Navy Bean - Don't ask what it means!

Musings on films, music, books, women's tennis, TV shows & more.

Saturday, December 10, 2005

Music: emusic Downloads

I signed up for a free month's trial of emusic.com a couple of months ago and then forgot to cancel my subscription, but no doubt I'm not the first. So today I cancelled my subscription and used up my remaining downloads as follows:

Artist: The Weekend
Album: Beatbox My Heartbeat
Year: 2005
Notes: The first track on this album is the excellent Into the Morning from the D.E.B.S. soundtrack.
Watch:Into the Morning video from the movie D.E.B.S.
Listen: Kick Myself

Artist: The Weekend
Album: Teaser + Bonus Level
Year: 2003

Artist: The Moto-Litas
Album: For the Greater Good

Year: 2001
Notes:All girl band signed to Amy Ray's Daemon Records label, who sound like the Go-Go's crossed with early Throwing Muses.
Listen: Cheated

Artist: The Perishers
Album: The Perishers Live (available for download only)
Track: Pills (featuring Sarah McLachlan)
Year:2005
Notes: The Perishers are a Swedish band who supported Sarah on tour in 2005, also on the Nettwerk label in the USA & Canada.

Music: Sarah Fimm again!

After discovering Sarah Fimm last weekend on the D.E.B.S. soundtrack, at first I couldn't stop playing Be Like Water and now I can't stop playing Nexus, the title track from her 3rd album.

Resistance was futile, so I succumbed and ordered all 3 of Sarah's CDs from CDBaby yesterday. I got the usual shipping confirmation email with a subject of CD Baby Loves Karen. It always makes me smile when I read:

"Your CDs have been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow. A team of 50 employees inspected your CDs and polished them to make sure they were in the best possible condition before mailing. Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CDs into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy. We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved 'Bon Voyage!' to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Friday, December 9th. I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did. Your picture is on our wall as "Customer of the Year". We're all exhausted but can't wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!"

Yes I could have put the CDs on my Christmas list, in the vein hope that somebody would get them, but I don't have the patience to wait and wonder. I need them now! Well, I will have to wait a week or more but at least I know that they are on their way.

I listened to a radio interview from Sarah's official site this morning and she said that she personally writes to everyone who buys her CDs from CD Baby, oh my goodness!

I've also signed up for the street team, the mailing list and the message board. Like I said, resistance is futile, so full immersion is the only way to go.

Wednesday, December 07, 2005

Film: The Family Stone

I should start by saying that this is not the sort of movie I would normally pay to go to the cinema to see, and fortunately I didn't have to as I went to a free preview tonight courtesy of See Films First at Cineworld (formerly UGC), Enfield. I'm not a great lover of feel-good movies, I prefer films that are original and make me think.

I had done a little research beforehand and discovered that the director/writer Thomas Bezucha is gay, which surely could only be a plus-point. This is his 2nd movie and he used to work in the fashion industry. I haven't seen his first movie, the gay-themed Big Eden.

On our way in to the screening we were asked to hand over our mobile phones, which was a stipulation by Twentieth Century Fox. My reaction to this request was simply :-o Yes I was gob-smacked, not only at the audacity of the request but also the stupidity. Even if someone had a phone capable of recording the whole movie, the quality would undoubtedly be awful. Besides it is not something you can hide as the light of the screen is a dead giveaway. Oddly our bags were not searched for video cameras. There was no way I was giving up my gorgeous Nokia N70, so I just said 'I don't have a mobile' and walked in unchallenged. My friend Caz did give hers up and got a raffle ticket in return.

The premise of the film is that Everett (Dermot Mulroney) goes home for Christmas and introduces his bride-to-be Meredith (Sarah Jessica Parker) to his family. However, they all hate her, with the exception of Everett's brother Ben (Luke Wilson) for a reason that is no doubt completely shallow and is never fully explained.

Good Points
  • Great performances from the whole cast
  • Rachel McAdams - I've never noticed her before, though I have seen Mean Girls, but I definitely noticed her in this. I shall have to see Red Eye, when it comes out on DVD next year.
  • Claire Danes - I first noticed her in Stage Beauty and she gave a nice performance in this film.
Bad Points
  • Predictable - within half an hour it was more than obvious how it would end.
  • Left me feeling sad - it should carry a health warning because Christmas is a particularly hard time for anyone who has lost a family member due to terminal illness and I honestly didn't want to go to see a so-called 'feel-good' movie to be reminded of this.
  • Heavy-handed PC attitude which pervaded the whole movie.
  • Slap stick - although the scene where SJP drops 2 large dishes of her breakfast creation while getting them out of the fridge was funny, it was also stupid. Nobody in their right mind would attempt to get 2 large dishes out of the fridge.
Rating: 4/10

Tuesday, December 06, 2005

Film: Flightplan


I had been looking forward to seeing Jodie Foster's latest film Flightplan for quite a while now. We have a lot in common Jodie and I, besides the obvious we actually share the same birthday.

Jodie plays Kyle, a mother taking her daughter home to the USA after the death of her husband in Germany. When she wakes up on the plane her daughter is missing and everybody denies seeing her. Did she actually board the plane or is this a figment of the grief-stricken Kyle's imagination, as therapist Greta Scacchi tries to make us believe? I probably wouldn't have recognised Greta if I hadn't noticed her name in the credits at the beginning (goodness I haven't seen her for years!)

A lot has been said about the improbability of the events in this film, both in reviews and on the IMDB message board, and I have to agree in some respects. Yes, it was highly improbable that none of the passengers remembered seeing the daughter either boarding the plane or before she disappeared, but that's my only gripe with the plot. The film works well and is rather reminiscent of Panic Room, which I do actually think is a better movie and people had plot grips with that too. I'm with Roger Ebert, who gave the film 3.5 stars; it was enjoyable, thrilling (especially in the last half an hour) and Jodie was excellent. She proves why she is one of the few female stars who can open a film. It was also good to see Sean Bean in a Hollywood movie not playing a baddie for once, as is usually the norm for him and other British actors.

The film is also rather topical as an air marshal shot and killed a passenger in Miami, who allegedly said he was carrying a bomb. When I heard about this I immediately thought of the shooting in London of Jean Charles de Menezez in July, a suspected suicide bomber who turned out to be innocent. However there are parallels with Flightplan as the evil air marshal was planning on killing passenger Kyle, once he had received the ransom money.

Rating: 7/10

Tech: extisp.icio.us - scattering del.icio.us tags

If you don't use del.icio.us (an easy-to-use bookmark manager that you can access whenever and wherever you are online) then you really should. Here are 2 more reasons why. Now you can visualise your bookmark tags as text or images. Excellent!

Monday, December 05, 2005

TV: Rachel Shelley

Ha ha! My trivia update for Rachel's IMDB profile is now live. Lives in Notting Hill, grew up in London (moved from Swindon at age 1). Yes, that's down to me, courtesy of Rachel herself (you see I met her at the "Meet & Greet" on the first evening of The L Event on 25th November). So, maybe Rachel will no longer be expected to know that Swindon is famous for its magic roundabout, as she moved to London when she was 1.
I didn't even know that fact about Swindon, but it's true. The magic roundabout in Hemel Hempstead looks a tad scarier and being a Hertfordshire lass I've done it once. I think I had my eyes closed at the time, and I swore I would never do it again so I avoid Hemel like the plague.

Music: Tina Dico

Tina Dico is playing a secret gig at The Troubadour in London tomorrow night. Tell all your friends!

Tina, who hails from Denmark, was featured on 2 tracks on Zero 7's last album When It Falls. She toured with them in 2004, and performed at Glastonbury and Hammersmith Apollo (one of my top gigs of 2004).

Her new album In the Red is released on January 24th in the USA and January 30th in The UK. You can download Room With A View from the new album for free from her myspace site.

The first single Warm Sand (not that far removed from the Mozez-featured Zero 7 track Warm Sound) will be released in mid-January.

Tina will be touring in 2006 to support the release of her album. I can't wait to see her at the finale of the 6th International Songwriter's Festival at the Borderline on January 30th (not December as it said in their newsletter today).

Sunday, December 04, 2005

Music: L'Aura

Fra emailed me on Thursday about L'Aura, an Italian singer that she thought I'd like. I did have some difficulty in finding her official site because I was originally told that her name was Laura and all I got when I googled 'Laura' was Laura Pausini - who I have dubbed the Italian Celine Dion. I've listened to some tracks from L'Aura's album today, courtesy of her official site (click Musica, Preview then Album) and eDonkey, and I have to say I'm very impressed. She sounds uncannily like Elisa (another Italian favourite of mine, whose latest single Swan plays when you visit her site). My favourite track so far of L'Aura's is Demons in Your Dreams, when she sings softly in the first chorus she sounds like Elisa. Then she lets rip in subsequent choruses and I can hear Lara Fabian (another favourite of mine, who's from Belgium) . I also keep thinking my oven timer is going off when I listen to that song as there's a beeping in the background! Radio Star with its piano intro and vocal style reminds me of Tori Amos.

5 of the 11 songs on her album Okumuki are in English. It might seem like 7 songs are in English when you look at the titles, however the song Alice is in Italian and the only English thing about If Everybody Had a Gun is the title, which is repeated in English throughout the chorus.

L'Aura's site is definitely worth checking out. Listen to the piano versions of the album tracks, as you get to see an animated L'Aura playing the piano, which is both funny and sweet. Because of that I'll forgive the fact that the annoying background music restarts after a few minutes when you turn it off via the loudspeaker icon.

Music: Sarah Fimm

Sarah Fimm is a new discovery courtesy of the D.E.B.S. soundtrack. The song included is the wonderful Be Like Water from her 2002 album Perfect Dream. She is a little reminiscent of another Sarah, my all-time favourite Sarah McLachlan.

Note that the D.E.B.S. soundtrack contains the cleaned up and inferior version; Sarah's site contains the explicit version (as in the link above).

I love the lyrics of this song (before I read them I thought she was singing Don't chase girls!):


Be Like Water
words & music by Sarah Fimm

Don’t chase ghosts, don’t get too close,
don’t get caught, don’t get spent
don’t get bought
Don’t sell out, don’t get bent
don’t fuck your best friend
if everything is just the way it should be
why am I why am I still hungry
Be like Water
don’t be shy, don’t shut your eyes
don’t get high
Expand your Mind.
don’t keep in touch, don’t touch yourself
don’t ever want to be somebody else.
when everything is bad as it can be
never be never be angry
Be like Water
Must be the answer you want
I’m not your slave
I’m not the one who burnt you out
fucked you up and put you on
broke you down
ask someone else
to be that someone
I can’t be that someone who can
Be like Water
Why can’t I be the answer you want?