Karl THE WEEKEND STARTS HERE:
CINCO DE MAYO commemorates the victory of Mexican forces led by General Ignacio Zaragoza over the French expeditionary forces in the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862. Although primarily a Mexican celebration, it's becoming more popular in the US and (presumably) Cuervo Nation. You will be glad to learn that new tests developed by scientists in Mexico and Germany will help distinguish real tequila from fraudulent versions, which are a potential threat as this alcoholic beverage grows in popularity. “Cinco de Mayo” is also the title of a Liz Phair tune. I don't think Phair ever did a video for that song — “Supernova” was the single from Whip-Smart (and it's likely NSFW for profanity).
THE REPLACEMENTS debuted their first new song in 16 years on a sports radio show. There's some killing of music at that link, but you can stream it from the Hype Machine also. Westerbergian, ain't it?
SONIC YOUTH: Stereogum is killing music with a leak of “What A Waste,” but more law-abiding folk can stream it from the Hype Machine. Pretty good, in that Sonic Youth-y sort of way.
GOLDEN SMOG has got one complete track and three teasers from their new album, Another Fine Day, streaming from MySpace.
THE SADIES may be best known for backing Neko Case on her previous tour, but the band is nifty in its own right. In August, the band will release a 41-track double-disc live album with cameos from Case, Kelly Hohan, Jon Langford, Gary Louris, Heavy Trash, Blue Rodeo and the Band's Garth Hudson.
DRIVE-BY TRUCKERS: Patterson Hood talks to The Stranger about balancing three songwriters in one band.
THE STATE OF THE SINGLE: Part one of a piece at PopMatters declares: “Video killed the radio star, right? Well, the single is slaughtering the album.”
THE KILLERS: Frontman Brandon Flowers claims the band is now making “one of the best albums of the last 20 years.” Save those nickels and dimes, kids!
SEEN YOUR VIDEO: The Champs' “Tequila” was nowhere to be found, so we head into the Cinco with Los Lobos' cover of “La Bamba.”
THE FLAMING LIPS: Ken King was a little surprised when I mentioned that the band recently played a cruise ship, but that's where Paste magazine first caught up with them. It's a long piece, during which frontman Wayne Coyne talks about the image he and the band project: “You can’t have too much ambiguity or gray area up front; you do want to have this sort of extrovert, eccentric, opinionated person. Even if I’m looked at as a fool, it’s better than simply being ignored. And that’s part of the appeal of anybody that goes onstage. We really would rather stand there and go for it and look like idiots than play it safe and say, 'Well at least we didn’t look like fools.'”
JAMIE LIDELL is classified as electronica, but NPR rightly notes that he owes more than a little to Sly and the Family Stone and Prince. Two streaming cuts at the link.
BLOC PARTY: The angular indie-rockers wants to do something different musically and lyrically when they start on their second album in the next few weeks. But you can hear stuff from their debut and a digital-only release at MySpace.
JOLIE HOLLAND: The Texan by way of San Francisco (who does a warm live show, btw) maDE NPR's Song of the Day with “Springtime Can Kill You.”
THE DARK SIDE OF THE HYPE MACHINE is that you run across things that are really bad for you, like Dead Or Alive's “You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)” and it's minutes of your life that you will never get back.
PETE SEEGER makes a great leap forward into the 20th century by deciding to learn how to type on a computer. Okay, he is 87 years old, so I give him some credit.
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE III — What? You thought that just because I've been mocking Tom Cruise for over a year straight, I wouldn't go to the advance screening for you? I had to! After all, if the movie stunk, it's an atomic payload of Schadenfreude; if it's good, its success will only encourage Cruise to get even crazier. It's a win-win. And I must admit that that the movie is very effective as a summer thrill ride. Obviously, my concern was that Cruise's dementia was such that I (or you) could no longer suspend disbelief, but the opposite may be true. We may have become so used to Cruise behaving in a completely over-the-top manner that super-agent Ethan Hunt is relatively more believable. There are a few moments where not knowing about Cruise would be better, but they aren't a terrible distraction. There are also a couple of intentionally funny moments, one of which is had with the first Mission movie.
Ditching the first attempt at this movie and hiring J.J. Adams (Alias, Lost) turned out to be a smart decision by Cruise and co-producer Paula Wagner. Adams brings many of the elements that made the first two seasons of Alias so good to this franchise, interweaving and intersecting global action sequences with the personal life of the agent. Put on the big screen, this installment seems part of a sub-genre that seems to have arisen with the end of the Cold War and the decline of the James Bond series — True Lies, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, and even The Incredibles are varying takes on an attempt to reinvigorate the secret-agent genre with the clash between work and home. And while the momentum flags a little at the end, with a climax smaller than the other action sequences, Adams and his crew acquit themselves nicely.
What the other films just mentioned really lack in comparison to the classic Bond picture is a villain with the flair of a Goldfinger (Syndrome in The Incredibles is good, but that's because you're working through the idiom of the animated super-villain). Phillip Seymour Hoffman manages to avoid the Oscar curse here, with a part that may not have that old skool flair, but plenty of new skool badass and is well-matched against Hunt and the IMF team. That's an improvement from the last installment as well — Adams smartly brings the story closer to the original show by making much of the movie an ensemble effort, not just Cruise's team, but his superiors, played well by Billy Crudup and Lawrence Fishburne. Adams also brings back more of the original music, adding Lalo Schifrin's “The Plot” to the iconic theme. Speaking of plot, this one had some nice twists, though I spotted the major one earlier than I would have liked. Adams also lifts from (or pays homage to) a variety of action movies, from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Red Corner, to name two. He even pays homage to Lost in the movie's final credit.
All in all a job well done. But I can't help mentioning that the fine folk from Hail Xenu hired planes to fly banners reading “Hail Xenu LOL <8 OT” and “The baby is Xenu's” over last night's Chinese Theater premiere.
TOM-KAT UPDATE: According to Entertainment Tonight, “Cruise Tops Premiere's Power List!” In reality, he's unlucky number 13. (I believe Steve Jobs and Pixar's John Lassater will share the real top slot.) Cruise's wackiness has inspired a bill that would prohibit the selling, leasing or distributing of an ultrasound machine by California manufacturers to anyone other than licensed medical professionals. Cruise hopes to get his baby skiing and motorcycling ASAP. He also would love to make a western. Impressed by Brokeback Mountain, were we? Given prior legal threats, there are some things Page Six won't imply about Cruise, so the column never misses a chance to remind you he's short.
NOW SHOWING: Obviously, the big release this week is Mission: Impossible III (77 percent Fresh on the Tomatometer), but the hug-an-owl tween movie Hoot (25 percent Rotten) and the historical horror An American Haunting 29 percent Rotten) open wide this weekend, suggesting everyone decided to clear a path for the Cruise crazy train this weekend.
BRITNEY SPEARS is rumored to be having a girl the second time around and plans to renew her vows with Spenderline after he promised to stop acting like a jerk to her. Which explains why she has hired a babysitter to watch him, right? According to In Touch Weekly, Spenderline is not thrilled about having the round-the-clock sitter, but “Britney told him it wasn’t up for negotiation.”
STAR WARS: In response to overwhelming demand, Lucasfilm Ltd. and Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment will release the original theatrical versions of the classic Star Wars trilogy on DVD in September. The fans have had this “demand” for sometime; what's new is Lucasfilm's “demand” for cash-flow.
GINA GERSHON caught canoodling a hunky country crooner after late night tequila shots at an NYC club.
EVANGELINE LILLY: The Lost hottie admits she has succumbed to Hollywood's weight obsession.
SPIKE JONZE and WES ANDERSON are adapting kids books for the big screen. Jonze is preparing to shoot Where The Wild Things Are, while Anderson is working on The Fantastic Mr. Fox. Henry Selick, the animator who worked with Anderson on The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou had been tapped to work on Fox, but has since jumped to animate an adaptaion of Neil Gaiman's Coraline.
KATE MOSS and SIENNA MILLER apparently patched things between them at the Anglomania fashion show in New York.
JANEANE GARAFALO is touting the controversial New York Rescue Workers Detoxification Project, a program based on the teachings of Scientology.
BIG LOVE: Chloe Sevigny is interviewed by Selma Blair, while Amanda Seyfried is interviewed by HBO about polygamy and more. At The New Republic, Michelle Cottle argues that “What most modern marriages I know really need is an extra wife…”
JOLIE and JOHANSSON: If you're not attracted to either Angelina Jolie or Scarlett Johansson, there's a good chance that you're Jonathan Rhys-Meyers. NTTAWWT. Kid in a candy store, right?
THE FRENCH HOTEL: According to TMZ, after her breakup with Stavros Niarchos, the shipping heir turned up at the French Hotel's pad early Monday morning and threw a crying tantrum. TMZ also has the first video of the French Hotel and newly-drafted Cardinals QB Matt Leinart caught canoodling in Vegas.
KIM JONG-IL: Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has implied that the North Korean dictator is a pervert. And who would know better than a member of the Clinton cabinet. (A cheap shot, but it's hard to just pass by the broad side of a barn.) It's news because the popular perception of the dictator was that he is so very lonely.
IRAQ: In hunting for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Coalition forces seized the “blooper reel” from Zarqawi's latest video, showing that he doesn't know how to fire his weapon. Yesterday, I linked to a blog that had excerpts from a memo retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey wrote to the heads of the social science department at West Point, where he now teaches international relations. Slate has the whole memo as an Acrobat file, and if you read the whole thing, it's easy to see how badly Fred Kaplan distorts it. Kaplan zeroes in on McCaffrey's question: “Do we have the political will, do we have the military power, will we spend the resources required to achieve our aims?” Kaplan leaves out that McCaffrey wrote that “There is no reason why the US cannot achieve our objectives in Iraq” before the question and “It was very encouraging for me to see the progress achieved in the past year” after that question. So it might be asked what effect that kind of journalism has on the political will and willingness to spend resources. Coincidentally, Kaplan left out McCaffrey's 12th point: “There is a rapidly growing animosity in our deployed military forces toward the US media.”
HURRICANE KATRINA: Vanity Fair is publishing an exclusive excerpt from the new book The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast, by historian and Vanity Fair contributing editor Douglas Brinkley. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin takes a beating: Nagin couldn't find the ignition keys to the handful of Regional Transit Authority buses that hadn't flooded, let alone mobilize the drivers. Brinkley also describes in great detail a scene on Air Force one when, according to eyewitness Ron Forman (who recently ran against Nagin in the New Orleans mayoral primary), Nagin, offered a chance to take an on-board shower, refused to get out of the bathroom, forcing a Secret Service agent to kick the door and demand that the mayor get out immediately because the president was about to arrive.
FINDING NEMO: In reality, Nemo is a goldfish swept from a New Zealand backyard pond by floodwaters and found alive and well two kilometers away in a roadside ditch.
CHICAGO BIRD COLLISION MONITORS rescue birds that fly into the city's skyscrapers and whisks them to a new bird hospital in the terminal of a now-shuttered lake front airport. That airport was Meigs Field, known the world over as the default takeoff field in many early versions of the popular Microsoft Flight Simulator.
BATS track insects like the system used by some guided missiles to intercept evasive targets.
RUSSIAN PIG BANNED FROM SOCCER MATCH for fear that it would incite a riot. As I have a personal story about the fans of Spartak Moscow, I cannot say this was a crazy decision.
A MALLARD halts construction of a new Lowe's home improvement center near Wilkes-Barre, PA.
A GIANT SNAKESKIN discovered in a town Down Under revived speculation that a large python may be loose in the area: “It's really big, it would be the size that would frighten the crap out of you.”
