Civil War
Mark Millar, Steve McNiven
Marvel, 2007
Rating: 3.0

Civil War: Amazing Spider-Man
J. Michael Straczynski, Ron Garney
Marvel, 2007
Rating: 4.3

As its individual issues hit the stands in pamphlet form last year (and earlier this year), the episodic nature of Marvel’s massive Civil War event helped add to the excitement.  By now you’ve heard the set-up: The New Warriors, a team of C-list superheroes with their own reality TV show, engage some super-powered fugitives in a battle that goes horribly wrong when the villain Nitro detonates, killing hundreds and destroying a large part of Stamford, Connecticut.

The first two chapters, especially, are a doozy. The tragedy sparks community outrage leading to the passage of a super-powered registration act, which splits the hero community down the middle and sends Captain America on the lam to head up a resistance movement. In order to persuade other heroes to sign up, Iron Man convinces Spider-Man to unmask on live television. Sounds like a rip-roaring yarn, doesn’t it?

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Hot Fuzz
Edgar Wright, UK, 2007
Rating: 4.1

The key to enjoying Hot Fuzz, the British cop comedy by Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright (the team behind the 2004 cult hit Shaun of the Dead) is to understand that it is not, strictly speaking, a parody. Yes, many references are made to big-budget Hollywood cop films (particularly Point Break and Bad Boys II), just as it was impossible to ignore the nods to George A. Romero’s zombie movies in Shaun of the Dead. But while there is some gentle nudging of the audience’s ribs concerning police-movie clichés, deconstructing the genre is not its sole (or even its main) purpose. Audiences who pay exorbitant ticket prices expecting a merciless evisceration of a genre overripe for parody may be disappointed by the explicit fondness Fuzz shows for its inspirations (yes, even Bad Boys II).

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From Wired magazine, an incredible story about how the CIA rescued a handful of escaped American staffers during the 1979 Iran hostage crisis by posing as a Hollywood production company.

It gets better: “Studio Six” was location scouting in Iran for a science-fiction film based on a book by Roger Zelazny, with early sketches done by comics legend Jack “King” Kirby.

Mere days after a hip-hop advocacy group headed by Russell Simmons requested that record labels, radio and television delete three commonly used terms from broadcasts of rap performances, a similar organization has come forward to ask the hip-hop community to refrain from using offensive terms that have graduated into the mainstream.

“It’s high time that we in the rap and hip-hop scenes send a clear message to the world, and stop using words that demean us as a community,” rap artist Hoodie, spokesman for the Coalition of Rappers Against the Appropriation of Colloquialisms by Caucasians (CRACC), said at a press conference on Thursday. “I’m talking about terms like ‘bling-bling,’ ‘off the chain,’ ‘gettin’ jiggy wit’ it,’ and ‘U can’t touch this,’” he said.

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Maturity is the theme for this month’s batch of albums, be it artists who’ve progressed, regressed, or simply stayed in a rut.

Quick links are provided for those who’d rather get right to a particular review.

+ Andrew Bird: Armchair Apocrypha
+ Bright Eyes: Cassadaga
+ Fountains of Wayne: Traffic and Weather
+ Grinderman: Grinderman
+ Rickie Lee Jones: The Sermon on Exposition Boulevard
+ Kings of Leon: Because of the Times
+ Panda Bear: Person Pitch

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By now you’ve heard — or at least heard about — the infamous Alec Baldwin voicemail message, which TMZ posted online yesterday. On it, Baldwin angrily berates his 11-year-old daughter Ireland for missing their scheduled phone call, threatens to fly from New York to Los Angeles (today, April 20) to “straighten her out,” accuses her of playing games with and humiliating him, and calls her a “rude, thoughtless little pig.” Just this morning, I’ve heard quite a few people say that they can never look at Baldwin in the same light again after hearing the tirade. To which I have to say: Hold the phone.

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I always thought The X-Files was overrated, and I’ve never liked its stars, David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson. To this day, any possible appreciation I might conceivably have for their current work is marred by the memory of seemingly constant bickering about how miserable they were to be locked into the show that made them famous. Not that either one of them has landed a lot of work after the series ended — gee, do you think there’s any correlation there?

 Now Gillian Anderson (here’s a photo of the only time she’s ever looked even remotely attractive) is back publicly badmouthing the very show that made anyone care what she might ever have to say. Even as Duchovny seems to be endorsing the idea of another X-Files movie, his dour co-star is haughtily bitching about how much she hated the whole experience. 

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The domestic release of Spider-Man 3 is two weeks away but already there’s all sorts of brouhaha surrounding the  future of the lucrative movie franchise. According to Entertainment Weekly, director Sam Raimi is seriously interested in the possibility of helming New Line’s upcoming adaptation of The Hobbit, which supposedly could seriously interfere with a potential Spider-Man 4.

No doubt there are diehard Lord of the Rings fans who’ll hurl arrows and crossbow bolts at any proposed director who isn’t named Peter Jackson, but if he’s not doing it — and given legal wrangles with the powers that be, it doesn’t look like he is — there are far worse choices than Raimi.

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Got an e-mail yesterday referencing, of all things, our review of the 2001 Incubus album Morning View, which I gave the rock-bottom rating of 0.0. We always enjoy getting mail here at Shaking Through, even from Incubus fans. At least he kept it short and to the point: “YOU’RE AN IDIOT.”

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It’s with extreme sadness that Shaking Through marks the passing of Kurt Vonnegut, inarguably one of the greatest writers in American literature. He died yesterday of brain injuries related to a recent fall.

There’s such a thing as damning someone with great praise, since phrases like “one of the greatest writers in American literature” often conjure images of “important” (i.e., stuffy) works.  There’s writing that calls attention to itself via its high-minded prose and academic meditations. There’s tweed-jacketed New England writing consumed with the idea of older men being attracted to younger women and fornicating like Rabbits outside the marriage bed (imagine that).

And then there’s Vonnegut’s writing, which was almost anti-”writing”: (more…)