CHUD

Special Features:

Commentaries

Deleted Scenes

Promos

and more!

The Venture Brothers keeps improving with each passing season. Hammer and Publick have created a show that has gone beyond parody and turned into the most honest portrayal of failure onscreen. The fourth season tried to re-establish normalcy after the chaotic Season Three finale which saw the supposed death of Brock Samson. Samson’s alive, but he had go the Tony Stark route to live. Now, the titular Brothers are having to live with the pedophile Sgt. Hatred. David Bowie, The Murderous Moppets, Holy Diver and Nathan Fillon as Spider-Man get ample time in this fourth year, but it remains Rusty who steals the show. The A/V Quality is pretty sharp, but the audio is awfully compressed on the Blu-Ray.

STAND BY ME: 25th ANNIVERSARY EDITION

Sony Pictures

Special Features:

Audio Commentary with Director Rob Reiner
“Exclusive Featurette “Walking the Tracks: The Summer of Stand By Me including interviews with Stephen King and Rob Reiner”
25 Years Later: A Picture-in-Picture Commentary Retrospective with Director Rob Reiner and Actors Wil Wheaton & Corey Feldman
Stand By Me Music Video

Stand by Me is a film that I can never ignore. It doesn’t matter where I am, if the film is playing…I have to make time for the only good Wil Wheaton movie. Wheaton isn’t the driving force of the film, that honor belongs to River Phoenix. Sony has dumped this film onto home video so many times, that I was surprised that they bothered to actually whip up a new supplement. The Picture-in-Picture commentary track is a fun feature that reminds you that Wheaton and Feldman grew old. They are very friendly and share tales of Kiefer Sutherland and working with light Stephen King fare. I just wish that they could’ve gotten Jerry O’ Connell to participate. Oh wait! He’s going balls deep into Rebecca Romijn. Dude’s got priorities.

THE TOURIST
Director: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck

Columbia Pictures

Special Features:

Director Commentary
Canal Chats
A Gala Affair
Action in Venice
Bringing Glamour Back
Tourist Destination-Travel the Canals of Venice
Outtake Reel

The Tourist was the worst major release of 2010. Johnny Depp looks embarassed, while Jolie continues to show that she’ll do any film offered to her. That’s not to crap on Von Donnersmack’s direction or the amazing supporting cast. Bettany and Dalton come to life, even when the script is so terrible that it boggles the mind. Could there be a reappreciation of the film in 20 years? Maybe, but Charade it is not. The film smacks of a vanity project crossbred with the worst script of the last decade. Too many loose ends, not enough focus and too much Johnny Depp going through the motions. There’s a drinking game to be had in this, so Redbox it and kill your liver.

THE CONCERT FOR GEORGE

Director: David Leland

Rhino

Special Features:

Theatrical Cut
Featurettes
and more!

The Concert for George was the last great concert. Name a concert film released after this that even matched up! Don’t even bring up The Flaming Lips stuff, sucker. That shit was a documentary film with limited concert footage. The Concert for George is finally arriving on Blu-Ray with uncompressed HD audio and a flawless 1080p transfer. If you haven’t seen Clapton’s epic jam , then you need this disc. A lot of home theater enthusiasts tend to overemphasis visuals over audio, but this disc is REFERENCE QUALITY AUDIO GOLD. When Eric Clapton launches into his While My Guitar Gently Weeps guitar solo, you will feel the ground shake beneath your feet. Then, you will try to lift up and turn off the subwoofer. But, you can’t move. Clapton just rocked your ass like Jodie Foster on a pinball table. Close your eyes and think of England. Afterwards, head out and buy this disc.

Music

Section By Jeb D.

Angles

The Strokes

Call it a weakness, but sometimes an album that provides me with some tangy aural chordal clashing– riffs that veer closer to the sour than the sweet, clangorous combinations that maybe shouldn’t work– can carry me along when there’s not much else going on. For whatever reason, Julian Casablancas and I have never been on precisely the same wavelength, and neither as singer or songwriter does he offer much here to change my mind on that. I suppose part of it might be that I have trouble accepting the urgency of something like “Don’t try to stop us / Get out of the way,” when presented in his langorous drone. But Angles gets all the punch it needs from the twin-guitar attack of Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond Jr. Even at its thematically haziest (“Two Kinds of Happiness,” “Games”), Angles never stops grabbing the ear, and if there’s less beneath the surface than you might wish, that surface itself has a cool, sly appeal that feels like the actual next step from the band’s debut a decade ago. Casablancas actually sums it up pretty well: “There’s no one I disapprove of / Or root for / More than myself.” Even if he’s hardly my favorite singer or songwriter, he fronts one helluva terrific band.

Vices & Virtues

Panic! at the Disco

Well, they may have shed some members, but it looks like Panic! hasn’t broken up just yet. This feels like a holding action, though: enlisting Avril Levigne’s Butch Walker and Foxy Shazam’s John Feldman, Vices & Virtues could easily have followed directly on from 2005’s A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out: big cheeesy guitars, Motown strings, and radio-ready singalong choruses. Problem is, the interesting songwriter of the bunch seems to have been Ryan Ross, who was able to craft a surprising amount of personal expression among the studio slickness. This time around, it’s singer Brendon Urie penning the lyrics, and he sums things up pretty well when he refers to himself as a “sentimental boy,” and never digs much deeper than high-school romance. Possibly, though, he’s aware of that as a failing, because he fleshes out the familiar sound with a small army of bonus sounds– marimbas, xylophones, accordion, synths, loose sound effects, whatever one might find lying around– so that while the songs can get a bit tedious, the album never really gets boring. There’s even a few songs–“Memories,” “Always,” “Let’s Kill Tonight”–that you might remember when the dancing stops. So there’s that.

Fiction

Quatuor Ebene

Half a century or so ago, classical players began to dabble in jazz, and vice versa, and you could generally assume that if they were improvising, it was jazz. Composers on both sides of that artistic line pretty much obliterated it, and left us with some difficulty in characterizing an album like this one: a “traditional” classical string quartet essaying an assortment of covers ranging from pop to classical to bossa nova to “world” music and pretty much anything in between. Opening with “Misirlou” is almost the signature: it’s a traditional Greek tune, but one most familiar in Dick Dale’s classic surf-guitar arrangement, and somehow the quartet manages to touch on elements of each while making it something entirely different. Maybe the most impressive results are on “Come Together,” where bows bounce off strings, produce harmonics, glissandi and pizzicato effects create an amazing sonic simulation of the original’s production. For variety, there are vocals from voila player Mathieu Herzog on “Streets of Philadephia,” opera diva Natalie Dessay on a wonderfully subtle “Over The Rainbow,” and the quartet put down the instruments for an a capella “Someday My Prince Will Come.” Almost by definition, an album of this type skirts the edge of gimmickry, and it’s not simply the high level of musicianship alone that prevents that here, but also the high level of imagination brought to bear.

Sophisticated Ladies

Charlie Haden Quartet West

When I reviewed the import version of this CD last fall, I had assumed that the domestic release was weeks away, not months. So, an album that made my list of the best jazz releases of 2010 can now easily find a similar place for 2011. Charlie Haden’s conception of an “aural film noir” is realized with deep, eloquent playing from saxophonist Ernie Watts and pianist Alan Broadbent. Roughly half the album is wholly instrumental, and the atmospheric darkness of Hank Jones’ “Angel Face” might be the most expressive playing I’ve heard from Broadbent. The album’s unforgettable moments, though, come principally from the amazing range of guest vocalists, including Norah Jones, Diana Krall, Cassandra Wilson, and Renee Fleming. Each seems to top the other as the sultriest assortment of femmes fatale this side of James M. Cain. Choice selections include Jones’ amazingly mature and poignant “Ill Wind,” and Wilson wrapping her dark velvet tone around some previously unheard Johnny Mercer lyrics to “My Love and I.”
The whole enterprise is held together with some tasteful string arrangements from Broadbent, and always at the bottom, Haden’s always intelligent and lyrical double bass.

Other Notable 3/22 Releases

Duran Duran, All You Need Is Now. Full CD version of last fall’s download release. Probably the funkiest outing of their most recent “comeback,” but I kinda miss the old 80’s-style melodrama of Red Carpet Massacre.

Green Day, Awesome As Fuck (or possibly F**k, depnding where you buy it). It’s not like I didn’t realize these guys had become arena rockers– I know people who went to two of the shows represented here– but hearing the exuberance of youthful snottiness harden into stadium cliches is never pleasant. Loud, though.

Chris Brown, F.A.M.E. I did plan to listen to this one, honest. But what the hell– between TV and the radio, I’ll probably hear every track on it within the month. It’s evidently got “songs that your mom and grandma can listen to and love.” So there’s that.

Joe Bonamassa, Dust Bowl. This guy is one busy SOB; this is his third album in less than a year. From the title, to guest stars like John Hiatt and Vince Gill, it’s clear this is his “roots” move, and I applaud the sentiment. I also sort of admire the swooping, swirling, super-speed guitar licks; I just have no idea what the one has to do with the other.

Soundgarden, Live On I-5. The cover of “Helter Skelter” is a little on-the-nose, but otherwise, a sturdy enough live set for those in the mood. Shame about Guitar Hero going under, though.

Aretha Franklin, Take a Look: Complete on Columbia. All the hits were on Atlantic, which in a way makes this doubly impressive: the greatest voice of 20th century pop music takes highly variable material and makes you think that the world would have survived even if she’d never got as far as “I Never Loved A Man.”

Howlin’ Wolf, The Howlin’ Wolf Album. The famous cover disclaimer (“This is Howlin’ Wolf’s New Album. He Doesn’t Like It. He Didn’t Like His Electric Guitar At First Either”) was always too cutesy, and Wolf had a point: while there’s some excellent playing here (notably from Phil Upchurch), and the Wolf is in good voice, the late-60’s wah-wah cheesiness would work better if Wolf hadn’t recorded this stuff in far better versions before.

Sam the Sham & The Pharaohs, The MGM Singles and Sir Douglas Quintet, The Mono Singles ’68-72. Two hours or so of utter Tex-Mex roadhouse bliss. If you can only buy one album this week, make it both of these.

VIDEO GAMES

edited by: Justin Clark

sales info: Judas Booth

CRYSIS 2
EA/Crytek
360, PS3, PC
3/22
$59.99

Crysis, consoles. Consoles, Crysis. You two play nice.

Now that the pleasantries are over, the sole legacy Crysis left upon its release was that is was groin-grabbingly pretty, and it gave PC gamers a chance to flaunt their e-wangs in grand fashion. Crysis 2 seems to be raising the stakes a bit, taking the formula to New York, making the alien scourge more of a plague than an invasion, and giving the aliens a slick, dangerous makeover. If anything, Crytek seem to be using the new urban landscape to their advantage. The trailers were 2 minutes of money shots each, and if the actual gameplay matches the chaos and lack of pretense that footage portrayed, we may actually have something new to talk about when we talk about Crysis. The alternative, of course, is that it’s another empty plate, devoid of nourishment, and that achingly gorgeous graphics engine will officially be the biggest waste of resources we’ve seen in an era of spectacular wastes of resources.

LEGO STAR WARS III: THE CLONE WARS
LucasArts
360, PS3, PC, WII, 3DS, DS, PSP
3/22
$49.99 360, PS3, Wii; $39.99 3DS; $29.99 PC, DS, PSP

At this point, these games are pretty much bulletproof. Legos are awesome. The things they’re building games around are awesome. And two happen every year. And there hasn’t been a truly bad one yet (though Lego Indy was kinda weak, and Lego Batman was surprisingly kind of a hardass). These are as safe a bet as exists in the world of gaming. Buy with pride. Though, if you get it on 3DS, nix the 3D. It is, apparently, worthless.

TOMB RAIDER TRILOGY
Square Enix/Crystal Dynamics
PS3
3/22
$39.99

Tits covered in dirt and bullet holes does NOT a game make. Gamers should know that by now, and shame on you if you don’t. Fuck this series.

SPLINTER CELL CLASSIC TRILOGY HD
UbiSoft
PS3
3/22
$39.99

Splinter Cell’s gotten more accessible over the years, and the last one with the floating titles everywhere was as close as I’ve come to truly enjoying one of these things, despite the omnipresence of pure Michael Ironside voiceover. I’d suppose if you’re a fan, this is a good week for you, but for me, I just can’t imagine the first games in this series aging well.

DISSIDIA 012 DUODECIM FINAL FANTASY
Square Enix
PSP
3/22
$29.99

I don’t know who slipped a Latin dictionary into the offices of Square Enix, but whoever it was needs his ass whupped but good. Honestly, what the crimson shit does that title even mean?

Oh yeah, and there’s also a game in here somewhere that’s like a fancy Powerstone, but full of people waxing vaguely poetic about friendship and evil and the power of memory and other pretentious cuntery. Enjoy.

RAYMAN 3D
UbiSoft
3DS
3/22
$39.99