Believe me. You're going to love it much more than you hate it.

Oh, MAN! I LOVE THIS GAME! It could be one of the best things to come from the whole GTA craze in the mid 2000’s. I mean, it’s got everything: car chases, mobsters, murderers, corrupt cops, good cops, bad cops, machine guns, and some of the best story telling to ever grace the PS2.

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Yeah, he was sleeping in a suit. So, what? You want to fight about it?

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Here’s the rundown: You are Mark Hammond. You used be a thug, but now you’re not. And those guys in that video, they took your kid, and the crime boss in charge, he won’t give him back unless you do what he says. Basically, you’re on the hook and you have to go on about 12 suicide missions before you can get your boy back. This cop, he starts figuring things out as he tries to capture you, following you through the bloody crime scenes, staying right on your toes, and eventually helping you get your son back.

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After you finish the game as Mark, you get to play through again from the cop’s perspective. It’s an original concept that most game designers would save for maybe a part two or something. It’s great. I remember when I beat the game as Mark and then had to start over. I was a little pissed, but mostly, I was jazzed. It’s like Enders Game and Enders Shadow. Don’t know what I’m talking about? Go read a book.

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I’ve heard that the game is based loosely on the movies Snatch and Get Carter. I don’t really see the direct connections, but I definitely feel it. The Getaway plays like a traditional tough-guy movie. There is no bullshit about it, so bring your A game. You can’t carry 20 weapons like in GTA and you don’t get a HUD to tell you how much life or how many bullets you have left. You run into a war zone and you pick up what weapons you can. You take cover to catch your breath and heal up a little, then you fire away until that weapon is spent. Pick up a new weapon and repeat.

The game might be lacking in graphics by today's standards, but the action more than makes up for it.

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This constant picking up and dropping of weapons and blowing up canisters and limping to the next shotgun or machine gun really helps get you in the mood of the game. It works well together with the driving missions. You’re always going somewhere, you’re always moving, pushing forward. The game keeps you on your toes and it really has a fast pace to it that grabs your attention and can create a lot of excitement.

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The developers at Team SoHo recreated London. I can’t tell you how accurate it is since I’ve never been, but I can tell you that it’s what you’d expect. The only real drag about it comes from trying get into cars on the wrong side all the time, but you get used to it. What I found interesting was that the game actually got car companies to let them use their models in the game. There aren’t that many cars, but it’s nice to be driving around in a real automobile.

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The controls aren’t bad. They aren’t winning the game any brownie points, that’s for sure, but after playing for a while you can get used to it. Cars are a little stiff and hard to move around tight corners at first, and sneaking around warehouses and stuff can be tricky, but it didn’t take me long to get past these issues and learn to cope.

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There was a sequel, but it wasn't very good. Stick with the original.

The killer in this game is the length and difficulty of the missions and the checkpoints. You’re going to spend more time cursing at your TV while trying to get to certain places on time and trying to survive certain moments than you ever have before. I promise you that there will never be a time when you wanted to swallow your tongue more than when you’re racing against a clock you cannot see. But you can’t stop trying, because damn it, this story is too good.

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In fact, the story is fantastic.  The game is a challenge for sure, but it’s worth it. I never walked away from a game, other than Fallout, with more respect for its storytelling. The characters are all well developed, Mark Hammond, the cop, and the man who has your son are all very easy to love and hate. The voice acting is some of the best you’ll ever come by. The city is massive, especially for the time it was released, and it adds so much flair and fire to the game to know that you’re actually igniting hell on Earth in London. The there isn’t much by way of its replay factor, but believe me, you’ll play it again.

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It’s an A+ game if you think you can handle it. The Getaway for PS2 is only 45 cents used on Amazon.com! Only $3 new!

Watching The Getaway recently reaffirmed for me what a great artist Sam Peckinpah was. Somehow I had missed this film over the years, discouraged from watching it by its highly uneven reputation, and the fact that I find Ali McGraw to be a black hole who tends to pull a movie into oblivion. The film didn’t change my opinon of La McGraw, and in fact her vacuity pulls her co-star Steve McQueen badly into its orbit. In Peckinpah’s preceding film, Junior Bonner, McQueen was at his best and seems well in the groove of Peckinpah’s male characters, their brutality an expression of their sensitivity. Here he seems like the Steve McQueen of the unwatchably glib The Thomas Crown Affair.

But everything about the film besides its lead actors is beautiful. The fact that it works as a crime thriller in a relatively uncomplicated way is a bonus, because, though it is not among his great works, it is fully haunted by the ghosts that make Peckinpah’s work so revelatory. Peckinpah at his best treats subjects that are at the centre of American storytelling (the frontier, masculinity, violence) with a grace, depth and poetry that exceeds even Hawks and Ford (maybe that’s just a generational thing, though; too bad no one of my generation managed to surpass Peckinpah).

So excited was I by this, that I immediately ordered a copy of The Osterman Weekend, Sam’s last film, which I saw at Toronto’s Imperial 6 Cinemas on its initial release in 1983, and remembered as borderline unwatchable. But if The Getaway was this good, perhaps I had just missed the point on Osterman (at the time I had yet to see The Wild Bunch or Ride the High Country or Bring me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, now three of my favourite American films, only Straw Dogs and at much too young an age [14]).

I have this theory: that films from the 70’s have gotten better, and films from the 80’s have gotten worse. It’s remarkable how few exceptions there seem to be. Sadly, The Osterman Weekend is not one of them. Not only was it is as bad as I remembered, knowing Peckinpah’s work makes its badness more tragic. Not primarily because of the vast gap in quality between Osterman and his earlier films — well, except for Convoy and The Killer Elite, though I think it is worse — but because it is a kind of announcement of the annihilation of a great filmmaker. It depicts a world in which all the values that were both celebrated and mourned in his great works – and that ability to both mourn and celebrate at the same time has something to do with their greatness– have ceased to exist. Those values have been destroyed by vast institutions (within the narrative, the CIA and the mass media; while embodied by the film itself, 20^th Century Fox and the cheesy producers [Highlander: Search for Vengeance, anyone?] who hired Peckinpah because he would work cheap and could do some signature slow mo). The “action” scenes come off as self-parody, which may have been inevitable given that the techniques of Peckinpah’s brilliant depictions of violence had already been absorbed by the mainstream which had fully inverted their meaning. The performances range from wooden to embarrassing, but what the actors have in common is an apparent cluelessness as to what kind of movie they are in and what they are supposed to be doing. Where Peckinpah’s great films were narratively spare, charting a linear trajectory as they accumulate mysterious depth, Osterman is not only cluttered to the point of absurdity but seems to deliberately void itself of narrative coherence as it proceeds (in spite of a screenplay by the wonderful Alan Sharp.) Where his previous films are preoccupied with the relationship between man and nature, and man and the community, in Osterman nature has ceased to exist (the film mostly takes place in an ugly house cluttered with video equipment, and the exteriors are largely barren) and the community has been rendered an abstraction by the mass media. In short, it may be that by 1983, the artistic construct known as the “Sam Peckinpah film” could no longer exist, not only because of Sam’s alcoholism, but because of history. (Alcoholism may have been only symptom, not cause.)

In any case, it seems like Sam, who had been given the kind of soul-breaking punishment Hollywood reserves for its most committed artists, had decided to offer a parodical reflection back at that world of its idea of what a commercial film is in the early 1980’s, in all its ugly, noisy, incoherent meaninglessness.

The saddest spectacle is watching auteurists try to justify the film’s brilliance, as though the subject matter was an artistic choice as opposed to the only job on offer, and as though it were an artistic testament rather than a self-inscribed grave marker.

It is true that the nihilistic ugliness of the film can be identified as a current in Peckinpah’s work as far back as The Wild Bunch. Part of what made Sam great as an artist was in the demons he confronted. In The Osterman Weekend, he shows us what ugliness is like without the artistry, since the world had no use for the artistry.

I haven’t yet listened to the commentary track by the redoubtable Seydor, Weddle, Simmons and Redmond, whose books I have devoured. Perhaps they will convince me otherwise. Nor have I watched the “directors cut” included, though I would bet dollars to donuts that it is just a more extreme version of everything I have stated above. Peckinpah spent 8 months editing the film before being fired, and I suspect he was just trying to leave them as big of a mess as possible.

I’m excited about the revelation of the top 20 dancers for season six of So You Think You Can Dance.  None of the dancers have really captured my attention other than maybe the krump guy if he makes it into the top 20. My favorite audition from this season was this kid in Phoenix. Pretty sure he has ADD, but he was ADD-Fabulous.

I like that this season it seems as if the judges are giving people the benefit of the doubt for the sake of ratings and giving dancers that more or less have no chance of making it past choreography an opportunity to learn choreography and then get the axe.

In other news.. I’m back on an Ebay kick. In the last week (or two) I got a new to me but used PS2 and 3 games for 100euros. The PS2 even came with a bunch of games and a steering wheel. I’ll have to do something to get rid of the children games (Kim Possible 2, The Jungle Book, The Sims ‘Stranded’..?), but all in all I am pleased with the purchase. How can you beat something so sweet placed at your doorstep? With two controllers!

I found a new game to play outside of the  – classics – I had to purchase (i.e. Tony Hawk 3, Grand Theft Auto:Vice City) I wanted something similar to “Grand Theft Auto”..and I came across “The Getaway”. The reviews of it weren’t awesome, it got 6.7 out of 10 stars..but it was cheap.

The deal is you play this guy whose name I can’t remember and his wife is killed and these goons kidnap his son. In order to get his son back you have to complete missions for this guy – like dropping off people, fighting people, whatever..it’s not so bad except you can’t skip the LONG movie interludes between missions ..and there is no way to see how much health you have left after you’ve been shot ..nor is there a city map one can refer to during game play – except for the city map of London that came with the package BUT it’s just a real street map of London without any of the locations one must visit during gameplay. WACK. Something else dumb about the game is that if you start a mission with say, three parts..you can’t save the mission until you have finished all three parts. Maybe it’s just me but I don’t always have time for a 3-hour session.

Admittedly, I just started playing the game a couple of days ago and am only on mission 7. Just remembered something else strange in the game – if I hold someone hostage, I can’t let them go free. I have to either shoot them or break their neck. Okay, I shouldn’t be taking them hostage in the first place to shield me from enemy gunfire, but what if I want to let them go? Maybe I haven’t figured out that trick yet.

The game is still enjoyable despite its downfalls. We’ll see how far I get in the coming weeks.

Michael Jackson’s “Scream” has been running through my head like crazy this week. “Stop pressuring me..”

Seguirle la pista al rodaje de Dexter no es algo complicado, comienzan a grabar en mayo/junio y terminan en octubre/noviembre. Siempre ha sido así y lo seguirá siendo mientras tenga sólo 12 episodios por temporada. Aún no se estrena la cuarta y Showtime ya ha emitido la última nota de casting para esta temporada, el último episodio de una temporada que estoy seguro será única y mejor que la tercera, pero no tanto como la primera (¡esa es inigualable!). En fin, ¿vemos el reparto para este episodio?

• Conductor Furioso: 40 años, de raza blanca, ágil. Se enoja luego de que alguien choca su auto. 4 diálogos y 1 línea, 3 escenas.
• Agente Especial Sheldon: Alrededor de 50 años, de raza blanca o afroamericano, distinguido. Es un Agente Especial del FBI. 3 diálogos y 1 línea, 1 escena.
• Ayudante del Sheriff: Entre 30 y 40 años, hombre. Ayudante del sheriff en una cárcel. 5 líneas, 1 escena. Cualquier etnia.
• Policía #1 y #2: Alrededor de 30 años, hombres, en buen estado físico. Estos dos policías enfrentan a un conductor involucrado en un accidente de autos. 4 líneas, 1 escena y 3 líneas, 1 escena, respectivamente. Cualquier etnia.
• Julio: Entre 35 y 50 años, hispano. Trabaja en un taller de reparación de carrocería de autos. 1 línea, 1 escena.

Qué mal… con este reparto no podemos hacer mucho. Con la llegada del Agente Especial Sheldon asumo que: a) Lundy dejó de existir gracias a Trinity, o b) simplemente es un refuerzo para Lundy. Respecto al accidente de auto, ¿habrá alguna fuga/persecución en la finale? El título sugiere que sí. Pero… ¿será la fuga de Dexter o la de Trinity? ¿Qué opinan?

Con el apetito por festivales que me corroe en el interior, y la imposibilidad de largarme a cualquiera de los que ahora se avecinan (veáse Sitges); además de la cantidad de tiempo libre que se tiene cuando se está en paro; decidí que es tiempo de volver a culturizarme (y viciarme al Guitar Hero).

Hace no mucho echarón en el canal TCM, la pelicula de Sam Peckinpah de 1972, “La Huida (The Getaway)”. Es una macarrada de mucho cuidado; robos de bancos, persecuciones en coches, tiroteos “masocas”, mozas de buen ver, gangstérs y mil cosas mas. Y a mi que me gusta mas el GTA que a un tonto un boli, disfruté como un niño pequeño. Expectacular Steve Mcqueen.

También ando buscando películas por la red, y para ello no encuentro nada mejor que un trago del cóctel Filmaffinity / IMDB , algo de cine en stream y con un toque de un buen gestor de descargas. Bueno, el caso es que acabé viendo una película de Phil Joanou, “El clan de los irlandeses (State of Grace)” de 1990. Peliculón sobre la competencia de “negocios” entre bandas, clanes o mafias de Nueva York, en concreto entre irlandeses e italianos. Los protagonistas son Sean Penn, Gary Oldman y Ed Harris, que pertenecen a la parte irlandesa, mil veces mejor que el rollo “Infiltrados” y sin faltar.

Y como quien va con dinero por un mercado, me entró el gusanillo por ver “Män som hatar kvinnor (Millenium I: Los hombres que no amaban a las mujeres” de Niels Arden Oplev, estrenada este mismo año y basada en la trilogía de best sellers del difuntoStieg Larsson . No es un peliculón, pero si que es verdad que es una de esas películas que entretienen y convencen; lo mismo me ocurre con la saga Harry Potter o El señor de los anillos. La actriz me pone, que sorpresa.

Essential viewing for Jennifer Tilly:

1.  Bound — The Illmatic of lesbian hiest flicks.  Still the best directing by The Wachowski Brothers (The Matrix triology)

2.  Bride of Chucky – The Ready to Die of horror flick cleavage.

3.  The Getaway –  It’s 1994.  Kim Basinger is still hot.  She’s starring in a movie with her then-husband Alec Baldwin, who was an uber-star.  Michael Madsen, newly christened cult figured badass via Reservoir Dogs, is the main antagonist.  And the sexiest, sultriest, most eye-catching performance was from Jennifer Tilly as Fran Carvey, meek spouse of a nerdy vetrenarian.

Fulla brevlådan idag när 3 st vadderade kuvert anlänt. Innehållet i de tre påsarna bestod av Das Boot och Den gode, den onde, den fule på DVD samt Bullitt, The Shining och The Getaway på BluRay. Min BD-samlig växer stadigt i hyllan och jag är nu uppe i 28 st. Blir kul att se den extremt långa Das Boot också. 4 timmar och 42 minuter är inget man plöjer igenom en kväll efter man har jobbat sen tidigt på morgonen. Kommer krävas lite planering för att få in den i schemat.

Nu alldeles strax sätter jag mig i Fiaten och drar ner mot staden där bland annat Nolia väntar. Ska förbi Jula en sväng och lämna tillbaka en stolphatt innan jag åker och förhoppningsvis hämtar upp Robert. Hänger på om han hunnit få ordning på alla siffror lr vad det nu är han pysslar med. Sen blir det Nolia. Måtte man ha lite flyt i Platespottingen nu när man kommer se så mycket bilar!? 061 var är du?

Borsta tänderna samt kladda till frillan lite sen är det bara att ge sig iväg.

Frågan är om det blir regn idag? Kanske är bäst att ta med sig ett paraply. Kommer troligen få ligga kvar i bilen, men det hänger iaf med så långt.

Just so you all know – we post ONLY the public events here on our blog and our website.  we host MANY more private events than we do public ones, so we are MUCH busier than our blog and our website would lead you to believe!  There are GREAT incentives to hosting your own BEIJO event at your home, your office or at a neutral location.  Contact us to see how easy it is to score big wth BEIJO private events!

Long Island, I would like to introduce you to Stranger In Arms. Stranger In Arms is a brand new five piece powerpop/indie rock band out of Selden, NY. This band features members from both Asher Levy and Stray From The Path. It’s insane to think that this band has only been playing together a few months and have already released some of the best stuff to come out of the Island in a long time. With great song writing, incredible vocals, a tight rhythm section, and thundering guitar riffs this band can do no wrong. At times this band is reminiscent of bands such as Cartel and Days Away, most certainly some great acts to be associated with. Head over to their myspace and be sure to listen to “All You Need” and “The Getaway.” Expect to see a lot more of these guys soon.
-Christopher Blanco

The rest of the best from the golden age of gritty crime thrillers.

The 70s were not an optimistic time, and most American cinema carried and echoed that cynicism. Cop films were no exception, eschewing the traditional white hat/black hat simplicity in place since the 1950s in favor of darker shades of gray among its cops and crooks alike. Looking past the “D’Antoni Trilogy” of Bullitt, The French Connection, and The Seven-Ups, movie theatres of the era were held down by dozens of gritty police and crime thrillers, many of which rivaled or in some ways surpassed the blueprint those three films delineated. Known for their realistic settings, amoral protagonists, and meticulous attention to violent detail, the era’s crime films were often as bleak and unremitting as the real-life stories that sometimes inspired them.

The following list includes films that exemplified the crime genre. The edges of film genre are seldom clear and almost never straight, but the list includes films of a certain recognizable kind but deliberately omits others. There’s no question that Chinatown, for example, was one of the 70s best films. Including it as a crime film, however, both sells its considerable achievements short while ignoring the criteria of texture and mood that defines most “crime” films of the period. Likewise for other films such as Taxi Driver, Murder On The Orient Express, The Godfather and its sequel, The Parallax View, Dog Day Afternoon, and no doubt many others.

In chronological order:

Shaft (1971): The decade saw the rise (and fall) of the blaxploitation sub-genre, typically low-budget efforts that brought the new cop movie morality to the inner city, a locale where in the real world crime and corruption were reaching catastrophic levels. Films  including Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, Dolemite, Black Caesar,  and Super Fly pitted strong black men against, alternately, evil white people, crooks, mobsters, revolutionaries and politicians.

The mack daddy of them all, however, was 1973’s Shaft, an eye-popping swirl of color, attitude, and especially violence. Richard Roundtree played the titular private detective on the trial of a local kingpin’s kidnapped daughter, bucking criminals and cops with help from a Black Panthers-like revolutionary cell. Touted as “The Black James Bond,” Roundtree reprised the role of John Shaft in three sequels, though none match the original. (Note that the following is a fan-made trailer.)

Dirty Harry (1971): A film that’s become somewhat archetypal over time, Don Siegel (The Killers) directed this ultra-violent crime thriller about rogue San Francisco Police Inspector “Dirty”  Harry Callahan, a role that after thirty-eight years and four diminishing sequels has become synonymous with star Clint Eastwood’s public and screen image. The plot puts the remorseless Callahan against a serial sniper loosely based on the real-life Zodiac killer, then at the height of his reign of terror over the Bay Area.

The story is straightforward and the characterizations rote, but Siegel keeps the mounting tension taut as piano wire. Callahan and “Scorpio” are both unstoppable objects, making their inevitable collision loom mercilessly over the audience. At leat the trailer gives fair warning:

The Getaway (1972): Mastermind criminal Doc McCoy (Steve McQueen) is paroled from a Texas prison on the condition that he plan a bank robbery for corrupt businessman Jack Benyon (Ben Johnson). One of the businessman’s goons kills a security guard during the heist, and Doc and his wife Carol (Ali McGraw) flee to the border at El Paso while eluding pursuit by Benyon and the killer. McQueen and MacGraw became real-life lovers during filming despite her marriage to producer Robert Evans, making them a kind of 70s Brangelina. Sam Peckinpah (The Wild Bunch) directs the sleek, swift-moving thriller purely for the sake of entertaining the audience, who loved the palpable chemistry between its stars. A 1994 remake starring then-married couple Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger flopped.

Serpico (1973): Director Sidney Lumet (Twelve Angry Men) returned to the theme of police corruption time and again through his career, though probably none of his works equal the haunting intensity of this true-life story of whistle-blowing narcotics detective Frank Serpico. Shunned and eventually set up for a near-fatal shooting by his NYPD colleagues, Serpico (Al Pacino) personified the righteous outcast persona typical of 70s film protagonists, as the film’s grim ending perfectly demonstrates. Pacino was only just coming into his commanding screen presence, and the on-location shots of a crime-devastated New York showcase Lumet’s attention to precise realism. The two reteamed for the bank heist classic Dog Day Afternoon two years later.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973): The poster on the left isn’t meant to be cheap -  it’s just that this film about the working class ranks of the Boston underworld is actually that stark and bleak. Faced with an impending jail sentence, low-level hood Eddie Coyle (the great Robert Mitchum, kicking off a late-career resurgence) agrees to snitch a gang of home invaders to the feds, only to learn that the gang was already caught that same morning. Meanwhile the Irish Mob, believing Coyle was actually the informant, sends his friend Dillon (Peter Boyle) to kill him in retribution. Mitchum and Boyle, two consummate pros, build their characters comfortably and with unforced but nonetheless mounting tension, while great turns by unjustly forgotten character actors such as Richard Jordan, Steven Keats and others fill in the grimy, desperate world they inhabit. Peter Yates (Bullitt) directs, and the film will see a long-anticipated DVD release this May.

The Conversation (1974): Francis Ford Coppola made this smart conspiracy yarn between the first two Godfather sagas, distilling the decade’s paranoia and fear of technology into an intense character study chock full of irony. Gene Hackman plays Harry Caul, a surveillance expert who leads a life of deliberate isolation from others while keeping morally removed from the consequences of his discoveries. Haunted by a previous mistake that left three people dead, he becomes obsessed with the meaning of his latest taped investigation, ultimately finding himself the target of eavesdropping and pursuit for reasons not immediately apparent. The script was written in the mid-60s, yet the film saw release during the height of the Watergate scandal. A pre-Star Wars Harrison Ford makes a rare screen appearance as the heavy.

The Taking Of Pelham One Two Three (1974): A British mercenary (Robert Shaw) and his three henchmen hijack a crowded New York subway train and demand a million dollar ransom. A Transit Authority detective (Walter Matthau) scrambles to stall the gang, which includes former subway system employees who know how to exploit the weaknesses in its safety features.  Directed by veteran TV director Joseph Sargent, Matthau and the versatile cast imbue the film with a cynical New York humor, while Quentin Tarantino lifted the hijackers’ color-coordinated code names for his Reservoir Dogs. A remake, starring Denzel Washington in the Matthau role and John Travolta as the hijacker’s ringleader, is scheduled for release this June.

- Michael Kabel
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[BTW, the audio embeds have been bitchy lately. We test them before we post them, so if you get a message saying "Error loading file" just reload the page and try again. It will work eventually. Thanks!]

Friend of the blog Anna has graciously put together a review of the latest Clifton Williams and the Blue James Band album. She has a radio show at Uconn, “The Getaway with Juice and APOC”, which airs this semester on Fridays from 2-4PM, and she will be interviewing the band this Friday. She also has a cool .mac website where she posts full podcasts/recordings of her radio shows. More details are in her post, so without further ado:

“You Should Know”

“Believe”

“WILL” was released in October 2008 and is the second studio album from Clifton Williams and the Blue James Band.  The album was produced mostly by Clifton himself with the exception of a few songs mixed by Jack Gautheir, who is well known for his work with Dispatch.

The album features good vocals, clean guitar, and a nice and simple drum beat.  The Blue James Band channels the likes of Dispatch and dare I say I was reminded of Phish? (how ever briefly)  The lyrics are well done usually with an up beat feel good message.

They incorporate a little bit of reggae, a little bit of funk, but are rooted in good ol’ rock and roll.  They don’t mess around with this indie, post rock, synth drenched pu-pu platter.  They keep it simple and it works pretty well.

My main complaint about this album is that the songs tend to sound very similar.  But that also means if you like one song you’re probably going to like the album.  I suggest “Down this Path”, “You Should Know” (…”a little poopy, a little poppy”…Empire Records?  Anyone?), and “Don’t Waste the Days”.

Also!  You will be able to hear and hopefully ask some questions of Clifton Williams and the Blue James Band this Friday when they will be doing an interview and live in studio performance on my radio show on WHUS 91.7.  Soooo tune into the Getaway with Juice and APOC and jam with the Blue James Band from 2-4 pm.  Also they will be performing at the Stonewall Tavern on route 32 in Mansfield later that night.  Check out their website for details: www.bluejamesband.com

To stream shows from WHUS over the internet go to www.WHUS.org

- Anna, aka APOC

Tengo q admitir que esta canción me queda como anillo al dedo, en ocasiones q me pongo a pensar… en ciertas personas, esta es la 2da vez q c aplica, así q decidme si les cae una piedra después de q la lean.

Un s@ludo y espero comentarios.

Regresar a Music

Hilary Duff – The Getaway

Here I am again
Talking to myself
Sitting at a red light
Both hands on the wheel
How am I supposed to feel?
So much running through my mind
First you wanna be free
Now you say you need me
Giving mixed signals in size
It’s so hard to let you in Thinking you might slam the brakes again
Push the pedal down
Heading out of town
Gotta make a getaway
The traffic in my brain’s
Driving me insane
This is more than I can take
You tell me that you love me first
Then throw your heart into reverse
I gotta get away

I can’t keep coming back to you
Every time you’re in the mood
To whisper something sweet in my ear
It’s so hard to move on
Cause every time I think you’re gone
You show up in my rearview mirror

Is this just a detour?
Cause I gotta be sure
That you really mean what you say
It’s so hard to let you in
Thinking you might slam the brakes again

Push the pedal down
Heading out of town
Gotta make a getaway
The traffic in my brain’s
Driving me insane
This is more than I can take
You tell me that you love me first
Then throw your heart into reverse
I gotta get away
To a place where I can be redefined
Where you’re out of sight
And you’re out of mind
But the truth is I can’t even say goodbye

Here I am again
Talking to myself
Sitting at a red light
Both hands on the wheel
How am I supposed to feel?
So much running through my mind

Push the pedal down
Heading out of town
Gotta make a getaway (a getaway)
The traffic in my brain’s
Driving me insane
This is more than I can take (I can take)
You tell me that you love me first
Then throw your heart into reverse
I gotta get away

You’re crazier than a mule-humpin’ goat. Sitting there with all that law crammed inside of you just bustin’ to get out. I wouldn’t give a sweet jerk in hell if the Kid did lay you out.

Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid

What a month February shall be for going to the cinema in Dublin! If the annual truckload of Oscar wannabes being marketed to death right now is not enough to entice you out, then there are the many highlights of the upcoming Dublin International Film Festival to be tempted by instead. In between all of this mayhem, the Irish Film Institute still manages to find time to carry on with its superb Sam Peckinpah retrospective!

Whereas the January films predominantly focused on his Westerns, this month offers a broader range of genres. However, the same troubled anti-heroes are to the fore, as they cope with the adversities heaped upon them from living in an immoral and difficult world.

Here are a few highlights to watch out for!

The Getaway (1972)

Peckinpah’s most commercially successful film is the story of a marriage on the rocks and a wedded couple on the run. Sprung from jail, “Doc” McCoy (Steve McQueen) has to carry out a bank robbery for his slimy benefactor in return. However, things quickly go from bad to worse during the heist and Doc and his wife (Ali Mac Graw) are left making a desperate run for the Mexican border, with both gangsters and policemen hot on their trail.

If matters are not difficult enough already, the couple’s marriage is in the balance, as both try to figure out if the things that they love about the other outweigh what they hate. As they try to resolve their situation by way of some frank discussions, a sleazy alternative on love and fidelity is provided thanks to one of the gangsters who has taken a married couple as his hostages.

Disturbing, uneven, and violent, The Getaway is not a conventional thriller by any means. Equally, it is not as nihilistic as Peckinpah’s other hardboiled works. Steve McQueen fans will already be familiar with this film, I am sure, but the man is on form in this one, as the tough but taciturn bank robber.

Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1969)

This film is a slow dance of death between two old friends who now find themselves on opposite sides of the law. Pat Garrett (James Coburn) is a pragmatic former rustler who can see that the way the world works is changing and takes up the role of sheriff in response to this. In doing so, his main job quickly becomes the need to end his old friend’s unrepentantly outlaw ways.

Coburn is fantastic as the cool-as-a-cucumber lawman who does the job that he has to do. Originally, the role of Billy, though, was to have gone to Bo Hopkins. His innocent-but-unstable looks would surely have been tailor-made for playing this character. Instead, the part went to Kris Kristofferson, who never quite captures the spirit of The Kid in the film.

By the way, it is beautifully scored by Bob Dylan, who also has a role as an enigmatic knife-throwing character called Alias.

In some ways, the film is still best known, though, for how difficult it was to make. The shoot was plagued with technical problems. There were also some major disputes between Peckinpah and both his scriptwriter and his production company (MGM). Because of the latter, the first version that came out cut many of the scenes that Peckinpah felt were important to the story that he wanted to tell. Appropriately, it tanked at the box office. However, following a much later release of the director’s cut, the stock of this film has risen greatly and it is now rightly seen as one of Peckinpah’s best.

Cross of Iron (1977)

To my mind, this is not only Peckinpah’s most overlooked work, it is also one of the most interesting war movies of all time. James Coburn gives another unforgettable performance here as Steiner, a non-commissioned officer in the German army, as it retreats from the Russian Front in 1943. Steiner is an excellent solider who leads his battle-weary men with courage and honour. However, his real fight is now with the regiment’s senior officers, whom he has grown to despise. Matters quickly come to a head when an aristocratic and ambitious, but also cowardly and inept captain (Maximilian Schell) is transferred to the regiment from serving in occupied France.

I will eat my jackboots if Clint Eastwood was not inspired in part by this film when making Flags of our Fathers.

Before we move on, David Warner is also great value in his supporting role as the pile of human misery that is Captain Kiesel!

Convoy (1978 )

The road movie meets the western in this tale of an anti-authoritarian truck driver whose beef with a local sheriff soon has a mile long convoy of trucks powering their way across State lines in protest. Kris Kristofferson and Ali MacGraw again star, but the real focus is on the trucks as they take on both buildings and the National Guard. There is also plenty of CB radio banter to enjoy! One of Peckinpah’s lesser films, but probably the first one that I ever saw, given that it can be screened before the watershed!

Noon Wine (1966)

This hard-to-obtain 50-minute film from 1966 gave a foretaste for the tough and violent films that Peckinpah was to ultimately become best known for. It is the story of a Texan farmer (Jason Robards) who is confronted by a knife-wielding stranger who is threatening his family. Despite its short length, Noon Wine is seen as a fantastic work and is definitely on my “must see” list for the month. It is accompanied by a 50-minute TV programme on Route 66 that Peckinpah once directed.

Other films being shown include The Killer Elite (1975) and Peckinpah’s last ever work, The Osterman Weekend (1984).

For further information on the Sam Peckinpah season at the Irish Film Institute, click on through.

Princess Mina’s friend, Tamara, is in town to visit and while she’s here, she played a scorching hot set at The Getaway near Dam Square! (Your raconteur had to miss her last gig there, so I made sure to be in attendance tonight!)

We were joined by Mina’s friends, Vani and Stefan, too!

This was the first night I’d been out since THE BAN and it was certainly strange!

We smokers spent a lot of time going outside…

It was a blast hanging out with such wonderful kittens!

Mina, Vani, and DJ Tamara!

Here’s the rest of this abbreviated set! (Click below, k?)

Enjoy!

This list last updated July 22, 2009.

Aggressive Inline
Clock Tower 3
Dark Angel: Vampire Apocalypse
Dark Cloud (Greatest Hits)
Drakan: The Ancient Gates
Extermination
Final Fantasy X
Final Fantasy XII Collector’s Edition
Forgotten Realms: Demon Stone
Freaky Flyers
The Getaway
Ghosthunter
God of War (Greatest Hits)
God of War II (Greatest Hits)
Gran Turismo 3 A-Spec (Greatest Hits)
Grand Theft Auto III
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories
Kessen
Kuon
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King
Madden 2002
Madden 2003
Manhunt
NCAA Football 2002
Nightshade
Onimusha
Onimusha 2
Onimusha 3
Power Drome
Red Faction (Greatest Hits)
Resident Evil: Code Veronica (Greatest Hits)
Resident Evil 4 (Greatest Hits)
Silent Hill 0rigins
Silent Hill 2 (Greatest Hits)
Silent Hill 3
Silent Hill 4: The Room
The Simpsons: Hit & Run (Greatest Hits)
The Simpsons: Road Rage (Greatest Hits)
Silpheed: The Lost Planet
SoulCalibur II
State of Emergency
The Suffering
Super Bust-A-Move
The Terminator: Dawn of Fate
The Thing
Tsugunai
Virtua Fighter 4: Evolution

Current game count: 50