Over: Beyonce
Under: Crazy in Love

Whoever composed it, that is. The horns, the whole thing…if that doesn’t get your booty shakin’ there’s something wrong with you.

with all the tabloid attention, it’s easy to overlook that this was a really fantastic movie. it’s totally worth checking out, just to appreciate what might’ve been with her.

Actually I like the entire span of the Bee Gees’ career, but I understand why people were sick of that nasally sounding trio’s disco tunes for about 20 years.

The sixties stuff, however, evokes Love, Smile-era Beach Boys, Rubber Soul, the Zombies, and makes it sound easy to flitter from one to the other while still keeping an original Brothers Gibb twist. Their music goes from minimalism to orchestration, from raga to church, all in about the span of three songs on various parts of their first seven albums or so. I recommend starting with the Bee Gees’ “1st” (actually sort of their fourth) and then going forward from there.

Back on topic:

Under - Alan Emrich
Over - Master of Orion 3

In 1992-1993, Alan Emrich was writing for a computer gaming magazine when he got his hands on an alpha version of the original Master of Orion (at the time, the game was known as Star Lords). It was his suggestions and comments that helped make Master of Orion (or MoO, as it is known to fans) the classic 4X conquer-the-galaxy game that it is today.

So naturally, when it was announced that he’d be heading up development on the third game in the much-celebrated series, fans were overjoyed. Unfortunately, MoO 3 turned out to be such utter crap, and this was after several schedule slips and Emrich leaving the project mid-development, that there may never be a MoO 4.

(Incidentally, one of the most notable bugs when the game was released was the fact that point defense beam weapons wouldn’t fire unless you had also equipped the ship with point-defense missiles. Because the A.I. took no notice of this bug, this lead to optimal ship designs being extremely missile-heavy, with some crap point-defense missile to compensate for the bug.)

A resolutely above-average director (who makes resolutely trite, above-average pap that everyone seems to adore) invents the modern summer blockbuster. That film doesn’t get nearly the credit it deserves.

Over: Eric Clapton
Under: Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs

Everyone knows the title song, but the rest of it is one of the greatest albums ever recorded. Well, provided you like blues-rock, but this is the cream of the cream of blues-rock. Heh. “Cream”.

Maybe more as they occur

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