Picked up the last Eagles live DVD the other day. I guess I’m in an Eagles kind of mood.

Eagles: band or brand? The same could be said about Pink Floyd from about Animals onwards — either way, I don’t give a shit. I’m a Star Wars fan, after all. We’re not talking about Britney Spears here, and as long as the product has artistry behind it, it could be wrapped in a McDonalds wrapper for all I care.

In any case, these guys are bloody good musicians who can put on a spectacular show. They sound amazing and obviously work hard. Not everything has to be a wankfest that’ll appeal to five people with arts degrees, yet neither does it have to be soulless inanity that aims squarely for the lowest common denominator. The Eagles manage to strike a good balance between the two extremes.

Pretty much all the hits are here, including some solo tracks (particularly by Don Henley, who is still cool even now). Go out and buy it ASAP!!!

Here are the movies I caught up with this week:

• Neil Young: Heart of Gold again demonstrates Jonathan Demme’s knack for making true concert films — this is as much a character study, with long closeups on Young in particular, as it is a document of a musical performance. Three-and-a-half stars.
• Strangers With Candy, a prequel to the Comedy Central series, is perhaps most notable for the fact that Stephen Colbert co-stars and co-wrote the screenplay. This is not great intellectual comedy, but it’s still occasionally hilarious (particularly Colbert’s character, a closeted-gay, born-again-Christian high school science teacher). Two-and-a-half stars.
• Death Proof is half a movie expanded into a standalone feature, and it feels like it. Read my review here. Two stars.

Saw this last night. Found it to be a real letdown, to be honest. Everyone was great in it, but it had no emotional resonance for me. Maybe the Wachowski brothers just leave me cold.

I may try to update Wordpress tomorrow — hopefully the blog will survive…

Yesterday I got my life back (for the time being), so today I chose to celebrate by getting back into movie viewing…

• The Brothers Grimm, despite being yet another case of Terry Gilliam fighting against the studios, is just fantastic. It’s gorgeous to look at, and Heath Ledger in particular is a lot of fun to watch. Nobody makes films like Gilliam.
• Children of Men I found slightly disappointing, though it’s still an excellent film. The visceral intensity of some of the scenes is outstanding, and Clive Owen and Michael Caine are both excellent. Bonus points for including references to both Pink Floyd and King Crimson.

I just finished watching Spider-man 3, so here are my initial impressions:

Wow! Spectacular!

A lot of people (including George Lucas, surprisingly) had problems with this film, but I enjoyed it more than the second one and about on-par with the first. The second film had a much more serious tone, but here Sam Raimi gets to have some fun, balancing the light with the dark with ease.

A lot goes on, but everything in the plot has a purpose, so there’s no real clutter. Plus, we get the best Bruce Campbell cameo out of all three films.

Just fantastic, and a great end to the trilogy.

I finished watching David Lynch’s Inland Empire only minutes ago, and I’m really not quite sure about what I just saw.

This is possibly his most challenging feature to date. Forget Lost Highway or even Eraserhead — those look like mainstream Hollywood blockbusters by comparison. This film’s length (180 minutes), combined with its handheld digital video aesthetic, creates an experience that is somewhat akin to a claustrophobic endurance test.

The themes presented in Lost Highway and Mulholland Dr. reappear — Hollywood, fluid identities — but even more so, Inland Empire blurs the line between fantasy and reality. Imagine being trapped in Club Silencio for three hours.

Okay, that’s all I’ve got at the moment…

According to Uncut.co.uk, Peter Gabriel has scored the new IMAX film, Sea Monsters.

You can see the trailer at the film’s official site, and it sounds like they’ve used Gabriel’s music in the trailer itself — his style is quite distinctive.

The only thing I thought was cooler than dinosaurs when I was a kid was dinosaurs in the water, so this film looks right up my alley. Hopefully Gabriel will also release his soundtrack on CD, however.

UPDATE: Turns out the soundtrack is a collaboration between Richard Evans, David Rhodes and Gabriel — the other two are excellent musicians who’ve worked with Gabriel for many years, so it’s still very much a project of interest.

Last week I bought the DVD of David Lynch’s new film, Inland Empire, and I still haven’t unwrapped the bloody thing. Finding time to watch a three-hour arthouse film in one sitting is a pretty big ask.

But I really want to see it!

Maybe next week…

I just discovered the key to my tastes (and personality in general): audacity.

Audacity, to me, is a boldness in breaking conventions — an enthusiasm in pushing the boundaries, to go beyond the limits of conventional thought. (Not coincidentally, it was while listening to Faust that I had this epiphany.)

Whether it’s A Saucer Full of Secrets by Pink Floyd or Brazil by Terry Gilliam, the artists who excite me the most use conventions as their playthings, using them and undermining them simultaneously.

People tend to think of Star Wars as being terribly conventional, but Lucas’s inventiveness in seamlessly combining fairy tales, westerns, samurai films, space adventure serials, war movies and hot-rodding makes the 1977 film a triumph of the same DIY mix-and-match aesthetic that pushed progressive rock forward earlier that decade. There was no respect paid to genre boundaries — anything could be plundered for inspiration and nothing was off-limits.

Of course, the irony is that once you create two or more works in the same unconventional vein, new conventions form. The most daring move Lucas could have made after making Star Wars was to make Apocalypse Now! as originally planned. The Empire Strikes Back was sufficiently shocking, however, turning audience expectations on their heads in those final climactic scenes. And had David Lynch accepted Lucas’s offer to direct Return of the Jedi, we quite possibly could have ended up with a cinematic masterpiece. But as the series progressed, fans’ expectations became more and more entrenched and Lucas found himself hoist by his own petard.

So true audacity leads to progress and growth. Get out of that comfort zone — break your own conventions. Life is for living. Be irreverent and audacious.

It’s about bloody time.

Micallef has reportedly teamed up with SBS to produce Newstopia, a half-hour comedy that takes a satirical stab at world news. The program is co-created by Micallef and his long-time collaborators Gary McCaffrie and Michael Ward.

Newstopia could follow a similar format to the popular Daily Show with Jon Stewart, which airs intermittently on SBS.

I’m a big fan of The Daily Show (and an even bigger fan of its spinoff, The Colbert Report), and if anyone can pull of an Australian version, it’s Shaun Micallef.

Micallef is my favourite Australian working in comedy, not the least of which because his writing is loaded with absurdist humour. His hosting of the Logies — matched only by Andrew Denton’s two stints — is one of the few highlights of an otherwise dull affair.

Besides revisiting Dune, I’m also currently rewatching Twin Peaks, the second season of which has only just appeared on DVD, years after the first season was released.

Twin Peaks stands as one of the most daring series to appear on mainstream commercial TV. When you consider that this is the artistic creation of the man who brought us Eraserhead and Blue Velvet (”Baby wants to fuck blue velvet!”), the fact that it was ever made is quite amazing, though in fairness, Mark Frost’s involvement probably helped to allay fears. David Lynch was no doubt hot at the time, but dream sequences featuring dancing midgets were not really the staple of prime time viewing in the late ’80s/early ’90s.

Lynch has a way of filtering American pop culture from a bygone era through a surrealist lens that creates the effect of viewing a reprocessed nostalgia trip. Be it a reference to The Wizard of Oz or The Fugitive, he makes films (and television) about the medium itself, the culmination of which is Mulholland Dr., whose themes of dreams, nightmares and Hollywood stardom are so masterfully woven that its disjointed past as a TV pilot is more fitting than forgivable.

My next task, of course, is to see Inland Empire…

Are they making straight-to-video movies? a new TV season? what?

Matt Groening offers the following information:

“I was frustrated when it got cancelled, but Fox, 20th Television is the one who came back and said, ‘Would you like to do a DVD movie?’” Groening recalled. “We said, ‘Let’s do two’ and they said, ‘Well, why not three?’ and we said, ‘Well, why not four?’ and they said, ‘Okay, four’ and then that’s it.”

After this, Comedy Central won a bid to air the films as new “Futurama” episodes. “We’re writing them as movies and then we’re going to chop them up, reconfigure them, write new material and try to make them work as separate episodes. Chopped up is an indelicate way of putting it but we are doing them as movies and then we are reconfiguring them and writing new material and narration and this that and the other so that they’ll stand on their own as episodes.”

Hopefully this will kickstart the series proper…