The Current Cinema

This week's A.O. Scott is just too delectable. Some choice quotes from his review of 300:

“300” is about as violent as “Apocalypto” and twice as stupid.

Devotees of the pectoral, deltoid and other fine muscle groups will find much to savor as King Leonidas (Gerard Butler) leads 300 prime Spartan porterhouses into battle against Persian forces commanded by Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro)

The big idea, spelled out over and over in voice-over and dialogue in case the action is too subtle, is that the free, manly men of Sparta fight harder and more valiantly than the enslaved masses under Xerxes’ command. Allegory hunters will find some gristly morsels of topicality tossed in their direction, but you can find many of the same themes, conveyed with more nuance and irony, in a Pokémon cartoon.

He's so good with terrible movies!

I'll follow up with one of my favorite music reviews ever, on The Chap by Matt Weir on tinymixtapes:

Geez, if any car company puts this in a commercial, phones will shake and internet search engines will sizzle as people everywhere search for this astoundingly perfect piece of dirty '80s-inspired dance-funk. "Baby I'm Hurting," they'll type into Google, and then it won't come up because that's not the name of the song! Ahh!!! Poor people!!! I hope everybody figures out that it's "Hurt'n"! For their sake!

"Baby I'm Hurt'n" makes me wish I had a girlfriend who was bored with me. Because then, at that moment when she walks into my apartment unexpectedly—without calling—and says, "Matt, we need to talk...," I can just turn on "Baby I'm Hurt'n" and prolong the relationship by three minutes. This is a stop-your-life song, folks.

After that I actually went to buy the song. It was pretty funky, but it didn't change my life. :/