Not tagging anyone… everyone is welcome to comment on this with their own!
Saw this here~~~ Cut the Crap Movie Reviews.
1. Open up your iTunes, music player, spin the CD, whatever, hit shuffle and tell us what is the first song to play…
Yuguo (羽果) – Ronnie Monkey from Babel (巴别塔)
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I watched all sorts of crap in the 90s, like… I could really be your teen comedy viewer. I’m still a sucker for a good love story… but, I think… I’m a little more picky now.
So I’ve made yet another list in The Auteurs~~~
Of course, no particular order~
Specifically to Julz, since we’re nearly the same age. What movies did you watch? Anyone else who was a teen in the 90s… early or late 90s. What movies?
I would watch teen comedies… like I’m pretty sure I could be ashamed of the things I’ve watched regarding teen comedies from Can’t Hardly Wait [listed] to things like Drive me Crazy [yes, with Melissa Joan Hart… and that Crazy Britney music video xD] to everything around and in-between teen romcoms.
From all the romcoms I have seen during those years, the only one that comes to mind at the moment that I don’t feel guilty about liking… and own on DVD is 10 Things I Hate About You. You could say I have a huge Ledger, Levitt and Julia Stiles bias~~~
There’s also the teenage “horror” flicks… from The Faculty [listed] to things like The Blair Witch Project [also listed] and those I Know What You Did movies also with Jennifer Love Hewitt… which I shamefully own. Those I own shamefully. LOL
And… oh god~ Cruel Intentions. I obviously rented the film [I don’t even know if it opened in theaters in here], so I rented it. I couldn’t have been older than 14 years old, so I was with my dad doing some grocery shopping when I stopped by the video store~~~ Me being the biggest Buffy fan — hence Sarah Michelle Gellar fan — caught the cover of the film and wanted to get it for the weekend. I’m telling you, it’s not such a good idea to rent a film Spanish-titled Juegos Sexuales (sexual games) with your father paying the bill.
I love Ryan Phillippe’s smugness on that role, and it’s not a shameful admission this one. I like Cruel Intentions, it’s just so satisfying to watch that last scene with The Verve’s Bittersweet Symphony. Obviously, I was a girl with a crush on Phillippe… but THANK GOD it only lasted those years.
And… thank god for quiver killers? LOL
There’s no gain without Wayne, or there’s no pain without Wayne. I know it’s something like that. It’s been years since I first heard Wayne Isham saying that on one of those episodes of MTV’s Making the Video, back when making a video was very important for MTV.
Wayne Isham was another name that really popped up when I spent all day watching MTV. If I could describe Isham’s music video style with one word, it would be “woosh!” even though that’s not a word. His videos captured a very energetic vibe with fast cuts and, what I call fade-in wooshes — it’s when Isham would be focusing his camera on the singer/group and there would be a fade-in from one shot to the next one that made it seem like pushing in or away from the subject in a very funky way.
Of course, the best way to understand that woosh concept is to see it in action. For instance, those fast cuts are very prominents on Metallica’s video of I Disappear (from the Mission Impossible II OST) xD Continue Reading…
Pitchfork has a really interesting article on how Pop music has changed these past 10 years, with a surprising take on the what was BackStreet Boys, Britney Spears, TLC, Christina Aguilera and Hanson. You know, since most people try to deny they listen to them at some point in their lives.
Here’s one measure of how well they succeeded. Breaking through behind the Backstreet Boys on 1999’s pop roster were a crew of former Mouseketeers: Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and ‘N Sync’s Justin Timberlake. Even the commentators who loved their records didn’t give them a hope of longer-term success. But 10 years on, Spears is midway through the year’s highest-grossing tour, Aguilera is lining up M.I.A. and Santigold to work with, and Timberlake can pick his hip-hop collaborators as he wishes. (Not to mention snaring a Pitchfork Single of the Year.) It’s fair to say the class of ’99 exceeded every expectation.
My only issue is the focus on the American market. Sure, BackStreet Boys, Britney, Aguilera and everyone were popular worldwide, across cultures. Since the market’s shift to online music, it hasn’t been really the case… so the 2nd half of the article feels dull, just like the ‘worldwide pop music’ market. How about an exciting comment about Pop music in Asia? I keep saying Asia is actually saving “pop acts” alone by taking it to different levels.
You can read the article here.
Also~ Pitchfork has its Decade lists…
From its 200 albums, we only concur on five choices. They also repeat artists… 2, maybe 3 albums per artists, while I chose 100 albums by 100 artists including soundtracks. Oh yeah, I also have albums in Chinese and Japanese and Korean, and French. They don’t.
I’m kinda mad at their lack of variety.
It’s as if music in English is the only one that matters…
Check all their Decade lists here.
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If you wanna check mine.
Best Albums of 2000-2009
Best Songs of 2000-2009
– part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5
To keep things interesting, I’ve decided to switch to the newest songs that made the best 100 songs of the decade. Just the heads up, it turned out to be very Asian. Is it trying to tell you something?
One of those examples was the Welcome to Beijing song, which had a HUGE bunch of Asian (mostly Chinese, Taiwan and Hong Kong) stars. The scale of the project is probably similar to (or even bigger than) Michael Jackson’s We Are the World song… which in its time was epic. To me, and to many Asian (and non-Asian) people who keep track of the Asian music industry it marked an important time. Not only did the Olympics opened China to the world… and the world to China, but it also felt like a huge switch on everything from basic economics, industry… and entertainment.
It’s as if Chinese musicians had been enclosed all those years while the economy started to pick up, and have exploded with a huge fireball of creativity. It’s amazing at the amount of talent coming out from there, especially now that they can upload their music through the many Chinese music websites like douban.com and haoting.com, and the amount of blogs and communities that are reporting on them.
Some really awesome music, which I have already blog in this place. This is the reason, I want to get over these ones first, before I post many other songs from 2002-2006 when I didn’t blog that much (or at all).
