so june seems to be big concert month after a long drought, and i mean long. other than coachella, i don’t think i’ve been to a single major show yet this year, which is truly pathetic. however things are looking up up up, as just this month i have streets & lady sovereign tomorrow night at the fonda, army navy & irving monday at the viper room, mountain goats wednesday at the troubadour (hooray!), and futureheads the following monday at the fonda again. plus at least two shows in july so far, flaming lips AND belle and sebastian both at the bowl. oh thank god, i’m not getting old, i’m just getting selective and bands tour more in the summer than the winter. smart on them. needless to say, i can’t wait to get back into the fray.

may summer blockbusters
and while on the topic of summer, have you been keeping up with your summer blockbusters so far? i’ve seen the big three i think so far — poseidon doesn’t count right? come on, you know nobody saw that shit — and i’m fairly disappointed. mission impossible III was great, i can’t lie. philip seymour hoffman as a cool villain, the action was good, the drama was high. not outstanding-good, but a solid movie.

x-men III (why am i seeing so many third iterations in such a short time span?) was a huuuuuge letdown. if you haven’t seen it by now i’m no longer concerned about vaguely hinting at the plot, so let me put it this way: killing a major character is a big deal. you don’t just do it because you’re a lazy writer looking to add drama. it better be a huge climax to a tense and gut-wrenching buildup, not just a way to get around working out problems with your crappy plot. and they don’t do it once, they do it THREE TIMES!? come on, man. besides that, they essentially castrate two other huge characters, erase half of the minor ones they introduced, never develop a few of the other ones (arcangel added exactly what to the movie?), and then give themselves an out at the end rendering the whole story essentially a do-over? give me a fucking break. when does the next batman come out?

and yes, this week i even broke down and saw the da vinci code, and i’m sort of at a loss on that one. i thought when i was lazily reading it that it was paced too much like a movie, but then watching the movie it was too much like reading because it was aaaallll expository dialogue. so you can’t win. the book created suspense in a really cheap way by using a three-page chapter structure, but then the movie had all these weird pauses where it was like being in school instead of a chase movie. what can you do? well, if you’re planning ahead, you’ll do one or the other and not both, because both are flawed but entertaining. however the dramatically delivered line, “i’ve got to get to a library” ranks nearly up there with, “get these mothafuckin’ snakes off this mothafuckin’ plane” in ridiculous quotability.