It's Done! It's Done!

Tomorrow I get back to the more forward-looking part of the project, which I'm looking forward to. Especially since other people in the department are ready for it to be done so they can use it.

It's nice to be wanted. But not too wanted!

You know what I miss? I miss seeing movies which make me go Yeah! at the climactic moment. Like the climax of the Babylon 5 episode "Severed Dreams". Or R2-D2 fixing the hyperdrive in The Empire Strikes Back. Something that makes me cheer from surprise or excitement, because someone did something great, not because an emotional psychodrama has been reached, or because a story's resolution was intellectually clever.

It seems like today's action films should be ideally suited to such things, and yet the writing is so contrived that it's never as rewarding as it seems it should be. The story is cheesy like The Mummy, or has a bittersweet ending like Gladiator, or the climax is awkwardly contrived as in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, or it's going for some sort of intellectual transcendence like The Abyss.

Ironically, the best film for that "oh wow" moment that was made relatively recently was The Shawshank Redemption, and it's not even an action film! Galaxy Quest came close, but didn't quite pull it off, and was just a little too silly to be entirely rewarding as a dramatic catharsis.

Am I just missing all the great films with "Yeah!" moments in them? Or are modern movies really as lame as they seem? Any suggestions?

Meanwhile, tonight I'm listening to VH1's top 100 Artists of Hard Rock show, which is rather interesting since it's all over the map.

I can see that the basic concept of hard rock advanced by the artists polled for the lists are biting guitar-driven rock, focusing mainly on noise, guitar licks, and, uh, that's about it. Ratt and Whitesnake, for instance, seem to be typical of many of the selections. I don't consider either group to be particularly talented or noteworthy. Easily forgotten, is more like it. Still, obviously someone remembers. And I guess The Black Crowes had to refine somebody's formula.

And Pat Benatar, Boston and Foreigner seem like pop music more than hard rock, to me.

Still, some of the choices are entertainingly eccentric. King Crimson has performed all kinds of music, and seeing people pay tribute to "20th Century Schizoid Man" when they have so much better material out there (Red, Discipline) is just very peculiar.

And they rope in alternative/grunge groups like Green Day and southern rock standard Lynyrd Skynyrd, too.

And to my surprise, folk-rockers Jethro Tull (one of my favorite groups) clocked in at #61.

I don't know if I'll be able to listen to the whole thing (say, tomorrow). I presume they'll get to Led Zeppelin at some point. I hope they'll include The Who (did anyone ever rock harder than Daltrey, Townshend and Moon?), not to mention prototypical hard rockers like Cream and Jeff Beck. And how about The Rolling Stones? Didn't Keith Richards basically invent hard rock?

I remember back in junior high (1983) my friend and neighbor Rob (hi, Rob!) had heard about MTV and wished we received it. Well, it turns out we did receive it; I'd come across it myself but it hadn't registered on me. (Have I mentioned that my interests in music were, uh, unrefined, to put it kindly?) It became a background staple for us for quite a while, and we of course knew all five of the VeeJays by name (Martha Quinn is the only one I can remember now). 80s popular music mostly sucked (it's hard to believe record companies couldn't field a better line-up than Duran Duran and The Human League; harder still to believe that the former, Barbarella-named group is still kicking today), but when you're 15, who cares?

MTV is part of the vast cultural wasteland today, focusing more on silly TV shows and endless 'specials' than on music, it seems. VH1 actually plays music, although they also seem endlessly show-focused. But I still tune it in from time to time.

What I'd really like to find is a good way to discover new rock music. Things like Napster don't do it for me, because it requires that I go out and consciously select something to try. What I really want are radio stations with better playlists, with less repetition, which play more tracks from individual albums so I can decide whether or not to buy them. It feels lame to be reduced to buying albums by Goo Goo Dolls and Collective Soul just to feel like I'm keeping up with rock music. Neither group is bad, but neither seems particularly inspired or innovative, either.

Or maybe it's just that I'm over 30 now, and my tastes are set for good. Sheesh. Pass the Geritol.