Catching up...

Oops, how time flies. Here's a brief rundown of what I've managed to work through since the last posting:

•  The entire Tori Amos studio albums discography. No, I'm still not her biggest fan. I enjoy most of her stuff and have loads of respect for her ambitious and unique output. But there's something a bit too self-consciously artsy there that creates a distance between myself and her music.
• Freedomland, the 2006 movie starring Samuel L. Jackson and Julianne Moore. This one falls in the yawning gap between social drama and outright thriller. There's nothing wrong with the premise and the acting is very good, but director Joe Roth is not Scorsese, Parker or Lumet, and his inability to fuse the diverse elements creates a self-destruct mechanism for the entire film.
• The Inner Circle, the 1991 movie starring Tom Hulce and Lolita Davidovich. Russian emigrant director Andrey Konchalovsky's almost Felliniesque period piece about the strange life and times of Stalin's personal movie projectionist. Ambitious and realistically grotesque (shot entirely in the USSR itself in the dying days of the Soviet Union), the film excels at points while underperforming at others. The grimness and absurdity of the Stalinist era comes through strongly, but as a dramatic narrative it is disjointed and a bit unfocused.
• Vlad: The Last Confession, an historical novel by C.C. Humphreys. The story of Vlad III Dracula, also known as Tepes (Impaler), may be ready-to-serve material as lurid entertainment for gorehounds, but Humphreys does a very good job in creating the authentic historical period in a distant culture in vivid, excellently researched detail. The storytelling is solid and the author's no-comment policy on Vlad's ultimate motivations works well. But the very detailed descriptions of extreme violence are so strongly presented and disturbing in a way that I found a bit upsetting - i.e. I found it hard to shake off the nightmarish imagery when I put the book down. A bit less might have been merciful on the innocent reader.
• Renaissance music of Grigorio Allegeri and Claudio Monteverdi has lent a wonderful, bright dimension to the everyday routine. It has also made me wonder about the hopefulness and optimism of the human spirit in an age when life was most often short, very painful and too often cruel. In our time of well-being and plenty, music that reflects such a strong trust in the eventual goodness of things is practically nonexistant. Maybe there's a lesson here, I don't know.
• Casino Royale, Bond #21. What an excellent piece of the action / thriller genre! Hard to believe the Bond franchise, as entertaining as it is, could spit out something as fierce as this.
• Quantum of Solace, Bond #22. Entertaining and explosive, yet a notch below #21. Director Marc Forster perhaps tries too hard to out-adrenaline Martin Campbell's steely direction in C.R., and the movie threatens to slide into sheer hysterics here and there. But a good ride nonetheless. The Tosca sequence is a nice Hitchcock moment, a rarity in the Bond franchise.
• Spartan, the David Mamet political thriller. I usually enjoy Mamet's work (House of Games and Things Change are among my all-time faves), but I honestly fell asleep about 2/3 way through the movie. The near-freezing emotional scale, the various methods of audience alienation and the awfully self-conscious plot twists caused a "who cares?" reaction in me. Excellent acting by the cast, but I just couldn't give a damn... sorry...
• Very stylish metal from Kamelot and Arch Enemy. Both bands have the ability to refine their style down to the essential core of their respective subgenres, and then add something of their own to it. Plus, the musicianship is of a very high standard in both camps.
• Monty Python: (Almost) The Truth, the 6-part doc series on the Pythons. I've actually watched only the first three episodes so far, but it already makes me sing praises. It also supports my theory that any succesfully creative group necessarily needs conflicts in its group dynamic; a Lennon to counter a McCartney, an Ulrich to counter a Hetfield, and so on. The various tense personal relationships and possible ego conflicts (Cleese, for example, seems to have constantly crossed swords with Jones and Gilliam) must have created a kind of creative friction that sparked their genius. It possibly also led to a fairly short career as a writing/performing unit, but that's sometimes the price to pay.