Propagandhi - Today’s Empires, Tomorrow’s Ashes
(Fat Wreck)

All I gotta say is it’s about damn time. This is an album that a lot of people have been waiting forever for. Personally I wasn’t overly excited about it, but I was curious to see whether or not I would like. And the answer is yes… and no.

A good portion of this album took me by surprise. I thought that after John had left the band to front The Weakerthans, they had lost their soft, sensitive side. However, songs like Natural Disasters and the title track are surprisingly catchy and melodic. I wouldn’t go so far as to call them “poppy”, but the guitar work in some of these songs is also a little more inticrate than usual. Also, many of the other songs have soft parts to them as well.

On the other hand, the album also contains a number of songs that are more aggressive than anything they’ve done in the past. Such tracks as “Fuck The Border” and “Ordinary People Do Fucked Up Things When Fucked Up Things Become Ordinary” seethe with so much anger that it seems ridiculous when the band claims they aren’t quite as “in your face” with their politics anymore.

More than anything, Propagandhi are still not ashamed to show off their metal/thrash influences in their songwriting. They don’t sound out of place on Fat Wreck Chords, but they do have a lot more heavy riffage than most of their peers on this label. Just check out the guitar solo at the end of Purina Hall Of Fame… sweet licks!

The thing about this band is that there is always more to them than their music. The real value in this album comes from the intelligent lyrics and the messages within the songs.Once again they are spewing out about a hundred words a second, and you definitely need the lyric sheet if you want to comprehend more than just the odd word here and there. It is highly recommended that you do read the lyrics, because otherwise you are only “hearing” their music, not really “listening” to it.

Even with the lyrics in front of me however, I still found that the lyrics of many of these songs went over my head. And if someone who is trying to read and understand the meaning of each song has trouble, then I think someone who couldn’t care less about the lyrics doesn’t stand a chance at catching on to what is being said. I praise Propagandhi for writing challenging and interesting lyrics, but I think they will be able to accomplish more with this band if they make things the ideas a little more accessible to people. I’m not saying they should dumb down their lyrics, but I am saying that they should have included blurbs with each song explaining what they are about. They included these little write ups for the first few songs, but the rest of the songs have no such explanations.

Thankfully, they made up for this missing info by including a great multimedia cd-rom presentation on the disc that provides a wealth of information and resources about the band and the causes that they support.This is one of the first times I have seen a band create a worthwhile cd-rom portion to their album. You get an interesting history of the band (I didn’t realize how far back their association with Fat Wreck Chords went), a discography that gives their feelings about each of their previous releases, a huge photo gallery, and a cool video with interview footage, live footage, and home video stuff mixed together. You also get info on their G-7 Welcoming Committee record label, and some documentaries and articles about the U.S. government and their hypocrisy.

Musically, this cd is a little too loud and aggressive for my liking. There are a handful of songs that I really like, but there are also points when I find myself wanting to skip the cd ahead. (Including the intro of Purina Hall of Fame, which has the disturbing sounds of a diseased cow crying out in pain while being beaten…)

At any rate, you have to give Propagandhi credit for putting out an album with real substance to it. It’s too bad that it will probably not reach many people outside of the usual punk rock circle. — Sean

Unbreakable
Written and Directed by: M. Night Shyamalan
Starring: Bruce Willis, Samuel L. Jackson, Robin Wright

This movie is about to be released on DVD, so I suppose it is as good a time as any to throw in my two cents.

I remember seeing the trailers in the theatres, and for some reason, it never really caught my interest. Bruce Willis in another M. Night Shyamalan movie. Big deal. I wasn’t the biggest fan of The Sixth Sense to begin with, and this one just seemed overly dramatic. They seemed to be playing up some sort of mystery about Bruce Willis’ character.

After the movie was released, I began to hear little tidbits of reviews from other people who had seen it. The general consensus was that it was a good movie, but the thing I found puzzling is that everyone said that the movie had something to do with comic books. Comic books?? That didn’t sound anything at all like The Sixth Sense to me. I have to admit, I was intrigued.

Of course, the movie starts off with a few captions with statistics about how many comic books are made and sold in a year. That seemed kind of lame to me, and it really wasn’t a very good way to start off the movie. It was like hitting people over the head with his intentions. Then again, maybe it was necessary in order for some people to catch on.

Unbreakable is a hard movie to review without giving something away, so I will try to steer clear of details here. Then again, I myself had a few things spoiled for me by talking to other people who had seen the movie, and I am still trying to figure out if this affected my opinion of the movie.

At any rate, let’s get on to the review.

As we saw in the trailer, David Dunne (Bruce Willis) gets in a train wreck, and yet he miraculously survives without a scratch on him. A comic collector named Elijah Price hears of this, and becomes intrigued with David’s story. He pursues him because he wishes to find out his background. It seems Elijah himself is quite a brittle man, having broken bones many times throughout his life, and he is quite bitter about it. But why is he so interested in David’s apparent “invulnerability”?

Well, I’ll give you a hint. It has something to do with comic books. And polar opposites.This is the mystery that the movie develops around. It seemed to me that the answer to this mystery was fairly apparent from the start. This is not to say that the movie was pointless, but one of my complaints about this film is that it is slow moving, and it seems like the same things just keep getting hammered on over and over again. It doesn’t seem like the story was deserving of a full feature length film.

There are some similarities between this movie and The Sixth Sense. For one thing, the style is similar. Unbreakable is slow and dramatic, and very focused on character. Also, Unbreakable has a few very suspenseful scenes, and I have to give Shyamalan credit, he does a great job at creating suspense in his films. Much like The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable also deals with the supernatural.

And then there is the issue of Shyamalan’s affinity for surprise endings. This time around though, the surprise ending seemed like it was thrown in just for the sake of having a surprise ending. Then again, someone had indirectly spoiled this ending for me, so maybe I didn’t get the full effect of it. Either way, the ending of the movie seemed a little too abrupt. Things were all nicely wrapped up in the span of two minutes, and it just didn’t fit with the slow, progressive feel of the movie.

Basically, I think what it comes down to is that Unbreakable was a cool idea that was executed poorly. I like the idea of taking a comic book world, and putting it into the real world. However, it is definitely not easy to pull off a movie like this, so heavily based on comic books, without being cheesy. Because let’s face it, superhero comics, at least the classic ones, are cheesy. It’s something that couldn’t be avoided here, and it really fought with the serious tone that Shyamalan tries to set.Luckily, some of the realistic elements of the movie are executed well. For instance, the relationship between David and his wife (Robin Wright) feels authentic, as does the relationship between David and his son. This manages to keep things interesting when they would normally be getting rather dull.

Which brings me to my next point. You would think a movie based on comic books should have a lot of action in it, much like comic books do. However, the only action in Unbreakable occurs near the end. It is very much a dialogue based movie.

I have just recently heard that Unbreakable is actually the first part of a trilogy of films. I suppose this explains the abruptness of the ending, and the reason why the story seemed stretched out. The thought of a series of films based on these characters is certainly keeping true to the medium of the comic book, but unfortunately, I think the films will suffer as a result. This movie takes a comic book concept and makes it gritty and realistic. I can only envision the sequels dissolving into tired, formulaic plots. I think this movie should have been a one shot deal in order to keep it unique. But I guess I can’t really say until I see the sequels, so I should keep my thoughts to myself. So forget you read that last bit.

Unbreakable was not the best movie of the year. I wouldn’t call it one of my favourite movies of the year. I liked it though. I just thought that maybe it could have been better. If you’re a fan of The Sixth Sense, you’ll probably like it, and if you’re a fan of comic books, you’ll probably also like it. There are also probably people who won’t “get” this movie, but they deserve to be beaten with a sharp, blunt object. — Sean