THE SPECIAL EDITION: 04.12.2011

Le Cercle Rouge is a film that I never really got around to watching when Criterion first released the DVD. One bad cop accidentally loses his prisoner, thus starting a train reaction that leads to a jewel heist. Melville is a great director and he’s the only person that can get me to admire Alain Delon, but there’s something missing. The film works as a greatest hits pastiche of Melville’s work. We get that he loves the crime picture, dramatic layers and playing with the underworld element. However, we never see him grow past that. The Blu-Ray A/V Quality is rather amazing when compared to the dirt-riddled transfer of the DVD, however large chunks of the film still sport minor distortion in the background.

The Incredibles is an amazing animated feature that shows how Randian claptrap can be forced down anyone’s throat. That doesn’t mean that I don’t love this film, as I truly worship at the altar of Brad Bird. It’s just that there’s something a little off about telling kids that other people aren’t as special as them. I would go deeper into it, but there’s plenty of essays to read about the matter. Disney/Pixar has done a fine job of releasing the film on a loaded special edition that couples the DVD special features with a gallery of new production featurettes. The A/V Quality is amazing, as it boosts a DTS-HD master audio track that continues to show that Disney is on their A-Game when it comes to High Definition audio.

 

COUNTRY STRONG

Director: Shana Feste

SONY

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Special Features:

Country Strong was a terrible film, but it has a campy charm about it. Gwyneth Paltrow seemed convinced that she had an Oscar contender and she went on a media blitz to push it down America’s throat. What we got was a stilted redneck version of All About Eve. The difference being that All About Eve was a well-written film crafted with immense talent. Leighton Meester and Tim McGraw are lost in the mess of a film that seems to defy logic. Basically, take every story about a self-destructive rock star and remove any sense of self-involvement. The result is a passive aggressive film that wants to fault everything in the world, but a celebrity’s warped personality for their downfall.

 

 

Music

Section By Jeb D.

NINE TYPES OF LIGHT

TV on the Radio

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Love in the face of apocalypse, intimacy in times of insanity: “If the world all falls apart /  How am I going to keep your heart?“. And that’s just one of many signs that, while Tunde Adebimpe doesn’t see much improvement in the wreck of a world that he surveyed in 2008’s Dear Science, he’s found a new kind of solace. He manages the amazing trick of pulling off a line like “You’re the only one I ever loved” without sounding embarrassed (or, more to the point, embarrassing), and he digs deep into the torchy “Will Do.” Dave Sitek’s production is an ear-enriching aural grab bag, from smoky nightclub piano (well, synthetic keyb, but the point is made) to scratchy JB-era guitar to wailing horns and slippery polythythms. Drummer Jaleel Bunton and Gerard Smith are less upfront this time, but blended expertly into the constantly shifting mix. Of course, things get cutesy here and there: the lead cut is called “Second Song” (Ha. Ha.), and “Caffeinated Consciousness” is already too on-the-nose before it even gets to the line about “optimistic overload.” But the odd bit of excess aside, this is as expertly crafted a pop album as we’ve had this year, the kind of music that makes you suspect (hope?) that an affirmation of love in time of despair isn’t just an adolescent fantasy.

 

WASTING LIGHT

Foo Fighters

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Given the amount of time over the years that has been devoted to pissing matches between Courtney Love and the surviving members of Nirvana, it’s nice that Grohl seems to remain on an even keel, relatively low-key, but positive for all of that. Thus, Wasting Light, as straightforward a rock and roll album as we’ve heard this year, full of back-to-basicness (“Cut live! All analog!”). Grohl’s still a much better drummer than songwriter, and his reunion with Butch Vig produces less revelation or revolution than retread (“White Limo” takes us back to thrash, “I Should Have Known” is a power ballad that Time-Life could be proud of).  But the crunch and thump are well in place, the sound big and vigorous, and Bob Mould’s incendiary guest solo on “Dear Rosemary” is a real kick. I don’t know that it’s the hookiest collection of songs that Grohl and company have ever come up with (there’s no “Learn to Fly” instantly burning its way into your synapses), but it gets over on enthusiasm and drive. Foo Fighters are the flannel generation’s Aerosmith, with all that implies for better and/or worse.

 

SO BEAUTIFUL OR SO WHAT

Paul Simon

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I think what’s always bugged me about Simon is his affectation of offhandedness: a music-biz pro since junior high, he reworked himself into a sensitive college boy to nip at Bob Dylan’s heels; and the worst part of the Graceland experience was the “aw-shucks, I didn’t mean any harm” approach to breaking the apartheid ban, while simultaneously taking all the songwriting credit for what seems, from all accounts, to have been highly collaborative music-making. Three decades on, he’s still at it, a canny veteran posing as the everyman befuddled by relationships (“If you shop for love in a bargain store / And you don’t get what you bargained for / Can you get your money back?” Puh…leeeze). And he takes something of the same approach to the onset of age (the man’s nearly 70, after all): entering heaven is more about bureaucracy than divinity, and God and Jesus are a real pair of cards: on “Love and Hard Times,” they leave behind man’s questions about his relationship with the divine with a dismissive “Well, we got to get going.” It’s nice that Simon can evidently face the dying of the light with such aplomb, but I’ll take that with a grain of salt. On t’other hand, there’s plenty of Graceland-by-way-of-One-Trick-Pony in the music making: catchy, lightly grooved, and with enough vocal playfulness to overcome the occasional patina of smarm.
PAPER AIRPLANE

Alison Krauss and Union Station

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The Grammy Goddess is back with her 14th album, and in a field like bluegrass, progress really isn’t the point. Union Station remains the standard-bearer for modern roots playing, and Tyminski, Bales, Block, and Douglas support Krauss with a technical expertise that they make sound back-porch casual, and this side of the Punch Brothers you won’t find more satisfying playing. For all her dominance in the field, though, I find Krauss something of an acquired taste: in contrast to the rough-hewn sound of the band, her clear, bell-like vocal tone has the deracinated purity that was once the province of folikies like Judy Collins or Joan Baez. There’s no question that when she mixes it up with the band, on, say, the Robert Lee Castleman-penned title track, her voice is a strong, confident lead instrument. It’s when the others step back and put her center stage that my attention wanders a bit: as an example, her performance of Richard Thompson’s “Dimming of the Day” is a thing of near-unearthly beauty… but compare it to the achingly understated emotion of Linda Thompson’s vocal on the original: Krauss’ voice might almost be some kind of ethereal musical instrument, but in Thompson’s hands, the song is a very human whisper of pain. In other words, where Krauss is concerned, I’d trade a Grammy or two for more grit.

 

Other Notable 4/12 Releases

Jason Isbell& the 400 Unit, Here We Rest. Given that Isbell wrote two of my three favorite Drive-By Truckers’ songs, I’m surprised that his solo outings have felt a bit flat to me, even though his strong authorial voice and pungent slide work are instantly recognizable. My guess is that his stuff works best when playing off other, equally strong voices, and there’s no Patterson Hood or Mike Cooley in sight here. An honorable effort, but nothing to fall in love with.

Marcin Wasilewski, Faithful. Eastern Eurpoean jazz used to be the whacked-out soundtrack to didactic black and white cartoons that came out of film festivals behind the Iron Curtain, with a weird freedom that was less common in the West. This Polish trio’s been playing together since they were kids, and while they’ve got chops to spare, they also hark back to that whacked-out spirit; good for them.

Panda Bear, Tomboy. Lisbon agrees with Animal Collective’s resident genius, with Eno-like guitar textures, radiant trance-like grooves, and sly electro-pop vocals. If you found the wait too long since last year’s release of the title single, just dig in to the opener, “You Can Count on Me,” and settle back.

The Feelies, Here Before. After all this time, it’s a little startling to hear Glenn Mercer’s voice transformed from 80’s nerd mumble to a kind of bullfrog croak, but the years’ll do that to ya, and he actually sounds more like Unca Lou than ever. Reuniting the Good Earth lineup circa 1986, the hypnotic, droning guitar-pop is as strong as ever, the gnomic lyrics neat and succinct (“Bring up the past / Like yesterday / Try to recall / What was so great?“).

K.D. Lang and the Siss Boom Bang, Sing It Loud. The deal here, of course, is that this is Lang’s first album of principally non-cover songs in years, but it rests on the same big-voice, torchy belting that made her reputation as everyone’s favorite duet partner and interpreter of standards. The original material doesn’t have much distinction beyond a hook for her amazing voice, and ironically, it’s a cover that tips the balance to the positive: you pretty much need to hear what she does with Talking Heads’ “Heaven.”

Low, C’mon. Their profile raised by placing two songs on Robert Plant’s Band of Joy album, Sparhawk and Parker step back from their side projects and deliver what sounds like renewal: a little brighter maybe, a tad more tuneful. You still get the slow burners like “Majesty/Magic,” but “Try To Sleep” is achingly lovely, and “You See Everything” would be hitbound in a better time and place.

The Del McCoury Band and The Preservation Hall Jazz Band, American Legacies. Unless you listen to a lot of bluegrass and a lot of Dixieland, you’ll probably have some trouble picturing how much imagination it took to wrestle the two musical forms into this highly distinctive album. What you don’t need any background for is recognizing just how weird it sounds: from Calloway-era “wah-wah-wah” horns to sighing Grapelli-like fiddle, to a version of “Jambalaya” that finds its rhythm in a funk more recent than Preservation Hall, it’s more than a bit reminiscent of Springsteen’s “Seeger Session” band: an album that owes more to a love of music-making than to any formal musicology.

Chronicles of Narnia: Dawn Treader                               $15.99 $19.99 $19.99

The Incredibles                                                                       $24.99

Cars                                                                                              $24.99

Country Strong                                                                       $16.99  $19.99

Harry Potter: Years 1-7 giftset                                        $54.99  $94.99

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

The Incredibles                                                                       $24.99

Cars                                                                                              $24.99

Country Strong                                                                       $16.99  $19.99

Knowing

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince

Secretariat