Jamie Lidell & Twin Shadow

I put on my brand spanking white Nikes, called up my sister-in-law and jetted up to Asheville last night for a great concert.

Jamie Lidell is all the modern blue-eyed British ElectroSoulFunk you'll ever need in this life. His last album, "Jim," reached classic status in my house, and now that the retro-Motown sound has just about been done to death, he comes back with "Compass," which sounds completely different-- the only common denominator being his amazing voice.

He's known for his ability to be a live sampling one-man band during his shows, but he had a full band with him last night and they were super funky, especially on the Prince-inspired "I Wanna Be Your Telephone."



Prior to the show, I hadn't heard of the opening act, Twin Shadow, but he was cool.

I say "he," because "Twin Shadow" is really just George Lewis Jr. His given name sounds like he should be challenging for the heavyweight title, but he's just a transplanted Brooklyn hipster doing cool new wavey songs, so he's (say it in a whisper) "Twin Shadow."

That's the latest trend, solo artists giving themselves band names. As far as I know, it started with Bright Eyes. That's just one dude, really. Sam Beam is a drink your grandpa would order, but then again, so is his stage name, "Iron and Wine." Conor J. O'Brien sounds like your Catholic bishop, so instead he's "Villagers."

I don't know. Look for it on Stuff White People Like soon.

Anyway, I like Twin Shadow. He didn't seem as pretentious as his name would suggest. You can get a free song here. This video makes me uncomfortable, though.

Netflix Challenge: Moon

I really, really liked Moon. It's a dark thinker full of Stanley Kubrick references (Kevin Spacey does the voice of a HAL-like robot) and a great performance by Sam Rockwell.

I was interested to learn on the old Wikipedia that the budget was $5 million. It seemed way more expensive.



This was director Duncan Jones' first feature. His next one is Source Code and will come out next spring. I'll go see it.

A good one and now it's gone: 55 remain.

Giant bubbles in slow motion

I see why this has 1.2 million views. You should see it, too. And take the extra time to let it download in hi-def.



I want to shoot in slow motion.

Netflix Challenge: 1990s Flashback

We're still slogging through the queue.

Last night it was Edward Burns' She's the One, starring Jennifer Aniston and Cameron Diaz in all of their mid-90s glory, followed by the always entertaining Saturday Night Live: The Best of Chris Farley.

I'd never seen an Eddie Burns (as Drama calls him on "Entourage") movie before. This was his follow-up to the Sundance award-winning The Brothers McMullen, so I'm sure everyone was real pumped to see it in 1996. Fourteen years later, it serves as a nice time capsule for Aniston's legendary haircut. Tom Petty also did the music with the same haircut he's always had:





The Chris Farley compilation always makes me laugh and wonder what he'd be doing nowadays.





Side note: In searching for that Farley video, I landed on SNL's site, which implores visitors to "Check out" this or that link seven times on the front page. Too much!

Just 56 titles remaining.

Bad sideline reporting

I think I just heard the Notre Dame network's sideline reporter conclude her post-game interview of Michigan's coach with "keep doing your thing."

Netflix Challenge: Triple Feature

The titles just keep falling off the queue.

Funny Games
This Austrian film was one of the last movies to get piled on the queue before the start of the challenge and now I regret it. It only got there because we had recently watched another in the Netflix recommendation category "Foreign Film Featuring Crazy Kids Tormenting Rich People in Big Houses For No Apparent Reason," and I just wasn't in the mood.

The strange thing is I vaguely remember seeing it before and enjoying it. It's intentionally painful to watch at times as this dim-witted family fails to rise up against two not-so-intimidating kids in short white shorts wielding only a golf club as a weapon. It's not scary, just hard to watch, as they fumble with duct tape and never run away fast enough. What makes it sort of different than other voyeur torture films, though, is that the fourth wall is broken down a few times by the lead bad guy, who'll turn to the camera Ferris Bueller-style and wink or ask the audience if they think the family will survive until morning.

The director, the respected Michael Haneke who won the Golden Globe for best foreign language film last year, actually did a shot-for-shot remake of his own film ten years later with Naomi Watts and Tim Roth.





Surrogates
An interesting idea, and I'm a Bruce Willis fan, but this one was a little on the hokey side.
It's the future and nobody does any thing for real anymore, they just link their bodies up to life-like robot surrogates who go out and do all the fun stuff. People live longer, but only because their robots do all the drinking and driving, coal mining and soldiering.
Everybody is real pretty, too, and Bruce's surrogate even has hair.





Independent Lens: Between the Folds
Who thought a movie about folding paper could be entertaining? Not me. Interesting, but definitely not a laugh-a-minute thrill ride. Too much paper folding.