Thumbs Down

Media General (which unveils its new website tonight!) has forced Daniel Neman and richmond.com's Mike Ward to do video movie reviews together under the awful title, "Showtime Showdown." Ward (who I mentally imagined was some little punk kid, and he's nothing like that) looks like he'd rather be just about anywhere else. Sparks do not fly. They stiffly seem to be reciting something from cue cards. The movie they're reviewing is "Quantum of Solace." Neman says it was better when it was called "The Bourne Identity." I think Ward liked it. Maybe they should try looking at each other and actually having a conversation, but it wouldn't fit into the rigid time requirement of this video. I can't imagine I'll be checking into this Showdown again, unless Ward takes his tie off and chokes Neman with it.

As for movies, my dilemma is whether to keep or delete "Synecdoche, New York" from my Netflix queue. Half the reviews really really like it, and half really really hate it.

Ward wrote a farewell to the old richmond.com world in Style this week. I have warm feelings for the place even though I visited only once on a job interview (Richard Foster got the job instead) and I never met anyone who worked there. That's because that same Richard Foster asked me to write a weekly band calendar for the princely sum of $100 a week. That extra $400 a month (and sometimes it was $500) was extremely welcomed, and it was an easy column to write since I knew something about most of the bands on the scene at the time and even had a huge personal photo collection to draw from. I did that from fall of 1999 to spring of 2001, so that's about $12,500 worth of band describing, and never once did I miss a deadline. Or meet Richard Foster. We did it all by email.

In the spring of 2001, they decided to make the column a staff position and give it to a young female writer who did actual band interviews, and that went on for awhile and then died, because here's the problem with band interviews (and I know this after doing a local music monthly newspaper for 11 years): it's the same story over and over and over. It never changes. A bunch of people get together to play music. They think they're different and unique, whether they are or not. They want a record deal. They record an album. They fight. Some of them quit. They get new players. They split and form other bands like reproducing cells. They travel to other small towns to play in other small bars. The van breaks down. They don't get paid. Even Fighting Gravity's story is the same times a decade or two, an endless loop of constantly changing players as they keep looping through the same Eastern seaboard frat circuit.

You can only read this story so many times. (And yet Rolling Stone -- the magazine -- not the band, but also the band -- survives. And Rolling Stone even told the Fighting Gravity version of the story.) Boy o Boy.

If you got that joke, you are old.