Todd A

[This was a long blog entry, unpublished as a formal review.]

I finished Ayn Rand’s Anthem over the weekend. (more…)

[Originally published in the Nashville Independent.]

Watching Casino Royale makes it clear that there are really two schools of Bond movies split along the lines of the character’s greatest actors: Connery and Moore. Ask anyone who is the quintessential Bond and the answer inevitably comes back: Connery. But Moore was a Bond for his time — a foppish, kind of twatish Bond and as one of my peers in a literary theory class put it years ago “much more condescending than Connery.” He was, though it pains me to say it, basically a ridiculously-dressed jerk. Yet oddly acceptable in the role. (more…)

The Borat movie is as hilarious as it is offensive which is leagues beyond any movie I’ve ever seen and well over the top of any contemporary “reality”-based media. The movie’s strength comes from Sacha Baron Cohen’s absolute fearlessness in using his character of an ignorant Kazakh reporter to satirize American culture through “real” interviews in which the subjects did not know that Borat was an actor. These interviews and scenes are cut into the plot of the movie as Borat travels across the US supposedly making a documentary about America “For Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.” (more…)

Have you heard The Horrors? You know when you find a band that sounds just like they look? It’s so tremendous. That’s like The Horrors. Totally trashy. Kinda foreign sounding (they’re English but they sound Swedish or something). A bit retro. Like what a Jess Franco film should sound like. Makes me wonder how all that hype gets attached to bands like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs when The Horrors are the real deal. Just sick garage rock. Beautiful.

I’ll be frank with you: my initial fandom of French Kicks, Strokes, Walkmen, etc faded. Pretty quickly actually. I loved what they were going for originally (or what I thought they were going for) but they all seemed to make a conscious decision to get off the path they were on and go somewhere else. Somewhere I didn’t care for. (more…)

[This piece appears in All the Rage.]

Glossary
For What I Don’t Become
(Undertow)

After nearly ten years, Glossary are as close to being an institution in whatever-you-want-to-call-the-college-rock-scene as any band could be. With their fourth long-player, For What I Don’t Become, they officially part ways with any indie-rock trappings – the record is as pure and solid an alt-country record as one could imagine. And the band jells as they never have on record before. Having weathered several lineup changes over the past few years, the new record reflects the live band sound better than previous efforts. (more…)

I can’t say that I’m all that familiar with Young Adult literature past or present. So I was a bit shocked to keep running across f-words and sex scenes in Frank Portman’s debut novel King Dork. Yeh, I know, I should probably read those Judy Blume books on my shelf. Or maybe I should have taken my nose out of all those comic books when I was younger. (more…)

Given the director (Napolean Dynamite), the writers (Napolean Dynamite, School of Rock) and the star (Heat Vision and Jack), what could one expect but an innocent (childish almost) romp from this movie about a friar who turns to Mexican wrestling to provide salad for orphans? (more…)

[This piece appears in All the Rage.]

In a little under a year, How I Became the Bomb has surged out of Murfreesboro with a pulsating, New Wave sound and quickly become one of the most talked about bands in Middle Tennessee. They are about to release their debut EP, Let’s Go!, with a show at the Mercy Lounge. All the Rage caught up with singer Jon Burr, guitarist Denis Deck and keyboardist Adam Richardson to find out what makes the band tick. (more…)

[A blog post unpublished as a formal review.]

I just finished Paul Murray’s An Evening of Long Goodbyes. Like the protagonist, Charles Hythloday, the novel is incredibly lazy. I’ve been reading it for about a month. Charles is, frankly speaking, a ponce. He chiefly specializes in doing absolutely nothing but daydreaming about restoring the old aristocratic air to his family home. Since it is his voice that narrates the novel, it often moves slowly and a bit unreliably through its plot. (more…)