TOPIC NUMBER ONE
I'm currently listening to Coldplay's new album, X&Y. It's pretty good, but I don't 100% feel their musical direction. In this new album, everything's a bit more energetic, less sad and melancholy. Well, the main reason I liked Coldplay in the first place was exactly because they were sad and melancholy. Who could I forget songs like like "Trouble" or "Amsterdam" or "Everything's Not Lost," which retained that melancholy feel?
That isn't to say that they haven't completely lost their edge - I'll tell you about four tracks that I really liked from the album.
The first track, Square One, reminds me of a mix of Coldplay's new style and the style they had adapted with A Rush of Blood to the Head. There's fairly much going on at the end and it goes into this great finale that gets stuck in my head whenever I hear it.
The second track, What If, is my favorite track of the entire album. The intro hearkens back to Coldplay's Parachute days. Then it ups the ante a notch and delivers a satisfying transition without being too energetic. It's sad, it's almost deperate, I love it.
The fourth track, Fix You, is similar to track 2, but is a bit more energetic than that one. It however manages to give me a pleasant feel.
The twelfth track, Twisted Logic, is a song unlike any Coldplay I've heard before. The fact that it's so different from the other tracks from the album is the reason I like it so much.
Other tracks include Speed of Sound, which kinda sounds like their hit song Clocks, and Talk, which is enjoyable but could have been a bit shorter.
TOPIC NUMBER TWO
I've watched a peculiar little film last night on the Star Movies Mandarin channel, which is currently having a trial run on Home Cable. (I wish they'd make it permanent, because that channel rocks, having introduced me to many great Chinese Flicks, notably Wong Kar-wai's Fallen Angels, the Takeshi Kaneshiro flicks Fuyajo (1998) and The Odd One Dies, the great parody Chinese Odessey 2002 and Fruit Chan's opus Made in Hong Kong.) It was the 1989 film "Fatal Vacation."
Well anyway, on to the film. The first face I recognized was the venerable Eric Tsang, who has starred and shined in a good number of recent HK flicks (Infernal Affairs, the HK segment of the first Three anthology) and the late but great Victor Wong, most prominent in a number of American movies, most notably The Joy Luck Club and the 3 Ninjas series of movies. Anyway, the plot consisted of Tsang and a number of HK tourists captured by the NPA (!) led by Bernardo Bernardo (!!) and held hostage until the brother of the leader is released. However, there's a little problem: the brother is dead.
Directed and produced by Chang, the film is a collaboration between HK and the Philippines, which is interesting. The film itself is a but absurd and unintentionally funny to boot - the scenes of eeeevil that abound in the movie are so cheesy, it's hard to take them seriously. I almost thought halfway, having not seen the opening credits, that Wong Jing could have directed this movie. That's not good.
I was amazed that Pen Medina was there too... he looks a bit different that what we see of him now, but hey, this movie was made 16 years ago.
Another interesting thing is that the movie ends with the Freddie Aguilar song Anak, which was kind of strange considering almost everybody got shot to death or something. Heh.
TOPIC NUMBER THREE
I saw Coco Lee yesterday. Tres cool.
No comments:
Post a Comment