CHUD

Special Features:

New, restored high-definition digital transfer, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
New audio commentary by film scholar James Naremore
Mackendrick: The Man Who Walked Away, a 1986 documentary featuring interviews with director Alexander Mackendrick, actor Burt Lancaster, producer James Hill, and more
James Wong Howe: Cinematographer, a 1973 documentary about the Oscar-winning director of photography, featuring lighting tutorials with Howe
New video interview with film critic and historian Neil Gabler (Winchell: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity) about legendary columnist Walter Winchell, inspiration for the character J. J. Hunsecker
New video interview with filmmaker James Mangold about Mackendrick, his instructor and mentor
Original theatrical trailer
PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by critic Gary Giddins, two short stories by Ernest Lehman featuring the characters from the film, notes about the film by Lehman, and an excerpt from Mackendrick’s book On Film-making

Sweet Smell of Success is one of the great American Classics of the 1950s. Burt Lancaster thrives under MacKendrick’s direction, as he brings life to J.J. Hunsecker. Hunsecker is one of those great movie villains that goes ignored by the modern film audience. Ernest Lehmann helps MacKendrick to create a perfect knock-off of the New York Theater scene, while examining what truly doesn’t work in show business. When Hunsecker and lowly press agent Sidney Falco team up to ruin a jazz musician, you see the damaging effects of public exposure. This is one of several titles that Criterion rescued from MGM and I can’t wait to see what they’ve got next. Sure, I know that Senso arrives this week too. I just don’t believe that it’s upper tier Visconti.

MEGAMIND

Directors: Tom McGrath

Dreamworks

Special Features:

Commentary
Featurettes
Deleted Scene
and more!

Megamind was a decent offering from Dreamworks Animation. But, I don’t really ask as much from DW anymore. For every Kung Fu Panda or How To Train Your Dragon that escapes the studio, we get another Shrek. This film starts off well, as it plays upon the Superman origin story to examine socio-economical impact on the rise of superhumans. Will Ferrell, Tina Fey, Jonah Hill and Brad Pitt play well in the animated spectrum without resorting to the usual Dreamworks Animation claptrap. However, none of the material is inspired outside of Justin Theroux’s take on Brando’s Jor-El. The added animated short was pretty fun, but it helps to have seen the film first.

GET LOW
Directors: Greg Schneider

Sony Pictures Classic

Special Features:

Featurettes
Commentary

and more!

Get Low arrives on home video for those that missed its theatrical bow. I would like to take this moment to advise you to watch this film. It’s a low-key indie flick with big names that will make it easier for you to stomach so much dialogue. Robert Duvall plays a crazy old hermit who has suffered a great tragedy. After several decades in isolation, he ventures out into the world and asks for a living wake. Since it’s the Depression and nobody has television, the town agrees to take part. Sissy Spacek shows up as a lady that Robert Duvall used to bang, while Bill Murray serves as the third banana. Good times abound.

ALL STAR SUPERMAN

Director: Sam Liu

Warner Brothers

Special Features:

Sneak Peek at “Green Lantern: Emerald Knights”
Featurette: “Superman Now” – In a moment of inspiration, Grant Morrison was provided an opportunity to revamp the Man of Steel into something modern, something more relevant for today’s audience. This is the story of All-Star Superman – where it all started, and what it came to be
Two bonus episodes from “Superman: The Animated Series” handpicked by Bruce Timm
Featurette: “Incubating the Idea” – A conversation with Grant Morrison
Audio Commentary: Bruce Timm and Grant Morrison
All-Star Superman Virtual Comic Book

All Star Superman is a DC’s best attempt at making a DTV flick worth a shit. While there were far too many compromises to get Morrison’s original work to fit to an animated feature format, it still works. The visual aesthetic of Frank Quitely’s work plays better onscreen than it has on the printed page. The voice acting is top notch, while the key elements of the comic are translated to the screen. But, the entire affair feels rushed. The added bonus for buying the Blu-Ray is getting a commentary track with Grant Morrison. Morrison spends time talking about the film, Superman and his views on the adaptation. Listening to Morrison speak is a treasure and one that’s well worth a purchase.

Music

Section By Jeb D.

Adele

The Big Voice returns, with an army of hot producers and studio pros at her back. With that kind of support (and one glance at her picture), it would be hard to take these generic tales of heartbreak and misery too terribly seriously; in particular, the self-pitying passive-aggressive loser at the heart of these songs feels wholly at odds with the sheer raw vocal power pushing the lyrics forward. But Sony didn’t spend umpteen production dollars on polishing the sound to perfection for nothing: every track on here is a sonic gem, whether wrapping the ear in the plushness of “I’ll Be Waiting,” or thundering onto the dance floor with the inescapable “Rumour Has It” (note, too, the classy Brit spelling). It’s also clear that Adele is in it for the long haul, as she’s quick to borrow a few tricks from up-and-comers like Lady Antebellum and demographic demolishers like Alison Krauss. Plus, she’s managed to come up with an even dumber title for a song than “Chasing Pavements”: I mean… “Set Fire To The Rain”? Huh?

JEFF BECK’S ROCK N ROLL PARTY HONORING LES PAUL

Jeff Beck, Imelda May, and Special Guests

If I were honoring the Henry Ford of the electric guitar, I don’t know that my first thought would have been to pair rock’s most eccentric ex-Yardbird with Dublin’s hottest little mama and her crackerjack band, but I won’t argue with the results. In the driving “Double Talkin’ Baby” and “Train Kept A’Rollin’” that kick off the proceedings, Beck reminds us that his urge toward experimentation has always gone hand in hand with a masterful ability to push his sharp, clean tone from roughness to the edge of distortion in just the right measure; switching guitars from track to track he gets a consistently gorgeous woody tone that embodies perfect rockabilly rawness. The backing he gets from May’s band (including her hubby, singer-guitarist Darrell Higham) is vibrant and sympathetic, and amazingly well-integrated, given the likely minimal rehearsal time that went into the project. The guest spots are a delight—Brian Setzer matching Beck chop for chop on “Twenty Flight Rock,” Trombone Shorty blaring out the brass part on “Peter Gunn.” The real highlight, though, comes on the “tribute” portion of the set, as Beck and May sail through such Les Paul/Mary Ford classics as “How High The Moon” and “Vaya Con Dios,” her voice alternating brightness with seduction, his fluid playing doing an amazing job of standing in for Ford’s typical multi-tracking. Think of this as your reward for staying awake through last year’s Emotion & Commotion.

SMART FLESH

The Low Anthem

The market for low-key, low-fi folk-rock gets a bit more crowded every day (Smoke Fairies, Mountain Man, Civil Wars, etc.), but The Low Anthem’s latest stands out a bit from the rest with the multi-instrumental textures of Jocie Adam, and the vocals of Ben Knox Miller, who possesses a buzzsaw whine reminiscent of the young Bob Dylan (and few writers since Dylan would have attempted an image like “her saccharine luster” or croaked “Will you be the one / To nest beneath my Gatling gun?”). There’s a certain “press-agent’s-dream” quality to the story of the band recording this album in an abandoned pasta factory, but there’s no question that the sound is lush and spacious, creating a setting that adds a hint of weight and history to the quirky, slight material. There’s nothing on Smart Flesh quite as immediate as “This God Damn House,” but give a few listens, and it grows on you, pleasantly if not quite compellingly.

ALLIGATOR RECORDS 40TH ANNIVERSARY

Various Artists

40 years seems like a long time, but it’s also a little surprising to realize that Alligator Records hasn’t been around since the beginnings of the blues. Instead, Bruce Iglauer’s label has spent the post-Sun/Chess era shepherding and cultivating the wide range of American music that falls under the general heading of “the blues.” Favorites are near-impossible to choose: the raw “garage blues” of Hound Dog Taylor and the Houserockers remains, for me, the signature sound of Alligator, all sinew and energy. Classic Chicago blues is another area of strength, where Iglauer’s stable rivaled that of Leonard Chess: Koko Taylor, Son Seals, and Lonnie Brooks, among others, are well represented. Maybe the heart and soul of the collection, though, are the sections focused on the blues’ principal instrumental calling cards: the harmonica (check out Charlie Musselwhite’s insane “Where Highway 61 Runs”) and the electric guitar: not only are there choice selections from Guitar Shorty, Roy Buchanan and Johnny Winter, but it’s hard to top the classic guitar summit of Albert Collins, Robert Cray, and Johnny Copeland on “T-Bone Shuffle.”. And Iglauer’s always been open to the wide umbrella that the blues encompasses, with the boogie-woogie piano of Marcia Ball, gospel blues from Mavis Staples, and the Cajun lilt of Buckwheat Zydeco. Far as I can see, this is the best album you can buy this week, and my only complaint is that it’s too short: serious blues fans will already have an awful lot of what’s here, and an extra disk or two of rarities would have been appreciated.

Other Notable 2/22 Releases

G. Love, Fixin to Die. With assist from the Avetts, more sly, tasty funk-lite.

Toro Y Moi, Underneath the Pine. Laptop music is growing into its own genre. Less energetic than Wavves, but with a consistent, ruminative groove.

Johnny Cash: Bootleg Volume 1: Personal File and Bootleg Volume 2: From Memphis to Hollywood. The attic-cleaning commences, as a year-long project of releasing material from Cash’s personal archives begins. Performance and recording quality vary, but for collector’s, they’re rich troves of treasure.

Brad Mehldau, Live In Marciac. One of the most distinctive and wide-ranging jazz pianists of the day in a warmly-recorded recital that ranges from standards like “Secret Love” and “My Favorite Things” to unusual cover choices like “Martha My Dear” and Nick Drake’s “Things Behind The Sun.”

Earth, Angels of Darkness Demons of Light 1. Take the first eight bars of Robin Trower’s “Bridge of Sighs,” slow it down to half-speed, then loop it for forty minutes. Or just buy this album.

The Flying Burrito Brothers, Authorized Bootleg: Fillmore East Late Show. Supervised by Chris Hillman, a previously-unreleased live set recorded on the same tour as the legendary Last Of The Red Hot Burritos, and since the two only overlap by a few songs, it makes a nice supplement.

Emerson Lake & Palmer, Live at Nassau Coliseum 78. I’m sorry, I reviewed three goddam live ELP albums last year. Enough is enough.

VIDEO GAMES

edited by: Justin Clark

KILLZONE 3
Sony
PS3
2/22
$59.99

Killzone is a prime example of the problem I have with the modern FPS genre, in that it’s a multiplayer game that needs to just cut the foreplay and get down to what it really wants to do altogether, which is get a bunch of people together, dress them in suits of armor, and have them fire inordinately large dick enhancement contraptions at each other. Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with that at all, but don’t try to dress it like your soldiers are fighting an important, vital war for the fate of humanity. Bullshit. Praise God, pass the portal nuclear weapon launchers, and shut the fuck up, Killzone. I’d rather you not try than give us a single player as useless and insulting as you’ve given us so far than give us this Helghast fuckery that just breaks up the mediocre overcooked gunplay.

BULLETSTORM
EA
360, PS3, PC
2/22
$59.99

And in the other corner is Bulletstorm. Bulletstorm, like Team Fortress 2 and Left4Dead to a lesser degree, GETS IT. It’s still a game that’ll bring out the swinging dick douchebag in all of us, but gloriously so. It revels in its true nature, bathes in it, allows the player to go as ridiculous as possible with the kills, and rewards you for it. And best of all, it has FUN. Remember when an FPS could be blatantly fun? The fact that you might get splattered a few times across a cactus because you couldn’t stop laughing at someone being called Dicktits or Sausagenipples is irrelevant. You’ll love every second, whether you win or not. If the focus is going to be on multiplayer, where there’s nothing at stake except the fun factor, being able to have fun and not take shit seriously is what will help your game fly, as opposed to the slog the Gears of Wars, Halos, CODs and, yes, Killzones of the world feel like most of the time, because we have to stop killing every 5 minutes so sad piano can play because Neckless McTesticles misses his daughter.

RADIANT HISTORIA
Atlus
DS
2/22
$39.99

Atlus is an RPG company on the brink. Their RPGs usually don’t do anything we haven’t seen before, but what they do, when they put their minds to it and keep the anime bullshit to trace levels, they do very well. Radiant Historia takes the time traveling aspects of Chrono Trigger (a series, by the way, in severe need of a reboot. Or, at least, the long overdue Chrono Cross port on the PSN, for fuck’s sake.) to their ultimate conclusion, crafting an RPG where the changes you make in the past can have a seriously wide range of repercussions in the future. It’s still pretty standard turn-based stuff otherwise, but the story’s getting some high praise, and the number of paths available to find “the true history” seems to be rather impressive. I can think of worse ways to spend the wait till portable Okami blesses us all.

DREAMCAST COLLECTION
Sega
360, PC
2/22
$29.99