I was surprised my recommendations got so much attention, I’ve added a section on Movies and another one on Games.
Here it goes just a couple of days before Spring:
Music:
- Arcade Fire – Neon Bible – the much antecipated second album for the canadian band. I’m still listening to this one but on a first look it’s not as good as the debut Funeral, anyway not many bands out there are capable of doing powerful stuff like this with David Bowie.
- Joanna Newsom – Ys – a beautiful indie folk album from a great artist. It is perhaps overconsidered by the critic but nevertheless it’s a great album.
- Tom Waits – Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards – what can I say, it’s simply Tom Waits, can you imagine somebody else doing a masterpicece out of title like this!
- I’ve also revisited a couple of personal classics lately: Ryuichi Sakamoto and Ennio Morricone.
Books:
- Richard Dawkins – The God Delusion – A great book from Oxford ethologist and evolutionary scientist Richard Dawkins. Thought provoking, brilliantly written with some great British humor.
- Philip Ball – Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another – this one was published a couple of years ago and only now I decided to give it a try.A very interesting perspective on the physics of society a must read.
Movies:
- Babel – there is something disturbing about this movie I can’t explain, following the scripting style of Crash (another great movie) it is a brilliant novel about modern times and globalization. I wonder how an american would look at this story… By the way the music in Babel is great, the end theme Bibo No Aozora was the reason I revisited Ryuichi Sakamoto.
- Pan’s Labyrinth (Labirinto del Fauno) – a great (horror) fairytale in fascist Spain (1944), one of the best movies of 2006 which makes Guillermo del Toro reach the standard of one of my favorite directors Tim Burton.
- The Good Shepherd – a brilliant film about the early story of the CIA from the perspective of a man’s life (Edward Wilson) – there is a magnificent quote in this movie:
- Joseph Palmi: Let me ask you something… we Italians, we got our families, and we got the chuch; the Irish they have the homeland, jews their tradition; even the niggas, they got their music. What about you people, Mr. Wilson, what do you have?
Edward Wilson: The United States of America, and the rest of you are just visiting.
- Joseph Palmi: Let me ask you something… we Italians, we got our families, and we got the chuch; the Irish they have the homeland, jews their tradition; even the niggas, they got their music. What about you people, Mr. Wilson, what do you have?
- Letters from Iwo Jima and Flags of our Fathers – two brilliant movies from opposite perspectives of the same battle. Clint Eastwood doesn’t stop surprising me.
- Deja Vu – an interesting sci-fi movie, it’s not a great movie but I particularly liked the storyline.
Games:
- Microsoft Game Studios – Viva Pinata – if you own an XBOX 360 (yes I own one but I wont admit provocative commentary in class) and you have kids age 7 and above go out and buy this game, it’s a marvelous piece of creactivity that will make the time they spend playing well worth it. This made our home a magnet for the kids at school and the neighborhood.
- Microsoft Game Studios (by Epics Games) – Gears of War – yes I also like to shoot some guys out there, but Gears of War is also an outstanding technical achievement which is use in my classes
to show the students how game technology evolved. It’s also the only way I could send the kids to bed while playing Viva Pinata. - EIDOS Interactive – Battlestations MidWay – I bought this one to see if it was this time they could solve the problem of playing strategy games in a console, meanwhile the console crashed and it’s up for repair. Anyway the game is combination of strategy, tactics and action – very interesting and quite challenging even for a longstanding strategy gamer like myself.