Andy Gapin

There isn’t really much to say about National Treasure 2. It was pretty much right on par with the first one. Some decent action and a story that moves pretty fast, but everything was very predictable.

I wouldn’t ask for the two hours of my life back, but I also have no real desire to see it again.

Note: This is my 100th post on this blog!

Here’s the playlist for my top 25 of 2007 countdown show from last night.

Christmas day, when better to go see a movie? I had never seen the play before so I was able to go into it with a pretty blank slate.

I think it’s a really great story and the ending is super awesome. The end is a little predictable and almost cliche, but still when it hits you, you feel it on an emotional level. You really feel bad for Todd and how much emotional turmoil the loss of his wife caused him.

When it comes to musicals, I’m usually not too excited because I find them a bit harder to follow. Sweeney Todd is pretty heavily a musical and a lot of the important dialog comes via song, but I didn’t find it to be a bad thing. I actually liked this quite a bit. The songs are very engaging and both Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter are great singers. Her performance was definitely a bit better though.

Some parts dragged a bit as you’re waiting for the bloodshed to begin, but once it gets going, it’s super awesome.

One of the movies I was the most hyped about all year was Juno and it turned out to be everything that I could have hoped for. It was really funny and incredibly cute without being cheesy at all.

Ellen Page had a great performance and Michael Cera was very on par with himself. His role was a lot lesser than I had expected, but it was good that way. The whole movie was very focused on Ellen Page’s character.

The soundtrack was really cute too. The thing that I noticed though was that it seemed like the music was much more in the foreground than is normal in movies. It was mixed pretty high in relation to everything else, but it was kind of awesome actually and added a lot to the whole “indie” feel of the movie.

This is great! One of my coworkers has a whole pad of these checklists. I’d like to fill this out for a few people I know, but I can’t see that ending too well!

Click the picture to get a bigger version that you’ll actually be able to read.

What an excellent movie this was!

The premise of the movie is that a group of art kids baits this total loser of a guy into going to what he thinks is going to be some crazy Halloween party. However, instead of a party, their plan was just to kill the guy in the name of art. Of course things go horribly wrong for the art kids and, one by one, they all end up dying.

The movie starts off a little slow, with a bit of a Seventies/Eighties slasher flick feel, but once it gets going, it sheds this for something a bit more modern. Then Alexander comes in and things really get going. The best that I can describe Alexander is pretty much what you’d have if Ryan Renolds was a pretentious art kid with no regard for anyone but himself.

There were some awesomely comical death scenes and a little bit of gore, but the absolute best was the one character who had a werewolf mask melted to his face and then started running around with a chainsaw. Amazing.

Highly recommended.

Last night’s edition was a bit different than normal. I did a retrospective type thing on 2007 playing some of my favorite albums of the year. Next week will be my official top 25 countdown. I also had Sue Lowe on my show to play live. She played four songs throughout the show and helped pick out music. It was a lot of fun.

And here’s the rest of the show!

Here is a fake top 10 albums of the year list that a friend of mine made for me. How sweet!

From now on, when things get ruined, I will refer to it as being “New Brunswicked.” Not only because I don’t like New Brunswick as a whole, but because it has a way of ruining things.

On Friday night, we went to go see Weston at the Court Tavern in New Brunswick. The set started off pretty well and the first 45 minutes were pretty great and a lot of fun. Good songs, lots of rocking out, and everyone was having a great time. Then all of a sudden, things got New Brunswicked. Everything just completely broke down and lost all steam. The banter between the band and the crowd became endless and unoriginal. I blame it on a handful of crowd members that kept antagonizing the band. Well, that and the fact that Jimmy was pretty drunk and drinking beer straight from a pitcher (he later jumped so high that he hit his head on the ceiling). So because of this, we ended up leaving early. Well, before the set ended, at least. It was already about 2AM at this point. Which is why shows should not wait until close to 11 to start and have four bands.

As for the other bands, For Science was pretty awesome. Their singer’s voice was so much raspier live than recorded. It sounded awesome, but really painful at the same time. The Sirs were alright enough, but I didn’t go there to see them and I find it hard to get into a band full of greasers. I don’t even remember the second band’s name, but they covered Minor Threat and it was awful.

PS: When I Google image searched “weston got beat up” to get the Weston image, a picture of one of my friends popped up as the 8th result. It ruled.

PPS: You know that you’re getting old for punk rock shows when your girlfriend takes a nap in the back of the room!