1) I'm super proud about having understood about 95 percent of the film considering it was in French or with French-subtitles. (It is kind of sad though that I'm still stagnant with my functional French and not even on the cusp of fluency yet.)
2) Man, is that one heavy flick. You don't even know what to say after you walk out of it. I won't give it away in case you check it out, but I'll just say that Freud was really one creepy guy. (And I'm still not sure about the character ages and how they all add up. I was doing the math for a couple hours afterwards and I still don't know if it's all possible...)
...and 3) During a preview for a new Sofia Coppola flick, I heard a melody sung by Julian Casablancas that I could have sworn I'd heard before. The chorus came: "sit me down/shut me up/I'll calm down and I'll get along with you..." and I recognized it from the First Impressions of Earth album, but I had to sing it over and over in my head about 30 times before I could build the song around it and realize it was the album opener, "I'll Try Anything Once." I couldn't focus on the first five or ten minutes of 'Incendies' because of this and the reason it took me so long to recall this track was that the song that appeared in the preview was a stripped-down, soft version with just Julian singing, accompanied by a fuzzy keyboard and not the layered version I was used to.
It's really damn good.
The Laser and I got to talking about the Strokes at a pub a week back after 'Is This It?' came on. We talked about how refreshing those Strokes were back in 2002 - 2004, when that album and Room on Fire were soundtracks to my life. Laser said the same, but added that he hadn't liked the second album as much and hadn't really heard any of the third. I admitted the third felt a little over-produced and that I'd only recently given Julian Casablancas' solo album a listen after my buddy Ska-Ped played me a few tracks this summer. (I have liked a lot of Albert Hammond Jr.'s stuff.)
The thing about the Strokes was that, although their albums do sound meticulously crafted, they didn't ever seem like they were trying hard, but with new each album - and expectations building and critics pleading with them to evolve and fans wanting them to stay the same - it seemed like they were pushing harder and harder to sound as much like themselves as possible. Unfortunately for all of us, they sort of lost what that was and what had made them so great: the effortlessness and the cool.
And so with a new Strokes album scheduled for release this year, here's hoping they sound more like this demo than their latest, glitzy incarnation.
But I'm just one guy, so who gives a fuck.
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