The James Logan Courier

By Michelle Danai, Courier Staff Writer

Hot Tub Machine is definitely better than I expected. Its commercials and title made me expect it to be another idiotic humor-filled movie with scenes duplicated from previous movies about time machines. However, this movie is a great mixture of comedy, fun, "bromance," and reminiscence of the unforgettable 80’s.

The movie was released on March 26 and stars John Cusack, Rob Corddry and Craig Robinson.

By Shamal Asnani, Courier Film Critic

Anyone who is a fan of Seth Rogen is truly doing themselves an injustice act if they have not yet watched the movie Pineapple Express.

The movie is currently available on BluRay and DVD and stars Seth Rogen as Dale Denton, a process server, who would much rather enjoy the affects of marijuana, than assume personal responsibility. The rising action in the film begins when Dale has to deliver a subpoena to Ted Jones (Gary Cole), a drug lord. Before he decides to carry out his task, he decides to enjoy a nice smoke of special type of marijuana, known as Pineapple Express. As he is smoking, he witnesses Ted commit a murder. In his fear of being spotted, Dale immediately flees the scene, dropping his rare marijuana. Ted notices that someone has fled the scene, and discovers the blunt that Dale dropped, quickly identifying it as Pineapple Express. He also knows that the only person he sold Pineapple Express to was Red (Danny McBride), who also only sold it to Saul (James Franco), Dale’s dealer.

By Luis Arroyave
Chicago Tribune (MCT)

CHICAGO — In September 2005, Tom DeLonge, known as the lip­ring-wearing singer-guitarist from Blink-182, announced that his new band, Angels & Airwaves, was "preparing the greatest rock 'n' roll revolution for this generation." He said it would be the best album "anybody has heard in 20 years."

On Saturday afternoon, the 34-year-old rocker explained his infamous comments backstage at the Aragon Ballroom hours before an Angels & Airwaves (aka AVA) show.

"I was on Vicodin," DeLonge said, laughing. "Lots of Vicodin."

By Billy O'Keefe
McClatchy-Tribune (MCT)

Remember how awesome "Red Steel" was going to be, and how the amazingly immersive mix of first-person shooting and motion-controlled swordplay promised to take action games to an entirely new plane? And remember how none of that happened at all? Oh, you do? Well "Red Steel 2" would rather you didn't, because three years later, all those empty promises finally have a game on which to hang their hats.
Fundamentally, what "RS2" does is similar enough to its predecessor to bear the franchise name. It's still a first-person shooter and motion- controlled swordfighting game cobbled together as one.

By Shamal Asnani, Courier Film Critic

Anyone who is looking to watch a movie that is completely out of the norm should definitely watch District 9, which was released on Blu-Ray and DVD around last Christmas. Although someone might look at movie and say,” oh it’s just another alien movie,” District 9 is far much more. The movie is about a large group of aliens that become stranded in Johannesburg, South Africa. After the aliens are discovered, they are given refuge at a government site; however, this is not given to them under pleasant terms. The area they are given quickly begins to resemble a slum, due to their harsh mistreatment by the government. The aliens are forced to start dealing in illegal arms and join gangs in order to barely survive, until they are able to find a way to get back home.

By Robert Lloyd
Los Angeles Times (MCT)

You are no longer loved, TV Theme Music, at least not by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, which is threatening to decommission your category from its Emmy Awards. In its place, more or less, will be a new prize for "music composition for a non-fiction program." As if you could ever hum that.

Many of us, I'll wager, had forgotten, or never knew, that they were giving you an Emmy at all — even before it was eliminated, your category was shut out of the prime-time telecast. The stated reasoning behind this bruited change is the fact that fewer and fewer series are mounting a "traditional" TV theme, although just what "traditional" means is unclear, and fewer does not yet mean "none."

MIAMI — Before he became an internationally lauded jazz musician, before he learned to play the guitar, Pat Metheny fell in love with the player piano in his grandparents' basement in Manitowoc, Wis. At 9 years old, the multi-Grammy-winning jazz composer was fascinated by the clumping, old-fashioned wooden invention that he'd play on family visits.

"It was ancient and really old-fashioned. It even had that smell of something from the 1800s," Metheny says. "At the same time it was like science fiction, Jules Verne, it had that quality to me. You kind of invented stories to go with it ... What is this thing, and how is it doing this?"

By Mike O'Sullivan, VOA News

In her novel Shanghai Girls, author Lisa See takes readers on a turbulent journey from China torn by war in the 1930s to Los Angeles' Chinatown.

Shanghai Girls is a story of two sisters, and it opens Shanghai in 1937. The city was a glamorous international center, known as the Paris of Asia. But according to Lisa See, that life was about to change for sisters May and Pearl.

"It was a final, final moment before things took a real change. In August of 1937, the Japanese invaded," See said. "The Sino-Japanese War rolled right into World War II. As soon as World War II was over, civil war [erupted]. And then in 1949, Mao [Zedong] and the communists took over the country. And so Shanghai went from being kind of like the Paris of Asia to being for many, many years a very dark, very gray, very grim place."

By Billy O'Keefe
McClatchy-Tribune (MCT)

The bad news about "Supreme Commander 2" is the same bad news that's held true for every real-time strategy game developers have attempted to migrate from PCs to consoles: If you're playing it this way, you're settling.

The good news? You're settling a lot less this time around.

Contrary to the buggy volcano that erupted when Hellbent Games ported the first "Supreme Commander" to the Xbox 360, "SC2" generally functions as it should. It isn't as pretty as on a top-shelf PC, but it's pretty enough, and outside of the occasional framerate dip, it keeps up on the performance side as well.

By Krystyna Wolny, Courier Staff Writer

San Francisco’s Third Eye Blind released Ursa Major in August 2009, which is their first album in six years. Being a former Third Eye Blind fan I took this opportunity to reconnect with my inner liking for rock, and I wasn’t too disappointed.

Overall, their music hasn’t changed much, but it seems to be edgier and more intense, especially in terms of the complexity of the songs. Each song is different, which is something that definitely stood out to me, as songs usually have a similar sound to them on most other artists’ albums.

By Shamal Asnani, Courier Staff Writer

Last month marked the DVD and Blu-ray release of a movie which has been highly anticipated, 2012. The film is based off the belief that the world as we know it will end in the year 2012.

The film stars John Cusack as Jackson Curtis, a science fiction novelist, and limousine driver. He is divorced, and his wife, Kate (Amanda Peet), lives with their kids and her plastic surgeon boyfriend. One day, John takes his kids on a camping trip to Yellowstone National Park.

By Beatrice Esteban, Courier Managing Editor

Folk music has been around for centuries but has often been ridiculed by people that prefer a more contemporary sound in their music. Despite the respect that the music community holds for artists such as Bob Dylan, some proclaim folk music to be a silly, outdated, and dying genre of music. However, in recent years, many different styles of music have emerged from the indie music scene. One such sub-genre, known as indie folk, combines elements of folk storytelling and the mellow instrumentals of soft indie rock. Singer-songwriter M. Ward and actress Zooey Deschanel fit perfectly into this description with their band She & Him’s second album, Volume Two.

In their sophomore effort, the two appear to be even more heavily influenced by folk than on their first album, Volume One. However, this influence comes with a price: the album’s content is much less substantive than Volume One, focusing primarily on love-oriented songs.

By Zola Boyd, Courier Staff Writer


When I received my list of suggested 20th century novels in my AP Lit class, I was surprised to see one of my favorite books, William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch on the paper.

Although it is considered one of the most significant novels of the twentieth century, the book is still obscene to some, called "pornography" by my own journalism teacher. A scattered and oddly poetic novel, it tells the tale of a heroin addict unmoored in New York city, Tangiers and eventually the wasteland of Interzone, a journey in and out of reality through the labyrinthine mind of an addict.

“Between the clouds, I caught sight of the sun slipping behind the moors like a streak of blood. The leaden sky seemed to press down heavily on the land. I had lived all my life next to the open sea, and those dark hills made me feel strangely hemmed in. For all my brave talk, I suddenly felt very small and alone. How stupid I'd been not to let Dad come.... Then the car turned a corner, and the church tower and gray stone buildings of Wyldcliffe village finally came into sight. The driver pulled up outside a tiny general store on the rain-blackened street. ‘Where to, then?’ he growled. ‘The Abbey,’ I replied. ‘You know, Wyldcliffe Abbey School.’ He twisted his head around and glared at me. ‘I'll not take you to that cursed place,’ he spat. ‘You can get out and walk.’”

Have you ever dreamed of what life would be like if you never died? How the world would change? How people would change? But what if in all those years of living you had to stay in the same area? The same place you’ve lived all your life? Watching as everyone you knew and loved died? Would you feel trapped? Lonely? Okay? Well in this book Evie Johnson is about to find a world quite like this.

By Laurel Brodzinsky, Courier Staff Writer

“From the neck half-way down the back, was something which was not flesh. A couple of inches thick, it gave the corpse a round-shouldered, or slightly humped, appearance.

It pulsed.”

While the threat of an invasion of aliens from space might seem cliché now, it wasn’t in 1951 when Robert Heinlein, famous science fiction writer, wrote “The Puppet Masters”. The novel is a quick read (175 pages) with a continuously moving plot, but still manages to bring out important themes like fear of assimilation, sacrifices for freedom, the problems with efforts to create a Utopia, and loss of individuality.

By Billy O'Keefe
McClatchy-Tribune (MCT)

The original "Just Cause" was sensationally fun despite having more issues than a panophobia convention, so how much better is "Just Cause 2" by touching the same fun-at-all-costs nerve and doing it without all those aforementioned issues?

No one really knows, because "JC2" brings back several of those issues en route to a sloppy opening hour that, thankfully, isn't a complete indication of things to come.

Most glaringly, "JC2" shoots like a third-person shooter from 2003. Auto-aim runs rampant, manual targeting is unwieldy and players looking for a way to seek cover will be dismayed to discover even the basic crouch mechanic is completely useless.

By Billy O'Keefe
McClatchy-Tribune (MCT)

Give 10 nitpickers 10 hours each to run through "Metro 2033," and each probably would emerge with a unique laundry list of missteps. There's no multiplayer. The gunplay is just a touch off. Checkpoints occasionally appear before unskippable (and, upon failure to reach the next checkpoint, repeating) cutscenes. The running animation looks hilariously wrong. The voice acting cuts out when it shouldn't. Human enemies have weird, sometimes amusing A.I. patterns, and they occasionally can withstand a perfect headshot and continue functioning like it's a bee sting.

But a staunch dedication to atmosphere — and a willingness to do anything, even to the player's occasional temporary detriment, to creatively make that ambience sing — is perhaps the one thing that makes grievances easiest to forgive. Despite dealing with themes (Nazis, Soviets, mutants, post-apocalyptic wastelands and subterranean warfare) other games have wrung dry, it's this attention to mood that makes "2033" not only forgivable, but an arguable must-play.

From wikipedia:
James Harrell McGriff (April 3, 1936 -- May 24, 2008)[1] was a hard bop and soul-jazz organist and organ trio bandleader who developed a distinctive style of playing the Hammond B-3 organ.

Born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, McGriff started playing piano at the age of five and by his teens, also learned to play vibes, alto sax, drums and upright bass. His first group was a piano trio, which found him playing bass in the band. When he joined the Army, McGriff served as an MP during the Korean War and he later became a police officer in Philadelphia for two years.

Learn more about Jimmy McGriff, free from soul-sides.com.

By Julie Mendoza, Courier Staff Writer

Many people are familiar with the classic teen film. Dazed and Confused. The movie set precedents for teenage film being produced today. Taking place in 1976, Dazed and Confused settles into the life of normal adolescents celebrating their last day of school. This includes hazing, drugs, partying, and figuring out what you're gonna do for the rest of your life. It consists of struggles that every teen still has trouble with. High school, no matter what generation, has something familiar and irreplaceable.

By Zola Boyd, Courier Staff Writer

Do you like good food? Do you have soul? If you answered yes to either of these questions, you should follow your nose to Souley Vegan, a restaurant specializing in vegan versions of your favorite comfort foods. The inside of the restaurant is white and modest, paintings of famous soulful people like Ella Fitzgerald line the walls and there's a live band on some Friday nights.

By Shamal Asnani, Courier Film Critic

Adam Sandler is undoubtedly one of the best current actors in comedy today, and his partnership with Kevin James, in I Now Pronounce You Chuck And Larry, was no exception to this fact. The movie centers around two firemen, Chuck (Adam Sandler) and Larry (Kevin James). Although the two are quite good friends, they are also quite different. Chuck is a ladies man, living on his own, who enjoys nothing more than having a good time. On the contrary, Larry is a widower, a father of two children, and is constantly devoted to being the best family man that he could possibly be.

By Zola Boyd, Courier Staff Writer

I'm sure any student at Logan knows what's going down on Saturday, May 29th, right? Senior Ball, of course, but that's not it. Not everyone is cut out for all that high heels and limousines business. If you don't feel like going to prom this year, but still want to get your groove on, you should make your way to ETD Pop 2010, a big ass rave that just happens to be the same night as prom. There's no dress code and everyone is going to be feeling real good, so get into it.

By Eric Brown, Courier Music Editor

Reviewing Becca, the new chick rock artist from Portland, Oregon, requires somewhat of a handicap: in a music industry awash with incompetent and untalented media whores, the role of the woman in music has shifted drastically in recent years. While her debut album Alive!! is far from a musical masterpiece, Becca is able to inject some sense of creativity into what has become a truly pitiful genre.

The artist, whose biography stresses her affiliation with Nineties rocker Meredith Brooks, is not your typical Beyonce or Rihanna prototype. In the package that was sent to the Courier, Becca’s body and physical appearance is highly downplayed—this isn’t to say she’s unattractive, but her record company makes it clear that she is not being marketed based on looks. Her biography also accentuates both humble and unconventional beginnings: Becca has been playing music since her early childhood, started collaborating with Brooks in her teenage years, and has since become a sensation in Japan. Although some of her music was used for commercial purposes, such as a Japanese anime show, Becca’s package generally seemed to be a genuine and promising one.

By Eric Brown, Courier Music Editor

Just a little less than forty years ago Jimi Hendrix, the seminal guitar virtuoso prophet of the Hippie Generation, played his final concert. The musician operated from 1967 until 1970, when he died an untimely and drug-induced death at the age of twenty-seven. Hendrix only released three studio albums, which to many guitarists and rock fans are not far from musical scripture, but was actually far more prolific than his initial catalog might indicate; once he became famous, Hendrix founded Electric Lady studios in New York City, where his frequent jam sessions with other masterful musicians became legendary. Ever since his fateful demise, Hendrix’s estate has been mining this veritable wealth of recordings, many of which faithful fans consider to be travesties. The most recent installment of these disputed studio takes is the new album Valleys of Neptune.

By Jericho Faustino, Courier Staff Writer

The new CD, FrostBite, delivers cool club bangers from one of the game's hottest artists, Gucci Mane.

I've never actually been a fan of Gucci Mane, but this album isn't as bad as I thought it would be. Something I liked about this album is the song " Mi Casa Tu Casa." Gucci Mane spits so much fire on this track that it started to steam up my computer screen.