It’s only sort of a terrace, and there’s no lake around anywhere that I could see, but that’s the name of the place. And the movie isn’t actually the action-packed, how-will-they-survive thriller the previews imply, either. But Samuel L. Jackson lives on Lakeview Terrace with his teenage daughter and pre-teen son, his wife having died some years earlier. He’s an LA patrol officer, and he aims to keep his street clean if it kills you. Other than that, it seems like a nice place to live.
Young marrieds Chris and Lisa Mattson (Patrick Wilson, soon to be in Watchmen; and Kerry Washington, Alicia Masters from the Fantastic Four movies) have just moved into this dubious paradise, taking the house next door to Abel Turner’s. (That’s Samuel L. Jackson, with beard and shaven head this time. He still has his own personal hair stylist listed in the credits, though, so that little beard must require lots of attention. Or maybe it’s the shaving of the head. Anyway.) Abel is a weird guy, and everyone seems to know it, but like the neighbors and friends of a newly unmasked serial killer, they seem to take it in stride and assume he’s a decent guy underneath it all. But he’s something of a control freak, and is utterly convinced that he’s right even if the rest of the world disagrees with him. Maybe especially if the rest of the world disagrees. That’s good if you’re Galileo, maybe, but not so much these days.
Abel doesn’t like Chris and Lisa, or more precisely, doesn’t like that they’re of different racial backgrounds. Chris is blond and pale, you see, especially when compared to his African-American wife. Abel’s barbed comments and not so subtle disapproval put a strain on the marriage, especially when Abel starts in with the lights shining into their bedroom at night and the breaking in to their garage. But his neighbors like their house and they’re not ready to move yet. Who can blame them, with the economy the way it is? So they tough it out, and of course things escalate, and nothing works out well for anyone, basically.
Samuel L. Jackson is a great actor. There’s very little he can’t make work. But there were still times when I felt kind of embarrassed for him in this flick. The writers were apparently not quite sure if they wanted to make him a misunderstood victim, overreacting to the bad hand dealt him by life; or just a creepy, psychotic sort of person who wants to impose his particular brand of order on the world. So sometimes he’s one, sometimes the other, and while that might have made everything more realistic, somehow it just didn’t quite work.
But he’s still Samuel L. Jackson, for heaven’s sake, so it still gets three idols. If it seems shaky in places, it’s still a solid movie overall — probably more solid than the rebuilt hillside on which all those expensive houses are perched. Again, don’t go into the theatre expecting lots of violence and people hunting each other down with guns — that’s there, but it’s minor until the end when everything explodes. It also isn’t any kind of scathing look at modern race relations — that’s always lurking, but not quite the focus. Like Abel, it’s never quite all one thing or the other, which is a little annoying sometimes, but at least it keeps things interesting, just like your weird neighbors. We’ve all got those, but fortunately they’re not all Samuel.

3 new pieces going up today. I call them interesting because ALL 3 are under the unclassifiable genre. Go have a listen!
Danse of Questionable Tuning
Impromptu for Pianoforte and Beatbox
Texture for Violincello

Two new pieces are now available, go have a listen!
Cool Intro – a short intro
Double O – an electronic piece – not quite glitchy

Due to issues with IE, the preview players are no longer on the front page.
No worries, the players are available on all the other pages.
Two new pieces today, titled from Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming”. It is an Eerie piece with kit, trombone, french horns and some strings. There is the instrumental version, and one includes a partial reading of the poem “The Second Coming” by Yeats.
Second Coming
Second Coming Instrumental

This seems like another in the seemingly endless string of movies lately that’s based on some dark, futuristic graphic novel. There was Sin City and 300, and coming up we have Watchmen and Max Payne. (Also a remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, which isn’t based on a graphic novel, obviously, but is chock-full of special effects, unlike the original. It stars Keanu Reeves as the alien visitor, which isn’t as awful a casting choice as one might think because the character isn’t supposed to have any emotions.)
Where was I? Oh, yeah, Babylon A.D. It’s actually based on a regular novel called Babylon Babies, which I haven’t read (surprise — I mean, I read a lot of books but never the right ones, apparently), so I don’t know how things ended. I didn’t leave early or anything, but after going along pretty well for 90 minutes, the film just… ended, and then credits rolled, and I wasn’t quite sure what had happened. I noticed that the version released in France was 101 minutes, and my first reaction was to be annoyed that only France got the real ending; but someone who saw that posted that the ending was awful. So either those extra 11 minutes weren’t at the end, or they were but the wrap-up was still somehow terrible/ridiculous.
And before I forget the plot completely, let’s get to that: Vin Deisel (not a favorite of mine, but I hear he plays Dungeons & Dragons, so that makes up for a little) plays mercenary Toorop, who was apparently kicked out of the US and now lives in Russia, where everything looks like a recently demilitarized zone. He’s forceably recruited by Gorsky (Gérard Depardieu, even though he’s French and not Russian), who is sort of the cuddly villain of the piece — the lesser of two evils, though he has the scariest nose I’ve seen in a long time. He wants Toorop (I don’t know whether that’s a first or last name… maybe it’s an acronym?) to smuggle a package into the US, where all the cities look like many, many giant billboards in thie brave new world of the future.

You have to admit that Vin Diesel is excellent at being scary.

The package is named Aurora (Mélanie Thierry), and she’s a young blonde woman with lips that I think might actually be very nearly as big as Angelina Jolie’s. She’s been raised in an orphanage in a convent that is an absolutely gorgeous building in a beautful spot, under the care of Sister Rebecca (Michelle Yeoh — I wanted to see her smack Vin Diesel around a little just because it would have looked so cool, but no such luck). But now Aurora is exhibiting strange symptoms of illness or psychological problems or maybe demonic possession, and she needs a commercialized US physician to help her out.
It’s somewhere during their trip to New York that the movie gets less good. By the time they actually reach the Big Apple, I’m pretty confused as to what’s really going on, but I have faith that all will be revealed, or at least enough so that I’m not walking out of the theatre dazed and confused. But I was dazed and confused, and it’s a shame because it started out really well, very dark and interestingly post-apocalyptic, and then it just turned into yet another action flick.
So two and a quarter idols for this one, the quarter being for Michelle Yeoh because she did get to smack around a lot of random bad guys. Like she tells Vin, “Just because we’re peaceful doesn’t mean we’re weak.” She’s so cool. She couldn’t save this movie, true, but I have a feeling that was more because of the editors than anything else. They must not have know what was going on, either, and just wanted the audience to suffer along with them.