Artist: Nini Camps. Album: Come Away – Single.
Artist: The Submarines. Album: Honeysuckle Weeks.
Duncan Jones' modest sci-fi head trip draws inspiration for its solid production design from the usual sources, although the director presents his lunar backdrops with a distinctive tilt-shift charm. What the film lacks in a sturdy premise—suggesting a world that's a few shades too engineered to be plausible—it makes up for with a refreshing lack of the genre's tendency toward horror, despite a freeze-dried evil-corporation subplot. Moon is a sad, dreamy little diorama about the cost of life amidst lifelessness and the residue of humanity in unexpected places. Grade: B
Artist: Spinnerette. Album: Ghetto Love – EP.
More like The Warmed Over. The usual cocktail of dick jokes, misogyny, homophobia, lazy setups and lazier acting. Lick it up, baby. Lick. It. Up. Grade: D
Artist: Hockey. Album: Too Fake – Single.
Artist: Seabear. Album: The Ghost That Carried Us Away.
Artist: Black Eyed Peas. Album: The E.N.D.
Artist: New Young Pony Club. Album: Fantastic Playroom.
Pixar finally devotes an entire feature to its animators' longstanding fetish for cantankerous codgers. As such, Up is an efficiently calculated, if somewhat trite, meditation on aging, loss and—aw fuck, it's a bunch of pet jokes wrapped around an animated short's worth of plot, drizzled with Michael Giacchino's almost diabetically treacly score. As much as I enjoyed its surfaces, the movie left me somewhat unsettled. It's basically the sentimentalized story of a friendless shut-in who becomes violent once his wife's no longer around to share his codependence. When his increasingly erratic behavior prompts the state to institutionalize him, he flees the country—accidentally kidnapping an ADHD-addled Boy Scout along the way. The two journey to Donkey Kong Country—I mean Paradise Falls, South America—where they proceed to murder an elderly explorer (voiced by Christopher Plummer since Peter O'Toole already did Ratatouille) and steal his zeppelin—returning Stateside just in time for the boy to receive some merit badges and the old man to face no consequences whatsoever for his crime spree. At least the 3-D wasn't super-obtrusive. Grade: B
Artist: Matt & Kim. Album: Grand.
The butler did it. Grade: B-
Artist: Camera Obscura. Album: My Maudlin Career.
Artist: Estelle. Album: Shine.
Artist: David Kilgour. Album: A Feather in the Engine.
The latest reframing of the ad-lib Terminator mythos brings both schlock and awe to the franchise, with Sam Worthington's young-dumb-and-full-of-come cyborg making up for Christian Bale's nuked-over messiah. Director McG's workmanlike craftsmanship references better, more austere science-fiction when it isn't laboring under a summer blockbuster-mandated Bed Bath & Beyond Thunderdome yolk. This installment doesn't so much move the story forward as it doesn't set it back (in time or otherwise). Grade: B
Artist: The Handcuffs. Album: Electroluv.
Artist: Michael Giacchino. Album: Star Trek (Music from the Motion Picture).
A rollicking, resounding franchise resuscitation—busy with charismatic casting, youthful exuberance, shiny production design and general space-sexiness. The likable leads turn in surprisingly subtle performances, restoring primal emotion to the Prime Directive. My main beef, almost grief, with the architects of the new beginning is this: As fearless as their reinvention of the Star Trek universe is, the genocidal violence they inflict to do so is also, at its molten core, pretty heartless. Grade: B+
Artist: Say Hi. Album: Oohs & Aahs.
Artist: The Boxer Rebellion. Album: Union.
Artist: Eagles of Death Metal. Album: Peace Love Death Metal.
Artist: White Lies. Album: To Lose My Life.
Legends of the Fall meets Airwolf … meets Thunder From Down Under. Grade: D
Artist: Club 8. Album: Spring Came, Rain Fell.