I like this. It’s frequently funny, and has some good acting. It’s flaws are the “good” kind of flaws, in that they are thought provoking more than irritating.

The movie consists of various Tucker Max stories merged into a single plot. If you’ve never read Tucker Max, imagine Hunter S Thompson minus all that tiresome journalism crap. A typical Tucker Max story involves him getting drunk, variously charming and insulting people, and otherwise avoiding his inner emotional issues. His stories aren’t great literature – they’re frequently much better.

The movie revolves around three characters: Tucker, Drew (based on SlingBlade) and Dan (a composite of various Tucker Max friends), who go to a stripclub in Salem, lying to Dan’s fiancee in the process. Then begins a series of tragic misadventures where Tucker learns valuable lessons about how to…well, see for yourself. I’ll say this: the film avoids the classic ending where Tucker Max renounces his crazy ways and learns to be a nice guy. It does something more subversive and clever, while still allowing hope for the character.

The acting’s great. Matt Czuchry’s Tucker almost bounces with a likable energy – which he needs, because his role requires him to do very unlikeable stuff. The SlingBlade character is a misanthropic Napoleon Dynamite who sells every line of dialogue like he’s earning a commission. The interesting part of the movie isn’t the story, it’s the energy generated by the three male leads. IHTSBIH makes me feel the same way I feel about South Park – I don’t care much for its supposedly brilliant satire and social commentary, I just like seeing the four kids fooling around.

Unfortunately, the movie has issues. To be fair, so does Tucker Max, and those issues make him attractive to women. Doesn’t really work here, though. This movie’s issues don’t entice me towards buying it a drink, unless it’s a drink of acetone.

A lot of the lighting is pretty terrible. SOME scenes look good (like ones in the school). Others (such as the opening scene) look like they were shot by college kids on a rented Arri. How’d they fuck it up this badly?

But the main problem is the writing.

The dialogue doesn’t sound like something a person would say. It all sounds “written”. The road trip is a good example. SlingBlade gets hungry and goes on a monologue about the wonders of an American fast food chain (“…if you EVER speak ill of the Pancakewich again I will personally force-feed you one while I fuck you in the butt using the wrapper as a condom and then donkey punch you when the infused syrup nuggets explode in your mouth!”). Tucker Max fans will recognize this rant as a word-for-word recreation of a post the real-life Slingblade left on the Tucker Max Message Board. It’s funny in written form, but having an actor deliver it via monologue just sucks all the life from it. People don’t talk like that.

At one stage, Slingblade says Tucker will probably get AIDS, to which he replies “it’s basically curable. It doesn’t even show up in Magic Johnson’s blood any more.” Slingblade skips a beat and replies “so you’re saying Magic Johnson’s black…and has AIDS…and has it better than me?” …but Tucker didn’t say that. The quip wasn’t set up.

This movie made basically no money, which is a shame. At least Tucker stuck to his guns and retained creative control. I recall him saying in an interview that he would never give it to a Hollywood flack to make, because “there’s no chance he would do anything except fuck it up”. So instead, he kind of fucked it up himself. But would anything else be the Tucker Max way?

In 2008 the two-piece Norwegian collective known as Keldian released their opus Journey of Souls, and entered a period of radio silence. Soon rumors were swirling online – mostly about Justin Bieber’s love life, but also about Keldian’s future. Was the band done? Or was a third album getting ready to emerge?

But now Outbound is out, and I can see that the truth was neither of these things. The band isn’t done. And Outbound doesn’t just emerge, it comes at you in front of 180 tons of burning rocket fuel. Holy shit, this album kills! Maybe the best power metal release I’ve heard all year!

“Burn the Sky” fades in with baleful electronic drone, and then launches into an agitated uptempo thrasher with an huge-sounding chorus. I actually looked up the meaning of the lyrics and I wish I hadn’t – something trite and silly about American foreign policy. Oh well. “Earthblood” is more sedate, featuring acoustic guitars and female vocals, but the largeness and sense of grandeur remains.

Then there’s “Kepler and 100,000 Stars”, which switches between a Scorpions-like riff and fast bruising speed metal sections. “Never Existed” and “A Place Above the Air” are huge anthemic stadium-fillers, which is ironic since Keldian never plays live at all, let alone in a stadium. “The Silfen Paths” is lengthy and progressive, seeming to channel Pink Floyd more than Iron Maiden and Helloween, with a spacey bridge that serves as a reminder of Keldian’s origins as an ambient rock band.

But the band has saved the best for last. “FTL” is probably the greatest thing yet to bear the Keldian name. It does not have a boring moment from start to finish – nearly eight minutes of Mach 5 velocity with the band beating on you with their superior songwriting skill. There’s a brief quiet interlude in the middle, featuring JFK’s iconic moon landing speech and a soft reprise of the chorus. The final words uttered in this song seem to answer and challenge the chorus of “Burn the Sky”, adding a sense of closure to Outbound.

There’s nothing to say about Outbound except that my expectations were high and yet were totally surpassed. The band just kicks it up a notch all around – better singing and performing, a larger guitar presence, more organic production, and best of all…it’s really an album!

Keldian’s first two albums listened like collections of songs. This might seem like a strange complaint, since that’s the definition of what an album is. But there’s a difference between ten songs assembled without rhyme or reason, like bedraggled survivors plucked out of the water by a lifeboat, and ten songs working in unity for a common purpose, like a rowing crew. Outbound is the second kind of album. The sum is way better than the parts – and the parts are already amazing.

Crossing to Kill is a true crime book about the life and (t/cr)imes of Abdul Latif Sharif, a chemist who fled the US to Mexico to avoid deportation, and then apparently became a prolific rapist and killer of Ciudad Juarez’s working class women.

Sharif was arrested (leaving an embarrassingly long body trail)…but the rapes and murders of young women went right on happening. The clouds were gone, but the rain continued. Was Sharif bribing local gangs to commit crimes on his behalf, to make it seem like they’d arrested the wrong man? Or is Sharif part of a Clockwork Orange-esque change in Mexico, with Hispanic macho culture morphing into something much sicker?

This book offers analysis and speculation on the causes of the Ciudad Juarez murders. Whitechapel’s prose is very efficient – and this might be Crossing to Kill‘s Achilles Heel. After about forty pages he has recapped the murder spree up to date, and suddenly there seems little left to talk about. Much of the book is filled with topics of general interest to Whitechapel – soon we’re reading asides about the body types of Roman emperors, and a Catholic writer’s mistranslation of a word in Ecclesiastes. Crossing to Kill takes you far away from Mexico, and reads almost as a continuation of his earlier book Intense Device in some parts.

Crossing to Kill is probably better read as a book on crime and psychology than a specific book about Sharif’s crimes. Answers are few, and vague. Perhaps that’s the point, that all we have are guesses. But why read a book when there’s nothing waiting at the end except “I don’t know”? The official police reports will get you to the same place much faster.

Occasionally Whitechapel makes an incredible through-the-scope sniper shot of analysis, and sometimes he draws together unrelated subjects into an unexpected but persuasive whole. Other times – as when he speculates that Sharif could have been on steroids, based on some of his buddies being into Arnold Schwarzenegger movies – you get the sense of too little butter being spread across too much bread.

But there’s creepy and evocative ideas, such as when the murders are compared with an electron microscope, where small cells must be destroyed so that they can be analysed. The comparison with the young women of Ciudad Juarez is unmissable. Young women who would otherwise have lived their lives and have been forgotten are now receiving publicity, memorials, and prayers. They are being used as rallying points for feminists and morality campaigners and social justice groups. Indeed, they have unintentionally achieved kind of immortality. All they needed to do was die horribly.

It’s readable and far from dull, but I think Simon Whitechapel was the wrong person to write this book. This subject does not lend itself to scholarly analysis and armchair detective work. Crossing to Kill should have been written by a Mexican policia with twenty years of dirt under his fingernails.