In The Mouth Of Madness

The best thing this movie does is balance jumpscare/gory horror with psychological/atmospheric/surreal horror.

The worst thing this movie does is have an underwhelming ending that feels like a shrug or a bunt, instead of leaving us with true ambiguity or a memorable visual/scene. Though it's a cliche, I think a Mobius strip style ending would have better served the narrative.

Some would argue it's debatable if the events of the film happen at all, but I think that's not the intent, given that John Carpenter considers it part of his Apocalypse Trilogy. I believe the intent of the film is a double twist, that everything really *is* happening AND, ironically, the main character we've been following *isn't* real and is a creation of Sutter Cane. (I think that's why his character is an actor in the movie at the end, like how you see Bond movies billed as "James Bond in...Moonraker.") 

I think the revelation of Sam Neill's lead as a fictional character could've been done better rather than Sutter Cane just telling it to him face to face. Hell I'd even settle for something like he dismisses it in the moment but later it's revealed to be true. Maybe with him returning to his home and finding someone else living there or calling up an old friend who no longer knows him, something like that. Keep it ambiguous if the book publisher is still somehow doing a proto ARG to promote the book by fucking with his life like that.

Ultimately I think this is a film that approaches greatness, and has many great things going for it, but there's just a bit of a muddled and hollow/unsatisfying feeling to the whole thing by the time it's over. If you've seen other "is this really happening/what is reality?" films, even non-horror/scifi ones, a lot of the tropes and ideas here will be familiar to you, albeit they are well done tropes and not mere cliches lazily followed. It certainly helps that the cast is excellent, though holy shit Sam Neill's accent travels as much as he does in the movie.

In The Mouth Of Madness sets itself up to be a 5 star classic for most of its runtime and then limps to an ending that has no stakes. Why do I say that? Well, because it turns out the main characters never had any agency to change anything at any point: one of them isn't real so nothing he did ever really mattered, and Sutter Cane's writing makes everyone else behave as he orders them to. There's an unspoken consequence to decisions like this in movies, including the audience becoming uninvested in the narrative, and it certainly makes rewatches pointless because every action the characters take is preordained and not due to who they are and who they become through the trials and tribulations of the plot. Though this movie is mostly excellent, there's a nagging asterisk that needs to be placed next to that excellent to qualify it.

Drive

This past November, I found myself moving in with a friend without a job lined up. I wanted to take some time off to recenter myself and so spent the better part of the Holiday season living the hipster bum lifestyle, playing videogames and writing and watching movies. While I've always enjoyed films, I had been going through a spell where I mostly watched action movie schlock or so-bad-they're-good movies like the masterpieces by Neil Breen. At some point, though, after so much junk food, you start to crave a decent meal, and I began to add quality like Raging Bull, Mulholland Drive, and Hard Boiled to my diet. The world of cinema began to bloom inside my mind, as if I was reconnecting with a lost lover. I then made a point of beginning to whittle down my Netflix queue, in particular the movies I had been putting off for years because I never seemed to be in the right mood for them. Drive sat at the top of the list, and the viewing experience was so affecting that I almost couldn't get to sleep because I immediately wanted to talk to people about it. I also wanted to watch it again as soon as it was over because it was the rare film in which everything works in concert, like Pulp Fiction or The Big Lebowski.

The opening scene of the nameless driver (hereafter referred to as Driver) talking on the phone and then executing the getaway instantly grips you. Its rising and falling tension is expertly shot and edited, with the literal ticking clock of the watch being mirrored in the ending of the basketball game on the radio. Eventually it's made clear why he has the game on, timing the escape from the police so that they arrive at the arena as the crowd is pouring out. Since the music isn't the usual overly dramatic Hollywood crap, the tension arrives organically as the basic electronic beats rise and fall, often quieting down entirely as if following a sigh of relief. In terms of its style and the Los Angeles setting, Driver reminds me of Michael Mann's Collateral, which also features plenty of driving at night and mysterious characters up to no good. Mann's 80s aesthetic is a clear influence on Drive, from the soundtrack to the pink font for the title cards to the cold/precise color palette. Anyway, Ryan Gosling immediately establishes Driver as a meticulous person who says little and betrays no panic or fear during this whole sequence. When the title cards hit and we switch to 'Nightcall' and lingering shots of Driver going about the streets, you know this is his passion. As he himself puts it in response to Irene asking what he does for a living, “I drive.”

The movie's cinematography and overall aesthetic are both stunning. It has a precision in its angles and arrangement of characters and objects in scenes. There are shots that make use of Kubrickian one-point perspectives, such as when Driver is wandering through the grocery store aisles or when he enters Cook's strip club. Drive also has multiple helicopter shots of Los Angeles at night, which are used as moments of calm and reflection. Praise must also be given to the use of color and lighting in the movie. Several scenes reveal the emotions of the characters through the clothing they wear, favoring blues for cool/collected moments and reds/oranges to underline the energy, violence, or passion taking place. All of the driving scenes, even at night, use naturalistic lightning and colors, so that as Driver wanders through Los Angeles he's bathed in neon blues, red/oranges, and yellows. During the first daytime driving scene with Irene and her son, the golden sunshine mirrors the romantic happiness of the characters. These two elements come together in one of my favorite shots in the movie: after returning to Irene's apartment after the aforementioned sequence, they talk about how her son had a good time, a conversation suffused with meaningful glances and pauses. Driver is wearing a basic white shirt, with a white window frame behind him. Between them is a light blue wallpaper, suggesting the thawing of Driver's cold exterior and emotional distance/incompatibility with other humans. Irene, meanwhile, is lit with orange/red light from behind, suggesting her positive influence on him and/or her growing affection toward him.

The soundtrack is utterly essential to the success of the movie. It helps to establish the emotion of a scene, of course, but it also helps state the movie's themes. Even the opening song, 'Nightcall', has lyrics that relate to the story and characters. Just as music is crucial in Tarantino films, Drive makes similar use of it as an important component of the overall feel and atmosphere. Some of the short scenes of Driver, well, driving are hypnotic and stick in your head long after you see it because the synthwave music is so effective at matching the look of the film. Whenever I think about my favorite movies, certain scenes or sequences play out in their entirety—dialogue, music, cinematography, etc.—in my head without any specific attempt at recollection on my part. Wes Anderson films have their slow motion walks set to classic rock songs, Mulholland Drive has the dreamlike Spanish language performance of 'Crying' in the Club Silencio sequence, Aliens has the climactic queen alien vs. Power Loader fight...I could go on. Suffice it to say, Drive is no exception, with vivid memories of Driver's face in the rearview mirror as he prowls through the streets at night set to synthwave or electronic ambient music.


I appreciate how Drive avoids cliches whenever possible. When Standard has his first conversation with Driver, we immediately get another masterfully choreographed spike of tension because we are expecting him to find out about the affair and confront/attack Driver. Instead, he ends up accepting the help of Driver in trying to get himself out of debt and keep his family safe and unaware of his misdeeds. Furthermore, I love how the main protagonist, Driver, and main antagonist, Bernie, are parallel characters, in that the 'hero' is committing crimes and has a violent psychopath hidden inside, while the 'villain' is not an outright murdering thug. Bernie is shown as being legitimately excited about getting into stock car racing and subsequently sorrowful when he knows it'll never happen. When he kills Nino's thug, he does it in a violent, exaggerated way to vent his frustration, whereas when he slashes Shannon's arm/wrist, he comforts the dying man. You can tell he feels pity for Shannon earlier in the movie when he talks to Driver about him, mentioning how he's never had a lot of luck in life. In a strange parallel, Driver brutally kills several no-name thugs yet merely drowns Nino and stabs Bernie.

The violence in Drive is intentionally over the top and shocking. While director Nicholas Winding Refn may have his own reasons for using it, my feeling is that it calls attention to itself to shake up the complacent audience. We're so used to seeing people get merely shot or stabbed, often seen from a distance, and it has a desensitizing effect. Refn seems to intentionally linger on some violent acts and not others—indeed, the ending co-stabbing sequence happens so fast, the first time I saw the film I barely noticed that Driver had stabbed Bernie. When people are shot in the film, such as when Standard is killed, it's initially seen from a distance to give us a surprise moment because we were instead expecting something from the mysterious car that pulled into the parking lot moments before, not from the pawn shop. After the first gunshot, Standard stumbles to the ground in disbelief and the camera moves in to capture his reaction and the subsequent gunshots that kill him. In the motel when Blanche is killed, her gruesome death is emphasized to show how ruthless the people coming after them are. This entire sequence reminds me a lot of similar hotel scenes in No Country For Old Men, with the also meticulous Anton Chigurh dispatching criminals and having a cat-and-mouse shootout with Llewelyn Moss. As Driver checks his surroundings following the bloodbath to make sure he's safe, he recedes into the shadows of the bathroom with blood all over his face. We as the audience have come to see the other side of his personality for the first real time. The 'scorpion' emerges and he retreats into darkness where he belongs. There is a crucial earlier scene where someone he did a job with before approaches him at a diner and we get the first hint at the 'scorpion' he is underneath.

Despite not saying very much throughout the movie, Driver is one of the more magnetically compelling characters of modern cinema. Gosling does so much with his physical performance and mannerisms like tightening his fists or breathing deeply. We never learn Driver's name though between the New Jersey accent that pops up here and there and Shannon mentioning his arrival in Los Angeles a few years back, we get the sense he may have done some bad things back home and fled to Los Angeles. Between the scorpion jacket, toothpick, and the driving gloves there is a theatricality to his persona, and in general you get the sense he has a romanticized notion of the world. Working as a stunt driver in Hollywood, he perhaps sees his life as being like a movie, so that his violent murders are justified by the fact they're committed against “bad guys.” His scorpion jacket is a sort of armor or uniform that he wears mostly at night/while doing crimes or violent acts. We often see him from the back when he's wearing it, suggesting a duality of his nature. The non-'scorpion'/human side of Driver is shown as being awkward around other people. When he first helps Irene get home she offers him a glass of water and he says “okay”, not “yes, thank you” or “no, thank you”, as if he took it as a suggestion and not a question. He often smiles in response to people talking to him or about him, much like a child would, as if he's shy and not fully matured. Indeed, he has several important moments with Standard's son, Benicio, suggesting he relates to and understands him more than the adults. When Standard is assaulted by Cook's thugs, Driver immediately goes over to check on the son and walks right past Standard.

Driver's theme song in the movie, 'A Real Hero', is one of the movie's obvious themes: is he, or perhaps can he be, a real human being/a real hero? When, before stalking and killing Nino, he dons the mask he wore earlier in the film to be a stuntman stand-in for the hero of the movie, it isn't to hide his identity. Rather he seems to be trying to transform himself into a hero. Just as donning the scorpion jacket indicates something about his nature and what he's doing, this scene has him wearing something different to indicate a different context and intent. It's true that he drowns Nino but this is one of the least violent kills in the movie. Contrast this with the famous elevator scene, where he has a moment of fantasy, kissing Irene goodbye before we snap back to reality and the dark side of his character, the 'scorpion', is finally revealed to her. He viciously stomps and stomps the man sent to kill them, and we again see him from the back, the shot lingering on the scorpion jacket. She stands outside the elevator and looks horrified, seeing the other side of Driver for the first time. It's in this moment that we perhaps get the sense he tried to change his character by wearing the 'hero' mask and exacting revenge on Nino but inevitably the 'scorpion' reemerges and ruins his chance to be with Irene and Benecio. While setting up the final meeting with Bernie, Driver mentions the parable of the scorpion and the frog, perhaps acknowledging he knows he can't change his nature. When meeting with Bernie at the end, you get the sense again that they're parallel characters: Bernie is shown being meticulous in cleaning his razor blade, and also in murdering people in equally brutal ways to Driver. Earlier in the film they both mention having dirty hands, and like two scorpions they can't help but stab each other instead of just walking away from the situation like they could have if they chose to. It's left ambiguous in the end whether Driver survives or if we're just seeing another fantasy (like the kiss with Irene in the elevator). I like to think it's up to the audience to fill in their answer. If he was able to change, he survives and drives off to somewhere else in order to continue his heroic path. If he can never change, he dies as the 'scorpion' he always was deep down.


The title of the film can be taken in a few ways. For one, yes, it's a movie about a driver who drives. But it can also be taken in another meaning of the word, that of the psychological definition of an innate, biologically determined urge to attain a goal or satisfy a need. As a 'scorpion', is Driver “driven” to be violent and to help others commit crimes by his very nature? The final meaning of the title also relates to this idea, that the true “drive” of Driver is to see if he can be good, to be a real human being/a real hero. When he notices Irene's car broken down in the grocery store parking lot, he could just as easily ignore it and leave, yet his drive to be good compels him to walk over and help her. He even tries to give her the stolen money before he leaves town for good, and it's made clear throughout the film that money is not a motivating factor for him, simply a necessity. I also like to think the title has a dual identity, just as Driver does. More than any other motivation, Driver is driven to drive. Everything he does in life—getaway driver, stuntman driver, possible stock car racing driver—is centered around driving. His romantic scenes with Irene primarily take place in a car, and when she tells him the news about Standard being released from jail, they're suddenly at a stoplight, a metaphor for their budding affair/relationship coming to a halt. Most importantly the film has many scenes of Driver aimlessly driving around the city at night, as if he can't sleep and can't stop moving. So much of the movie is spent seeing him in motion, whether it's in a car or in a grocery store or in an elevator, that you wonder if he actually is capable of “stopping” in a metaphorical sense and settling down with Irene somewhere.

One of Drive's other central themes is the notion of fate. We see Driver's keychain a few times and it has a lucky rabbit's foot on it, suggesting he believes more in luck and that not everything is predetermined. Luck means there is a chance to change your fate. Bernie mentions that Shannon never had much luck in life, though in some sense Driver disputes this later when he tells Shannon that he “fucks everything up”, thus that Shannon's problems are the result of his actions and choices. Nowhere is this theme of inevitable fate vs. changing your luck more embodied than in Driver himself. You get the sense he starts out the movie accepting his status living a dual life as a 'human' during the day and a 'scorpion' at night. He seems resigned to his fate, yet in helping Irene and Standard you see him start to believe that he can change, that his luck can change, too. He isn't fated to always be a 'scorpion', and he might even be able to have a happy life by changing his path, going into a career as a stock car driver and possibly settling down with Irene and her son. The ending of the film might suggest he believes he has changed because his theme song plays again. Yet I believe that true change has to come from within, not because we want to change for other people, to placate their desires or to be what they believe we are on the surface. So as a whole I interpret Drive as saying that we can't change our fate, we only delude ourselves into thinking we can/have. Driver ends the movie after revealing the other side of himself to Irene and (assuming he survives Bernie's stab and the ending shots aren't a death dream) he subsequently leaves Los Angeles because he's lost everything (well, and because the police will be after him). He hasn't really purged the 'scorpion' from himself and become a real human being/a real hero, though he seems to think he has. You could even argue he's back to square one, in the same boat as he was when he arrived in Los Angeles, possibly fleeing something back home in the Jersey area. Who knows? Drive leaves the ending purposefully open and ambiguous, so your interpretation will differ from mine.

The brilliance of Drive is that it's both very stylistic and very substantive, too. Some early reviews and reactions to the film focused solely on the surface level, praising it for its seductive aesthetics but lamenting it was so busy with its style it had nothing to say. Obviously I disagree with these assessments. To me Drive is a film, like Pulp Fiction, that marries the artistic craft of filmmaking—action, direction, production design, narrative style, themes—with pure popcorn entertainment. Both films can be mistaken for style over substance, but this is due to people not engaging with the ideas and philosophy of the world and the characters. To me, Drive is that perfect ideal of a movie that can be as shallow or as deep as you want or need it to be.

30 For 30: Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind

I turned 30 on February 18th. I want to celebrate this, and get myself back into writing, by spending a few weeks rambling about the 30 things that have meant the most to me over the years. These will be from music, movies, books, videogames, and maybe even art and other things for good measure. I feel like my life has been much more about the things I've experienced than it has the people I've known or the places I've traveled to, and these 30 things have helped to make my 30 years more than worth all the innumerable bad things. Expect heartfelt over-sharing and overly analytical explanations galore! In part 14, things maybe get a little too real. And I talk about what the ending is really asking.

It's a good thing that nobody I know in real life reads this blog, because today is about to get pretty real. You see, after a solid five months of clean living, I have fallen off the wagon in spectacular fashion, and the last week has been an almost nightly routine of beer and cigarettes. I don't expect any sympathy for, or tolerance of, my problems; you shouldn't expect any explanation or further details as to why this happened. It's complicated yet I suppose it's very simple, too. And no, it's not something as simple as “I just turned 30, I'm getting old, boo hoo!”


Anyway, I think I'd have to be in the midst of a bender to be able to write about Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind because of how much it brings up for me. This is the one entry in my 30 For 30 series that I dreaded sitting down to write. It's not necessarily that it stirs up memories of ex-girlfriends, though that is part of it. Moreso it's the way the movie makes me examine my own life, the poor choices I've made I wish I could forget and the mistakes I've made I wish I could take back. Though the movie is ostensibly about a troubled couple who erase memories of their relationship, I mostly experience it now as a mirror, by which I mean every time I've watched it for the past three years I barely notice what's happening on screen while instead staring at the stubble on my face and the bags under my eyes. Metaphorically speaking.


Perhaps the strangest thing about my continuing experience with Eternal Sunshine is that, when I saw it for the first time (with my first girlfriend) in the theater, I related to Joel but now I relate to Clementine. Whenever people ask me if I'd ever get a tattoo, and what it would be if I did, I just bluntly say “nah, I'm not a tattoo kind of guy”, although deep down I know I'd get a tattoo of Clem's line: “I'm just a fucked up girl who is looking for my own peace of mind. Don't assign me your's.” Would I change it from “girl” to “guy” for my tattoo? No, because I like the idea of confusing the people at the autopsy and/or funeral home someday.


I really can't think of too much more to say about the film without veering into sloppy, rambling stories about ex-girlfriends or explaining in detail why Eternal Sunshine is such a unique, well acted, and astonishing looking movie. And despite mentioning alcohol earlier in this piece, I am actually sober while writing this, so don't expect much sloppy rambling. Rambling maybe, sloppy no. All the same, watching Eternal Sunshine almost does qualify as drinking for me because, like booze, it makes me feel great for awhile before it turns on me and I start to feel guilty about relationships that went bad, or at the very least, to second-guess many things in my life.


One could say that the film's ending argues that certain events are inevitable and that certain people are naturally—perhaps fatefully—drawn to each other. However, this has never been my experience, and I blame Eternal Sunshine for convincing me (for a few years) to believe that way, much to my detriment. Nowadays I'm a realist. Or a cynic. So I'm a big second-guesser and “what if?” question asker, often neurotically convincing myself if I had just done X, Y, and Z, or done them differently, things would have gone the way they were supposed to. Maybe a better way to say it is that I subscribe to the Terminator 2 idea of “no fate but what we make for ourselves” versus the Terminator 3 idea of “you only postponed it, Judgment Day is inevitable.”


Did I really just bring up the Terminator films? I swear I'm not drinking!


All digressions aside, the ending to me has become less about “do you believe in fate?” and morphed into a litmus test for whether you're a romantic or a realist. If you think Joel and Clem will actually stay together and work through their problems, then you're a romantic. If you think they're bound to keep having the same issues over and over and never grow past them, then you're a realist. Or maybe the better term is cynic. Whatever.


All I know is, I don't have an answer anymore. And maybe that's the root of my problem.

30 For 30: Fight Club

I turned 30 on February 18th. I want to celebrate this, and get myself back into writing, by spending a few weeks rambling about the 30 things that have meant the most to me over the years. These will be from music, movies, books, videogames, and maybe even art and other things for good measure. I feel like my life has been much more about the things I've experienced than it has the people I've known or the places I've traveled to, and these 30 things have helped to make my 30 years more than worth all the innumerable bad things. Expect heartfelt over-sharing and overly analytical explanations galore! In part 12, we take a look at one of the greatest love stories of the last 30 years, and I resist the urge to mention Meatloaf or use that still-frame from the end of the movie with the guy's dick.

 Amidst all the controversy that greeted Fight Club upon its release—all that talk of it being a misogynistic or fascist or pro-violence film—there was one significant lack of controversy. And it was that Chuck Palahniuk, the man who wrote the novel upon which the movie was based, thought the movie was better than the book. You see, most authors famously hate the films that are made out of their novels. This includes Stephen King, who is maybe the only person alive who hated Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. Yet there's an interview I can't track down that I read years ago wherein Palahniuk basically admits that he now finds the book embarrassing compared to the film because it does a better job with the ideas and themes he was trying to lay down.


Having read the book during my college years, I can say with certainty that he's absolutely right. Understand that I think Palahniuk is one of the best authors of the modern era, even if I haven't felt compelled to keep up with his newer works. Yet Fight Club, and to an extent his 'true' first novel, Invisible Monsters, were undercooked and unfocused compared to his novels that followed. So while I've only ever read Fight Club once, it still means a great deal to me, because I have watched it dozens of times.


However, in the same way that Radiohead's OK Computer continues to mean something to me even though I rarely listen to it, I only watch Fight Club once every couple years. It's still an amazing film, even judged simply from a visual perspective, and you should really go watch it if you only know of it as “that violent movie with the soap or whatever.” I have a well worn copy of the early 2-DVD release of it from my high school days, and to be sure, I watched the fuck out of it when I was younger. I can't say that it made me want to go out and fight someone or blow up a bank, but watching it, especially with the DVD commentaries on, did help me to appreciate it on another level.

 The packaging is just perfect, too.

In fact, I'll go ahead and say that, without seeing Fight Club at that time of my life, I might never have gotten into movies on any kind of serious basis. I never really thought about the things they teach you in film school, such as what makes acting good, or cinematography interesting, or how special effects can help tell a story without distracting from the rest of the movie. But watching the movie over and over, and listening to the various commentary tracks, I began to see and think about Fight Club, and other movies I was watching around that time, in a totally different way. No longer was it just a movie with great quotes and use of music; now I was actually noticing the fact that I didn't see the people in the movie as actors, I saw them as their characters. No longer was I impressed by how cool the explosions looked; now I was actually noticing the subtle use of CGI throughout the film to, say, put prices and items in the narrator's apartment or to add steamy breath to the scene in the cold cave with the penguin.

The nerd in me wants to know what font they used here.

It's fascinating to think how Fight Club may ultimately be regarded as a cult classic yet it features actors and a director who are anything but cult. David Fincher didn't really solidify his reputation until after Panic Room, true, but it's hard to imagine that the lead actors Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, and Helena Bonham Carter could have given better performances at that point in time, and could have gone on to do the roles they did afterward. I don't doubt they would have had careers without Fight Club but I don't know if they'd have had as good a demo reel, you know what I mean? This isn't to say that everything they're done in the 21^st century is pure gold but so much of the work they pursued post-Fight Club feels encoded in the acting they did in this film. Personally, I used to think of Brad Pitt as a pretty boy with no real acting chops or range, and Fight Club changed that. Go watch it again and as you do, think about the roles he'd go on to play in Inglourious Basterds, Snatch, and even something lesser known like The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford. And for what it's worth, I have a pet theory that the reason Tim Burton cast Helena Bonham Carter in Planet Of The Apes is that he saw her in Fight Club and fell in love with her portrayal of Marla Singer. 

Ah, romance.

Speaking of love, I'd like to conclude this entry by saying that I think of Fight Club as being one of the best love stories in recent times. This may sound crazy, since upon first viewing it feels like anything but a love story (in fact, you can't really pin a basic genre like drama or comedy to the movie at all, can you?). However, think about the scene where the narrator's apartment is blown up and he briefly calls Marla before not saying anything and trying Tyler instead. Knowing what you know about how the movie ends, don't you think the whole point of the movie is that he should have gone for Marla right away and stopped heading further in the Tyler direction? After all, she only stops seeming so crazy once we realize everything she has gone through with the narrator and Tyler. It's worth noting, too, how much less suicidal she is once she finally gets some action, and how strong she suddenly seems when she walks away from a destructive, confusing relationship—or tries to, anyway, before she's brought right back to the narrator at the end of the movie. On a side note, I love how she reacts throughout the ending scene. There's something sweet and tender about the way she tries to fix the narrator's wound that works in a way 90% of other overtly romantic movies can never hope to achieve.

Anyway, the lesson here is, if you ever meet a girl (or guy!) who loves Fight Club, you should probably marry them. That way you won't develop a split personality, beat the shit out of yourself, and blow up a bunch of banks while 'Where Is My Mind?' by the Pixies plays and a still frame of some guy's dick flashes by.

11 Stray Thoughts

1) The new album by Beach House, Bloom, is pretty good even though it feels more like a slightly different sequel to Teen Dream than the next step in the band's evolution. Don't get me wrong, it's almost as good as Teen Dream. Perhaps the best parallel is Radiohead's Kid A and Amnesiac; both are great, but the former came first and felt newer/fresher even if many prefer the latter.

2) After spending most of their career using as little instrumentation as possible, and falling more often than not on the dour side of things, The Walkmen have recruited producer Phil Elk and guest Robin Pecknold of Fleet Foxes to help them expand their sound. The result is arguably the band's best record yet, Heaven.

3) The titles of the new Beach House and The Walkmen albums should be switched. Heaven should be a place of relative stagnation but enjoyment (more like how Beach House's new one feels), whereas Bloom is more fitting for the by turns majestic and uplifting Walkmen record.

4) You should immediately go listen to all the Felt that you can. Such an underrated, under-known band.

5) I've slowly become addicted to Beach Fossils. Their new single, Shallow/Lessons, is fantastic, and I'm definitely anticipating their forthcoming sophomore record with increasing impatience.

6) The Horrors and The Drones are also underrated and under-known bands. The Horrors's Primary Colours sounds like a combination of Liars and My Bloody Valentine. The Drones recorded Gala Mill at the titular mill in an isolated area of Australia, and the atmosphere of that environment permeates these songs. The Drones sound most to me like the rock guitar side of Sun Kil Moon and the impassioned side of Nick Cave combined with bare bones, distorted Spiderland guitars as engineered by Steve Albini.

7) Bardo Pond's 'Back Porch' and 'Tommy Gun Angel' kick incredible amounts of ass.

8) The Days Of Wine & Roses by The Dream Syndicate is a perfect amalgamation of Velvet Underground and The Feelies-esque jangle-pop.

9) Sufjan Steven's Age Of Adz gets better with time.

10) How I Met Your Mother is my new favorite sitcom. Imagine a modern version of Seinfeld, with all the wit, neurotic characters, made up words and terms, and odd misadventures that implies, but actually much better than that comparison makes it sound.

11) Predator 2, as with Ghostbusters 2, is an unfairly maligned sequel to a classic film.