Ok, if everything went well, you should notice no difference in how you get music from my site. However, it is all changed. The backend is a full-blown database, which means easier updates for me, and more music online in the long run.
Here’s some that have been waiting in the wings for too long… In order from longest at 3:18 to shortest at 9 seconds.

• Olde Timey
  
• Plucky Daisy
  
• Five Card Shuffle (bluesy)
  
• Breaktime
  
• Look Busy (full band)
  
• Hand Trolley
  
• Barroom Ballet
  
• Gold Rush
  
• The Bandit
  
• Mr. Mealey’s Mediocre Machine
  
• Doh De Oh
  
• Heroic Reception
  
• Piano Cue One
  

When you go to the theatre every week, you can bet that you stay up-to-date on all the latest trailers. I’d seen the preview for this film several times, and it looked good — even Yahoo movies told me I’d probably like it. And does anyone not like Sandra Bullock? I mean, seriously. Besides, the only way I would have agreed to review Dead Silence is if someone brainwashed me into thinking it was a comedy.
Sandra (I just feel like I have to be on a first-name basis with her) plays Linda Hanson, Everywoman. She’s a housewife living in a nice house in a town that’s never named, with her hardworking husband and 2.4 adorable children. Er, I mean, their two adorable daughters. She even has the same kind of coffee mug my mother does. The only thing missing is the faithful dog with soulful eyes. She drives her kids to school, cooks, cleans, and somehow manages to look terribly pretty without looking like her personal stylist has just finished with her. I don’t know how she does that. Oh, and she also lives the days of the week out of their usual order. I don’t know how she does that, either.
Poor Sandra is equally confused. She lives through the nightmare of a police officer appearing on the doorstep with the news that a loved one is dead — in this case, her hardworking husband, Jim — only to discover the next morning that Jim is alive and well and eating Raisin Bran in their nice, homey kitchen. Her efforts to figure out what’s happening only confuse her more, and every time she wakes up (sometimes every time she turns around, it seems) it’s a different day, and not the day she was expecting. At one point she prefaces a question to her husband (on one of his “alive” days) with a faintly helpless, “If tomorrow is Wednesday”, which gets about the reaction you’d expect, and I really feel for the poor woman.
In fact, you’ll feel for Sandra through this whole movie. Her reaction to the news of her husband’s death is heartwrenching, her efforts to make sense of it all are realistic and tense, and the camera work really pulls you in. I’m often a little leery of handheld cameras, because they all too often end up as a distraction, but here it gave a feeling of being in the room with the actors, just as it should. In spite of the fact that it’s filmed like a horror movie at times, it’s really a very homey picture, revolving around friends, family, and what it means to be married with kids and a mortgage.

Sandra waits for all her nightmares to come true.

Unfortunately, the film loses its way a little towards the end — or the beginning, depending on how you look at it. A wise old priest appears from nowhere to explain things, and it all seems rather forced. I’d heard that Groundhog Day originally explained Bill Murray’s plight as being the result of a curse placed on him by an ex-girlfriend, and I’m very glad they took that out. It’s better unexplained. And since this film is being compared to Groundhog Day a lot, it’s a shame they didn’t learn from that example on this point.
Aside from that, though, it was a good film. Sandra carries the whole thing pretty much single-handed, but she can do it effortlessly ’cause she’s Sandra. Not that the supporting cast isn’t good — Peter Stormare, for instance, has a fun little part playing the only psychiatrist in town, which probably explains why he has such a cool office — but it’s all about Sandra’s struggles. I’d never seen Julian McMahon, who plays Jim, in anything before (he was Victor Von Doom in Fantastic Four), but he seems like a good actor. He just needs to do something with those perfectly horizontal eyebrows of his. They’re distracting.
So the bottom line is three and a quarter idols. Almost three and a half. It’s spooky, but not overwhelmingly so, intelligent, and very entertaining. So go watch Sandra now. Just be careful of some of the flashbacks — the director was unfortunately very fond of fading to pure, blinding white instead of black, so watch out for retinal damage.

Deliberate Thought
This is a very round analog piece with a subtle choir. Keep listening. They’re in there!

Q: What do you call one hundred Persians at the bottom of the ocean?
A: A good start.
I like Frank Miller — he’s been at the forefront of getting comics and graphic novels recognized as serious work, and I’m glad of that — so I was looking forward to this film. And now, though I may be a lone voice crying in the wilderness, I have to say that I didn’t really like it. Sigh.
In 480 B.C., King Xerxes of the Persian Empire attempted to invade Greece. A force gathered from the various Greek city-states of the time went to Thermopylae (literally hot gateway), the only pass through the mountains the Persians could use, and held off the Persian hordes long enough for Athens to prepare for a naval battle. They fell after three days, betrayed by a Greek who lived nearby. Their sacrifice made Thermopylae into a byword for tactics, determination, and courage.
That’s the real story in a nutshell. It sounds grand enough to me — what more could you want, than these few overwhelmed soldiers fighting and dying to defend their homes and families, for their own honor and for the sake of their comrades?
Apparently, you want giants, pseudo-samurai, battle rhinoceri, a frighteningly androgynous god-king that travels around on his own portable staircase, and redundant voice-over narration that made me want to yell for the projectionist to turn the sound off. (Don’t even get me started on the wrinkly ‘priests’ covered with boils who keep control of the young, beautiful oracles and can only be bribed with huge amounts of gold. I think maybe they were early Ferengi. This was more a sci-fi movie than anything else.) You also want faded-out color, grainy film, and a hugely annoying obsession with slow motion.
Honestly, isn’t that done with yet? Ever since The Matrix, every action film that also wants to be considered ‘artistic’ resorts to the slow motion thing, and it’s driving me crazy. This film was just a few minutes shy of two hours, but it would have only been ninety minutes if the action had just gone at normal speed once in a while. Entirely undramatic sequences still got the slow treatment, for no reason I could see except to remind the audience that they’re watching something Grand. Once it almost turned into a music video, and I seriously considered leaving the theatre.

Leonidas shows off his six-pack, and Gorgo laments her unfortunate name (and wardrobe).

Anyway. Gerard Butler plays King Leonidas, leader of the Spartan troops. You can tell he’s king because his beard precedes him by a good half-hour. He’s also the spokesperson for Democracy in Action against the horrible Xerxes, whose troops are all mistreated slaves. Never mind that historically, Sparta had only a few elements of what we would call democracy, being instead more totalitarian, regulating everything down to the length of a man’s hair; and the Persians were enlightened despots who valued truth and justice above all things, and generally won the respect of those they conquered.
There was at least a good female role, in Lena Headey as Leonidas’ queen, Gorgo. Yes, Gorgo. I’d wondered why no one called her by name during the film. But she’s as strong a character as any of the men, fighting a political battle to rally the reluctant Spartans to her husband’s aid. (Maybe she should also try to get some kind of railing around that giant hole in the middle of the town square.) She gets a far better inspirational speech than any of Leonidas’, strangely, but I was just glad to see that women weren’t completely neglected as I feared they might be. Dominic West is playing a bad guy, a career politician and Gorgo’s main opponent. I’m not used to him as a bad guy, so this was kind of strange, but he is a good actor.
I have nothing bad to say about any of the acting, which makes the movie’s faults seem that much more awful. It goes so far over the top striving for glory that it just slides down into the valley of ridiculousness on the other side. Life was brutish and short then, and I didn’t need three slow-motion decapitations to prove that. (There may have been more than three, but I sort of stopped looking.) The rare scenes where the film succeeded in moving me were the small, human scenes. The Spartans discover a burned-out village, and a terrified child passes out in Leonidas’ arms. Two soldiers tease each other and boast in the pauses between combat. That’s what I was hoping for from this movie.
Instead, I got a movie to which I can only give two idols, darn it. It was at least visually stunning, when it wasn’t lapsing into Matrix-land, and those brief moments of simple humanity really do shine, in spite of all the tedious fighting in between. Yes, after the first few minutes of it, I can only say it lapsed into tedium, I’m afraid. The best advice I can give you? Take the money you would have spent here and go buy a copy of Gates of Fire, by Stephen Pressfield. It’s just as blood-spattered, but underneath that blood you’ll find real human beings, and it’ll make you cry for them.

So for this one, I did a little research. There were two things involved in this film that I really didn’t know anything about: the real-life Zodiac killings, and Jake Gyllenhaal. I’d heard of both, but really couldn’t pick either one out of a line-up, so to speak. I wasn’t even born when the killings began, and (like just about everyone else I know), my history class in school barely made it up to World War II, so my knowledge of anything after the Battle of Britain is a little shaky. I’m not sure we would have covered serial killers anyway.
A quick check of Jake’s career revealed that I hadn’t seen him in a movie since his debut in City Slickers at age ten, so I still didn’t know if I’d like seeing him as the star of a major motion picture. (No, I haven’t seen Brokeback Mountain. Yes, I know it won three Oscars.) As it happens, I still don’t quite know what he’s like as the star, because he isn’t, really. He doesn’t start carrying the picture until the last forty minutes or so. The rest is all Mark Ruffalo and Anthony Edwards as the police detectives in charge of the case, and the scene-stealing Robert Downey Jr. playing Paul Avery, a crime reporter who drinks too much, smokes too much, and does all the other bad things you expect from one of Robert’s characters. He also (at least at the beginning) looks like he’s in search of a trendy coffeehouse where he can recite his latest poetry.
For those of you as clueless about the Zodiac killer as I was, here’s the summary: in 1969, three northern California newspapers received letters from a man claiming responsibility for three murders and one near miss in the area. Also included was a cryptogram which supposedly contained his identity, though of course it didn’t or we wouldn’t have this movie now. It was mainly badly-spelled rantings about why he was killing people, but it was scary enough. The media focused its attention, and a new serial killer was born. Read all about it here.

The Chronicle cryptogram, described by a random person in the film as “not looking very Christian”

Jake plays Robert Graysmith, the political cartoonist for the San Fransisco Chronicle when the whole mess began. Graysmith’s 1986 book Zodiac was the basis for this film, and considering how much of this movie shows Graysmith staring wide-eyed, looking like a lost, hopelessly confused puppy, I’m faintly surprised he wrote a book about anything. But he likes cryptograms, and forms a slightly awkward friendship with Avery over this, and slowly, Graysmith’s interest in the Zodiac morphs into obsession.
Being based pretty closely on real life, I was expecting that the film wouldn’t feel polished, but it was still jarring at times. You’re going to get sick to death of captions that say things like, “2 1/2 weeks later, Vallejo, California”, for instance. Leads are discovered, sound promising, and then vanish at breakneck speed without being resolved one way or another. That must be how real investigations go all the time, but I don’t pay to watch them. On the other hand, the film does do a nice job of showing how the case affects all those involved. Graysmith and Avery lose the most — the former a marriage and (I think) a job; the latter quits his job and eventually smokes himself to death. There’s nothing like watching Robert Downey Jr. sitting in a bar, alternating puffs of his cigarette with breaths from his oxygen tank.
All in all it was a fun ride, and I give it three and three-quarter idols. The acting is uniformly top-notch, the story moves along at a good pace and keeps the audience’s interest, and movie fans like myself will have the added bonus of spotting all the classic movie posters around. I’m also always glad to see Brian Cox, here playing flamboyant attorney Melvin Belli and having a great time doing it; and there’s a fun cameo by Clea DuVall, who I really miss seeing on Heroes. One warning, though: the ending is tantalizingly ambigous, so if not knowing drives you crazy, watch out. Just like real life, there’s no pat solution.