I’ll be honest here, this is a quick post to say that I haven’t missed a day blogging. We’ve been spending a great weekend with family and friends, which takes precedence to blogging. However, I did get to see Surrogates tonight. If you haven’t seen it and would like to, skip this blog post because there may be spoilers (I’ll try not to ruin it though).
Basically the movie started off well, but pretty much fell apart half way through. The premise seemed somewhat believable (in a Sci-Fi kind of way), but as the movie progressed, the more it just came off the rails. What made the movie most frustrating was that we had a pretty good idea what was going on (in terms of the conspiracy and who the villains were shaping up to be), but Bruce Willis’ character hadn’t figured that out – which simply got annoying.
To top it off, they developed an unnecessary back-story between Willis and his wife in the movie. There was potential with his personal tragedy, but they never developed that anywhere.
Finally to make things worse, they didn’t wrap up any of their loose ends. We were led to believe that Bruce Willis was able to cause a catastrophic event, yet go home completely unscathed – especially legally.
Did you see the movie? What did you think?
This album is more coincidental than a curse, and I’ll admit that this may not actually fall within the realm for two reasons: 1) This wasn’t a 2-disc album of original songs, the first disc was a “Greatest Hits” compilation. 2) Jackson’s career was already on the decline due to his 1993 tour cancellation and the sexual abuse accusations. Jackson followed this up with a huge multi-year tour. Jackson didn’t release new material for another six years, and Invincible’s sales were notably lower than any of the other albums.
This is another one of those gray areas, while OutKast did release this as a 2-disc, these essentially were two solo albums (although they did appear on each other’s songs). This album was their most commercially successful album, and “Hey Ya” transcended hip-hop to commercial pop, with “The Way You Move” on it’s coattails. The album won a Grammy for “Album of the Year” in 2004. The curse struck again and they followed it up in 2006 with IdleWild, a film-based concept album. We’re still waiting for the real follow-up album, and 
The Chili Peppers had been around for over 20 years when they released this double CD, which featured 28 tracks. What I didn’t realize was that according to Wikipedia they actually recorded 38 tracks and were planning to release this on three albums (each six months apart). After touring for nearly 2 years, the band is now officially on a hiatus. Lead singer Anthony Keidis cites burnout from the touring and says that the Chili Peppers will reunite later this year to begin studio work, but guitarist John Frusciante has no immediate plans to return right now. Drummer Chad Smith is doing Chickenfoot, so I’m just hoping the curse doesn’t ring true for another one of my other bands.
