annie hall.

i'm not sure really how i feel about woody allen. as far as i know i think i've only seen like one and a half of his movies, the one being annie hall and the half being scoop during which i fell asleep. he seems like a very smart comedian, if a little too something else. what that something else is i haven't nailed yet.

i'd say annie hall is a good movie. i'd even go so far as to say a really good movie. allen makes really insightful and funny observations on relationships and how men think. the whole movie is metafiction; weaved through the whole thing are plot devices where allen breaks the "fourth wall" and talks to the camera, where he blends well with his own fictional world but keeps referencing the real world outside of the camera. it's really the pre-cursor movie to high fidelity, without all the music savvy and hilarious supporting characters.

i watched it for the first time when i was younger; i say younger but really it was only like two years ago max. i didn't really get it then. i watched it again about a month ago and i understood it a lot better. and i realized that it's a really good movie, yet mildly inaccessible, in a weird way. in a basic way, it's just allen's thoughts on life and love and women and sex and relationships, and nearly everybody can relate to that, but if you listen to half the movie's dialogue, it's all references. and obscure references too, references to literature or weird psychoanalysts and 70s culture. tons of references that i had no hope of understanding. and you know what it reminded me of? freakin' juno. that awful movie about the pregnant teen. i bet when annie hall was released in '77, it was really popular with loads of college douchebags who were really into the latest kurt vonnegut book and who voted for carter. it was the juno of the late 70s. except much smarter and better overall.

it is pretty slow though. there's a good laugh about every 10 minutes or so, and there are some really long takes. at one point annie has a long monologue which is like 5 minutes with no camera cuts, just one long take. so it feels a lot slower than current movies. another reason those freakin' hipsters love it so much. it's feels "artsy".

even though it was probably popular with the indie hipsters of the 70s and nowadays it's so hipster to say it's one of your favorite movies, i still liked it, because it is a really good movie. here's woody's summation of his relationship with annie.

after that, it got pretty late and we both had to go, but it was great seeing annie again, and i realized what a terrific person she was and how much fun it was just knowing her and i thought of that old joke, you know, this guy goes to a psychiatrist and says "doc, my brother's crazy; he thinks he's a chicken." and the doctor says "well why don't you turn him in?" and the guy says, "i would, but i need the eggs." well, i guess that's pretty much now how i feel about relationships. you know, they're totally irrational and crazy and absurd, but i guess we keep going through it because most of us need the eggs.

perfect. i should watch more woody allen movies.

-jon

finals week.

i'm in a random room of prairie lakes bible church, sitting at a table with my friends joel and ryan and pretending to study. prairie lakes opens up its facilities for finals week, staying open until midnight each night, providing lots of study room and tons of free food for the students. it is awesome.

this is why finals week is always great. everybody seems more stressed, but there are cool things like a big church offering help to the college kids. and my take on finals is pretty unstressful; my work all semester is where i'm stressed rather than finals. when finals roll around it's like i've done what i've done, usually my finals are not make or break my grade type important. pulling all nighters is so pointless to me because it's like cramming isn't going to help my final grade at all. so while i still study and get the last few bits of information into my head, i don't let finals get me down.

plus, i'm three days away from being absolutely done with this semester and three weeks long of working at family video (closing christmas eve, opening christmas morning, among others), playing guitar, reading the hobbit/lord of the rings, and beating grand theft auto iv and lego indiana jones with joel. and hoo boy am i excited. it's a bummer that i don't get this excited about what i'm doing with my education because it would be phenomenally easier to wake up and go to class if i was excited about it. instead, i get excited at the end of my school day when i can go home and read things about music artists or discover remix albums or watch movie trailers or blog or anything of that nature. i feel like an hour playing video games with joel is more productive than an hour long class because i am deepening a friendship (no matter how pointless one might think video games are, they can serve as a catalyst for real fellowship) instead of learning about lipids. who gives a crap about lipids? honestly.

why can't there be some major in school which involves blogging. listening to tons of music and telling people about it. playing guitar with other musicians. it sucks. instead i'm learning about the molecular cofactors involved in the electron transport chain and which parts of the brain affect motor function. interesting stuff yes, but to me? not particularly. can't help thinking i've chosen the wrong things to focus on in school.

whatever. i've got another semester-ish to finish and then i can get a job and learn how the real world works. go to work during the day and then come home and have my evenings to myself and my wife. sounds great. in the meantime though, lego indiana jones is pretty fun.

-jon

808s and heartbreak.

so it's been a little more than a week since kanye west released his latest, 808s and heartbreak. granted, i didn't have loads of time over break to digest it, but i feel at least introduced to the album now. here are my initial thoughts.

actually i want to start by saying that i am excluding pinocchio story from any review i do of this album. that song is so terrible and i'm so confused as to why kanye tacked it on the end. kanye might've said "scrotum" in graduation's closer, big brother, but that tune is far and away better than pinocchio story. so i'm not even counting that as part of the album. moving on.

right off, i knew it was gonna be different. i did my very best not to go into it thinking it was "kanye's fourth album". and it's not at all. the whole thing feels like a side project rather than an album in the "kanye west" discography. obviously as time goes on, as his listeners absorb this album and he releases more, we will find where it fits with the rest of his albums. but right now, a week after it came out, it doesn't feel like it fits anywhere with his previous three records. he sings and makes use of the auto-tune through the whole thing. no real rapping here, at least by kanye. this isn't really a bad thing though, at least it doesn't take away from the album. kanye isn't a good singer (if you've ever heard him live...egh.) but the auto-tune corrects his off pitches and gives him a robotic element that is pretty cool. very importantly though, he doesn't overdue the robot voice like t-pain, so i haven't gotten sick of that.

the thing right away that was hard for me to get around and i'm still trying to get used to is the music. talk about veering away from what worked for him. kanye was one of the kings of sampling and organic, original hip-hop beats. this is so far away from that. he used a drum programming machine, the roland tr-808, for most of the beats, and instead of actually sounding like a real drum kit, a lot of the foundational beats of this album sound really computery. still, not necessarily a bad thing, but what he layers on top is what i didn't warm up to right away. there's more piano here than his previous work, which isn't bad, but a lot of it is just really repetitive. and that's where i think i go off track with this record. there is so little variation here. almost all the songs are just one chord progression with little difference between the chorus and verses. there isn't enough that draws me in. lots of reviews i've read are saying things like this is a bold move from his previous work and it's a really new original thing for him to do. i'd say it's a bold move, but i wouldn't say it's original. so many of the songs sound like what everybody else is doing right now. with a few exceptions, this could've been an album from t-pain or akon. it's new in terms of kanye's catalogue, but in terms of popular music right now? not at all. heartless is such a bore to listen to for me because not only it is super repetitive, it sounds like a thousand other people's songs. same with robocop (especially robocop) and see you in my nightmare. amazing sounds like it was made 100% by timbaland. street lights sounds like a postal service tune with a black guy singing. it just didn't sound new to me, didn't seem fresh.

i could go through song by song and pick out things i don't like, but i don't really want to do that. i think my biggest critique is that this doesn't seem that new to me. i feel like i've heard songs like this before from other artists of whom i'm not a huge fan. i was hoping for something totally off the wall in terms of not only kanye's music but music in general, not something inspired in any way by lil wayne. there seems to be a lot of potential on this album, it's just not pushed as far as it could go. like love lockdown, it's an awesome song, whenever the african drums are getting pounded. but when they stop it's like are we even listening to a song anymore? this whole album is sparse and i think i was hoping for a little more.

i'm in kind of a rough place cause i don't want to bad talk this album a lot, i don't even want to go as far as to say i'm disappointed in it. cause i kind of knew this is how it was gonna be and this is how i was gonna respond to it. but after my first listen through, there wasn't a single song that i really wanted to go tell colleen about or made me jump around my room. there weren't any flashing lights or good life type tracks. this just isn't exactly my style of music. if this album had been released by anybody i probably wouldn't fall in love with it. kanye hasn't alienated me with this, he just released an album i'm not particularly crazy about.

least favorite track: see you in my nightmare feat. lil wayne
awful. all the way around. sorry, where the heck is the beat? there is nothing solid at all. and that synth. did kanye choose the "mosquito" setting on his keyboard? horrible sound. and lil wayne...man i am still confused where this guy came from and how he is so popular. i guess i never listen to the radio so i never, ever hear his songs, but i feel like he just popped up like 9 months ago and was suddenly the most popular rapper around. whatever, that's something for another blog. what is important is that his verse on this song is not good. this whole break-up theme, "see you in my nightmare" idea isn't good at all. i love break-up songs as much as the next guy, but if you're really gonna complain about your break-up, do it in a way that is engaging. this is not engaging. this is engaging (#4 for the best angry break-up song ever). it's just not an original concept.

favorite track: paranoid. this is my jam. my favorite for sure. super fun beat, great sing along chorus, the chords keep me guessing, it's just an all around awesome tune. thanks for this one 'ye.

-jon

p.s. give me another week and i will like this whole album more than i do now. i started writing this yesterday and listening to the record while finishing this up, i'm liking all the songs even more now than before. so this review only really applies to the first week of listening to the album for me.