There's a scene in The Rotters' Club, Jonathan Coe's warm and funny novel of growing up in '70s Birmingham, England, where a character attentively works on a review of Yes' album Tales from Topographic Oceans for the school magazine. He concludes that "...if someone was to ask me who this album was by, and whether or not it was a masterpiece, I would be able to give the same answer: YES!!" Since those no-nonsense, beard-stroking times, TFTO—a four-song record, where the shortest "tune" was over 18 minutes long—has become a symbol of what went wrong. A corrective was needed and, luckily, it happened. Never again were we to venture onto those shores, and to dip our toes into those same oceans that Yes once did. We had learned our lesson.
But then, of course we really hadn't learned our lesson.
It certainly won't be difficult for some overpaid script doctor to turn Nobel-prize winning author Jose Saramago's new novel, Death With Interruptions, into Hollywood's next box-office smashing romantic comedy. Christ, Saramago's done half the work already. First he took death, historically a macabre sort of creature, and made her into a sexy lady. This death lady loves dogs, has a spunky, talking scythe as a roommate, and a doomed, Buffy/Angel-style crush on a mysterious musician. Also? Her job majorly sucks, in her opinion. So, after centuries of delivering the ultimate downer, hot lady death goes all Office Space and just stops working. And then? Well, people just stop dying and she is free to catch up on long-neglected correspondences.
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I'm not such a big fan of movies with lots of raping! Except Midnight Express. And of course Ms. 45. (Buy it now!) I never did see that Irreversible with the infamous nine-minute Monica Belluci rape. (That is a really long time on screen.) So in Blindness, the new film by Fernando Meirelles, there is a bit too much raping for my taste. Your mileage may vary?
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Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist has all the charm and spontaneity of a high-schooler's MySpace page: a static display of typical teenage agita, perfunctory cataloging of "it" bands, shots of boozey blondes mugging for the camera. And like a MySpace page, it fails to convince you to give a shit about anyone who appears on the screen. It is a stylish, self-satisfied little flick that tries so desperately to define its protagonists by what they're not—popular, happy, loved—that the writers unwittingly neglect what satisfying, quirky characters need to be: likeable.
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If Being There's Chance the Gardener were younger, smarter, and a medical student, he might look and act something like Peter Hadley (Jeremy Strong), the character at the center of Humboldt County. After his own father (a nicely understated Peter Bogdanovich), who is also one of his med school professors, fails him out of med school, Peter has a drunken one-night stand with a lounge singer named Bogart (Fairuza Balk) and then goes along for the ride with her to Humboldt County. Peter is a character who has seemingly always just gone along with the ride, though until now the ride has been the a conventional, emotionally void trek through higher learning. When Bogart bolts after one night in Humboldt, he's left stranded with her pot-farming foster family.
Max (Chris Messina), Bogart's hometown beau and the prodigal son of the marijuana-cultivating clan (note: he and Bogart aren't related, it's just complicated), refuses to take Peter to the bus station the next day, forcing Peter to spend another night and then leading him to stick around for several—a week, the whole summer, it's unclear. Time and motivation get a bit hazy, but what can you expect in the marijuana capitol of North America?
Technically, Miracle at St. Anna is a Spike Lee joint, but it could just as well be called Another Great American War Epic. Or The Black Saving Private Ryan. Ostensibly inspired by black platoons in WWII, the ill-trained African-American soldiers dodge loads of bullets and stuff, but minus the deep-fried Southern ebonics, you'd be hard-pressed to tell their hijinks apart from any of their white Hollywood counterparts. Which is of course disappointing.
The unlikely hero, Sam Train (Omar Benson Miller), is nicknamed, variously, "Sniper Bait" (because he's fat) and "The Chocolate Giant" (because he's black). There are lots of nicknames! Character types, too: Stamps (Derek Luke) is the quiet leader; Hector (Laz Alonso) is the Puerto Rican; and Bishop (Michael Ealy) is the light-skinned playboy. They're abandoned by their platoon in Nazi-occupied Italy, where Train rescues a young white boy (Matteo Sciabordi) and recovers a mysterious Florentine artifact that, years later, uncovers the tragic story of where the boy came from and how his family died. Feels a little bit like a screenplay-generating software program is at work, no?
What is it with the wildly rich and successful? What's this so-called drive of theirs? Why can't they do like the rest of us when we cash in on our own meager business doings and order in an overpriced pizza with carmelized something or other, splurge $6.95 to watch the wonderful Michael Cera do something wonderful on pay-per-view, and recline in the comfort of knowing we won't be working on the betterment of anything until the checking account dips dangerously close to the red? Oprah, she builds poorly run schools for "less fortunate" boys and girls in far-off countries. Jim Carrey, he jeopardizes his whole career to tackle "serious roles" in a dramatic movies. And author Dennis Lehane, he has to go and expand our "literary horizons" with a beastly 700 page historical novel, The Given Day. People, please. We don't need so many favors! We're getting a complex.
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Unfortunately, director Saul Dibb (Bullet Boy) missed a key memo: If you're gonna make a movie about an iconoclast, you need to show her doing something iconoclastic. Getting crapped on by her husband and birthing loads of babies doesn't exactly count—especially when modern female audiences are used to seeing women whip stadiums of voters into a pro-drilling frenzy.
Danny Goldberg is one of those names that anyone remotely in the sphere of the music industry knows. He got his sea legs in the biz as Led Zeppelin's publicist and was, for an exceptional stretch in the '90s, the head man at three different major labels—Atlantic, Warner Bros., and Mercury. Oh, and he also managed a little group called Nirvana.
During college I worked as a marketing rep for Atlantic when Goldberg ran the label. As mountains of free CDs and promo materials arrived at my house every week I wondered how so many crappy bands get signed, and why a few of them received a giant label push while other bands I considered to be far better were ignored. I imagined Goldberg sitting in his corner office, sweeping views of Rockefeller Center at his back, as he conferred with executives deciding the fate of all these artists. Did he know more about music than anyone else? Did he somehow intuit who could, or should, be a star? Or was he just a guy throwing albums against a wall waiting to see which ones would stick?
When Goldberg's new book Bumping Into Geniuses landed on my desk a couple of weeks ago, I tore into it, hoping his "life inside the rock and roll business" might finally offer a peek behind the executive's door. Turns out, it's as lamely unscientific as you expect!
It's not just the once-proud American dollar that's being outshone by the British, allowing them to come over to our land with smug looks on their smug faces, crowing to us "yanks" about how everything in this country is "half-off." Indeed, there's a history of this sort of mania: After we invented the mighty Rock and Roll and let it wither among racist hysteria and Pat Boone covers, we found ourselves taken over by four hicks from some crap coastal shipping town who promptly sold the whole thing back to us. And the Brits haven't shut up about "changing the world" ever since.
Now that the recent explosion of American folk music (unfortunately saddled with the catch-all term "freak-folk") has drifted off into airy-fairy, 20-minute-long harp sagas (Joanna Newsom), silly Marc Bolan-impersonations (Devendra Banhart), and meandering, maundering psychedelic bores (the rest of them), a hearty British response was to be expected, an answer to the question we'd forgotten to ask (how to write actual songs, mostly). This year, a steady stream of fantastic records have been released by these London types, the latest of which is Noah and the Whale's Peaceful, the World Lays Me Down (released yesterday), and they've all begun to tour America. As with the previous British invaders, it's difficult to resist their charm.
Blissed out British group Goldfrapp played to a very happy house last week at Radio City Music Hall. I dunno if she's on Wellbutrin or Paxil or what-not, but something has really changed in singer Alison Goldfrapp's formally frosty demeanor. The girl and her music seem positively giddy these days (now gimme some of whats she's on!). Case in point, Goldfrapp's new single, Happiness.
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BRIGHT IDEAS Fujiya and Miyagi's latest, Lightbulbs
No, they're not actually Japanese—they're named after their keyboards. And no, that doesn't mean they're geeks—they don't even know about iPods. British Kraut-rock offshoots Fujiya and Miyagi are just a regular bunch of guys who follow sports, apologize too much, and happen to write the occasional Pitchfork-perfect record. Now they're gearing up to release their third album, Lightbulbs (Deaf, Dumb, & Blind, September 16) and hit the U.S. for a fall tour. Radar exchanged e-mails with lead singer David Best (aka Miyagi) to talk about the new record, the band's Miller Lite dependency, and why you shouldn't call him pervy for reading Proust:
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The Women opens with a terrible, ugly, meaningless series of shots of ladies' legs walking in shoes. They are in a city! They are click-clacking around! Some are walking their dogs! Some shoes are more expensive than others! This is like the opening credits of a low-budget cable network's show, as if The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd were remade with a negative budget. Perhaps for YouTube! And then things get awfuler.
If today's indie rock were the Louisa May Alcott classic Little Women—and, let's face it, it totally is—then Okkervil River would be Beth, the forgotten middle sister solemnly dedicated to the betterment of the world and doomed to die of Scarlett Fever before ever knowing the gentle caress of the listening public. For the last seven years, the band has turned out a string of fantastic, quickly forgotten albums more likely to find their way onto critics' year-end "best of" lists than the average Arcade Fire fan's iPod. Now they're at it again with The Stand Ins, and if there's any justice in the world—and, let's face it, there's not—this album will break the trend.
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"Two covers in a row, that's unprofessional," quipped British song bird Adele in between covers of Bob Dylan's "To Make You Feel My Love" and the Raconteur's "Many Shades of Black" at a sold-out show at Webster Hall Wednesday night. In truth, the young, rapidly rising singer was anything but unprofessional. In between songs, she was refreshingly chatty, gabbing on in her heavy London accent. But once she started a number, she morphed easily into a sultry songstress, breezing through the tracks on her debut album 19, which she's said is all "about being between 18 and 19; about love." Even with such wide-eyed statements, being that she's British and has a big jazzy voice, Adele is inevitably likened to Amy Winehouse. The comparison is only so accurate.
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