Elastic No-No Band's blog

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A little bit ago my friend Steve posted this link to my Facebook wall:

Worst-to-best Best Picture Winners.

An interesting little intellectual exercise that would be fun for most film buffs. Of course, things being subjective like they are, it seems like he underrates some good movies and overrates some bad ones. (And, as much as I didn't like it, I expect some of those early winners are probably worse than his bottom pick, Crash.)

So as an intellectual exercise, I decided to look at the list of Best Picture winners and rank them in my order of preference. Of course, I haven't seen them all. And some I haven't seen in years. In fact, after I got done with 10, I sort of felt like further ranking was pretty arbitrary nonetheless, here goes:

1. The Sting (1973)
2. Marty (1955)
3. The Apartment (1960)
4. The Godfather (1972)
5. Amadeus (1984)
6. Casablanca (1943)*
7. No Country For Old Men (2007)
8. One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (1975)
9. On The Waterfront (1954)
10. The Godfather Part II (1974) Read more »

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A lot of times I am compelled at the end of the year to cook up some sort of Top 10 list of favorite movies. This year is a toughie, though. I haven't seen a lot of new movies, and the ones I've seen have largely been wiped clean from my brain-slate.

So, I won't do a top 10. Here are the 3 films I remember liking best from 2010, in alphabetical order.

And Everything Is Going Fine (Dir. Steven Soderbergh, with Spalding Gray) - Spalding Gray was a unique talent who managed to create a niche for himself, doing pieces that incorporated performance art, stand-up comedy (more like "sit-down" in his case), and something like confession or open therapy. There are already 3 feature films documenting Gray's best-known monologues -- all performed with Gray seated at a desk, while the film directors try to figure out how to keep things visually interesting. Steven Soderbergh (the Ocean's movies; sex, lies, and videotape), who directed the last of those movies (called Gray's Anatomy), here constructs a narrative of Gray's life through a succession of clips from Gray's other monologues, some television interviews, and a few home movies, with no authorial interjection from any other voice besides Gray's. The effect is that of a posthumous autobiography, or as the blurb in the trailer below suggests, a final monologue. Read more »

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About a week ago, The Onion's AV Club website syndicated an article about the top 10 songs a survey of men said made them cry:

http://www.avclub.com/articles/these-are-the-songs-most-likely-to-make-a...

For those of you too lazy to click, here is the list:

1. R.E.M,"Everybody Hurts"
2. Eric Clapton, "Tears In Heaven"
3. Leonard Cohen, "Hallelujah"
4. Sinead O’Connor, "Nothing Compares 2 U"
5. U2, "With Or Without You"
6. The Verve, "The Drugs Don’t Work"
7. Elton John, "Candle In The Wind"
8. Bruce Springsteen, "Streets Of Philadelphia"
9. Todd Duncan, "Unchained Melody"
10. Robbie Williams, "Angels"

When I saw this list, I had two thoughts -- which are echoed by many folks in the AV Club comments sections: 1) these songs don't make me cry, 2) who cries at songs?

Well, yesterday, I listened to the 2008 album by country singer Jamey Johnson, That Lonesome Song, for the first time, and when it came to a song called, "In Color," I got chills. It's a little obvious and sentimental, but it's not extraordinarily cheesy and expresses something that moved me deeply in what I feel was an evocative way. Read more »

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I've taken it upon myself to now and again write little reviews of various awesome items in the OJ distro that might get lost in the immensity of it all. My first entry can be viewed here: http://bit.ly/acP1sM

In a just world, there would be no fame and every piece of art would be appreciated purely on its inherent merits. But, even in this unjust world that we live in, it seems particularly egregious that brother-sister duo Double Deuce have not reached even the moderate fame of other sibling musicians like The Fiery Furnaces or ... I don't know... The Osmonds.

Double Deuce is a supergroup consisting of the mind-bogglingly prolific Toby Goodshank and his sister Angela Carlucci (aka Little Cobweb). They have put out only two CDs, one home-recorded and one in the studio. The latter, Camp Candy, ranks as one of the best albums I have ever heard. Focused largely around Goodshank's guitar and the pair's vocals, although augmented occasionally by a full band (including cello parts by Carlucci's bandmate in The Babyskins, Crystal Madrilejos), Camp Candy is full of memorable songs that catch in your brain even if it's hard to decode their literal meaning. Read more »

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I've taken it upon myself to now and again write little reviews of various awesome items in the OJ distro that might get lost in the immensity of it all.

The first one I've decided to highlight is the album Sloppy Kisses and Serious Guitars (2005), which might be my favorite Huggabroomstik CD and is probably the psych-noise band's leanest and poppiest recording. Sure, they have made some memorably poppy tunes since then -- the two-parter "Diamond Eyeballs" from Alternate Huggabroomstik and "In The Sun" from Ultimate Huggabroomstik (which is out-of-print!?! we've got to do something about this!) stick out in my mind in particular. Yet, Sloppy Kisses consistently highlights the band at its most focused and entertaining. Even the album's requisite freak-out track, "The Rainbow Ofof Shit," is downright concise compared to later jams like Ultimate's 14-minute track, "Duck Hunt." Read more »