things i've been enjoying/not enjoying over the past couple of weeks, squeezed down into bite-sized assessments for your reading pleasure:

-brendan benson's the alternative to love. fun, retro-sounding, shiny good power pop. at least the first half of the album. the second half, for some unfortunate reason, comes to a grinding halt and enters the realm of total premeditated crap that sounds like pete yorn but somehow even more formulaic. but the first five songs - pure pop goodness. you can download "the alternative to love" here and you can watch the video for "spit it out" here. my favorite is really "pledge of allegiance," and i've got an mp3 for it at home, but can't find it on the internets right now.

-"mr. and mrs. smith." this movie wasn't half bad, but i thought it could have used a) more rocket launchers and b) more sex. and c) more assassin scenes, because the two scenes where jolie and pitt go off to kill their respective bad guys are pretty kickass. there's a good amount of humor laced through the film, but otherwise i found it kind of clunky. and weirdly slow-paced. definitely not as good as "the bourne identity."

-"batman begins." i really liked this movie. i don't have any comic book baggage, and i barely remember the tim burton movies, so i had no basis for comparison, which might have affected how i saw it. but i thought it was great. the first 1/3 moved slowly for me - the part where christian bale is off at that ridiculous asian boot training camp - but i thought it picked up as soon as michael caine and morgan freeman came into the picture, and as soon as bale was allowed to inject bits of humor into his delivery. cillian murphy as the scarecrow was weirdly fascinating, and i didn't want to rip katie holme's always-twisted mouth off, though she was certainly the weakest actor in the whole thing. my main beef was the fight and chase scenes - i thought they were shot too dark, too close and too fast for anybody to get a good sense of what was going on.
UPDATE: it is with much glee that i discovered that katie holmes has been dropped from the "batman begins" sequel while everybody else has been signed. suck it, scientology.

-the irving penn exhibit at the national gallery. totally fantastic! i just wished they'd had more posters for sale. the only one they had was this one, which i like, but was so straightfoward compared to most of the other stuff.