Lists

Here are some tunes that have gotten me through these hostile and opposing environs. It's mostly the usual years-old bangers and decades-old post-punk ish, but now featuring some bangers in Russian. Young Jeezy narrowly beat Elephant Man for MVP on this one.

Young Jeezy ft/ Jay-Z, "My President is Black (remix)"
Maximum Joy, "In the Air"
Young Jeezy, "Gangsta Music"
Elephant Man, "All Out"
MED, "Push"
Grauzone, "Wütendes Glas"
The Monochrome Set, "The Ruling Class"
Judy Nylon, "Jailhouse Rock"
Love Committee, "Just As Long As I've Got You"
Wire, "1 2 X U"
Seryoga, "Дискомалярия (Disco Malaria)"
Timoti ft/ Bogdan Titomir, Tuman & Geegun, "Грязные Шлюшки (Dirty Bitches)"
Lil Vicious & Doug E. Fresh, "Freaks"
Shawnna, "Getting Some Head"
Jay-Z, "La La La (Excuse Me Miss Again)"
Swizz Beatz ft/ Young Jeezy, Eve, Elephant Man, "Money in the Bank (remix)"
Spragga Benz, "The Pusher"
Robin Thicke, "When I Get You Alone"
Tatu, "Ya Soshla S Uma"
Seryoga, "Аггробабруйск (Aggrobabruisk)"

Our love of Nic Cage is historic.
Epic in scope.
Deep in depth.

We once chronicled an action movie marathon and posted the results of that day. Yet there was one stat that never sat right with us:

nic cages: 0

So tropical storms were braved.
Scores were tallied.^
And an instant-classic-remade-from-a-less-than-decade-old-Thai-classic was born.

We present to you the statistics from Bangkok Dangerous:

KILLS: 42-47*
EXPLOSIONS: 5
STABBINGS: 3
FANCY GUNPLAY: 2
DISMEMBERINGS: 2
GLASS BREAKING: 8
FAST-FORWARDS: 8
SLO-MO’S: 19
360 SHOTS: 4
NICOLAS CAGE LEERING AT MALES: 5
NICOLAS CAGE LEERING AT FEMALES: I counted up to 20 then gave up (mainly due to cage’s love interest being mute)
RIDICULOUS & INAPPROPRIATE MAKING OUT: none
INTERNATIONAL LOCALES: 4
EATING WHILE CONDUCTING “BAD MAN” BUSINESS: 4
ELEPHANTS: 3
ASSASSINATION-SUICIDES: 1
METACRITIC RATING: 19

^ notes on methodology: Kills were sharpied on my shirt while Miguel diligently moleskine'd detailed notes.
* Kill counts are discrepant as Miguel got 42 and I got 47, which included a few kills tallied during a quick flashback of previously unmentioned kills and a final mark for the deaf-Thai-pharmacist love story which killed my heart (in a good way).

Synergy!: Miguel's Tumblr and the Playlist via Alex

"Again!...Again!....Again!....Again!..... Again!.... That was your first lesson."

Anyone who knows me knows of my near-pathological love for The Wire. But long before I was resident Wire-ologist, I was a big fan of OZ - HBO's very first (yes, even before the fucking Sopranos) one-hour drama from the late 90s. With The Wire (aka the greatest piece of literature emerging from my lifetime) nearing the series' end, I wanted to offer this suggestion for a series, sharing many of its qualities as well as its actors, to queue up on your Netflix in order to avoid that hollowing feeling we will all inevitably experience in a few weeks. The actor crossovers alone should keep you satisfied. Who and what do they have in common?

[Ed. note: this story was updated on 7/1 with Nos. 39-29.]

A few weeks ago, Stylus posted a list that was at once entertaining and utterly underwhelming. This is our response to that list.

The list, "The Top Ten Musical Moments From Film" presented a selection of great moments in the use of in-film sound in the movies. As one person's selection of ten moments, the list is not bad at all (in particular, much respect for the choice of using Anna Karina's dance in My Life to Live over the equally great, but better-known dance scene in Band of Outsiders.)

However... ten is just not enough for a list of this sort. There are entirely too many great uses of diegetic sound in film to count. In fact, given certain cinematic trends, we could easily make entire top tens consisting of scenes from films by Quentin Tarantino, P.T. Anderson, or a number of their derivatives.

Thus, we present you with 57 58 59 of the Best In-Movie Music Moments, starting with an alphabetical list of 59-11, and the top ten to follow soon.

Nos. 59-50
Nos. 49-40
Nos. 39-29

RE-UPPED as of 6/27

Here is a look ahead at 2007... not everything that is coming out, just everything that might actually be worth your $12. These are the movies that you can expect people to be talking about, critics to be putting on their year-end lists NEXT January, and Cosmodrome to be regretting having missed. I'll continually update the list throughout the year, as release dates get changed and as new things pop up.

To Put on the Netflix Queue
An Unreasonable Man (dir. Henriette Mantel & Steve Skrovan)
The Lives of Others (dir. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck)
Zodiac (dir. David Fincher)
The Host (dir. Bong Joon-ho)
The Wind that Shakes the Barley (dir. Ken Loach)
The Page Turner (dir. Denis Dercourt)
After the Wedding (dir. Susanne Bier)
Black Book (dir. Paul Verhoeven)
Grind House (dir. Quentin Tarantino & Robert Rodriguez)
Private Fears in Public Places (dir. Alain Resnais)
Red Road (dir. Andrea Arnold)
Syndromes and a Century (dir. Apichatpong Weerasethaku)
Triad Election (dir. Johnny To)
I Don't Want to Sleep Alone (dir. Tsai Ming-liang)
The Brand Upon the Brain! (dir. Guy Maddin)
Away From Her (dir. Sarah Polley)
Day Night Day Night (dir. Julia Loktev)
28 Weeks Later (dir. Juan Carlos Fresnadillo)
Flanders (dir. Bruno Dumont)

Read on...

GOP Presidential Candidate Fred Thompson has scored the support of an important demographic: his ex-girlfriends. Ordinarily this might be a minor victory, but Thompson's list of former paramours reads like a "Women of the Republican Party" calendar.

Ex-No. 1: Country singer Lorrie Morgan called Fred, "every woman's fantasy." Morgan thinks Thompson has a great chance of cornering the women's vote because, "He’s a soft, safe place to be and that could be Fred’s ticket. Women love a soft place to lay and a strong pair of hands to hold us.”

[On a side note, I'm starting to understand every day, a little more, why the women of the USA aren't supporting Hillary.]

Ex-No. 2: 1st Wife Sarah Knestrick. Knestrick married Thompson at 17 and divorced him 26 years later. I believe this is called a "Starter Wife." Ms. Knestrick holds no grudge though, as she intends to campaign for him.

Ex-No. 3: Georgette Mosbacher, who seems like one heinous bitch; she's the author of "Feminine Force," and co-chairman of McCain's 2000 Presidential campaign. Ms. Mosbacher likes Fred's ability to appeal to “traditional women who will like the Southern gentleman in him."

More Fred Exes

Wrapping things up, here are five of the most memorable moments in Swedish (World?) history.

Europe: "The Final Countdown"

From Sweden's Wikipedia entry:
The Kingdom of Sweden (Swedish: Konungariket Sverige) is a Nordic country in Scandinavia. It is bordered by Norway in the west, Finland in the northeast, the Skagerrak Strait and the Kattegat Strait in the southwest, and the Baltic Sea and the Gulf of Bothnia in the east. Sweden has a low population density except in its metropolitan areas, with most of the inland consisting of forests. The country has large natural resources of water, timber, and iron ore. Its citizens enjoy a high standard of living in a country that is generally perceived as clean, modern, and liberal.

As Jules noted in Pulp Fiction: "Oh, man, I'm goin', that's all there is to it -- I'm fuckin' goin'."

But wait... there's more. Over the years, Sweden has given us some of the greatest (and kitschiest) music Europe has to offer. Inspired by The Knife's amazing music video oeuvre, here's an incomplete survey of the greatest Swedish music videos that YouTube has graciously provided, broken down into five mostly meaningless categories: The Knife & its Derivatives, Pop, Rock, Popular or Shitty or Both?, and Classics.

For those of you that don't like The Knife, hopefully you'll find some good stuff here. In fact, I know you will.

Pop
A few years ago, when the Concretes came out with "You Can't Hurry Love", I was sure it was going to be one of those breakout pop hits in the mode of the Cardigans' "Lovefool" or Sixpence None The Richer's "Kiss Me". Alas, I was wrong. Still, it's a nice catchy pop tune.

As you may have gathered from previous posts, the staff of Cosmodrome has been whipped into a World Cup frenzy over the last few weeks. And this is despite the fact that our knowledge of soccer is pretty minimal for people who have watched (or at least read a live blog of) nearly every match so far. Including the ads.

So of course, I've been consulting with my friends and Wikipedia and beyond to extrapolate whatever I can from my meager knowledge to date. As it turns out, I once played this game - for something like 8 years! In fact, thousands (millions?) [Editor's note - our interns blow, and couldn't find the statistic.] of kids in the United States play the game every year. Will Ferrell even made a movie about this phenomenon, or at least something related to the phenomenon (I've only seen segments of the film when accidentally thinking it's this movie).

Alas, I digress. The best "find", and the one most worth sharing is that all of soccer's history (or most of it) has been saved on YouTube & Wikipedia. Below, you'll find video for all 10 goals selected in FIFA's poll to decide the greatest World Cup goal ever, and a couple of selections from yours truly. Enjoy it, and send us more video of your favorite goals, because you can critique FIFA's selections as much as you want, but considering it came out four years ago, only Cosmdrome will actually listen to what you have to say. ...Get the Videos...