Miscellany: Will Elder, silly sequels and "Once"

• Aw, nuts: The utterly mad cartoon genius Will Elder is no longer with us, dead at the age of 86. In the hundred years or so of the cartoon medium, I would have to peg Elder as the single funniest cartoonist we ever had – best known for his work in Mad, Little Annie Fanny and Goodman Beaver, some of the funniest comics the '50s and '60s ever saw. Together with partner Harvey Kurtzman, Elder would pack every single molecule of his art with way-out gags, going for sheer quantity over anything else – and his rubbery, detailed art was fantastic, wonderfully suited for his parodies of Superman, Archie, King Kong, et cetera. With Kurtzman, he basically created the spirit of Mad Magazine that still spins along today. More than 50 years later, his work still holds up as a pinnacle of the art form - even if you've never seen an episode of the old TV "Dragnet" you can still get a grin at his utterly insane riff on stiff Joe Friday's detective skills. Dang, dang funny stuff and pretty much every cartoonist who picked up a pen with the idea of being funny in the past 50 years owes something to him -- but very very few could do it with his skill. The great coffee-table art book "Will Elder, The Mad Playboy of Art" from a few years back is a fantastic tribute to his life and work. Rest easy, great jester.
(*And go read my pal Will Pfeifer's own post on Elder for a far more eloquent memorial and some more excellent Elder art samples!)

• Unwanted movie sequel news #1 - Donnie Darko 2, aka S. Darko: Um, no, no, no. We don't need this. Or to use Will Elder to frame my feelings on the matter:

• Unwanted movie sequel news #2: Point Break 2 -- Dammit, you don't mess with Johnny Utah. The original, is, of course, the finest movie ever made as I have written. Don't despoil it. As Keanu would say, "Whoa."

• Watched the lovely little Irish movie "Once", which picked up an Academy Award for Best Song a couple months back. Humble and charming, it's a sweet almost-romance about a struggling Irish musician and the Czech girl who becomes his artistic muse, and it's one of these small movies that just sticks in your head after seeing it. It doesn't have a bone of irony in it, and somehow that's what makes it so nakedly emotional and great. Frames frontman Glen Hansard is particularly fine in it, one of those musician types we've all met who have their head halfway in the clouds most of the time, his eyes intense with imagined tunes. The music is surprisingly intense, and although most of the The Frames' music I've heard is good but not great there's a couple of songs from this soundtrack I can't get out of my head. Well worth seeing if you're a fan of music or sweetly subtle love stories.

The history of rock: The Replacements 1981-1984

Lots of people think of '80s rock and they think hair metal, Boy George and that moonwalking guy. But the '80s also brought us a band that endures, the rangy junkyard mutts of the Replacements, a scrappy bunch of Minneapolis yokels who turned from aspiring punk rockers into crafters of some of the most perfect yearning pop songs you'll ever hear. They summed up rock 'n' roll's essence – one minute mean as a feral cat, the next capable of a moment of dizzying emotional clarity that grabs you right in the spleen and doesn't let go. And as the years pass, the Replacements' brief spin through rock history just looks better and better.

The Replacements' first four albums – Sorry Ma, Forgot To Take Out The Trash, Stink, Hootenanny and Let It Be – are the subject of a sprawling new reissue program from Rhino Records. They've been re-released before, of course, but these comprehensive sets, overseen by longtime Replacements manager and producer Peter Jesperson, are a must-have. Over these four discs you see "the Mats," as fans know them, rise from young bratty punks to gifted rock prodigies – the learning curve is astounding.

A lot of times I find ballyhooed "remasterings" seem to just make the music louder rather than better. But Rhino's excellent job here wipes off several layers of murk on the old original issue CDs I have – stripping the Mats back to their garage-band essentials. You can practically hear the sweat flying off their hair and beer bottles clinking, and there's a spacious feeling to the music now. I came away with new respect for the late Bob Stinson's fiery lead guitar. Each disc comes with lengthy essays in the liner notes. Oh, and did I mention the plentiful extra tracks – 27 spread across the four discs. The new tracks run from rickety demos recorded alone by frontman Paul Westerberg to undiscovered gems.

Start with debut Sorry Ma, Forgot To Take Out The Trash, in its original 1981 release 18 tracks of high-speed would-be hardcore, a sloppy and cheeky combination of punk and pop that felt like it drew equal inspiration from the Sex Pistols and Cheap Trick. It's all tremendously fun and cartoony anti-authoritarian rock with titles like "I Hate Music," "Shutup," "Careless" and the first great song by the band, "Shiftless When Idle." While it's raw and ragged compared to the band's later work, it all still holds up a lot better than other nearly 30-year-old first albums.

Sorry Ma also gets the wealth of bonus material in the reissues – 13 new tracks, including the extremely crude but spunky first demos the band used to get a record deal. After all the thrashing, hearing Westerberg alone on the country-fried B-side "If Only You Were Lonely" is a lovely evocation of his often underrated later solo work. There's even a rambling rehearsal "Basement Jam" that puts you right there in the dirty cellar, missed cues, made-up lyrics and more. Geez, the Replacements were young – bassist Tommy Stinson was all of 12 years old when the band formed – and cruising through their first four albums is like watching the difference in someone between their freshman and senior year of high school.

The Replacements' second disc was the EP Stink (as in, "The Replacements..."), a mere 8 tracks over less than 20 minutes that continued the quasi-hardcore slacker zeitgeist with more tunes like "God Damn Job" and "White And Lazy." By now, though, you're starting to see the wink in these speedy songs, and some real talent lurking behind all that teenage angst. Toward the end of Stink you get hints the angry-young-turk thing is running its course. It's a real shock to find the album winding up with the polished gem "Go," which has all the yearning power of the Mats at their best. A handful of extra tracks added to the new Stink include shambling covers of "Rock Around The Clock" and "Hey, Good Looking." Motley fun, and they make me wish that some of the legendary Replacements live bootlegs of the era might sometime get an official release. In their shambling and obnoxious drunkenness, the band could often be the best and worst band in the world on the very same night.

Hootenanny is where the Replacements explode. Astoundingly, it was only their second full-length album, but it's miles ahead of Sorry Ma. "They were clearly bursting at the seams with ideas and inspiration," writes PD Larson in Hootenanny's new liner notes. "Seemingly nothing was too crazy to try once." If you want to pinpoint the moment when The Mats went from good rockers to perfect pop tunesmiths, it's about halfway through Hootenanny and the sublime "Within your Reach." Westerberg puts together all the pieces he's been slowly assembling and creates a song that speaks to anyone and everyone. There's no joking here, only a nervous skittering drum machine beat and stinging guitar soaring through the tune like a lost airplane. Hootenanny is filled with marvelous little moments, such as in the snide and resigned "Color Me Impressed" when Westerberg sighs, "Everybody at your party / they don't look depressed." Several outtake bonus tracks include the rowdy sketches of "Junior's Got A Gun" and "Ain't No Crime", with the band working out their power trash fetish.

And then came 1984's Let It Be. Naming your third album after the Beatles' swan song takes either artistic confidence or sheer screw 'em guts. The Mats had both by this stage, coming up with a tremendous disc that's regularly called one of the best of the 1980s. There's sheer gold on this album track after track – "I Will Dare," "Sixteen Blue," "Androgynous." The band hasn't given up their bratty, loud side – witness "Gary's Got A Boner" or Kiss cover "Black Diamond" – but clearly Westerberg is looking toward loftier goals than being a soundtrack for beer bashes.

In their final albums, the Replacements would sink a little too much into sentiment – especially after hard-partying Bob Stinson was kicked out of the band – but on Let It Be, they find a perfect balance between rock and heart. "Unsatisfied" is perhaps the Replacements' best moment to date, an every-man anthem response to Mick Jagger's "Satisfaction." "Look me in the eye and tell me / that I'm satisfied," Westerberg wails over a track that builds in momentum to a heartbreaking climax. It's hard to believe this is the same band that was singing "I hate music / it's got too many notes" just a couple years before. Bonus tracks added to Let It Be include excellent outtakes "Perfectly Lethal" and "Temptation Eyes," which wouldn't be out of place at all on the album itself, plus a fun cover of T. Rex's "20th Century Boy."

In their lifetime the Replacements were critics' darlings and a lifeline for a small, dedicated fan base. By the time word was getting out about them, they broke up in 1991. Rhino's dazzling restoration and expansion of their first four discs – and the second set coming this fall – make a valiant case for them possibly being the best band the '80s ever spawned. If you've never heard the Replacements before, it's never too late to start.

The campaign that never ends

Yeesh. Cheerful thought of the day: Can you believe it's still six months until the November presidential election?

...I've kept my yap shut about the primaries for a while now as, despite what the chattering pundits have been telling us, there really hasn't been much to say. In my eyes, Barack Obama basically won the race when he won Virginia back in February. Since then, it's been a whole lot of sound and noise about a result that was barely in doubt. Hillary Clinton is far too flawed and reviled a candidate to ever win the White House. Too much baggage despite her good intentions. Honestly, when the stupid stuff a guy's pastor has said becomes a major issue, you know they're reaching for ammo against a very good candidate. What's next -- Obama's dentist had a DUI?

And frankly, while no politician is ever going to be perfect, Hillary Clinton lost me for good the minute she accepted right-wing assassin Richard Mellon Scaife's endorsement of her in Pennsyvlania. Scaife is one of the major men behind the hunting of Bill Clinton for everything from Whitewater to Paula Jones, and a prime mover behind the impeachment. And then he endorsed Hillary over Obama in his newspaper. For Hillary not to basically stand up and tell him to stick his endorsement where the sun don't shine shows a lack of courage and principle on her part. Instead, she embraced it. Yeah, politics, strange bedfollows, et cetera, but y'know, I'd have more respect for her if she had refused it, or say, forcefully repudiated the idiots out there who still say Obama's a Muslim. I feel like she'll do anything to win, from a pandering, disavowed gas tax holiday to using tactics Karl Rove would love to go after Obama.

For a little while there back in January/February, I was actually really pleased with press coverage of the campaign, when there were a dozen or so viable candidates running and nobody knew what would happen. Maybe this time we in the media would live up to the job, rather than lower down to it. But once it settled into an Obama/Clinton/McCain round robin, we pretty much gave up on substance and settled for trivia and personality coverage – which has its place, but not dominating endless news cycle after news cycle like it has. When was the last time we saw a series of stories on the candidates and the issues?

Despite what you've read, disputed primary seasons are nothing new. Parties used to battle "all the way to the convention" quite often, even as recently as Carter/Kennedy in 1980 and Reagan/Ford in 1976. The last 20 years or so, it's been more of a coronation than a fight for most nominees after the first few weeks. But what's new is the never-ending news cycle, 24 hours a day of cable news and infinite terrabytes of Internet to fill. Newsmakers hate, hate dead air and blank copy, so we've had endless somersaults of logic and hyperbole trying to fill the air in a period of the campaign which, when you get down to it, hasn't really been all that much hard news.

Anyway. Clinton is finished, whether she accepts it with grace or with a gasping death rattle – there is no way for her to win without using every dirty trick and procedural twist in the book. Deep down she knows it – look at the footage of her after the win-that-was-really-a-loss in Indiana. She gave Obama a hell of a fight, but in the end his message - solipitisic though some might find it - meant more than hers. Now it's on to November, and maybe the press corps can take a wee break after Clinton makes her final speech.

A Yank's Humble Guide to Kiwi Rock (Part I)

So May is New Zealand Music Month! New Zealand has its own big and diverse music scene, as sprawling in its own way as any other country's – pop, punk, R&B, rap, opera, Maori tunes, you name it, it's all down here down under.

Unlike my wife Avril, I didn't grow up with New Zealand music, and so I've been kind of exploring it with a prospector's eye. Recently tossing together a mix disc of some of my favorite NZ music songs got me looking at the spectrum of NZ music. A really cool set of 6 CDs that came out a few years ago are "Nature's Best," which is the top 100 songs of all time in NZ as chosen by kiwis. Great sampler of NZ music.

Here's a totally non-comprehensive handful of some of my favorite NZ bands that appeal to my narrow post-punk/indie rock kinda sensibilities – the ones I've discovered so far, that is. This is hardly all-inclusive – I'm not really into hip-hop or acts that are imitating limp top 40 American music , and there are a lot of acts who are quite famous in NZ music industry that I still barely know like Dave Dobbyn, Bic Runga, Th' Dudes, Dragon and Chris Knox, to name a few. I'm still figuring it all out!

Crowded House - Basically, the Beatles of NZ music. I first heard Crowded House back in 1988 or so long before I really even knew there was a New Zealand and I've long loved their gently melancholy pop music. The one NZ band most Americans know, and songs like "Better Be Home Soon" and "Something So Strong" still play on '80s radio stations today. Frontman Neil Finn has a real gift for melodic hooks and has a fine solo career aside from the House as well. Crowded House's hits collection "Recurring Dream" is just about all perfect songs in my book. (Also related: Neil's older brother Tim Finn and the very influential band they both were part of, Split Enz - who might be the Little Richard to the Beatles analogy. Or Jerry Lee Lewis.)

The Chills - After Neil, my favourite NZ band I think. I first heard 'em on a tape my eventual wife made me back in 1993 or so, and they had a haunting, otherworldly quality. Fine pop music that was laced with an echoey, spacey aura that made it feel like amazing hit tunes from an alternate reality. Great songs like "Pink Frost," "I Love My Leather Jacket" and the self-explanatory "Heavenly Pop Hit" all muster up restrained elegance and a sprinkling of grit. Lovely stuff. Go get "Heavenly Pop Hits: The Best of the Chills" immediately.

SJD - A semi-veteran of the current alt-rock scene. Last year's album "Songs From A Dictaphone" won rave reviews and I picked it up recently. It's an eclectic, very '80s feeling kind of mix that's frequently quite beautiful, electronica-leaning tunes that have a confessional feeling, like "I Wrote This Song For You" or " Bad Karma In Yokohama." Kind of a distant cousin of Elliott Smith with keyboards instead of a guitar, maybe?

Shihad - Hard-driving alt-rock act that's quite big among the head banger crowd. I like some of their mid-90s work that my wife owns although not all of it's to my taste. Perhaps a NZ version of Soundgarden would be the best analogy?

Anika Moa - I saw her open for Ryan Adams a year ago, and she was great – doing the sensitive singer/songwriter thing, but with a wry and witty side. I only own her second album, and it's pretty good, although she was actually more spunky live I thought. There's a lot of similar girly singers here (Bic Runga perhaps the most famous) but Anika's the only one who's grabbed me so far.

Liam Finn - The son of Neil, so you know he's kind of like the Julian Lennon of New Zealand. Actually, his debut solo album, "I'll Be Lightning," is quite good, slightly askew power pop with a raw, garage-band edge to it. There's a lot of dreamy Finn/Crowded House influences, but run through an alt-rock filter and it's all a very promising, hook-filled debut.

Flight of the Conchords - Wrote about them quite recently, and just last week they stunned by having their first album debut at #3 on the US Billboard top albums chart - which turns out to be the top New Zealand artist debut ever there, even outdoing the mighty Neil! That said the album is good if not quite great - basically a soundtrack to their HBO TV series but not much new stuff, which is a bummer. It feels a bit more like contractual obligation than artistic leap. Great versions of folk-joke stuff like "Robots," "Leggy Blonde" and one of my favourites, the highly goofy "Bowie."

The Clean - The big grandaddies of the alt-rock NZ scene and their 2-disc "Anthology" is an excellent primer for anyone interested in post-punk; a big influence on bands like Pavement and Yo La Tengo. Formed way back in 1978, and their songs like "Platypus" and "Tally Ho" have a kind of ramshackle fuzzy beauty, like the Velvet Underground through an antipodes filter. It's got that kind of faraway strangeness the best of kiwi rock I've found has, like a pub-rock singalong composed entirely of arty rock fans. Definitely one to check out if you're interested in "the scene".

...And that's just a start, mate! I could easily put together a "part II" of this sometime soon as I delve more into the mysteries of Kiwi rock history. Cheers!

Movie review: Iron Man

"Iron Man" is here. And abandoning any pretense at being critically impartial, I've got to say – "Iron Man" rocks. It's a near-perfect summer movie confection.

The latest in the never-ending line-up of comic book-films is right up there with the first couple of "X-Men" and "Spider-Man" movies in my mind, a perfectly balanced combination of character, humor, action and whiz-bang special effects. The storyline is your basic origin tale, with a plot that's fairly predictable, but it's the quirks and small tweaks director Jon Favreau and a smart, snappy script add that make "Iron Man" fly.

The lovingly detailed production really makes you believe a man could cobble together a flying suit of armour; the grease, nuts and bolts show. Iron Man is a character I've long liked - some of the first comics I remember reading back in the '80s were from the great Micheline/Layton run - but he's been served poorly in comics in recent years. I don't even recognize the guy they have being Iron Man these days. Which is why "Iron Man" the movie is such ripping fun - it takes you back to the core essence of the character, a spoiled hyperactive genius playboy who becomes a hero, but who's basically still a boy with the biggest toys in the room. The storyline has been slightly rejiggered to examine the post-9/11 murky reality of the world, but not in an obtrusive fashion.

Robert Downey Jr. is perhaps the best superhero casting choice since Christopher Reeve. I love how he's matured from the wise-ass young punk into a battered, riveting leading man, and he simply IS inventor and gazillionaire Tony Stark. The tremendous presence he's shown in recent flicks like "Zodiac" and "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang" is here in spades, but honed into action-movie coolness. While the hard-living, flawed Tony Stark takes the piss out of traditional square-jawed superhero notions, Downey also wisely manages to keep his turn from being strictly comedy. He balances action and humor very well.

I don't want to spoil Downey's wonderful final line in the picture, given at a press conference, but to me it just sums up his wiseacre charm and the movie's entirely beguiling fanboy whimsy. While it's got darker moments, Downey's Stark is simply a less tormented figure than the Batman, Hulk, Spider-Man and Wolverine – and even Superman – than we've seen in the past couple of years. He digs being Iron Man. (As Downey says with a kind of stunned amazement, "Yeah, I can fly.") He combines the do-it-yourself heroism of Batman with a James Bond-like love of gadgetry.

Downey without a doubt makes "Iron Man" work, but he's backed up by a swell cast. Terrence Howard's role as sidekick James Rhodes is underwritten, but Howard brings a wry strut to it, while Gwyneth Paltrow's spunky Pepper Potts takes a fairly forgettable female sidekick role and makes it subtle, and sexy. Best of all is Jeff Bridges as villain Obadiah Stane, hamming it up tremendously. I usually associate Bridges with benevolent authority figure roles or gently befuddled goofballs, ala "The Contender" or "The Big Lebowski." But here, he channels his genial presence into genuine menace, with a shaved head that evokes Lex Luthor and a purr that quickly becomes a growl. Sure, I found his character's transformation a little drastic, but heck - it is a comic book movie after all.

Do I have a quibble or two? Well, sure, it's a little light on the action maybe, but then again so was "Spider-Man" frankly and I loved that too. Character is never abandoned for special effects. The story is Tony Stark's, rather than Iron Man's. The final battle sequence is a wee bit rushed compared to the leisurely build-up, but hey, it works for me. I have to admit that when Tony Stark dons the familiar "Mark 3" gold-and-red armor and starts flying about, I felt a rush of honest adrenaline and fanboy glee at seeing the comic become reality. Toss in all the nifty little "Easter eggs" for Marvel Comics fans like myself and you've got a comic book movie that's solid as Iron Man's armor. Check it out.

Shake, rattle and roll

Reno is shaking lately. Quite a lot. Been watching this all from New Zealand a bit worried as we of course used to live just 30 miles from Reno for many years, up at Lake Tahoe, and my parents and many friends still live like only 90 miles or so from Reno in the California foothills. Hope this "earthquake swarm" doesn't indicate something much bigger in the offing.

Reno, Nevada isn't a place you think of earthquakes happening, although I remember when we lived in Tahoe we had a few 5.0 or so shakers – one happened when I was at a video store and knocked about half the videos off the shelf and I immediately worried everyone there thought I somehow did it. Another happened while we were sound asleep in our condo and an enormous WHUMPPPP woke us up. I was sure some idiot had run his truck into our building or something, as that's exactly what it felt like. No matter how often you deal with earthquakes, I don't think you ever quite get used to 'em.

Anyway, I hope Reno's going to be OK. Although it isn't the most elegant town in the world – casinos, sagebrush and strip malls set in the dusty desert edges, with the grand Sierra rising behind it – I've always felt an affinity for the "Biggest Little City In the World." I've never quite wanted to live there, but I often enjoyed visiting when we lived up at the lake. Neon and sprawling, but it's got an all-American spunky charm (much more so than the overblown and absurd Las Vegas, I think).

Book review: Haruki Murakami, After Dark

Haruki Murakami is one of Japan's finest authors, and for my money, one of the best writers wielding a pen these days. His works, global in voice but with a uniquely Japanese perspective, are filled with layers that disappear into subterranean mists. Murakami's work is that of a modern man's probing of where Japan today fits into its bloody, mythology-filled history. Underneath everyday doings like feeding your cat and playing a jazz record lie the potential for strange abysses indeed. Murakami's work isn't science fiction, precisely, but it carries a healthy element of the outer limits coloring the edge of everything.

Murakami's most recent American-published work, now out in paperback, is the short novel After Dark, which steps back from the longer epic approach of his other books like the magnificent The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka At The Shore.

After Dark is a series of vignettes set over one long Tokyo night for 19-year-old Mari, a student who can't sleep and is passing time at a coffee shop. She meets a goofily endearing young musician, a burly "love motel" manager, a battered prostitute and more as she passes a most strange, sleepless night. Meanwhile, Mari's gorgeous estranged sister Eri is in a strange coma-like state, her fate somehow connected to Mari's wanderings.

Murakami casts a beguiling rhythm of endless nights, evenings not spent getting loaded and throwing up in an alley somewhere, but rather, a more lonely, mysterious darkness – the people who sit in coffee shops alone at 2 a.m. reading a book, the guy shuffling home from work just as dawn is rising. After Dark is populated with the characters of the sleeping world: "Time moves in its own special way in the middle of the night," one character notes sagely. The enigmatic After Dark is almost more of a tone poem than a fully fleshed-out novel, a kind of throat-clearing between bigger tales. Set in "real time" – each chapter ticks by with a clock telling us the hour of the evening – it has a brisk feeling.

Where the novel threatens to derail is in its plot, which meanders enticingly yet never quite gels. Like much of Murakami's work, resolution remains just out of reach – but while that quality works in some of his other books, making the reader feel involved in an open interpretation of events, here it's all just a little too opaque.

The finest parts of After Dark are the teasing, thoughtful dialogue Mari has with the various misfits and strangers she meets during the night. Murakami expertly portrays a thoughtful young girl trying to figure out her place in the world. But in its more overarching symbolic threads, After Dark feels rushed and less haunting than is typical for Murakami.

I wouldn't quite recommend After Dark for someone new to Murakami (try Norwegian Wood's bittersweet romance, perhaps). Yet while it's less satisfying than it might be, it's still got a sheen of mysterious beauty to it that carries through all his work. It's a minor piece, perhaps, but still part of a career tapestry full of often astounding imagery and strangeness.

Misc., I say, miscellaneous

...Yeah, been a busy week and not much blog time in there. And there are few things lamer than a three-day holiday weekend in which you work two of the three days. ('Tis Anzac Day today.) So a few random thoughts so I don't leave the week totally blogless:

• Peter's request today: "Tofu with silly sauce please." (That would be "soy." Yes, we're raising a hippie.)

• Is there a better white female singer than Dusty Springfield? When I say "singer," I mean in terms of pure belt-it-out hit-you-in-the-spleen hollerin'. (Of course there are many other white female singers I love like Cat Power, Lucinda Williams, Linda Thompson and many more, but technically Dusty is the queen methinks.)

• OK, I love Frank Miller, and I love the late Will Eisner. I love Frank Miller's over-the-top gonzo "Sin City" movie. But grim 'n' gritty Frank Miller taking Eisner's pulp hero "The Spirit" and making his movie into what surely looks like "Sin City II"? Ugh, not so much. The levity, invention and sheer good cheer of Eisner's work is really missing from this trailer. Hopefully the movie will be better than this teaser, but I dunno man....

• I'll add to the millions who've already said this, but so long to blogger supremo Dave's Long Box, who closed up shop this week. Easily in my top five blogs to visit list, Dave was totally Airwolf and pushed the Boob War to the max. And if you didn't have a clue what that meant, go page through his archives.

Summer 2008 movies excite-o-meter preview

OK, it's getting all cold and damp down here in the antipodes but in theory it's nearly summer in some parts of the world, which means summer movie season! The time of year when it's all about the bang-bang, boom-boom and cool one-liners. Of course, in my preview I'm probably missing several movies including the ones I'll actually like the most at year's end, but what the heck. Here's a quick look at the main "blockbuster" movies of the season and how excited I am about them myself on a scale of 1 to 10:

Iron Man
Excite-O-Meter: 9
This checks all my latent 13-year-old comics fanboy buttons – based on a comic I used to love reading, a nifty man-in-armor concept, absolutely fantastic casting (Robert Downey Jr, genius!) and very fun trailers so far. I expect this one to be a massive hit and hope it's of "Spider-Man" level quality as well.
The trailer

Wall-E
Excite-O-Meter: 6
Hey, it's Pixar, it's about robots in space, and eventually Peter will want the DVD and watch it until it falls apart. It'll be fun, I'm sure.

The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
Excite-O-Meter: 4
Funny thing is I grew up loving the Narnia books, but the first movie was just OK to me. I will see this eventually, but I hope it's got a more engaging feeling than the rather staid and uninspired first one. More excited for the eventual "Voyage of the Dawn Treader" movie, though, as that's easily my favorite of the book series.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
Excite-O-Meter: 8
Shoot, it's Indiana Jones. It's hard to imagine how they can screw this up, but then I think "Phantom Menace" and know it's theoretically possible. Crossed fingers that it'll be a retro thrill-ride blast, though. Extra points for Cate Blanchett as an evil Russian vixen villain. Ay chihuahua!
The trailer

Wanted
Excite-O-Meter: 3
Yow, another comics-based movie? Apparently this bears almost no resemblance to Mark Millar's notorious comic book about a man who becomes a supervillain assassin, which frankly was more shock than substance anyway. Sure, Angelina Jolie in tight clothing is always interesting, but generally this one screams "rental" to me.
The trailer

Sex And The City: The Movie
Excite-O-Meter: 2
Um, not in the demographic for this one. And aren't they all getting a bit old?

The Incredible Hulk
Excite-O-Meter: 4
Well-publicized troubles surrounding the production, the stench of the first movie just five years ago, and a trailer that left me going "meh." Replacing the entire cast of the 2003 movie is interesting, but frankly Edward Norton doesn't seem like Bruce Banner to me. I'm geek enough that I usually see most comic book movies in the theater, but frankly, I'm probably waiting for DVD unless the word of mouth is far better than the advance press.
The trailer

Hancock
Excite-O-Meter: 4
Will Smith superhero comedy (not based on a comic book, believe it or not). Amusing, I imagine, but probably a rental.

Get Smart
Excite-O-Meter: 5
Ah, I liked the TV show reruns as a kid and Steve Carell's always fun, but probably not going to make a special trip to a theater to see this.

Hellboy II: The Golden Army
Excite-O-Meter: 8.5
I love the comics and the underrated original movie is great fun. The trailer for this offers bigger bang for the buck than the first. It's interesting that director Guillermo Del Toro followed up his Oscar-nominated "Pan's Labyrinth" with the sequel to an earlier genre picture he directed. Nobody evokes magic and mystery quite like Del Toro. Ron Perlman was friggin' great as Hellboy in the first one, and I expect more demon-punching, cigar-chewing action in the second.
The trailer

Speed Racer
Excite-O-Meter: 0
Not a fan of the cartoon, and this incredibly gaudy quasi-animated trailer is the ugliest thing I've seen in years. For hyperactive video game addicts only, I suspect. Pass.
The trailer

X-Files 2
Excite-O-Meter: 5
Hmmm, I think the zeitgeist has passed. Mild fan of the TV show, so I will catch on DVD eventually.

The Mummy 3: Return Of the Golden Orangutan or something like that
Excite-O-Meter: 1
First one was amusing retro sub-Indiana Jones fun, second one a boring slog with the worst CGI effects I've seen; third one, no Rachel Weisz, and I pass.

Batman: The Dark Knight
Excite-O-Meter: 8
So, anybody heard anything about this one? All the cast and crew from the first movie are back, except the bland Katie Dawson, so it's likely to be very good. Frankly, the only thing that turns me off is a bit of self-generated backlash to the excessive amount of fanboy slobbering about it online ("will Heath Ledger win an Oscar?" "Best superhero movie ever?"), and worries they're pushing the Joker too far into R-rated serial killer mode. The first was very solid entertainment and the first half or so definitely the best Batman movie yet, though, and I expect this one will be a great, dark ride.
The trailer

Star Wars: The Clone Wars
Excite-O-Meter: 3
In theory, "Star Wars 2.5" or somesuch, but sorry if I consider it a cynical cash in on a fading franchise – creepy-looking computer-generated cartoon filling in gaps between sequels, with none of the original cast doing voices – meh, says this 30-years "Star Wars" fan. I'm out of goodwill.
The trailer

'Stand' in the place where you live...

• What do you do with a sick 4-year-old and torrential rains on your day off? We try to limit the lad's TV watching, which means daddy's brain gets stretched to the max filling up the time. Lego car death match!

• So after several weighty nonfiction tomes recently, I felt the urge for some good ol' Stephen King, like the craving for a big messy cheeseburger and fries. So I'm reading "The Stand" for the first time in many years; all 1100 pages (urk!) of it. It's a fine companion on rainy afternoons. I won't say King's the finest crafter of sentences on the block, but no matter how highbrow my literary tastes might get I still find the man can tell a ripping yarn like nobody else (I've plowed through 500 pages of "The Stand" in a couple days). It's interesting to see how books change when you return to them after a few years – the horror of 99% of the world's population being knocked off in a plague hits home to me far more now that I'm a father and husband than it did when I read this as a single 20-something. Sure, the characters sometimes seem a little more one-note than I recalled, but the essential primal notes King hits in this saga of an empty America still sting, as I read and wonder, "what would I do?" Like many folks, I'm a sucker for "end of the world" tales, and this one in its epic biblical sweep and everything-including-the-kitchen-sink storytelling still works for me. (It's funny to read a story originally written in the 1970s that's set in 1990 while you're in the year 2008, though.)

• Hey, congratulations to reader Lefty Brown, who wins the little contest I offered up a week or so back in honour of my Fourth Blogoversary of Spatula Forum. Lefty gets my "NZ Mx" CD featuring 21 of what I consider nifty tunes by New Zealand musicians including SJD, The Chills, Phoenix Foundation, The Clean, Flight of the Conchords and more! Cheers mate, and email me your address so I can zip that out to you!

You know it's going to be a bad day when...

So I was at work this morning, and I kept getting annoyed by ants. Crawling on my arms, etc. I was irked at the low level of housekeeping at my job that resulted in ants everywhere. Then I stuck my hand in my backpack for something, pulled it out and my hand was covered in ants, like some horror movie special effect. My entire pack was swarming with the buggers, who had somehow gotten into my lunch packed the night before and colonized my entire pack, which I then unawares brought to work. And sat right by my feet.

Naturally I ran out of the office shrieking like a schoolgirl, smacking ants off my hand, throwing my ant-infested sandwiches out into the rain and shaking my backpack madly. Spent the morning scratching lingering ants out of my clothes, covered in ant bites. And no lunch.

Bloody ants, I say.

R.E.M. "Accelerate": Call it a comeback

Once upon a time, 15 years ago or so, R.E.M. was like the Beatles to me. I was one of the "late" fans who discovered them circa 1989's "Green" rather than their earliest work, but that slam-bang series of discs in the late '80s-early '90s won me over. R.E.M. were mysterious, a first hint of the world of "underground" rock to me when I was mired in Billy Joel and Genesis fandom (it's a time I try to block out of my rock memoirs). "Orange Crush" tantalized me – what was this song about, I wondered as I listened to Michael Stipe holler/mumble his way through the lyrics. "Out Of Time" was that rarity, a huge hit album that was actually superb (if you ignore the rap song), and "Automatic For The People" simply is the soundtrack to my early years in college – I remember listening to the CD in the dark with friends in my first apartment, caught up in the forlorn drift of "Drive" and "Nightswimming." They were trying to tell us something, if only we could figure out what it was.

But unlike their 1990s alt-rock superstar contemporaries U2, R.E.M. seemed to go off the rails in the last decade, after drummer Bill Berry left in 1998. The albums post-"Automatic" drizzled away fans, although I still think the barbed-wire angst of "Monster" and the ecclectic fumes of "New Adventures In Hi-Fi" are fantastic work. But 1998's "Up" was a droning bore, while "Reveal" was half great, half-awful (I absolutely love "All The Way To Reno," though), and 2004's rock-bottom "Around The Sun" is the first R.E.M. album I listened to twice and re-sold for credit. It started to feel like the band should've, as Stipe once joked in an interview, broken up at the stroke of midnight on Dec. 31, 1999. There was a sense of sputtering out, and I kind of forgot about the band they way you do when someone you like disappoints you once too often.

All of which brings us to their latest disc, "Accelerate." As the reviews generally have been saying, it's a real comeback – for the first time in a decade, Michael Stipe sounds excited to be here, Peter Buck's guitar is a soaring delight, and you can even hear Mike Mills doing harmonies just like the old days. The plodding crooning of the last few discs is gone, and Stipe brings back the bellowing revivalist-preacher power of some of his "Document"-era work. It kicks off with a superb one-two punch in "Living Well Is The Best Revenge" and "Man-Sized Wreath," two guitar-drenched full-force raves that have the propulsive momentum that too much recent R.E.M. has lacked. Melody is there, but this is also the loudest R.E.M. record since "Monster," and Buck's guitar is fantastic -- that patented R.E.M. jangle is back, man! "Supernatural Superserious" is a fine sing-along crowd pleaser, while title song "Accelerate" carries the disc's metaphor of momentum to a hard-driving, head-banging extreme. It's got that yearning passion that the best of R.E.M. offers.

Much of this record has echoes of the past, but it never quite devolves into an exercise in nostalgia (even if the song "Sing For the Submarine" actually quotes a line from their '80s number "Feeling Gravity's Pull"). It echoes their prevoius work, but heck, the band's been around almost 30 (urk) years – they're allowed to look back a bit. The campy album closer "I'm Gonna DJ" seems like a direct rebuttal to the band's critics: "I don't want to go until I'm good and ready." Stick around, guys, I remember you now.

A quick zip around volcanic fields

It was getting to feel weird that we've been living in New Zealand now over a year-and-a-half, but we'd barely been out of the Auckland vicinity. Work, buying house, et cetera... we did a lot of touring on previous trips, of course, but heck, there's still lots to see. So when we finally had some joint vacation time last week, it was off exploring areas of New Zealand I've never seen before, down in southwestern corner of North Island in the Taranaki and Wanganui areas, and visiting the fearsome Mount Ruapehu.

There are really two New Zealands, as most kiwis will tell you – Auckland and everywhere else. There's a lovely rural beauty to the Waikato region just south of Auckland stretching along the spine of the North island. It's full of farms, sheep and cows, endless agriculture and green hills. Lovely stuff, mind you, but a lot of New Zealand looks like that, and we wanted new – the Taranaki area is quite grand, a peninsula jutting out of southwestern North Island with the pointy majesty of dormant volcano Mount Egmont (or Taranaki, as it's usually called these days) plopped right in the middle. We spent several leisurely days camping our way around this peninsula (which is quite tiny by American geography standards -- only a couple hours to go round the whole thing, really). Desolate beauty, the often cloud-shrouded mountain looming in the distance, the rough waters of the sea bashing around all the surfers who love this area (I kept having "Point Break" flashbacks, myself).

Unfortunately our digital camera decided to temporarily spaz out and I have no pics to show of the Taranaki area, so I picked a nice wintry shot I found online to represent, at right. You're able to drive right up towards the lower/middle of the mountain, and we stopped at the grand Dawson Falls area where on a viewing platform I was able to see farmland going flat and the sea in one direction, the towering ruggedness of Taranaki on the other. Not too many mountains where you can see the sea, too.

We explored the nice small towns in the area (including Wanganui, which has the single coolest, biggest kids' playground I've ever seen) before working our way back North again on the final day, and stopping at Tongariro National Park for more volcano action. This cluster of volcanoes in the middle of North Island is anything but stagnant – the biggest, Ruapehu, just exploded a bit in September. You can also drive right up to the bottom of Ruapehu, which is a popular ski area. It's very "Lord of the Rings" territory, and lots of the Mordor/Mount Doom action was shot in the area. The ski area, dry of snow right now, fascinated me as it was sharp, nasty-looking piles of lava rock everywhere. Wouldn't much like to fall on that even with snow covering it.

We also had grand luck with both mounts Taranaki and Ruapehu, where you're as likely to see nothing but cloud as anything. The skies parted nicely for both of them, and we had some gorgeous views up on Ruapehu, particularly. I would love to climb right up and hike around Ruapehu sometime when there's no 4-year-olds around. (But watch out the volcano doesn't blow up on you).

It's a nice reminder that New Zealand mostly isn't the traffic and typical urban annoyances you sometimes get sick of in Auckland. Now we just have to wait for our next vacation!

Now we are four

Egad, can you believe that it's really been four years since I began this blogging business? That's right, on April 8, 2004, I took a hit off the blogging crack pipe and lordy, I ain't never laid down that wicked drug since. Blogs are addictive, kids.

I started this as an editor at a medium-sized paper in rural Oregon, with a bouncing baby boy just a couple months old; I plod on 48 months later living clear on the other side of the globe in New Zealand, still working in newspapers, with that bouncing baby now a rampaging 4-year-old and all in all, it's been quite a wild trip.

Nothing too much to belabor the day or overstate here, but four years in blogging years is like 10 in the "real world" (many of the blogs I read back in 2004 no longer exist, I think). I've come and gone with the inspiration, and definitely post less often than I used to, but I still enjoy sharing my random thoughts on life Down Under, music, movies and books with those of you who stumble on by. Thanks to all the more constant readers who leave comments, as you're the fire that keeps the blogging crack pipe alight (last time I use that metaphor, I swear).

Heck, in honour of Spatula Forum's Fourth, we'll have a little contest – it's been many moons since I had one of those. Here you go -- leave a comment below and you're automatically entered. In a week or so I'll randomly pick one of you out of a hat and send you something nifty from New Zealand. Deal? Deal. Cheers, and thanks again for reading, mates!