Selfish Thoughts

I'm oddly fascinated with the recent war of words between Avril Lavigne vs Chantal Kreviazuk. Part of me would love to see a reprise of the 1995-6 Elastica "Name That Tune" game, with Avril subbing for Justine Frischmann, and part of me thinks about what all the non-Canadians are thinking, namely "who the hell is Chantal Kreviazuk"? Chantal could do worse than plying the route of Controversy Creates Cash, maybe then she'll get a bit more publicity for helping to write other people's songs.

The new Die Hard movie is tremendously entertaining, although once it was over I found myself remembering the original movie more fondly, in lieu of any real yen to see the new one ever again. What's more, the computer hacker hero had an awful taste in music, getting off on goth metal like Evanescence and dissing CCR. This put me in a very unfortunate frame of mind -- wanting to see the fucker get blown up for his shitty taste but resigning myself to the need for tolerating him for the two hours that followed. Now compare this to "War Games", and to a lesser extent, "Hackers". The "Hackers" gang made computer nerdiness seem cool, and the movie had a cool soundtrack to boot. Really, that should have been the last word in movies about evil computer geniuses causing mischief. And let's be serious -- the terrorists in "Die Hard" might have caused havoc on a local level (car crashes, power outages, etc.), but Matthew Broderick nearly started a nuclear war in "War Games". Worldwide nuclear war with everybody dying is a tad more serious than a few traffic jams. Also, IIRC, Broderick's character was big into punk and new wave. A true hero! "War Games" really was the template. Now *that* is what these hacker-action movies need -- a slick late 70's/early 80's soundtrack of new wave, geek rock, electronic pop, and krautrock. I guess we need some Television, probably Devo (I'm not a huge fan of either, but nobody will argue if that stuff is included), Feelies, early Human League, maybe some Japan if some dark/atmospheric moments are required, Cluster during the scenes when somebody is downloading a lot of data and numbers are streaming across the movie screen like in the Matrix, and so on.