TheRetroCritic

Anyone who knows me knows I have worshipped Metric since their kickass breakout album Old World Underground (Where Are You Now?) .   Their unique blend of punk rock attitude and electro pop acting like a kind of best-of-music-I-like for me. Since that album, a few others followed, all good, so I had high hopes for Synthetica . The result? Well it is indeed good, about as strong as Grow Up And Blow Away  I would say. It opens with the very Metric "Artificial Nocturne" which never fully takes off the way "Help, I'm Alive" did, for example, but which nonetheless lures you hypnotically into the album. It has a great build-up. "Youth Without Youth" is next and adds a bit of Black Keys-style blues to the mix. Again, it doesn't have that extra level to it but it's still a cool tune. "Speed The Collapse" brings with it a darker tone and is all the better for it. One of the best songs on the album, definitely. The following song

James Franco stars in this decent TV movie about the life of troubled Hollywood icon James Dean. The casting of Franco is perfect and his portrayal is entertaining to say the least. The film itself is the usual biopic template with Dean's daddy issues and his climbing success steadily developed throughout. The film looks great and although it romanticizes a lot of Dean's life, that style feels strangely appropriate. Perhaps the melodramatic nature of Dean's work ( Rebel Without a Cause , East of Eden ) makes it a logical choice and adds a tragic feel to the whole thing. For such a short life as a subject, the film does really well to keep us hooked and although there's the usual name-dropping inevitable with biopics (Martin Landau!) it doesn't overdo it and sticks to the important stuff. Not bad, definitely worth checking out.