My Top 10 Albums of 2011

I know, 2011's over. Deal with it. These albums are awesome.

1. Drive-By Truckers, "Go-Go Boots"
Hands down, the album I listened to most this year. The music is a mind-blowing gumbo of country, soul and dirty southern rock, all of it driving the best lyrics I've heard all year. Every track is a master-class in songwriting and musicianship. This will leave you stomping your foot, slapping your knee and with a tear in your beer. And, now that bassist/singer/songwriter Shonna Tucker has left the band, it's a feat that will likely never be repeated.

2. Tom Waits, "Bad As Me"
Welcome back, Uncle Tom, it's been far too long. Rock's great carnival barker returns in a big way with this record that finds him at his bluesy rock best. Yes, the album is a little restrained by his standards, and I could have done with a bit more of the good old weirdness, but the songs are too brilliant to deny -- in fact, there's at least two tunes here ("Last Leaf" and "Hell Broke Luce") that would make my list of all time favorite Waits tracks.

3. Wugazi, "13 Chambers"
This mash-up of Fugazi instrumentation and Wu-Tang vocals is damned genius. Ian McKaye and the RZA working together in perfect digital harmony. Believe it.

4. The Roadside Graves, "We Can Take Care of Ourselves"
Jersey's roots rock kings take on S.E. Hinton, and we all win. This concept album inspired by "The Outsiders" should be required listening -- it's a sophisticated, mature and quietly stunning work by a band that consistently blows minds and breaks hearts. Cheers.

5. Jonathan Coulton, "Artificial Heart"
This geek-friendly singer/songwriter is probably best known for "Still Alive" and "Want You Gone," the tracks he wrote for the smash hit video games "Portal" and "Portal 2," respectively. Both those tracks are here, along with 16 other smart and unbelievably catchy power pop gems that touch on topics as wide-ranging as married life, mustaches, local news anchors and Rick Springfield.

6. Scott H. Biram, "Bad Ingredients"
The perfect bluesman for the 21st century, Biram combines sweet country, hardcore, metal and dirty delta blues into a style that's entirely his own. Long a force to be reckoned with live, "Bad Ingredients" is his best studio album yet.

7. Adele, "Live at the Royal Albert Hall"
She had the biggest-selling record of the year with "21," but Adele has never sounded as brilliant as she does on this live album. She segues so effortlessly from working class NSFW banter to stunning vocals that it left my jaw on the floor.

8. Bon Iver, "Bon Iver"
This album was probably the year's biggest surprise for me. Bon Iver got a lot of folks' attention a few years back with his quiet and folksy debut, but on this record his takes the sonic building blocks of '80s station wagon pop (sweet sax, plenty of synths, reverb-heavy drums) and constructs a weirdly brilliant stunner.

9. Dawes, "Nothing is Wrong"
Remember how a few years ago every band was showing the world their best Bruce Springsteen impression? Well, if "Nothing is Wrong" is any indication, the Boss had better make way for the Pretender -- Dawes seems hell-bound to record the best album Jackson Browne never made, and the resulting LP is like a warm blanket for lovers of folksy-leaning '70s rock. (The fact that Browne shows up for some guest vocals on one of the album's best cuts, "Fire Away," doesn't hurt.)

10. New York Dolls, "Dancing Backward in High Heels"

Don't let the name on the disc fool you -- this isn't a New York Dolls album, not really. The band's two remaining original members, David Johansen and Sylvain Sylvain, may still record under that name, but fans of "Personality Crisis" and "Trash' are in for a shock with this one -- the blues and girl group roots that were always behind the band's sound are now in the forefront, while the punk tendencies have basically been phased out entirely. The resulting record is soulful, quiet and incredibly revealing. It's a great album, no matter what the band is calling itself these days.

Special mention: Big Wilson River, "Untitled" (aka "Octopus"): I love this album. It's one of my favorites of the year. It may or may not be better than a couple of records in my top 10. But this band also happens to feature a great friend of mine, and I played a barn-burning show with them at the Asbury Lanes in December, so the journalist in me thought it wouldn't be exactly kosher to include them here. But you can listen to the whole album on Bandcamp, and you really should. It's brilliant work. Cheers friends!

Alex's Record Collection: 'Piano Music of Erik Sature, Vol. 1' by Aldo Ciccolini (1968)

Since moving to Asbury Park a little over a year ago, I have amassed quite a large record collection, and so I've decided to go through my stacks of wax and discuss some of the items in my collection - the good, the bad and the weird included. This is Alex's Record Collection.

So, do you remember how in my last "Alex's Record Collection" post I went on a long, scholarly, biographical and opinionated tangent about the career of the Doors and only really talked about "Other Voices" as an album for about a paragraph and a half? I'm not doing that this time.

As many folks who know me can testify, I am an avid collector of knowledge. It's usually not enough for me to like a song, I need to know everything I possibly can about the music and the people behind it. And yes, this ultimately does, for better or worse, inform my perception of the work. Don't know if that's a good thing or not, but that's the way it is.

Except, it's different with Erik Satie. I don't know why. I know pretty much noting at all about this composer. Until about five minutes ago, I didn't know what time period he lived in. I don't know what nationality he was. I'm not sure where his work falls in the grand scheme of European(?) art music. And you know what? I don't need to. His work tells me absolutely everything I need to know.

Aldo Ciccolini's 1968 stereo recording known as "Piano Music of Erik Satie, Vol. 1" is perfect. The collection is hypnotic, tender, mellow, intriguing and gives me something new to discover and love on every wordless listen. I adore the scratchy, quiet copy I found for $1 at HoldFast a few months ago (I bought it in the same transaction as Harry Nilsson's "Son of Dracula" soundtrack, by the way. The less said about that "album," the better, I'm afraid.)

Although my own copy of "Vol. 1" came into my hands a few months ago, this is an album I have loved for years. On mellow evenings, my best friend and former roommate Dave would put his copy on the turntable, and I was sold. The record gives me much more of a peaceful, easy feeling than any goddamn Eagles song of the same name.

I really don't have all that much to say about this record except that if you come across a copy, buy it. Then take it home, light a candle, pour a glass of wine and fall in love with a mystery.

Alex's Record Collection: 'Other Voices' by the Doors (1971)

Since moving to Asbury Park a little over a year ago, I have amassed quite a large record collection, and so I've decided to go through my stacks of wax and discuss some of the items in my collection - the good, the bad and the weird included. This is Alex's Record Collection.

When I interviewed Ray Manzarek of the Doors for my day job a little while back, I was faced with a bit of a predicament: I hadn't really listened to the Doors in years. When I was in middle school and into my early high school years, they were my band, they got it, man.

But as I grew older, my tastes expanded, I put away my Morrison-wannabe leather pants and headed into other areas. Going back through the Doors to get ready for my interview with Ray, I realized something: as a 20-something musician/writer, I was straining to listen past Jim Morrison, trying to sonically see through him. Yeah, he's an American poet. Yeah, he's an icon. And yeah, he's a fine singer.

But lately I found myself getting more into what Manzarek, Robbie Krieger and John Densmore were doing behind him, underneath him. Truth be told, I was bored with Morrison's shtick, and I was more into the acidy blues rock that his fellow Doors were churning out. So, what do you do when you want to listen to the Doors but you're not interested in the Lizard King (other than listening to Love's "Forever Changes")? Enter "Other Voices."

When Morrison shuffled off this mortal coil in July of 1971, the Doors were just beginning to hit their musical second wind. From January of 1967 to April of 1971, the band put out six studio LPs - one of them was great (the first one) and the rest were varying degrees of OK but all featured a handful of great tracks. But the last album with the original lineup, "LA Woman," found the band embracing jazz, jam and lounge elements in a fresh, exciting way that got the buying public interested - it was their most commercially successful album since their first one, and their most interesting sounding one since then, too.

The Jim went to Paris and died.

That's where "Other Voices" comes in. The band had started recording the music before Morrison headed to Paris, and when he died in July, they kept going. They released the album in October. And you know what? It's really damn good. And not just "good enough for a Doors album without Jim" good. No, it's really good.

Sure, there are a couple of duds, specifically the first two tracks on Side Two ("Down on the Farm" is just stupid and "I'm Horny, I'm Stoned" is a little too on the nose.) But the playing on this record from the three instrumentally-inclined Doors is amazing. This is the most free they ever sounded on wax. It's as if after years of being a solid trippy blues rock band who had to be the foundation for Morrison's antics, they're finally allowed to play to the best of their abilities.

You know what this is? It's a jam band album. Seriously, you can keep this record on the shelf right next to "Blues for Allah" and "Terrapin Station" and it will hold its own. Don't believe me? Check this out:

Holy shit, how awesome is that? This album is so, so damn good, and I'm so happy to have it in my record collection. It's the sound of three free men playing exactly what they want, how they want and having fun doing it. Morrison was gone, but the genius wasn't. As far as vinyl goes, I only have two Doors albums, this one and the first one, and I'm fine with that. In fact, I listen to this one more, so sue me.

I kinda wish Ray, John and Robbie had kept this lineup of the band going, either as the Doors or as something else, because they were on the cusp of a whole new greatness here.

Oh well, at least I've got my record collection.

An extraordinary night at the Lanes

Last night, I caught a show at the Asbury Lanes that was so damn good, so incredibly original, that I find myself compelled to write about it.

The show last night (Thursday) was part of the residency of local band Atlantic/Atlantic. And while I'm sure A/A is a fine band, I actually wasn't there for them - I was there to see the two opening acts.

First up was a band that ranks among the finest things ever produced by Philadelphia (and that includes the Declaration of Independence): The Extraordinaires. I first discovered the Extraordinaires a year ago when they played the after-party for the Tromadance Film Festival. I was knocked out by them at the time, and they've gotten even better in the year since.

I can't really cite specific songs or band member names for the band, but I can proudly speak in generalities: this is nerd rock at its finest. Showing influences that seem to range from Cake to the Muppets, the Extraordinaires are funny, rocking, inventive and seem like genuinely nice dudes.

Last night was the final night of the Extraordinaires' month-long tour, and by the time they got to Asbury they had sold out of full-length CDs and t-shirts. Good for them. While I would have loved to purchase more merch, the fact that they moved so much product seems to indicate that they're finding an audience out there. In a perfect world, the sky would be the limit for these guys.

(And for the record, I did pick up one piece of Extraordinaires merch: their new "Postcard" EP, which is a postcard that comes printed with a download code that gives you access to three songs for $5. You can then stick the postcard in the mail and send it to a nerd rock-loving friend, who can then download the songs and pass the card on some more. It's like a chain letter, except instead of giving up money for baseball cards that never arrive in the mail, you get some awesome indie rock.)

After the Extraordinaires was Yula and the Extended Family, a musical collective fronted by a star in the making whose path has crossed mine in a few minor ways over the years.

Some background: about five years ago, I found myself in New York City on Halloween night, dressed as Nacho Libre. I went to a club in the village with some friends to see a couple of bands that I had found out about through a Dresden Dolls show a week earlier: Luminescent Orchestrii (whose frontman, Sxip Shirey, had MC'd the show) and Australian art rockers the Red Paintings.

On Halloween night 2006 (?), the Orchestrii and the Red Paintings (whatever happened to that band? They kicked a bit of ass, in a mildly pretentious way) were joined at the bar, the name of which escapes me at the time, by a brilliant Israeli gypsy punk trio, Nanuchka, which was led by a bass-wielding siren named Yula Beeri. This band was brilliant, they were a revelation - part Regina Spektor, part Joan Jett, part Gogol Bordello, they were all kinds of perfect.

Unfortunately, I forgot to pick up any Nanucka merch that night, moved on, and never had another chance to see the band. It seems that in the 5 (?) years since, Yula has moved on, too. I happened to see her at the Lanes about two years ago (?) at a Tromapalooza fundraiser for Tromadance. (Troma's got great musical taste, doesn't it?) She seemed in fine form, but the music didn't wow me the way Nanuchka had all those years ago. I don't know, I guess it just didn't rock enough.

Fast forward, and then rewind a bit, to last night: I knew Yula was on the bill, and I was interested, but I didn't know what to expect. Well, she and her band, the Extended Family, kicked all kinds of ass.

Playing what can really only be described as gypsy ska (and even that doesn't totally do it justice), Yula was Yula, totally bringing it on guitar, keys and bewitching vocals, and she was backed by a brilliant musical hive-mind that included a lovely lady in a red dress playing a saw and a full horn section. It was, simply put, pretty fucking brilliant. And I'm listening to the band's "Victor" EP now, and the music sounds just as great the day after at home as it did last night in the bar.

And if I have an over-arching point to this story (other than the fact that you should totally check out both of these great bands and show them all your love and support) is that, when I hear people bitch about the lack of quality art out there today, I wish those people could have been here. This was at 9 p.m. on a Thursday, there were less than 50 people in the crowd, and the music was genius, pure art; it deserves to be heard, and thanks to places like the Asbury Lanes, you can hear it nearly every night of the week, and even if you've been to as many shows as I have, you can still be surprised by what's out there.

Photo by Doug Glass, http://yulabeeri.com

Return to Sunnydale: The Great "Buffy" Rewind, Season One

This summer, I embarked on a rather ambitious project, if I say so myself: thanks to the glories of Netflix instant and the infinite patience/passing interest of my special lady friend, I am going to watch every single episode of "Buffy: The Vampire Slayer," and then blog about my thoughts on the show here, one season at a time. This is the first installment in that series.

In my late-middle school/early high school years, I knew a lot of people - a lot of girls, anyway - who loved "Buffy." And while I would catch the occasional episode here and there and generally knew what was going on the in the show even when I wasn't watching it, it never became must-see-TV for me, for reasons I still can't quite define.

However, something has happened over the last couple of years: I have slowly but surely begun turning into a Joss Whedon fanboy, and I'm going about it all wrong. It all started during the writers' strike of a few years back, during which Whedon created "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along-Blog," a web series Tara introduced me to which I immediately fell in love with. If you haven't seen it, go watch it now.

After "Dr. Horrible," one of Tara's good friends bought her a "Firefly" box set and, just as with "Dr. Horrible," I instantly fell in love with the space western series, and I really enjoy its big screen continuation, "Serenity." Hell, I even bought the comics because I couldn't get enough of those characters and that story.

But still, being the obsessive geek that I am, I felt bad for falling in love with the Whedonverse without experiencing "Buffy," a series he put seven seasons of work into. I had seen the feature film version (which I hear Joss is none too fond of) and I had the earlier-in-life flirtations with the series I described above, but I felt like now was the right time to take the plunge.

And I have to say, after having knocked back the first season of "Buffy," I'm really enjoying myself. Sure, it's not great. Hell, there are some episodes that I'd consider flat-out terrible, but it's a fun ride, and I'm curious to see where the show went after season one.

(Note: I'm not going to do an episode-by-episode breakdown, because neither you nor I have the time for that; instead, I'm going to give you my general impressions of the season.)

The tricky thing about "Buffy" appears to be the overall tone of the show: there's some campy shit that goes on in these episodes (I'm looking at you, ancient Italian demon that haunts a high school's intranet for the purposes of flirting with a shy, bookish girl before possessing a giant makeshift robot with glowing eyes and horns) but each episode is grounded in issues that were on the minds and hearts of myself and my "Buffy"-watching friends when we were in school: popularity, rejection, infatuation, friendship, love, longing and confusion all being as prominent in the show as any monsters.

As a result, the performers who are the most successful in the show's first season are the ones who pull off the balancing act between camp and all-too-real emotional turmoil: Alyson Hannigan (Willow), be-still my beating heart, is perfect at this. You know that Italian internet demon robot thing I was telling you about? Well, it was after her, and she sold the hell out of the shy girl looking for her shot at companionship at the other end of those awfully strange online conversations. Bless her heart, even when the show falters, which it does quite often in season one, Hannigan's performance never does.

Every time Hannigan was on screen, the show seemed to step up its game, and the same could be said for Anthony Stewart Head (Giles) and David Boreanaz (Angel). Two solid actors, they bring so much more to their underwritten characters than what must have been on the page, and the couple of scenes they have together were my favorite of the season.

Other performers, however, haven't fared so well: Nicholas Brendon (Xander) has yet to master the art of delivering overly-witty Whedonisms and Buffy herself, Sarah Michelle Gellar, sure does kick a lot of ass, but when it comes time to hit the deep emotional notes, she and the show sometimes waver, not sure how straight or campy to play key moments.

While there were plenty of season one episodes ("Teacher's Pet," "The Pack," "Out of Mind, Out of Sight") that I wouldn't be surprised to discover are legendary in fan circles for their awfulness, the show in general took an interesting arc as the season progressed: the ideas didn't get any smarter, but the execution got better, as if the crew in front of the camera and behind the scenes were getting closer to honing "Buffy"'s tricky tone.

Two fine examples of this actually aired back-to-back: "The Puppet Show" and "Nightmares." The former is based on the goofiest of horror concepts - the killer ventriloquist dummy - and plays it for equal parts laughs and scares. And you know what? It works, thanks in large part to how the episode's plot plays with the conventional trappings of that particular cliche.

And "Nightmares," while not making the most sense in the world plot-wise, strikes a similar chord: the plot revolves around the main characters' worst nightmares coming to life. Some of them are funny (Willow's), some are kind of scary (Xander's) and some are nearly tragic (Buffy's/Giles'). All in all, good stuff to be found here.

So now I'm 12 episodes into "Buffy" and with Halloween right around the corner, I'm ready for more. Stay tuned, faithful readers.

Review: "Scott Pilgrim vs. The World"

All right, here we go. I know it's been a while since I promised this post, and even longer since I've blogged at all, so I'm gonna play things fast and loose with this here review -- spell check be damned!

I hate to say it, but for the first time, Edgar Wright let me down. "Spaced," "Shaun of the Dead," "Hot Fuzz": they're all very good or great. He's a key director for my generation. But the dude dropped the ball on this one. It's just that simple.

OK, so I don't get labeled as a hater or whatever, I'll give you the good stuff first. Any conversation about "SP vs TW" and its positives has to start with Kieran Culkin as Wallace, Scott's roomate. Loved him seven years ago in "Igby Goes Down," and he just keeps getting better as an actor. He brings Wallace (my favorite character from the "SP" books) to life so perfectly, any time he was on screen the movie immediately got better. This isn't the kind of role that wins Oscars, but hopefully it's the kind of role that leads to bigger parts in the future.

Also, while we're talking about the goods, I'll say this: Edgar Wright is incapable of making a movie that doesn't look or sound amazing. His use of color, lighting, editing and sound design make this one of the most thoroughly enjoyable action movie experiences I've had in a while, probably since JJ's "Star Trek." Edgar knows how to shoot a movie and deliver a series of images to audiences in a way that is exciting, informative and fun. You can feel a love of the possibilities of the cinema in every frame he shoots -- kind of how you could feel that with Kurosawa and early-to-mid-period Spielberg.

But while we're talking about the sound, let me segue to the bad. For the most part, the soundtrack kicks ass. However, a big chunk of this movie is about musicians. And in the original "SP" books, Bryan Lee O'Malley makes it perfectly clear what the music made by his characters should sound like. In the epilogue to one of the books (4 I think?) he says that the Flying Burrito Brothers, the Graham Parsons-led band that birthed alt-country, is the soundtrack to Scott's head, while Uncle Tupelo, the alt-country trio Jeff Tweedy was in before he started Wilco, is the favorite band of Stills, the lead singer of the band Scott plays bass in, Sex Bob-omb.

OK, so, given that information, you'd think that the big screen Sex Bob-omb would be an alt-country band. Hell, the Flying Burrito Brothers' cover of Bob Dylan's "To Ramona" is used in the movie. But, all of the Sex Bob-omb songs were written by ... Beck. Yep, they didn't bring in an alt-country guy like Jeff Tweedy, Ian Felice, AA Bondy, the Avett Bros., or even Beck's roots music-leaning buddy, Jack White. No, they brought in garage rock/sex rock/acoustic mopey rock (sometimes)/Danger Mouse pawn Beck to write Sex Bob-omb's songs. And how were the songs? Oh, they were fine. Probably the best Beck songs I've heard since "Sea Change." But they weren't Sex Bob-omb songs. They were Beck songs (which were imitations of White Stripes songs).

And that may seem like a minor gripe, but I'm using it to make a bigger point about the film. "SP vs the World" is a well-executed technical exercise that misses the point entirely, kind of like those pesky songs.

In anticipation of the movie, I read the six volumes of the "SP" series in the week before I went to the theater and saw it. And while I greatly enjoy the books, they're not without their problems, the biggest one of which being that the story, even after Bryan Lee O'Malley has spent six books and upwards of 1,000 pages telling it, feels rushed. That's due to the richness of the world and characters he created. I could have kept reading about super-powered hipsters in Canada for a dozen books, and I was sad to see it end so soon.

My second issue with the "SP" books is that their two protagonists, Scott Pilgrim and Ramona Flowers, just aren't good people, and O'Malley doesn't hide this fact. At one point, Ramona tells Scott, "You're the nicest boyfriend I've ever had," to which Scott replies, "That's sad." Yes, it is, because Scott's a dick. You see, something you learn from the books is that pretty much every supporting female character in the books has had her heart broken and her life damaged by Scott in some way. He's a selfish, self-absorbed, willfully ignorant prick, a fact that the movie pretty much white-washes over entirely -- and not only does this take several layers away from its title character, it pretty much results in the removal of characters' entire back stories (did you ever see Kim Pine not behind the drums in the movie?! In the books that character is so much more) and the erasing of entire characters whose mere presence would make it clear how bad of a guy Scott is (I'm sorry you didn't get to be in the movie Lisa, I really liked you).

At another point in the books, a far more sympathetic character tells Ramona, "You're not nice!" and no, she's not. You know those "seven evil exes" that Scott has to battle over the course of the story? Well, in the book they each have backstories, and the thing that unites each of them is the fact that they were hurt, damaged, emotionally harmed by this insensitive and selfish bulldozer that is Ramona Flowers. They each had a reason for being angry, for being vengeful, for having been turned "evil." However, in an attempt to make Ramona more likable, the exes' backstories were pretty much minimized (Matthew Patel), changed so they become Bond villains (Gideon) or removed entirely (the twins have no lines, when in the books they said some pretty important stuff to Scott).

So essentially, we went from having six mythology-rich books fueled by an alt-country soundtrack and centered around two terrible, selfish people who were together because they each deserved to have someone that bad thanks to all the harm they'd done to others TO a movie about Michael Cera and a quirky girl with multi-colored hair walking through the snow to the sweet sounds of OK Beck songs while doing well-filmed battle with criminally underused character actors.

So yeah, looks like Edgar kind of missed the point. Oh well, at least we have Wallace.

Review: 'Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time'

If there was any film that had the potential to break the curse of the lackluster video game adaptation, it could have been "Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time." The PS2 game of the same name has a well-defined (though clearly "Aladdin"-inspired) aesthetic, an interesting McGuffin (a sand-filled dagger that reverses time), some cool visuals, plenty of running, jumping and climbing and not much of a story to speak of. That's where a strong screenwriter and a director with a sense of adventure would swoop in, tie all of the game's tried-and-true elements together with a fun story that clocks in at an hour and 45 minutes and let everyone enjoy their popcorn and go home.

That's not what happened here.

Here we have a film from the writers of "Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights," "The Uninvited" and "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" and directed by Mike Newell, who gave the world "Mona Lisa Smile" and the shockingly forgettable "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire." This movie isn't fun, it isn't clever, it isn't cool -- hell, it's not even so bad it's entertaining. No, it just plain sucks.

Frankly, dear reader, I don't even know where to begin. This movie is bad in so many ways, it would be quicker and less painful for me to list the ways in which this thing doesn't suck. But no, that would be letting it off easy.

I know, let's start at the beginning: you know how you can tell when a screenwriter lacks the basic fucking skills that it takes to tell a simple story? When a movie opens with on-screen text, followed by narration, followed by an opening flashback sequence, that are all, for lack of a better word, pointless. The text is all about the power of destiny, but when you're making a movie about how you can just rewind time whenever something that you don't like happens, destiny doesn't really enter into the equation. And then the narration and opening sequence tell us that the beloved king of Persia (I didn't know Persia had kings, but whatever) was not content with his two biological sons that were produced by their never seen or mentioned mother, and so he just went out into the street one day and adopted the first acrobatic street rat he saw. Umm... why? It's never explained, so I would say it doesn't matter, but that would then make the first 15 minutes of the movie pointless, wouldn't it?

Look, I could go through the entire movie like this explaining why it's stupid, but I hope you get the idea. Jake Gyllenhaal is fine as the Prince, I guess, but he simply cannot salvage this material. And likewise, Gemma Arterton is drop-dead, eyes-shooting-out-of-my-head, whistle-blowing, smoke-out-of-my-ears gorgeous in this, but she happens to be stuck in a crap movie, which is ultimately too bad. Still, I was grateful whenever she was on screen, because then at least I could be distracted from the dumbness that was coming at me from all angles. And Alfred Molina and Ben Kingsley probably got paid a whole lot of money for putting on eye-liner and some spray-on tanner and getting to ham it up, so more power to them.

But, while we're talking about the performances, let's talk about the ways "Prince of Persia" is perhaps too faithful to its source material. Remember how in the game everyone, despite being from the Middle East, spoke in a British accent? Yeah, they do that here. In fact, with the exception of Gyllenhaal, the entire principle cast here is English, and the only one among them who attempts to change their voice at all is Gyllenhaal, and he's trying way too hard to sound English.

But, on the whole, this movie does borrow incredibly liberally from the world of video games, just not the one that inspired it. There are shots, ideas, sets, entire sequences, which were taken straight out of "Assassin's Creed." At one point, during one of many, many, many, many rooftop chases involving Gyllenhaal's character, I leaned over to Tara and asked why the Prince didn't simply hide in a pile of hay, because that's what you do in "Assassin's Creed" to get out of that exact same situation.

Oh, and this movie isn't content simply ripping off other games. I'll let you discover this act of plagiarism for yourself (if you dare!) but at one point in the movie Tara and I simultaneously looked at each other and said, "But in Latin, Jehovah starts with an I!" Yeah, they go there.

In the interests of time and brevity, let me just give you a quick rundown of some of the other stupid shit that happens in this movie. And I swear, I am not making any of this up:

- There's a major subplot involving ostrich racing.
- Alfred Molina gets to make a couple of dick jokes in what is supposedly a kids' movie.
- There's a secret group of assassins called aSANDsins. Seriously. Not kidding.
- The CGI in this movie is nothing short of embarrassing for Disney. There are evil snakes which do the bidding of the aSANDsins and look worse than the snake in "Anaconda," which came out over 10 years ago. Plus, these "snakes" make noises that sound like a combination of a chimpanzee and a bird. And whenever Gyllenhaal's character is supposed to be doing an acrobatic stunt and filmed from afar, he looks alternately like a cartoon character and an action figure.
- Two characters are talking in a desert (this actually happens a lot). An establishing master shot shows the weather conditions to be just fine and dandy. They cut to close-ups for two lines of dialogue. Then it's back to a master shot, which now shows a sandstorm roughly the size of the Manhattan skyline about 50 feet away. The characters treat this like it's no big deal.
- You know that magic time-reversing dagger? It's explicitly stated that it only holds enough sand to rewind one minute of time. But the sand is used up fairly quickly towards the beginning of the movie. It's refilled once, and then used pretty much at the characters' will for the rest of the movie, the whole "this thing only holds one minute of time-reversing sand" presumably thrown out the window.
- (SPOILERS FOR THIS ONE) You know that dagger? Yeah, at the end of the movie one character uses it to rewind the action of the entire film, bringing us back to the beginning and making the whole viewing experience, you know, entirely pointless. (SPOILERS OVER NOW!)

Before I go, I'd like to mull over the film's politics for a minute. On one hand, the hero has severe reservations about preemptively invading a city that may be manufacturing weapons for his empire's enemies, and in general seems to be arguing for reason and discussion while jumping off ledges and stabbing people. On the other hand, the film's supposed comic relief character spouts nothing but Tea Party talking points about the evils of government, especially where taxes are concerned. So, does this film lean hard left or hard right? I'd say it leans both ways so carelessly that it's sure to offend those from both sides, but I think the audience that flocks to see this movie will be too dumb to notice.

Case in point: Remember those on-screen titles I mentioned before? Well, when I saw this at a sneak-preview screening in Ocean County on Tuesday night, there was a woman behind me who had to read those five sentences or so out loud to herself, and aside from that pesky reading junk, she seemed to love this movie. In fact, most of the audience I saw this with loved this, disconcertingly so. They ate this shit up like me at a sushi buffet. But me, I just hated it, and I mourn the cool movie it could have been.

Avoid this at all costs.