As an excercise/experiment, I've started writing mini-reviews of every movie I watch, concert I see, book I read, etc -- as long as it's the first time I've consumed it, I'll try my best to review it. I'm not exactly sure how long it'll last, but while it does, I'll probably collect a few of them every week here on the blog. They're all pretty informal, but hopefully someone'll get at least some enjoyment out of them -- and having an audience will make me more likely to actually carry on with this.

CONCERT: DINOSAUR JR, Nov. 14: There's no denying that a lot of their songs sound the same (they all boil down to volume + guitar wank), but there's also no denying that the band truly delivered. Mascis can rip out solos with the best of them, but the real key seems to be Lou Barlow, who is a fucking monster on the bass (and no slouch on the vocals, either). My ears are still ringing. As long as it stops within a day or so, I will consider this worthwhile.

FILM: 2012: I was expecting the disaster movie to end all disaster movies, and on that level at least, director Roland Emmerich delivers. 2012 basically just takes scenes from every apocalypse flick ever made (a bit of Deep Impact here, some Volcano there, even some Titanic for good measure) and strings them together with the flimsiest pseudoscience and most saccharine dialogue that Emmerich and go-writer Harald Kloser could half-ass together. It's fairly hilarious, even with Woody Harrelson mugging it up as an almost-too-far-gone parody of his eco-activist persona. Chiwetel Ejiofor even manages to deliver a genuinely compelling performance in the midst of all the schlock. Not a good movie by any stretch, but I've spent 2 1/2 hours on worse things before.

FILM: Gone With the Wind: For some reason, I've long been apprehensive about this one. It's always portrayed as the uber-romance, a heartbreaking epic of southern chivalry, damsels swooning and "yessum, mastuh" servants, which didn't much entice me. There's some accuracy to that, but I don't know that I would even categorize it as a love story. It's more a character study of Scarlet O'Hara, a mostly awful person with moments of true humanity. She's manipulative, cold, calculating, seemingly incapable of real love... and a whole lot more interesting than the belles that surround her. Clark Gable is perfect throughout -- he has an inhumanly perfect smirk, and while his character is nearly as self-centred as ol' Scarlet, he's both more honest about it and more prone to demonstrating the soul beneath the persona. Better than I expected, mostly because it's more cynical than I expected. Anyone who talks about classics being overly saccharine just hasn't watched them; mainstream movies these days are far more emotionally straightforward.

CONCERT: No More Shapes w/Beneath These Idle Tides and Free Nude Celebs, Nov 12: Weeds Cafe isn't my favourite venue in town, but the cramped quarters really did help make this one feel special — 60 people in the back room of a coffee shop listening to avane-garde noise can't help but warm your heart. Shapes and Tides collaborated for the opening set, and the warm drones of the latter provided a sturdy foundation for the more freeform explorations of the former. BTIT's solo set started off familiarly enough, with a simple melodic line filtered through the most powerful reverb this side of... um... a really large room, but actual, clearly defined picking patterns actually emerged at the end — a welcome development. The real suprise, though, was Azeda Booth frontman Jordan Hossack's Free Nude Celebs set. Dressed in hippie garb that would've made Ken Kesey blush in 1967, the singer abandoned the falsetto and electronics that have served him well in favour of an erratically strummed acoustic guitar. The strumming patterns were steady enough to provide momentum, but off-kilter enough to keep things on edge. Lyrics were a bizarre mix of poetry, self-confession and humour, all delivered with an almost superhuman transparency — Hossack seems completely incapable of artifice. He's a thoroughly weird dude, and that can be off-putting, but there's a real brilliance behind each of his oddball tunes.