Just Make Us Look Cool...

Front and center, thousands starring while holding a mic and a guitar. Adrenaline running through numerous veins to only hope to rock as hard as anyone has ever before. Almost Famous represents music and the people who need and follow the adrenaline of music. William Miller (played by Patrick Fugit) dreams to become a good writer. Be able to write about things that matter to him, music. As, William sends his underground paper to Lester Bangs he is directed to follow his outstanding writing abilities and to not fall shallowly into misleading and unwanted writing by the evil honkey dory Rolling Stones. Through the film William follows the band Stillwater in 1973 to critic the concert for Creem magazine. William ignited their attention by knowing the band members by their first names and why he personally was reached out by the music. When William finds out that he gets to write a full front cover issue of Rolling Stones for Stillwater they utterly repeat to William, "just make us look cool," William learning to write through his experiences faces turbulent swings as to write what he knows and see then what Rolling Stones just wants to hear. William frequently called Lester Bangs for advice in communicating with band members and Rolling Stones. As being put on the tight rope William tries to balance what the band will approve of and what he is actually reviewing, the music. As, relationships built William found himself having a harder time being critical. When the band didn't confirm that the story was true for Rolling Stones they had a tuff time knowing if William was telling the truth. The criticizing that William had to portray shows the constant struggle that writers and journalist have to go through to get things straight.

Jupiter One

Jupiter One, Sunshower

With wide range of influences, Jupiter One is an American indie rock band from Brooklyn, New York combining a futuristic style sound and a poppy up beat. K Ishbashi, Zac Colwell, Mocha, David Heilman, and Pat Dougherty formed in 2003 with three albums under their belts, Sunshower released September 18, 2009.

Listeners can understand why Jupiter One first started as just an instrumental band because it joins the beats together as one and not choppy.

Jupiter One’s debut is well produced making this third one, one of the most intreguing to listen to. And, with a rare, synth-tactic, crazed sounds, unfused with an array of influences, they breathe new life into the indie genre

This album can follow any kind of mood, and is an accomplishment for an artist. It’s their sway of many correlated genres that help them to impede these emotions especially through electronic, pop, punk and indie/folk. Jupiter one can be compared with the band Mute Math, sharing the same passion for in depth thought out beats with a strange twist to each one.

The ups and downs of ageless melodies stomping carelessly through each second of the song are nothing more than pure harmonic obsession. This song’s strong suit is located in its catchy chorus surrounded by hand-claps and grind up riffs. A drop in movement can be heard especially a little later in the album.

Favoring “High Plains Drifter Finds the Oracle At Delphi” attracts light drops, basic strung of cords repeated, with a harp and a joining chorus brings your ears forward like a cat. Each line of lyric is like a piece to the puzzle to figure it out but that doesn’t distract you away from the sound. With their added harp to the beat it cleverly combines a balanced melody that is unusual but comprehended.

Placing and comparing this album from genre to different bands, one song in particular “Anna” has a familiar sound, like an 80’s cover band of Naked Eyes playing, “Always Something There to Remind me.” For Jupiter One to have this bounce back, shows possibly the time period they were influenced in and a nice change up for the listener to still enjoy.

American Saturday Night. Brad Paisley

Brad Paisley’s American Saturday Night is an instant reminder of why the country crowds have come to love him. Listening to the 62 minute album will feel like only a minute has flown by with one after another keeping you wanting more.

As Paisley’s previous album, Time Well Wasted, took a hold of the air waves in 2005, Paisley jumps the hanging word of, “Alcohol” in our speakers and makin’ us feel pretty with “She’s Everything” and a good feeling knowing that every man is “Waitin’ On a Woman.” This album only gave Paisley fans a glimpse of what Paisley is capable of composing.

American Saturday Night combines everything majestic about Paisley without overdoing all the wonderful things in life. With fellow country star Kenny Chesney filling all the same rock beats of his concerts year after year, Paisley delivers them in concert anthems like “American Saturday Night” and the energetic “Welcome to the Future.” He never forgets what made him who he is today with three gentle, soft ballads - “Anything Like Me” about his son, “No” about his grandfather and “Then” about his wife.

Paisley couldn’t make any album without a little chuckle, and a love affair with “Water,” “Catch all the Fish” and “The Pants.” None of these songs wore out their welcome the way that previous Paisley light hearted tracks “Ticks” and “Online” did.

Not only is Paisley having a rodeo but the heart beat strung of the blues makes you move your head to the beat as it flows down your leg to tap your foot, “She’s Her Own Woman,” and “Oh Yeah, You’re Gone,” brings just that sound to your ear drum.

American Saturday Night challenges Paisley, particularly on “Everybody’s here,” a slow-burn lonesome ballad, Paisley known for unique guitar bluesy torch kills it. Paisley continues to write and play ballads that are related to him and his upbringing, covering experiences that anyone can relate to. The album features bits of his finest songwriting to date, and again seems to have been put together by an artist rather than a singer.

TimeOut Piece... Donna Seaman

http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/books/chi-plaguebw03may03,0,2671236.story

Descriptive, knowledgeable, and conjoined are only a few ways Donna Seaman approaches the way she critics books. In the Blog Critics, Dean Seaman that, "...the art you dedicate yourself to and devote your critical attention out of hunger for what books or music, literally, food grants you...."

A description is to convey an idea or an impression, in which Seaman approaches her reviews. Seaman continues to back up her idea by the knowledge of history and evidence. Questioning the reviewer for lack of knowledge and general idea is never what a critic would like to have happen and Seaman "sustains enough distance" to let the reader convey their own impression.

Seaman shows how discipline and the immersion to any subject has to involve passion in the thoughts to fully understand the basis of any read or viewed piece.

Pulling quotes from pieces into a review locks in more understanding to what the piece is about. Seaman does it in a way the can’t be confused not only flows well but the transition from book to the approach of the review is perfected in her writing skills.

Reviews of Seaman almost is hard to tell it’s a review because of the constant engagement even conversation she has with the reader over tea. Again, descriptive words to lock in attention, the continuation of begging middle and end is effortless, because it is almost difficult to un-puzzle breakage where Seaman transfers from one idea to another.

The approach with Seaman is simple, knowledge, knowledge knowledge because with that, there is evidence and with evidence there is a description.

.Tracy chatton

Bad Vz. Good

http://web.me.com/moviecritic1/Site/Gran_Torino.htmlGRAN TORINO

Directed by Clint Eastwood

R, 116 minutes

-Jonathan Richards

POLITICALLY INCORRECT

If Mt. Rushmore were to make a movie, it would probably look a lot like a Clint Eastwood movie. There is something so iconic, so chiseled in granite about Eastwood's screen persona, that it stands apart from the specifics of the film's material and trails with it ghosts and whispers of values and challenges of an America that may never have existed but is appealing to think about.

There is nothing particularly nice about Eastwood's character in this crisp, deceptively simple story of life in an ethnically changing neighborhood in a Detroit suburb. Clint plays Walt ("Don't call me Wally") Kowalski, a grumpy, bigoted Korean War vet who has spent his working life on the auto assembly lines, and is spending his retirement growling from his front porch at the Asian immigrants who are taking over his block. He has a couple of upwardly mobile sons (Brian Haley and Brian Howe) and some indolent adolescent grandchildren whom he keeps at a mutually agreeable arms length. As the movie opens, he is laying to rest his beloved wife of many years in a Catholic ceremony that is clearly honoring her wishes rather than his own inclinations. The wake at his house that follows is balanced by a party next door for a Hmong newborn, a juxtaposition that avoids heavy-handedness while framing the evolution of the neighborhood, and the country.

The vintage, lovingly-cared-for Gran Torino under a tarp in his garage epitomizes the old America in which Walt's heart and values are rooted. He has very little use for much of anything in this modern world – not his sons and their families, not the Church and the youthful, apple-cheeked Father Janovich (Christopher Carley), and certainly not the "slopes" and "gooks" who are changing the face of his decent old Polish neighborhood. The feeling from his new next-door neighbors is mutual; the Asian grandmother rocks on the porch glaring at Walt, spitting tobacco, and wondering in subtitled Hmong why the old white guy doesn't just take the hint and move away.

Walt packs a lot of firepower in his house, and brandishes it freely when his space is invaded. When a tussle between Asian gang members and Thao (Bee Yang), the Hmong teenage boy next door, spills over onto his property, Walt comes out loaded for bear, snarling "Get off my lawn!" For saving Thao he becomes, unwittingly and unwillingly, a hero of sorts to the Asian community he despises.

There is a predictability in the journey of this story, as Walt morphs from a crusty racist sonofabitch into a slightly mellower, more understanding crusty racist sonofabitch as he begins to see individuals behind the ethnic features. He thaws first toward Sue (Ahney Her), the teenage daughter of the Hmong neighbors (the Hmong are hill tribes whose homelands spread through mountainous parts of Southeast Asia) when he rescues her from a black gang in vintage Dirty Harry fashion. Sue persuades him to come over for a Hmong barbecue, and he angrily mutters to the mirror his realization that "I have more in common with these gooks" than he does with his own family. Eventually, grudgingly, he takes young Thao under his wing, and a curious father-son relationship develops.

But although there are familiar clichés in this picture, Eastwood is such a savvy director that he gives them freshness. Sometimes his direction gets a little obvious, sometimes he indulges his own character in a cartoonish slow burn. But it all feels right within this tradition of filmmaking You root for Walt to stand his ground, not to give in to pressures of Church, age, political correctness, and family, not to compromises with his own fierce, stubborn iconoclasm. His racism is an equal opportunity bigotry that Eastwood shows as not admirable but at least un-hypocritical. And in one enormously entertaining scene he takes young Thao to the barbershop run by his friend Martin, an Italian-American with whom Walt routinely exchanges ethnic insults. The visit is to teach Thao how to "man up" – to enter into the bluff, acerbic, but healthily friendly give-and-take that allows some fun to be had out of the differences that define and link us in this country.

Though it deals with racial tensions, and ends with a melodramatically violent cataclysm, Gran Torino is as much a comedy as anything else, and the comedy is bracing and funny. Eastwood elicits wonderful performances from his partly non-professional cast, and brings his own special easy grace to his first on-screen role since Million Dollar Baby five years ago.

He has hinted that it may be his last. And as such, it's tempting to read Walt Kowalski as a kind of valedictory to his great career rogue's gallery of characters, from Rowdy Yates to The Man with No Name, to Dirty Harry, to Unforgiven's Bill Munny and Heartbreak Ridge's Sgt. Highway, and all the other gruff, succinct, tough guys he's put into the American myth.

As we enter that annual cultural frenzy of movie awards season, Gran Torino isn't likely to figure as a major player. But it would do the creators of many of today's cinematic objets d'art good to sit down and watch the smooth, crankily sentimental old-fashioned movie deftness with which one of Hollywood's masters works.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/film-reviews/film-review-gran-torino-1003919698.story Review

By Kirk Honeycutt

Bottom Line: Clint Eastwood delivers one of his rare comic performances in a film that otherwise doesn't measure up to his recent outstanding works.

So now we know what became of Dirty Harry.

In "Gran Torino," Clint Eastwood plays a retired auto worker in Michigan who could literally stand in for his iconic character a quarter of a century later. Crotchety as hell and a gun never far from his side, Harry -- sorry, Walt Kowalski -- lives a sullen, solitary life in a deteriorating blue-collar neighborhood where nonwhite and immigrant faces constantly irritate him. Indeed everything from the rundown funk of the 'hood to his blase grown children and their punk kids irritates him. A scowl chiseled into his gruff, stony face, he spits foul-mouthed commentary and racial epithets from the side of his mouth about everyone he sees.

Eastwood has always had the gift for comedy in his acting repertoire, but he indulges in it only rarely. His fans might embrace this return to comedy, but those expecting something more in the vein of recent Eastwood incarnations as an actor ("Million Dollar Baby") or director ("Changeling," "Letters From Iwo Jima") may be in for a disappointment. So it's up to Warner Bros. marketing to make that distinction prior to release for "Gran Torino" to gain boxoffice traction.

The movie itself, directed by Eastwood and written by Nick Schenk (from a story he wrote with Dave Johannson), is an unstable affair given to overemphasized points and telegraphed punches. It lacks the subtlety of Eastwood's recent efforts, but then again, the film must be seen in the mode of "Dirty Harry reunites with his 'Every Which Way but Loose' orangutan" -- only this time it's an aging dog named Daisy.

Seated on his immaculate front porch with a steady supply of beer, Walt stews in the bile of his own hatred of anything contemporary seasoned with bitter, soul-shattering memories of the Korean War. He acknowledges Hmong neighbors only with a sneer until the next-door kid tries to steal his beloved 1972 Gran Torino.

As both Richards and Honeycutt dish out on "Gran Torino," they state their opinions on current film of Clint Eastwood and past. Richards begins his review of the film, and how the begging character flowed onto screen, focusing only what was happening between Eastwood and the viewer. Richards discriptive details of Eastwood's character and language linked in together for the review, grabbing the reader to understand the feel of the film without giving all detail and conclusion of what the movie symbolizes. What makes Richards a good critic is he compared past films to now this current of Eastwood at the end, without opening or closing the door on Eastwood as Honeycutt did is his review.

Honeycutt reviews the film of Eastwood comparing other films then focusing on how the film is in introduction. Seems to be upset that Eastwood was not strong enough in this one as he has been in others but fails to notify whether or not Honeycutt could put it past him and focus on the structure and dialogue, but intertwined how "Dirty Harry" has put his opinion of Eastwood on a high bar now. Choppy paragraphs from character comparision to who wrote and directed, to finally filling some little detail of the film. No offense to Honeycutt but he doesn't understand why Eastwood would use gangs like the Hmong and not present gangs to convey the message.

-Tracy Chatton

A Rubric for Reviewing Your Reviews

	Yes!	Yes, but…	No, but…	No
Focus: Did you answer the question/fulfill the assignment?
Organization: Did your points build in a logical manner?
Evidence: Did you back those points up with good examples?
Style I: Did the writing have color, flair, zing?
Style II: G.U.M. (Grammar, usage, and mechanics)