MTV's Skins

I'm all for MTV giving this a go, but these are my impressions:

• It feels like taking a four-and-a-half star movie from two years ago and reenacting it with lesser actors for no good reason and with embarassing results. (In a similar vein, Let Me In takes a five-star movie from a couple years ago and reenacts it … but with excellent results.)

• The removal of a straightforward equivalent of the Maxxie character feels like pandering to American male tastes in the worst possible way.

• Watch the BBC original and forget this mess.

Guiltless Pleasures, or, 2010's top albums

Goldfrapp takes album of the year.

My top 10 scrobbled albums of 2010 per Last.fm again reveal that I am mostly out of synch with popular tastes, but who can blame me when the likes of Ke$ha and Katy Perry rule the chart? I like to go with a scrobbling recap rather than devising my own top 10 partly because I'm lazy but also because I like to consider everything current. That said, however, my favorite albums from this year are exactly where they should be on this list.

10 Christmas EP • Pet Shop Boys // Helped the boys retain their usual spot as most-played artist this year.

9 Information Society • Information Society // Had the big single back in the day but never got the full album until this year. The ballad "Repetition" is much better than I remembered.

8 Don't Stop / All Night EP • Annie // I'm throwing in the EP as well because I culled the best tracks from the two into one album of electro-pop goodness. It straddled the end of '09 and early '10, or it would have been closer to the top.

7 Kaleidoscope • Tiesto // The hardcore fans dismissed it as a pop sellout, so naturally I loved it, particulalry "I Will Be Here (Wolfgang Gartner Radio Edit)."

6 The Fame Monster • Lady GaGa // Whether you choose to view it as the second album or an EP, clever pop songs like "Bad Romance," "Monster" (how was this not a single?),  "Dance in the Dark" and "Telephone" make it essential.

5 La Roux • La Roux // La Roux put out one of the best Erasure albums of all time, and songs like "Fascination" and "As If By Magic" left me slobbering for more. To boot, it was gratifying to see that synthpop like "Bulletproof" can still be embraced by the wasteland of U.S. radio.

4 Fixin' to Thrill • Dragonette // I'm a sucker for melody and an '80s sensibility.

3 Body Talk • Robyn // Had the full album emerged earlier in the year, this sly dance album would have made a run at number one.

2 Interpreting the Masters Volume 1: A Tribute to Darryl Hall and John Oates • The Bird and the Bee // Why didn't they just use the brilliant working title, Guiltless Pleasures? That sums it up perfectly in contrast to the bloated, over-compensating title it released under. Nevertheless, this concept worked, with The Bird and the Bee's electro lounge pop marrying perfectly with H&O's pop chestnuts. "One on One," with its mesmerizing synth filigrees, is a song that seems like it ought to be left alone, frozen in the perfect moody '80s production H&O bestowed upon it, but Bird and the Bee manage to create something equally evocative in its own way. However, for me, "She's Gone" is the crowning achievement here. I do wish there had been a less predictable song choice or two — throw me a "Missed Opportunity" or "Some Things Are Better Left Unsaid" for fun. Also around the same time they gave us a soundtrack offering, a very groovy cover of "I'm Into Something Good." Now, who's up for Interpreting the Masters Volume 2: A Tribute to Depeche Mode?

1 Head First • Goldfrapp // My expectations were lowered after the folktronic nirvana of Seventh Tree, but they needn't have been. Golfrapp veered back toward the dancefloor but did so with a set of hypnotic, danceable songs that reference the synth of '80s pop in a most satisfying way; I don't think I've heard music that is so satisfyingly now and 1985 at the same time. Brilliant stompers like "Rocket," "Believer" and "Alive" glisten alongside satisfying slow-burns like "Head First" and "Hunt." More, please.

iTunes store extends song previews to 90 seconds (check your scrobbling)

You may have heard or noticed by chance, as I did, that Apple in the last few days has extended song previews from 30 to 90 (!) seconds in the iTunes store. The first time I noticed it, I did a double-take, thinking I had somehow accidentally bought the song.

One undesirable side effect that I noticed: In some cases, depending on the song length and your preferences settings in Last.fm's Audio Scrobbler, the preview may be long enough to count the preview as a full play and add it to your profile on Last.fm. I've got my Scrobbler set at 75 percent to count a song as a full play, and that was enough to add two preview plays to my profile. For the stat-obsessed, this could be quite the nagging annoyance.

So, the result was Bananarama's "Baby It's Christmas" and Double You and Friends' cover of "Do They Know It's Christmas" from Super Dance Christmas Party Vol. 3 showed up on my Last.fm history merely from listening to the iTunes samples. I deleted the scrobbles on principle (not because those song selections are anything of which one would be ashamed, of course).

On the plus side, a 90-second sample is a much better taste of a song — you're less likely to get those clueless samples that only feature the intro of a song or some middle breakdown that is unrepresentative of the whole — and an unexpectedly generous move on Apple's part.

Apocalypse

Katy Perry's Teenage Dream album has been nominated for a Grammy award for album of the year.

That's it, folks. It's all over. If she walks away with a Grammy, I'm quitting music.

If you're looking to nominate a pop album in this category, how does this trash get nominated over Lady Gaga's The Fame Monster?

Review: Teeth (2007)

Verdict: 4.0 out of 5

Teeth is one of the most twisted movies you'll ever see. Its subject matter, at once laughable and horrifying, is sufficiently scandalous that major movie chains wouldn't carry it. The story of our young heroine, a somewhat self-righteous "promise ring" wearer, is wickedly humorous as it skewers that mindset while she stumbles through a series of disastrous encounters with young men who want to get in her pants. The twist in this story is that she is in possession of a vagina dentata, a concept rooted in folk tales of many cultures, and it proves to be a weapon she can wield against masculine aggression. The movie drops none-too-subtle hints of the source of her situation as shots of a pair of enormous smokestacks near her home repeatedly appear , and her mother is dying, presumably of cancer. As fear builds in her of what she is, a mixture of dread and anticipation builds in the viewer for each successive encounter. And to the movie's credit, each tops the previous in over-the-top outrageousness. Whether or not you care about the feminist statement bubbling throughout, it's a surprisingly compelling shocker. And you will be shocked.

Review: The House of the Devil (DVD)

Verdict: 3.0 out of 5

If your fondest horror movie memories take you back to the early 1980s and movies like Halloween, you'll want to have a look at The House of the Devil, which meticulously recreates the look and feel of horror cinema of that era. Directed by Ti West, whose resume includes such nuggets as Cabin Fever 2, it also indulges in the nearly lost art (at least for the horror genre) of the slow burn, taking its sweet time to get to the payoff.

College student Samantha (Jocelin Donahue), desperate for cash to pay her first month's apartment rent, snags a phone number for a babysitting gig from a bulletin board on campus. When she gets the job and shows up at the middle-of-nowhere address, she finds herself in a dark, cavernous old house with a mysterious old couple (the briefly seen but effective Tom Noonan and Mary Woronov) who would have fit right in with the Rosemary's Baby crowd. Samantha is then left to her sitting duties, and the movie finally begins to amp up the tension with a few bump-in-the-night noises and … well, not much else, really, until the climactic scenes, which center around a lunar eclipse and a rather unconventional ritual.

To be such a long time coming, the denouement is neither original nor particularly compelling, but that's also not the point in a movie that gives you Dee Wallace (the mom in E.T.) as the landlady and a soundtrack that includes The Fixx's "One Thing Leads to Another" played on cassette through a Walkman. Satisfying as those nods to elder horror fans may be, it's equally disappointing that the movie mostly squanders the frightful opportunities of Samantha wandering tentatively around that big scary house — it's a slow burn that never reaches a boil.

Review: Surrogates (DVD)

Verdict: 2.5 out of 5

The recent box office misfire Surrogates is based on a graphic novel with a clever premise: The world's populace sits at home in virtual hibernation, connected to sensors and diodes, operating robotic representations of themselves out in the world with their minds. I like this hook because it's really not that far removed from spending a day connected to a video game controller, something millions of people do more often than not. In this world, the death of a surrogate by an accident such as getting hit by a car while crossing the street leaves the hibernating owner untouched. Want to look sexier than you really do? That's possible here, too. The conflict in Surrogates arises when a couple of surrogates are "killed," and the action results in the deaths of the owners, as well. Enter Bruce Willis and his surrogate with really bad hair to tackle the case, which involves the remorseful inventor of surrogates, a military weapon and a protagonist steadily awakening to the dulled human existence of the surrogate world. The action intensifies as Willis casts aside his surrogate and reenters the world in his own skin. Although Willis spends some scenes trying to spark a renewed real-world connection with his wife, the movie lacks a compelling emotional anchor and ends up feeling much like the surrogates look — a bit too plastic and polished with nothing genuine underneath.