Every week, we list our recommendations of new music, books, comics, movies and TV to check out. This is Recs in Effect:
New Disc
No, not the shitty shitty shitty AMC show. (Sidenote: I'm not a fan of that TV show) This is a Criterion Collection release of the pretty great Stanley Kubrick movie. A disjointed, alinear tale of a heist, violence and the desperate people these things tend to attract, The Killing has been hugely influential to many filmmakers. Reservoir Dogs, Heat, The Town, Taking of Pelham 123, Pulp Fiction and The Dark Knight all draw pretty heavily from what Kubrick has done here. It's one of the late master's lesser known works, but it's pretty great. The whole "colors as names", lack of chronology, eerie mask thing that's been cool in the films of Tarantino, Soderbergh and all sorts of heist movies? Yeah, they started here in 1956. I also like that Kubrick so loved Sterling Hayden in his role as the tough guy Johnny Gray that he brought Hayden back as Brigadier General Jack "Precious Bodily Fluids" Ripper in Dr. Strangelove. Plus Criterion will certainly be bringin it with this disc so it looks better than ever before.
New Book
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
While I'm not the biggest fan of Ernest Cline's movie, Fanboys, I still respect all that Mr. Cline has done to meld high art with nerd culture. His spoken word/slam poetry album, The Geek Wants Out, is like Henry Rollins if Henry Rollins was tormented by Henry Rollins fans in high school. And this book sounds awesome - here's the synopsis:
Ready Player One takes place in the not-so-distant future--the world has turned into a very bleak place, but luckily there is OASIS, a virtual reality world that is a vast online utopia. People can plug into OASIS to play, go to school, earn money, and even meet other people (or at least they can meet their avatars), and for protagonist Wade Watts it certainly beats passing the time in his grim, poverty-stricken real life. Along with millions of other world-wide citizens, Wade dreams of finding three keys left behind by James Halliday, the now-deceased creator of OASIS and the richest man to have ever lived. The keys are rumored to be hidden inside OASIS, and whoever finds them will inherit Halliday’s fortune. But Halliday has not made it easy. And there are real dangers in this virtual world. Stuffed to the gills with action, puzzles, nerdy romance, and 80s nostalgia, this high energy cyber-quest will make geeks everywhere feel like they were separated at birth from author Ernest Cline.
Add to that cool sounding breakdown this glowing review from iO9, Cline's cool website for his book and his ongoing work creating the ultimate 80s nerd car in Ecto 88 - and I think the book will be worth checking out.
"New" Music
Frank Ocean, Nostalgia, ULTRA. mixtape
This isn't a new release - it came out in March - but there's not much else coming out (The Cool Kids album is dropping on Tuesday...but I have no opinion on them), so why not spotlight something that I think rocks? Frank Ocean is part of the OFWGKTA crew - the California weird rap collective bunch that has also spawned Odd Future and Tyler the Creator. While those projects are definitely interesting and unique, they ultimately aren't that easy for me to listen to them. I get that Tyler the Creator is playing the antagonistic role, the shockingly defiant asshole that has been previously played by Marilyn Manson, Eminem and a slew of others through the years. But just because something is intellectually appealing doesn't make it aurally fun to play all the time. Frank Ocean, though, appears to be R&B influence in the group - the man more interested in singing and crafting cool hooks and being odd without being inherently aggressive. He uses samples from Radiohead and Eyes Wide Shut, references in Murder She Wrote and many other oddball cultural creations. He's odd, but it's all wrapped up in a mixtape that sounds good and that operates on multiple levels, not just the highbrow, Pitchfork realm of clever. Obviously, as a "mixtape" it's given the out of being unpolished and using other people's beats, but it's more accomplished than a lot of studio albums I've heard recently. Plus...it's free. Stand out tracks to me are "Novacane," "Lovecrimes," "There will be Tears," "Dust" and "American Wedding."
New on Blu
I'm on record: I love Demolition Man. It's dumb - but fuck it. Three Shells FTW!