The White Peril 白禍

Been busy of late. Lots of news, though. The best is that Virginia Postrel seems to be doing well with her cancer treatment and is posting again. Best wishes to her.

Speaking of recovered cancer patients…KYLIE! Of course. Some people seem to be bewildered that her new album doesn't address all the profound, life-changing experiences she's had in the last few years, which only makes you wonder whether they've ever heard her music before. Kylie is not Madonna, who apparently regards every thought that floats through her head and everything that happens to her as deeply meaningful and worthy of picking over in song. Kylie is an entertainer, and (bless her heart) seems to feel no need to sing about elements of her personal life if she can't do so in a way that pleases her fans.

The new album is good, of course. With the glut of super-skilled writer/producers for hire and all the technology at their disposal, no dance diva with a recording budget will ever make a truly bad album again, I suspect. "The One" is a terrific-sounding rip-off of Madonna's terrific-sounding rip-off of Kylie's previous terrific-sounding rip-off of Madonna's previous terrific-sounding rip-off of "I Feel Love." And so on.

The thing is, about half the songs on X would, frankly, have better served the strengths of her sister. Dannii Minogue has a deadpan, husky voice that's emotionally blank but stays immediately recognizable even when processed to death--perfect for imprinting a brand on club songs on which the beat is the point. She goes with the mechanical flow…kind of like an antipodean Britney without the skank factor.

But Kylie's gift is for humanizing dance-pop. Fans want to hear her coo, sigh, burble, pout, and wail, and there's little room for that in the kinds of brittle, boxed-in tracks everyone's making these days. Stuck, like Madonna's "Jump," two thirds of the way through is the most affecting song on the album: "No More Rain." Looking forward to the remixes, especially if someone actually comes up with a bassline that hasn't been done to death.

And please, can we consign "Nu-di-ty" to outer darkness while there's still time? No Kylie album is complete without one track that totally sucks, but really! These things do have their limits.

Remember Suck.com's list of ten warning signs you should stay away from a movie on the basis of its trailer? My favorite was always this one:

9. The Ominous Ominousness of Ominosity

Frequently used in tandem with Number 8, this is the one where you see the hero in various happy-family scenes — enjoying a long kiss with the wife, playing with the kids. You know exactly what's going to happen to that wife and those kids. So why see the movie? In addition to providing a nearly flawless "Do Not Enter" indicator, the Triple-O effect provides support for the theory that Death Wish is the most influential film in history. So perhaps it's not completely without value.

I think it was the graphic.

Anyway, it was always clear that there were more rules to be added, and Andrea has found one...albeit by actually sitting through the movie:

[D]ear filmmakers, please think of some other way of getting your characters in trouble that does not necessitate them contravening basic human nature. One tenet of which is people do not stand in the middle of the road, thereby making themselves available to be hit by the next high-speed vehicle that comes along. They just don't.

I don't see movies quite as often as I used to, but though I tend to forget those I do before I get home and have occasion to say anything about them here, they usually make good dinner/drink conversation with my companions afterward.

Not so that Jodie Foster movie, You Talkin' to Travice Starling-Bickle?!, which regurged just about every cliché in action-movie history, then sucked back up and swallowed several in order to hurl them at the audience a second time. Foster did an okay job, considering that the whole point of her character was to seethe in that watch-me-pointedly-refrain-from-chewing-the-scenery way that is supposed to pass for subtlety. She's nothing if not professional. And given that you go in knowing exactly how she's going to be turned into a vigilante, the movie doesn't spend too much time building up the happy-couple scenes before the lead pipe finally falls.

Nevertheless, the dialogue was beyond ridiculous, with Foster delivering an improbably perfect one-liner every single time she was about to blow some baddie away. And yes, there was a scene in which she walked blithely in front of a car with a sicko behind the wheel (while helping along a kidnapped teenaged prostitute!). You know that's gonna end in tears.

I don't think this post has a point. Just, as Andrea says, I think The Brave One is the kind of movie you have to see drunk. That may be why my buddy and I forgot about it almost as soon as we left the theater and turned our attention to more compelling matters, such as where to go for some nice beer and fish & chips.

Yes, of course, I'm in love (whoo!) with the new Kylie song and video--you had to ask?



I suppose it does sort of sound like a Gwen Stefani song...or, rather, what a Gwen Stefani song would sound like if she weren't the second-most ANNOYING PERSON ON THE FACE OF THE EARTH. Personally, I see "2 Hearts" more as accomplishing what she should have years ago with her cover of "Give Me Just a Little More Time," which turned out murky and a little flat.

Alice has seen the new Spice Girls video, in which most of the five have their scalpelicious assets on full display, and wonders why women stars in their thirties "all want to dress up as ladies of the night these days"? I don't know--the inspiration has always looked more like stripping than like streetwalking to me. (I guess "ladies of the night" includes both.) The Flea manages to keep a straight face while proffering the argument that the girls' message is that "you should be proud of yourself no matter what you look like," even if you look like a bad boob job wrapped in electrical tape and topped with the head from a Rachel Roberts blow-up doll. Me, I'm not sure whether Baby looks like the spitting image of Bonnie Tyler through nature or art, but the resemblance is so uncanny it's distracting.

Anyway, yeah, slutty outfits and dance moves from pop stars. There's no frisson left, really--witness the perfunctory clip for the lead single from Britney's new album. You can practically see her thinking, Blah, blah...shake rear, gyrate, slide up and down pole, flip hair...yawn. It may be the single lamest attempt at titillation I've seen in my entire life, which is a shame, because the song deserves better. I think the Pussycat Dolls visual tropes will take a while to shake themselves out.