I had a bunch of interesting choices for the Music Capsule this week, but I settled upon a Seattle band, Those Damn Twins, whom I reviewed for GarageBand. Their 1 minute, 26 second opus "Floor" grabbed me by the cerebral cortex and wouldn't let go. Apparently they actually are twins, but the non-creepy fraternal kind, so it's okay. Check out the Damn Twins, and their quirky, crunchy rock short-stories from the capsule at left.
There's a sequence near the end of Ratatouille that serves as a perfect 30 second demo of why Brad Bird is a genius. It's an animated combination of Hitchcock (as cinematographer, not as master of suspense) and Proust, and it's one final audio-visual rocket boost that takes the film out of the running for an all-time great animated movie and into the category of an all-time great movie period. It's not just that Ratatouille is stunning to look at, brilliantly "shot," simultaneously hilarious and touching, and better than anything else anybody has released this year, it's...no, sorry, my mistake, it is just that.
I got my hands on an actual iPhone over the weekend, and I'm now buying into the hype. It's not so much the phone itself that deserves the hype as the UI. It takes four seconds to figure out the basics of the touch screen and thereafter everything you think should work does work--scrolling, tapping, sliding, scaling, and so on. Also, the thing is incredibly sexy-looking. Not sexy enough that I have to have one myself, but sexy enough that I'll admire them from afar, with a kind of tragic longing for what might, but never can, be. Or whatever.
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