For those scoring at home

The review of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is here. The condensed thoughts: it's not as good as the book - no duh - but considering how much it had to shear off, it's not bad at all. More details on that and some more praise as well, but you'll have to read it.

Jonesing for trouble

If you were thinking of buying the Jones Holiday Soda pack because you thought it seemed amusing or something... holy shit, do not do it. Alma and I did it for you and I can report that this is not something one can enter into lightly.

The road to wherever the crap

For just the third time since leaving high school, and the first without having to resort to single-elim playoffs, the team I was on won a tournament this past weekend, and in the best possible place - a 9-1, oh-so-close to undefeated campaign at TRASH Midwest Regionals to give ourselves an automatic berth into TRASHionals, wherever it ends up being. (I'd like something fairly close, but que sera sera.)

The recap of the tournament, which is not all that funny but at least tells you what happened, is here.

One of our prizes for winning was a VHS copy of Left Behind: The Movie, which had apparently been left behind (eh? eh?) in the bargain bin at Blockbuster. Alma and I actually subjected ourselves to it; it is indeed pretty terrible. I may actually write a review, or maybe I'll just get bored. Maybe one of these days I'll put up a FOGHAT recap too, but then we didn't win that one.

Tyler gets to see if he's right

The review for Stay is here.

48-7???

I'm not even going to talk about the Northwestern game. Just ugly, and that's that.

It's been a while since I've made an update here, hasn't it? Work is going along; it's kind of the busy season what with Black Friday just two weeks off, so I've been doing more, which is always good. For those of you who don't know what I do, no, I don't really work in retail, but I work for a company that has connections to retail. It's probably best not to discuss it here, but you can always ask if you're so curious.

Someone posted a thread over at Rotten Tomatoes asking what we thought the best songs of 2005 were. I came up with this shortlist of my favorites:

Ben Folds, Landed
The New Pornographers, Use It
Fountains of Wayne, Maureen
Oasis, Lyla

I also included Green Day's Wake Me Up When September Ends because some people were throwing in songs that had been released as singles in 2005, but since the album came out last year I guess that doesn't really count; many of the bands I listen to these days don't even do a lot of single releasing in the U.S. and I rarely find that singles end up being my favorite songs on particular albums anyway, so counting that way seems kind of silly.

I decided to look at Amazon's Editorial 100 list of the albums of 2005 to see if that would jog my memory at all and found out that Idlewild have a new album out, which somehow escaped me. I'm a big fan of their last effort, The Remote Part, and I own 100 Broken Windows though I'm not sure I've actually listened to it (or if so, not more than once). I listened through Amazon's song samples and the new one, Warnings/Promises, sounds pretty... well, promising. (Pun not intended.) People have called them the "Scottish R.E.M." - if that's the case, I feel sort of like someone who caught on at Life's Rich Pageant. You know, not early enough to feel totally awesome (that would be "Radio Free Europe," I guess), but before any potential explosion (the eventual Automatic for the People breakout).

The other album I'm looking at right now is Out of Nothing by Embrace. As with Oasis' "Lyla," I found out about this one largely due to the influence of the FIFA 2006 video game, which has a playlist coming straight from the Europop scene. Needless to say, it features about three bands I'd heard of pre-game (Oasis, Doves, Bloc Party... there might be one or two others that I'm forgetting), but the finds were "Lyla" - I'd heard of Oasis, of course, but I'll be damned if I knew they had a new album out before then - and "Ashes," by Embrace. Embrace are another British band that have some connection to Coldplay - Chris Martin did some work on some of Out of Nothing's tracks - and draw comparisons to them, but there's something about their sound that strikes out on its own. Coldplay, though I like some of their stuff, tends to strike me as kind of clinical, like the sort of music that might be created by a supercomputer programmed to make Top 40 hits but unable to parse human emotion. Not that Coldplay's stuff can't be emotional ("The Scientist" works for me), but it's the sound I'm talking about... something about the way it's done. I can't really describe it. Anyway, Embrace doesn't do that - there's a recognizable vibe, in particular to "Ashes," that just sounds more to me like there's something else behind it. This probably isn't making much sense, and I'm sure Craig is polishing his gun as we speak, but oh well.

Every once in a while I seem to go through a point where music means a lot more to me. I love movies and I love going to see them, but you can't take movies with you wherever you go, and while the best of them certainly connect to the emotions, they can't really do it in that kind of easily repeatable way that a good song can. (No matter how much I love Shawshank, I'm not going to watch it six consecutive times. But when I first listened to "Landed," I played it at least that many times in a row and maybe more.) Maybe it's the early sunsets or just the cooling temperatures, but the fall always seems to be a time when I want to see more movies and listen to more music. And right now there are still only a few movies out that I'm really that interested in, and since I'm working full-time it's harder to see them... so music takes over. Though I feel in some ways like a different person when this happens, I can't say I don't enjoy it; the prospect of discovering the next great album for myself is always a tantalizing one.

If anyone has any suggestions based on what's been mentioned in this post, I'm open, though Idlewild and Embrace are probably the next two purchases, if and when I buy anything at all.

Movies!

I jumped from five to seven on "movies seen in the theater this year" in the past two days. It's always nice when stuff actually comes out that manages to pique your interest. So what did I see? Well, I saw Good Night, and Good Luck and Elizabethtown. One of them was very good. One was very bad. You can guess which is which before reading the reviews... or you can just read them. But here's a preliminary hint: as with my review of Almost Famous, someone I know will not be thrilled with my review of a Cameron Crowe film.