Changeling (2008)

Clint Eastwood directed, wrote the music for, and bathes daily with this film. Its title comes from European folklore. A changeling is the offspring of a fairy, troll, elf or other legendary creature that has been secretly left in the place of a human child, says Wikipedia.

Here, the corrupt, murderous 1920s LA Police Dept. substitutes an abandoned boy for a mother's missing kid, hoping to make some good news headlines. But Rev. Gustav Briegleb (John Malkovich), a pastor who spends his time poking things up the police department's butt, and mother Christine Collins (Jolie) won't have it.

I'm so cynical when I see Malkovich's face -- he's a die-hard right-winger, evidenced in the ode to himself, Being John Malkovich, with its pathetic left wing animal rights activists who dream of being him -- that I read it into his characters. But he plays this one pretty straight. His pastor is a lover of the finer things, and speaks over and past the distraught single mother (Angelina Jolie), but still manages to support and even save her.

I felt like this film would not have been so good if it wasn't true. And that kind of makes it bad. Like a screenwriter could have thrown in some child rape to make the bad guy worse ("You want to make my day, punk?") and then implicated the bad cops or maybe the docs that locked Collins in the psych ward. Also, Jolie has like no breasts. What happened in Tomb Raider that didn't happen here?

Various Artists - Special Brew (1996)

I found a copy of this for $2 last weekend during an insane journey to four Half-Price Books stores in one day in the Chicagoland area.  (Half Price, which I hadn't been to before, is one of those places where if really good stuff doesn't get seen by the right people within about a month's time, it ends up in clearance racks...Nah, who am I kidding; "nobody listens to techno" and it would have sat there forever if I hadn't bought it.)

Finding and hearing this again just a few months before my 10-year high school reunion is very apropos, as it was seminal for me in terms of my introduction to electronic music.  (Basically it was this, The Saint soundtrack, and the Wipeout XL soundtrack.  Too bad the core products those CDs were hawking stunk so much butt.)  The artist list reads like a who's who of the '90s heyday of triphop and big beat, and features a sequence of tracks (Prodigy remixing Method Man through Underdog remixng Massive Attack) that outlined a decade's worth of musical interests for me and, I'm sure, all of the other couple of thousand (maybe?) people who heard it.  I'm kind of bummed out that the scene got so overtaken by male posturing, both in terms of dnb going dark and nerds declaring the idea of a follow-able beat passe.  We're due for a revival people.