ENTERTAINTMENT

Rockers First Release loaded with Attitude
Richard Carter | For the Wichitan

Several years ago, rock was in the doldrums. The best music was barely passable, with serious listeners mostly digging into the past to find an occasional good album they hadn’t heard before.
And then the Williamsburg scene hit, alive with new tunes and energy from bands like Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Liars and !!! and so on. It was back to the clubs to hear good new live music again.
Now, we are finally starting to get some independent label fallout from the good Brooklyn bands. I’m not sure where Gin Palace came from, but thank small labels for their brand of no nonsense rock.
I do know that the band’s name came from an Emile Zola novel, and they feature the very hot and exceedingly in-your-face Meaghan Wilkie on vocals. The surf-y Jon Free willfully cranks guitar and Stuart
Bell thrashes the drums.
Supposedly Free is married to Wilkie—lucky bastard.
Anywho, their first ep titled “Kill Grief” is just all out hard rocking noise with loads of attitude and thrash. It’s heaven. And their first full-length, “Kicking On” was just released this month. Even better is that these 27 minutes of sheer blues-y garage band punk has two videos on the disc.
Why is this album a breath of fresh air? Well, for one thing, if you like Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and you should if you know what’s good for you, then you’ll be all over Gin Palace.
       But Gin Palace is hardly a copy, though they do have the same set-up, drums, guitar and chick vocalist. If YYY’s drip with irony and all sorts of really subtle art rock influences, Gin Palace simply slams, cranks and throws down attitude.
     Wilkie can get major overdrive on her voice and sometimes does a nice impersonation of sailor vocabulary. Don’t let the cute looks fool you, she sounds a lot like a Baptist minister’s hell-bound daughter on a rampage.
Free slashes rockabilly and blues and hard barre chords on his suitably distorted electric guitar. He worries a lot less about technique and concerns himself more with driving the power full speed ahead.
Finally, drummer Bell smacks his snare and floor tom while keeping the bass drum pedal kicking. There’s no sissy hi-hat, and Bell crashes and smashes his crash ride all the way to hell, and then some.
Should you get “Kicking On”? I dunno. If you like the Eagles, probably not. If you like warm meaningful music; no, I don’t think so.
But if you have lots of real anger and enjoy listening to people play with some real backbone, then “Kicking On” and “Kill Grief” could be your CDs.
Hell, Gin Palace has to be cool because I had to go to Dallas to get the CDs. None of the corporate run stores here trust listeners to buy it.    
Let’s not even talk about the “alternative” radio station locally which should have played something (hell, anything!) from the Brooklyn explosion of bands.



The Incredibles: one kick-ass animated Superhero Flick
Jason Kimbro | Staff Reporter

Never thought I would say this about a Disney movie, but “The Incredibles” is one kick-ass movie!
Why can’t all of Hollywood have the same creative genius that the people over at Pixar have?  Maybe because the silver screen would then be a boring place where nothing is special and all is the same mundane genius that makes Pixar a special place.
Director Brad Bird, whose only other film credit includes 1999’s box office flop “The Iron Giant,” has snazzed up his resume with an incredible, yes incredible, tale of heroic proportions!  I should replace Gene Shalit, I should!
Here’s the gist:
The world is full of dangers, but it is full of superheroes as well, so all is grand and dandy.  One night, on the way to his wedding to Elastigirl (Holly Hunter) Mr. Incredible (Craig T. Nelson) decides to make a few heroic stops, saving a jumper from suicide and almost foiling the plot of a French supervillain. 
He was able to get away because a silly little boy keeps getting in the way, hoping to be his sidekick, Incrediboy!  In the midst of the foiling, a train bridge is destroyed and Mr. Incredible must save the passengers from plunging to their death.
Well, unfortunately for Mr. Incredible, the jumper didn’t want to be saved (who’d a thought) and all the train passengers got whiplash, thus a series of lawsuits began to appear against superheroes all across the world.
Mr. Incredible and Elastigirl, along with all the superheroes of the world, decide to hang up their capes and masks and try to fit into the world of the normal.
Fifteen years later, the Incredible family is your basic, 1950’s nuclear folks with a hard-at-work father and a good stay-at-home mother with two and a half kids.
The problem here is that it isn’t the 1950s and father definitely does not know best for he is constantly reliving his days as a superhero, listening to police scanners and trying saving the day all under the guise of a ski mask, with the aid of his old superhero chum Frozone (Samuel L. Jackson).
Well, his superpowers get the best of him and eventually, Daddy Incredible is fired from his job after assaulting his boss (not sounding much like a kid’s movie anymore.)
He keeps the loss of his job under wraps, along with his recruitment from a hush hush group called Mirage.  Yes, he is called back into the line of duty!  He tells his wife, Elastigirl (us men could only dream of having a wife like that) that he is going off on a business trip.
An action sequence and a music montage or two later, and we find out that Mirage is actually headed up by a new super villain who calls himself Syndrome and that he was actually using Mr. Incredible, along with dozens of other superheroes, to test out a new indestructible robot of heinous proportions!
Then the fun begins.  The family all gets into the scheme of things, including the daughter with the power to make herself invisible and make force fields, and the son with the power of lightning-fast speed.  They all must save daddy and save the day.
This is not your typical cartoon, nor is it your typical computer generated cartoon.  When characters die, they stay dead, and several do die in this film.  And if you ask this critic’s opinion, that is really, really cool!  Of course, Disney has always been somewhat decent about killing off the bad guys.
There’s no doubt about it, this is one entertaining film.  Probably one of the most entertaining flicks in a really long time.  Intense action, inventive adventure that would put some of the early Spielberg films to shame, and interesting characters all brings this film into the realm of greatness.
The story and the plot is pretty decent, though some might have complaints concerning the ideals behind having the mother stay at home and the father go to work.  To those people I say, “WAAAAH!  Shut up!  It’s a movie!  Not everything can be of this Utopian society of equality on film!”
There is not too much to say about the artistic styling behind this movie because it is an animated flick, therefore it is all about art, to some extent anyway.
Performances were pretty good.  I was amazed that even though many of the characters were indeed funny caricatures and were obviously made to make us giggle, I found myself forgetting that this is indeed an animated film.  I really felt like I was watching some live-action flick at times.
I really loved this movie.  It has as much heart as “Finding Nemo” without being so depressing.  The inventiveness can not be overstated nor has it ever been topped in another Pixar flick.
You definitely do not need a screaming child in order to go see this movie.  There will be enough in the theater to annoy the crap out of you, believe me.  So go watch “The Incredibles” but don’t forget the oldest member of your family.  This will drive most of the kids away for what I can remember, kids are scared of old people.