November 16, 2007
W eekend
A4
A5
Music
Britney’s ‘Blackout’ a return to form
By Andy Battaglia
Onion Wire Service
The list of musicians who should use the word “derrière” in a song doesn’t include Britney Spears. But there
she goes in Blackout’s second song, between self-introductions as “Miss Bad Media Karma” and “Mrs. She’s
Too Big She’s Too Famous,” just asking for it. There’s a
lot of asking-for-it of various kinds on Blackout, an album that counts both as a significant event and as a disquieting aberration that couldn’t be more mysteriously
manufactured or bizarrely ill-timed.
But if listeners are supposed to fixate on the stories of
celebrity crackdown, they need a conclusive reason why
such stories should matter. Besides, more interesting
than haircuts and driving records is the considerable
strength of the songs on Blackout, which flag whenever
Spears tries to account for anything related to herself,
but thrive when she just forgets about it all.
“Gimme More” opens on a sultry, clubby space-pop
note that’s sustained throughout; the tracks, produced
for the most part by Timbaland protégé Danja and
the Swedish duo Bloodshy & Avant, traffic in a mix of
red-lined synth riffs and beats that fan out through all
kinds of timbres and times. Every song counts as markedly progressive and strange, from “Get Naked (I Got
A Plan)” (which sounds like intergalactic R&B filtered
through The Cure’s Pornography) to “Freakshow,” which
gets by on little more than serpentine snaps, wub-wub
bass, and Britney sounding synthetic and irresistibly at
home.
By Robert Ebert
Chicago Sun-Times
In the name of the mighty Odin,
what this movie needs is an audience that knows how to laugh.
Laugh, I tell you, laugh! Has the
spirit of irony been lost in the
land? By all the gods, if it were not
for this blasted infirmity that the
Fates have dealt me, you would
have heard from me such thunderous roars as to shake the very
Navy Pier itself down to its pillars
in the clay.
To be sure, when I saw “Beowulf” in 3-D at the giant-screen
IMAX theater, there were eruptions of snickers here and there, but
for the most part, the audience sat
and watched the movie, not cheering, booing, hooting, recoiling,
erupting or doing anything else
unmannerly. You expect complete
silence and rapt attention when a
nude Angelina Jolie emerges from
the waters of an underground lagoon. But am I the only one who
suspects that the intention of director Robert Zemeckis and writers Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary
was satirical?
Truth in criticism: I am not
sure Angelina Jolie was nude. Oh,
her character was nude, all right,
except for the shimmering gold
plating that obscured certain crucial areas, but was she Angelina
Jolie? Zemeckis, who directed the
wonderful “Polar Express,” has
employed a much more realistic
version of the same animation
technology in “Beowulf.” We are
not looking at flesh-and-blood
actors but special effects that
look uncannily convincing, even
though I am reasonably certain
that Angelina Jolie does not have
spike-heeled feet. That’s right: feet,
not shoes.
The movie uses the English epic
poem, circa 700 A.D., as its starting point, and resembles the original in that it uses a lot of the same
names. It takes us to the Danish
kingdom of King Hrothgar (Anthony Hopkins), where the king
and his court have gathered to inaugurate a new mead hall, built for
the purpose of drinking gallons of
mead. The old hall was destroyed
by the monster Grendel, whose
wretched life consists of being the
ugliest creature on earth, and destroying mead halls.
To this court comes the heroic
Geatsman named Beowulf (Ray
Winstone), who in the manner of
a Gilbert & Sullivan hero is forever making boasts about himself.
He is the very model of a medieval monster-slayer. (A Geatsman
comes from an area of today’s
Sweden named Gotaland, which
translates, Wikipedia helpfully
explains, as “land of the Geats.”)
When the king offers his comely
queen Wealthow (Robin Wright
Penn) as a prize if Beowulf slays
Grendel, the hero immediately
strips naked, because if Grendel
wears no clothes, then he won’t,
either. This leads to a great deal
of well-timed Austinpowerism,
which translates (Wikipedia does
not explain) as “putting things in
the foreground to keep us from
seeing the family jewels.” Grendel arrives on schedule to tear
down the mead hall, and there is
a mighty battle which is rendered
in gory and gruesome detail, right
down to cleaved skulls and severed limbs.
Now when I say, for example,
that Sir Anthony plays Hrothgar,
or John Malkovich plays Beowulf’s
rival Unferth, you are to understand that they supply voices and
the physical performances for animated characters who look more
or less like they do. (Crispin Glover, however, does not look a thing
like Grendel, and if you are familiar with the great British character
actor Ray Winstone, you will suspect he doesn’t have six-pack abs.)
But I’m not complaining. I’m serious when I say the movie is funny. Some of the dialogue sounds
like “Monty Python.” No, most of
the dialogue does. “I didn’t hear
him coming,” a wench tells a warrior. “You’ll hear me,” he promises.
Grendel is ugly beyond all meaning. His battles are violent beyond
all possibility. His mother (Jolie) is
like a beauty queen in centerfold
heaven. Her own final confrontation with Beowulf beggars description. To say the movie is over
the top assumes you can see the
top from here.
A2 Edition
Canadian Press
Welcome to Mr. Magorium’s
Wonder Emporium, the strangest,
most fantastic, most wonderful
toy store in the world. It’s a tantalizing toy haven in which everything inside literally comes to life
– including the store itself – and
where marvels of every imaginable, possible kind, and beyond,
never cease... that is, until now.
When Mr. Magorium (Dustin
Hoffman), the store’s extraordinary 243-year-old proprietor, announces that he will at long last
hand over the reigns of his wonder-expanding store to his unconfident young manager, Molly Ma-
honey (Natalie Portman), the store
decides to throw an unusual tantrum. As a skeptical accountant
named Henry (Jason Bateman)
comes in to audit the Legos® and
Lincoln Logs®, not to mention the
Whodathoughts and Whatchamacallits, the once sparkling, colorsaturated Emporium is suddenly
embattled by mysterious changes.
The playful toys are all still there,
but they’ve turned gray and quiet
– and only Mahoney and Henry
can revive them if, with the help of
a superdexterous 9 year old (Zach
Mills), they can find the source of
magic inside themselves.
Top 20 Movie
Snacks
•Popcorn
• Junior Mints
•Reeses Pieces
•Reeses Peanut Butter
Cups
•Runts
•Butterfinger
•Buncha Crunch
•Everlasting Gobstoppers
•Icee
•Lemonheads
•Soft Pretzels
•Milk Duds
•Raisinets
•Nachos
•M&Ms
•Nerds
Britney Spears “Blackout” (Jive)
•Sour Patch Kids
By Nathan Rabin
Onion Wire Service
With his criminally overhyped, thuddingly anticlimactic comeback album, Kingdom Come, Jay-Z offered listeners insight into
the surprisingly dull life of a thirtysomething hip-hop mogul with nothing to prove and nothing much to say. The album’s disappointing sales suggested that fans found the view from the boardroom infinitely less compelling than the street-corner perspective of Jay-Z’s early work. On American Gangster, the hustler-turned-executive finds inspiration in the Ridley Scott film of the same
name, the lush atmosphere of ‘70s soul, and the bracing grit of blaxploitation.
American Gangster stumbles a bit in its Diddy-dominated first half, but it locks into a slinky retro nighttime groove with “I
Know,” which breathes new life into the heroin-seduction song with one of Pharrell’s mile-wide space-disco grooves. And the
album sustains that groove until the final track. Meanwhile, “Blue Magic” ruthlessly deconstructs the Neptunes’ sound until
all that’s left is organ vamping, spare percussion, and
vintage Jay-Z braggadocio. On the similarly minimalist
“Success,” Jay-Z and Nas reaffirm their potent chemistry over No I.D.’s sleazy funk. Gangster makes explicit
the implicit subtext of so much street rap: that studio
gangstas are generally more influenced by the contents
of their DVD collections than their personal memories.
Judging by this surprisingly strong return to form, Jay-Z
might want to consider spending less time in the office
and more time at the movies.
•Sweet Tarts
•Skittles
•SnoCaps
Source: www.rateitall.com
Cinema
By Steven Hyden
Onion Wire Service
For Bob Dylan, a song is a living thing that changes every time it’s performed. On I’m Not There, the soundtrack
to Todd Haynes’ new Dylan biopic, 34 Dylan songs are
performed by 29 artists that mostly try to re-create old moments instead of create new ones. Eddie Vedder and Stephen Malkmus don’t do much with “All Along The Watchtower” and “Ballad Of A Thin Man,” respectively, and
Mason Jennings draws the shortest straw by covering the
most well-worn Dylan track of all, “The Times They Are AChangin.’” At its best, I’m Not There retrieves lost gold from
the nether regions of Dylan’s back catalog. Sonic Youth
brings appropriate spookiness to the haunting title track,
an oft-bootlegged outtake from The Basement Tapes.
Whether in the hands of the man that wrote them or his
myriad musical admirers, the songs on I’m Not There continue to live fruitful lives., gs on I’m Not There continue to live fruitful lives.
TOP 10 CHRISTMAS MOVIES
Jay-Z “American Gangster” (Def Jam)
By Some Editor
Wikipedia News Service
“I‘m Not There” is a biographical film reflecting the
life of musician Bob Dylan. It depicts the iconic singersongwriter through seven distinct stages of his life by
using six different actors (Marcus Carl Franklin, Ben
Whishaw, Heath Ledger, Christian Bale, Richard Gere,
and Cate Blanchett).
It was co-written and directed by Todd Haynes. The
film has received a lot of press for telling its story using
rather non-traditional techniques, much like the poetic
narrative style utilized in Dylan’s songwriting.
It was rated R by the Motion Picture Association of
America (MPAA) for language, some sexuality and nudity.
The title “I’m Not There” is a reference to the Dylan
outtake recorded during The Basement Tapes (Sessions). It was not included in the studio album The Basement Tapes and, for years, could only be found on the
CD bootleg set The Genuine Basement Tapes and the
later remastered version (still considered a bootleg) of
that set A Tree With Roots. “I’m Not There” is one of the
most famous and highly regarded outtakes, not just of
the Basement Tapes, but of Dylan’s whole career. It was
never officially released until it appeared on the film’s
official soundtrack album.
The film is scheduled to open in limited release in the
United States on November 21, 2007.
Original Motion Picture Soundtrack “I’m Not There” (Sony)
By Armond White
The New York Times
“It’s just all out war. I can’t figure
it out,” remarks a deputy sheriff on
instances of violence—carnage—
that disrupt the Texas setting of the
Coen Brothers’ new film, No Country for Old Men. This is the Coens’
first crime movie since they began to
master the medium, and the way No
Country morphs from noir into contemporary-western moral struggle
makes it deeper, funnier and even
stranger than Fargo, their 1996 hit.
You know what national cataclysm happened since then, so it
should be no surprise that the Coens have made a crime movie that
seems quietly aghast at the likelihood of death and menace occurring on American soil. Unlike
American Gangster’s sensationalized crap, this is a crime movie/
western exercise that contemporizes the miasma of a world at war.
Following the novel by Cormac
McCarthy, a mysterious psychopath named Chigurh (Javier Bardem) collects underworld lucre
and destroys souls at random. A
Texas war vet, Llewelyn Moss (Josh
Brolin), trades good luck for bad
when he stumbles upon a cash-pile
leftover from a disastrous drug deal
and becomes Chigurh’s particular target. The drug deal and Moss
and Chigurh’s fates are tracked by
worn-down local lawman Sheriff
Bell (Tommy Lee Jones). The entire movie becomes a stakeout,
but with parts of the story deliberately
dropped-out—acknowledging what is unpredictable and
unknowable in life. The Coens test
audience perception through entertaining details of local color and
concentrated sequences that tease
tension (Moss hiding the loot while
being stalked by Chigurh).
These characterizations are pungent and vivid: Brolin’s Moss has
a square, half-Mexican chin like
a Rolando Merida drawing, Bardem’s Chigurh wears Richard III
bangs and a sallow disposition and
Jones’ Sheriff is timelessly worldweary. It would be pathetic to reduce/praise No Country as a thriller. The Coens’ technique goes far
beyond that. Moss, Chirgurh and
Bell’s appointments with mortality
lift the film from plot mechanisms
to a confrontation with fate.
Like The Man Who Wasn’t
There—the Coens’ finest film so
far—this movie stretches genre
sophistication in order to contend
with real-life complexity. Crit-
ics disregard the Coens’ political
smarts (their brilliant The Ladykillers wasn’t only a superior remake,
its final Bob Jones University joke
was the best political gibe of the
past decade) but to see No Country
as a mere thriller misconstrues the
Coens’ sensibility. They chart the
spiritual mood that ensnares us
but that most recent movies—with
the rare exception of Neil Jordan’s
The Brave One—merely vulgarize.
Coen artistry heightens our level
of perception. They reveal the first
murder with an astonishing image
of shoe sole scuff marks on a jail
floor that looks as avant-garde as
a Jackson Pollack painting—a harbinger of modern chaos that puts
post-9/11 terror in artistic focus.
But not sentimentally. When Sheriff Bell expresses existential fatigue,
the sorrow he vouchsafes to his father is actually spoken to himself
(thus to us in the audience). And
still, the Coens contextualize: Bell
is brought to reality when his father
tells him, “What you got ain’t new.
Can’t stop what’s coming. Ain’t all
waiting on you. That’s vanity.” The
Coens make that wisdom mythical and all encompassing—from
Vietnam to 9/11 to Iraq and to the
Texas homeland.
1.
A Christmas Story (1983)
2.
It’s A Wonderful Life (1943)
3.
Die Hard (1988)
4.
Christmas Vacation (1989)
5.
Love Actually (2003)
6.
The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)
7.
Home Alone (1990)
8.
Bad Santa (2003)
9.
Scrooged (1988)
10. The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992)
Source: Digg.com