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Film: Review:The Box
6 November 2009 9:19 AM, PST
The dilemma is simple: A couple has 24 hours to choose whether to press a button and consequently kill someone they do not know in exchange for $1 million. The movie, however, is anything but simple. The opening stretch of Richard Kelly’s third feature (after Donnie Darko and Southland Tales) faithfully keeps the beats of Richard Matheson’s story “Button, Button” by way of its previous adaptation for the 1980s version of The Twilight Zone, which gave Matheson’s tale a different final twist. The film keeps going long after exhausting the logic of the original tale, almost as ... »
Film: Review:Precious
5 November 2009 12:05 PM, PST
Precious features plenty of off-putting images and attitudes, beginning with the movie’s straight-out-of-Rush-Limbaugh’s-nightmares vision of lazy welfare queens, and ending with the way the film seems to wallow in inner-city misery. It isn’t enough that director Lee Daniels and screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher (working from a controversial bestseller by Sapphire) present teenager Gabourey Sidibe as morbidly obese and functionally illiterate; she’s also a victim of sexual and physical abuse, with a mentally retarded daughter, another child on the way, and a serious health crisis looming. Not even Douglas Sirk or Lars von Trier would heap so much ... »
Film: Review:The Men Who Stare At Goats
5 November 2009 12:04 PM, PST
A gag early in the eccentric military comedy The Men Who Stare At Goats neatly summarizes what the movie’s about. George Clooney, playing one of a secret cadre of American super-soldiers, is driving into Iraq with hapless reporter Ewan McGregor by his side, and is attempting to demonstrate his ability to disperse clouds with his mind. Clooney successfully clears the sky, but while his eyes are off the road, he crashes into a boulder. The Men Who Stare At Goats effectively satirizes the blinkered arrogance of military types and New Agers, showing Clooney and his colleagues—played by Kevin ... »
Film: Review:a Christmas Carol
5 November 2009 12:03 PM, PST
A digital Scrooge scowls through a digital London in Robert Zemeckis’ A Christmas Carol, a new attempt to warm up Charles Dickens’ holiday chestnut using state-of-the-art technology. But the results feel like the product of a microwave instead of an open fire. A skilled director long infatuated with technological breakthroughs, Zemeckis here makes his third excursion into the animation-meets-live-action world of performance capture. Zemeckis has described the process as offering the “best of both worlds,” but in A Christmas Carol, it feels neither here nor there, never multiplying the warmth of human performances by the artistic freedoms of animation. It ... »
Film: Review:The Fourth Kind
5 November 2009 12:02 PM, PST
When considering the spooky questions raised by the science-fiction/horror docu-fiction The Fourth Kind, it’s helpful to remember Occam’s Razor, the logical principle that rejects unnecessarily complex theories when trying to arrive at an explanation for a phenomenon. Take the case of Dr. Abigail Tyler, a Nome, Alaska psychologist played by Milla Jovovich in the dramatized sequences, and appearing as “herself” (if she exists at all, which she almost certainly doesn’t) in documentary-ish segments. A disproportionate number of people in her city have disappeared under odd circumstances over the past 40 years, and under hypnosis, several of ... »
Film: Review:Collapse
5 November 2009 12:01 PM, PST
The current documentary landscape is chockfull of doom-laden scenarios of every stripe: If global warming (An Inconvenient Truth) doesn’t get you, then maybe genetically engineered Frankenfoods (Food, Inc.), will. Or contaminated water (Flow). Or crushing personal (Maxed Out) and national (I.O.U.S.A.) debt. But few apocalyptic visions are as comprehensive and frighteningly assured as the one offered by Michael Ruppert, the subject of Chris Smith’s mesmerizing new documentary Collapse. A former Los Angeles police officer turned independent reporter, Ruppert has chased big stories for his self-published newsletter, From The Wilderness, on everything from CIA involvement ... »
Film: Review:La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet
5 November 2009 12:00 PM, PST
Frederick Wiseman is an American institution, albeit an invisible one. Every few years, he adds to his formidable body of documentary work, slipping, apparently unnoticed, into environments ranging from hospital wards to housing projects, and returning with unblemished portraits of life within. Wiseman’s latest subject is the Paris Opera Ballet, whose roots go back more than 400 years. As is characteristic of his method, Wiseman minimizes his presence, both on- and offscreen. There are no interviews, no captions, and few contextual clues as to which of the seven ballets featured in various stages of rehearsal is being performed at ... »
Books: Review:Douglas Coupland: Generation A
4 November 2009 10:00 PM, PST
After Douglas Coupland’s 1991 novel Generation X became an international bestseller and slapped a name on a generation of kids, he resisted becoming a spokesperson for them, and disavowed the label he’d given them. For his 13th novel, Generation A, he establishes the source of the Gen-a term up front in an commencement-speech epigraph from Kurt Vonnegut—supposedly Vonnegut’s rebuttal to the Gen-x label. And again, he isn’t trying to label an entire age group. His protagonists are treated as anything but typical, thanks to a zoological fluke that brought them together, and through which they ... »
Books: Review:Tracy Morgan with Anthony Bozza: I Am The New Black
4 November 2009 10:00 PM, PST
Tracy Morgan is an extremely funny, naturally gifted comedian who has led a crazy life. He’s also black. Regardless of whether those things are obvious, readers will be reminded of them again and again and again in Morgan’s thin autobiography, I Am The New Black. His story is undoubtedly interesting: He grew up in tough New York neighborhoods, hustling to make ends meet, and to meet girls. His father, a Ptsd-stricken Vietnam vet, died from AIDS after years of IV drug abuse. After stints as a drug dealer (among other things), Morgan eventually focused on comedy and essentially ... »
Books: Review:Anne Rice: Angel Time
4 November 2009 10:00 PM, PST
In retrospect, Anne Rice was way ahead of her time. Imagine the fortune she could be making on books and ancillary properties if she were publishing her Vampire Chronicles in the vampire-crazy 21st-century market. Perhaps it’s to her credit that she got vampires out of her system before the glut, but what she’s pumping out these days is enough to make anybody wish she’d hop back on the bloodsucker bandwagon. Rice returned to her childhood Catholicism with a vengeance in 2004, and since then, she’s been writing “only for the Lord.” And now she’s taken ... »
Books: Review:Rob Young, editor: The Wire Primers: A Guide To Modern Music
4 November 2009 10:00 PM, PST
In its 27 years, the London-based music magazine The Wire—whose function has been to treat German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, astral-jazz shaman Sun Ra, and dubstep pioneer Kode9 as pop stars—has found an enviable niche as one of the few newsstand titles in its league continuing to thrive as more mainstream-minded titles go belly-up. Besides catering to a hard core of music lovers who think there’s more to life and listening than the umpteenth Beatles cover story, The Wire runs essential regular features like Invisible Jukebox (name-that-tune sessions that expand into discussions of the interviewee’s career and ... »
Books: Review:John Irving: Last Night In Twisted River
4 November 2009 10:00 PM, PST
Last Night In Twisted River is the I’m Not There of John Irving novels. Like Todd Haynes’ attempts to turn Bob Dylan into a figure of myth in that film, Irving playfully invents a story that’s as much about the pleasures of reading one of his novels as it is anything else, until it poignantly turns into a paean for a dying art and a plea for the idea of the story. This could all seem self-indulgent. Instead, it’s Irving’s best since the ’80s. As a novelist, Irving simultaneously seems to invite questions of how much ... »
DVD: Review:Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics I
3 November 2009 10:01 PM, PST
Nearly every DVD company with access to a classic Hollywood catalog has released a film-noir collection over the past decade, but while Sony is arriving late to the party with its five-disc Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics I, the set is hardly an afterthought. The Columbia library holds some of the most distinctive noirs in the history of the genre, and Film Noir Classics features five of them—four by well-known directors, and one by a wild card. There’s even a theme of sorts uniting these films, in that each explores the criminal mind (either from the inside, or ... »
DVD: Review:Battlestar Galactica: The Plan
3 November 2009 10:01 PM, PST
A gift for those who geeked especially hard on the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica, the two-hour addendum The Plan (out now on DVD, due for broadcast next year) illuminates what exactly those tricky skinjobs were thinking throughout the seasons. In doing so, it effectively answers one of the series’ slightly nagging questions: Why didn’t the Cylons hidden among the few pockets of surviving humans simply finish the job they started at the beginning of the series, and wipe them out? The Plan reveals that each basically had second thoughts after the nuclear attack that wiped out the Colonies—second thoughts ... »
DVD: Review:Night Of The Creeps: Director’s Cut
3 November 2009 10:01 PM, PST
Fred Dekker’s 1986 horror-comedy Night Of The Creeps had the curious distinction of being simultaneously anachronistic and ahead of its time. By the mid-’80s, the heyday of campy, drive-in-ready B-movies about square young men battling creepy-crawlies from another world while trying to muster up the courage to ask their gals to the big dance had long passed. But the winking meta-commentary of Scream and Hot Fuzz wasn’t yet in vogue. Like Dekker’s simpatico next film, The Monster Squad, Creeps picked up a cult following, but that must be cold comfort to its writer-director, who hasn’t ... »
DVD: Review:DVDs In Brief: November 4, 2009
3 November 2009 10:00 PM, PST
There’s plenty to hate about G.I. Joe: The Rise Of Cobra (Paramount): It’s packed with broad clichés, terrible lines, and utterly generic summer-blockbuster fodder. But compared to the clumsy, ugly nads-joke-fest that is the Transformers movie, it’s a pretty slick, propulsive package, and a solid win in the still-pretty-small “Hasbro program-length cartoon toy ads that became live-action summer blockbusters” category… Critics by and large gave a pass to the Denzel Washington/John Travolta thriller The Taking Of Pelham 1 2 3 (Sony), but for those of us who cherish the glorious profanity and local color ... »
Music: Review:Molina And Johnson: Molina And Johnson
2 November 2009 10:00 PM, PST
The LP debut from Jason Molina (Magnolia Electric Co.) and Will Johnson (Centro-Matic, South San Gabriel) plays out almost exactly as expected considering the ingredients: two men with the dark, dark blues, the tools of Americana at their fingertips, and the broad Texas sky overhead. Molina And Johnson is almost brutally spare, aiming only to capture the fleeting beauty of a one-off collaboration, then drift back out on the barely perceptible breeze that blew it here. The opener, “Twenty Cycles To The Ground,” shuffles to a feathery drumbeat, while “Lenore’s Lullaby” would float away without its grounding piano hits ... »
Music: Review:Foo Fighters: Greatest Hits
2 November 2009 10:00 PM, PST
Greatest-hits compilations seldom make worthy additions to bands’ catalogs, but in some rare cases, they become the only record fans need to own. That’s overstating it in the case of Foo Fighters, but long before the release of the new Greatest Hits, the band had a reputation for filler-heavy albums punctuated by takeoff tracks. Even fans may remember 1997’s The Colour And The Shape mostly as a bunch of other stuff surrounding “Monkey Wrench,” “My Hero,” and “Everlong,” but when Foo Fighters were on their game, they tended to hit it out of the park. So few bands ... »
Music: Review:Weezer: Raditude
2 November 2009 10:00 PM, PST
Presuming to know what’s going through an artist’s mind can be dangerous, especially when that artist’s muse is as flighty as Rivers Cuomo’s. Post-Pinkerton, that little bugger has led the Weezer frontman through a number of inexplicable stylistic swerves, from the power-pop reboot of the self-titled “green album” to the underrated guitar heroics of Maladroit to the faux-Who theatrics of the “The Greatest Man That Ever Lived” from the self-titled “red album.” Saddling the band’s latest with a title that grows stupider with every utterance—Raditude—may indicate to some that Cuomo’s muse ... »
Music: Review:Julian Casablancas: Phrazes For The Young
2 November 2009 10:00 PM, PST
Well, no one’s going to mistake this for a Strokes album. Sure, Phrazes For The Young shares a voice with Julian Casablancas’ recently silent band, and occasionally it even shares The Strokes’ love of nervous energy and oddly angled hooks. But the building materials have changed, with Casablancas tiptoeing out of his ’70s Cbgb comfort zone to bring in ’80s synths. And the voice has changed as well, both sonically and lyrically. Here Casablancas reaches beyond his familiar sneering readings to occasionally (gasp!) emote from the heart. “Somewhere along the way, my bitterness turned to anger,” he sings on ... »
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