gameplay, but there are no brilliant themes that I will listen to over and over again. ¿Qué pasa, Marty and Mike?

The voicework is radtacular, with part of the Firefly cast providing characters we can love. Captain Malcom Reynolds (pre-Battle of Serenity Valley) plays the part of Gunnery Sargent Buck, Jayne steps in as big gun man Dutch, and Wash plays zen master pilot Mickey. Number Six from that show I don’t watch is apparently the voice of a blonde chick that Buck used to date and still carries a torch for.

Which brings me to the only way I’m really going to be a griefer on ODST. How was this story penned by the same Joe Staten that gave us the Knight-and-Lady tale in Halo 3? ODST suffered from a lack of relevant female characters, largely because its goal to include feminist themes was transparently insincere. A note, Bungie: don’t bother if you’re not going to do it right. I’m fine with a story by, for, and about men. I’m not okay with pseudofeminist elements because marketing said it was a good idea.

We’re introduced at the beginning of the story to Dare, an ONI officer who’s called on her ex-boyfriend Buck after mysteriously walking out on him and breaking his heart a while ago. She lied to him about being a spook, and he never got over it. Buck is completely awesome everywhere else in the story *except* when he’s mooning after Dare, who is pretty much a walking stereotype of everything women do to make men go insane. She’s indecisive, never giving Buck a straight answer about anything. She smacks him and then kisses him. She needs to be rescued and doesn’t give him all the information he needs to know what the hell is going on. And the fact that the AI controlling her movements when I was trying to escort her out of a covenant-infested building is dumb as a box of rocks really didn’t help me like her any better. When rescuing her, I never once felt the same passion and urgency as I did when it was me and John-117 saving Cortana from the Gravemind. This could have been eliminated by one of three simple options:

1. Make her less of a stereotypically useless cold-hearted blonde
2. Give her some lines that don’t indicate her helplessness. (i.e. NOT “I couldn’t do this alone”)
3. Allow me to play her as a character, the way I did for all of the male characters in the game

I also hated the stupid subplot where The Rookie has to track down surveillance video and audio of a girl reacting to the Covenant arrival in New Mombasa. This is confusing, because the game’s story line already weaves in and out of the story lines of the scattered ODST team. The voice work in the audio segments is the worst in the entire game. (Read: worst fake African accents ever.) There’s a token nod to feminism, when a sinister government official recognizes the girl on the street and tries to take advantage of her in the back of his limo. Rape is wayyyyyyyy too complicated a subject to address so briefly, and her plucky (but useless) refusal to cooperate is negated by the fact that has to be rescued by the limo driver. My reaction: “it’s great she didn’t get raped and all, blah blah blah . . .” This girl plays no part in the game. We never see her face. Her story is irrelevant to achieving the goal. Why was it included? Why should I care about female characters if they don’t serve any purpose other than to give the guys something to rescue, and they don’t rescue anybody right back?

I heartily agree with Geek Grrl that it would have been super easy to make The Rookie genderless. He doesn’t speak, and it would be easy to either offer the player an option that would enable either male or female vocalizations, or have gotten a voice actor that can do grunts and “ha!”s that could sound male or female. Or even better, they should have hired Morena Baccarin and replaced one of the ODST guys with a female trooper. Just like Terminator: Salvation suffered because there was no female character to fill Sarah Connor’s combat boots, ODST suffered from the absence of the kickass female role models that Cortana and Miranda Keyes provided in the previous Halo titles. I was really hoping to finally get to see some chicks among the several different characters you get to play in this game. We have female Spartans. We have female troopers and ONI officers. So how come it’s still just for guys?

Feminist complaints aside, this is a buy-it-now game from the standpoint of visuals and gameplay. There’s new maps for multiplayer, and the diversity of fight scenarios in the campaign mode means you can play through this one over and over. See you online!

Part of what makes this band rock so hard is their unabashedly hybrid style. They draw from every corner of the music world and mix it all together with the sort of annoyingly casual ease that virtuoso musicians seem to be capable of. The style, as usual, is undefinable, but if I had to try I’d call it “baroque synth pop with a healthy dose of prog.” We’ve got Baroque, Romantic, Impressionist, Metal, Synth, Pop, Industrial, Retro and good old Glam in this musical stew, which I believe will hold up against Muse’s previous albums. Whether it can stand up to repeated listenings in quite the same way as Black Holes and Revelations remains to be seen, but that’s a tall order to fill. The song order was well thought out. Begin high energy, mellow it out, get introspective, punch it back up, and finish with a masterwork. Track by track, here’s my first impression.

Uprising: The catchiest tune on the album. This tune captures all the swagger of “Supermassive Black Hole” but plays it cooler with aggressive drumbeats and lyrics that make you want to put your fist in the air. If your head doesn’t start bobbing within the first three seconds of this track, don’t bother listening to the rest of the album.

Resistance: Introduces the first of many exquisite baroque piano riffs on the album. The awkward chorus feels out of character with the rest of the song, but Bellamy’s soaring vocals elsewhere make up for it.

Undisclosed Desires: This track really shows off the band’s ability to make the music tell the story even better than the words do. This song feels sneaky and dirty. Venturing as close as Muse will likely ever get to an R&B track and Except for the fact that the lyrics use words with four syllables and describes sex symbolically rather than explicitly, this song could easily be covered by any top 40 R&B artist.

United States of Eurasia: This proggy neoclassic masterpiece was probably composed after a lengthy seance channeling Freddie Mercury. Delicious melodramatic vocals, driving piano undercurrent, and explosive choral orgasms followed by tickling guitar riffs.

Guiding Light: With Edge-y guitar riffs and very Bono-ish vocals soaring over a steady, driving, but tranquil beat, this could have been a track off The Joshua Tree, which is absolutely a compliment.

Unnatural Selection: This well placed, histrionic retro-pop number perks the album back up ere it waxes too poetic. Very few bands have the chops or the presence of mind to treat the bass as a lead instrument, and this song is a great follow-up to the superb bass countermelodies in “Hysteria.”

MK Ultra: This might be the least interesting song on the album. There are some sick head-banging guitar riffs, but the song never quite builds anywhere in particular in between the high-energy portions. Rather, the good riffs will likely made good fodder for remixers.

I Belong to You: Wives everywhere could rekindle even the most blasé marriages by performing a strip-tease for their honey to this sexy hip-swayer. Where “Supermassive Black Hole” was desperate and swaggering, this strutting ditty is sassy and in control. Pair them back to back on your next iPod mix to help you prep for a hot date.

Exogenesis: The Exogenesis Symphony must be listened to as a companion piece to the Odyssey suite that Incubus contributed to the Halo 2 soundtrack. Both are masterworks of contemporary prog rock. If one artist can be credited most for influencing this composition, it’s undoubtedly Beethoven, although each movement is played as if some other artist were putting their particular twist on Beethoven. There is exquisite piano work throughout the album, but it really shines here. If anything could have been different, the vocals should have taken even more of a back seat.

• Symphony Part 1 (Overture)
  The first movement features strings that quiver like a theremin, and tension that builds like. Regal guitar work, distortion turned up all the way. This movement screams Bach from beginning to end with flowing, precise arpeggios with ethereal melodies floating above the action.
• Symphony Part 2 (Cross-Polination)
  Hints of Gershwin feed into Beethoven for a heartbreaking waltz that quickly breaks down into a tempestuous interlude before going back to the first theme. Pair this number with “Rhapsody in Blue,” “Sonata Pathétique” and “Clair de Lune.”
• Symphony Part 3 (Redemption)
  If Beethoven and Mozart met at the Glastonbury Festival and collaborated late at night over many pints and bitter tales of abandonment and love gone wrong, this is the song they would have written. This Moonlight Sonata meets Elvira Madigan meets Claire de Lune is a hypnotic lullaby. The only problem with the song is that when it ends you’re left with the feeling that there should have been more.

So there it is. I say buy the album. If you’re not a massive Muse fan and only want a couple of tracks, I’d recommend “Uprising,” “United States of Eurasia,” and “I Belong to You” in order of replay value. “Uprising” is a must-have song of the year and is the song that few people will tire of easily. The only question I’m left with is when are these guys announcing some tour dates in California??? Huh? HUH?