Artist: James Blunt. Album: Back to Bedlam.
Essentially one long set piece, this solid genre pic is the perfect antidote to a rainy afternoon—Mos Def's grating man-child routine notwithstanding. (In terms of serviceable vehicles for aging action idols, this is the kind of movie Firewall should have been.) It's easily director Richard Donner's most competent work since 1994's Maverick. Grade: B
When it's good, Curtis Sittenfeld's prep school picaresque is ingratiatingly so—by turns nostalgic, observant, funny and heartbreaking. When it's not so good, the story becomes grating, its neurotic heroine insufferable, its supporting characters somewhat arbitrary and occasionally inscrutable. Nevertheless, this is a solid first novel—deeply felt, literate and, finally, rewarding.
If you can get past Spike Lee's rote racial commentary and a penchant for putting his actors on dollies that's hardened into a visual tic, Inside Man stands as one of the director's more accessible movies. The plot is admittedly transparent and the story overstays its welcome by about forty minutes, but the cast is outstanding—particularly Jodie Foster in a confident, ingratiating turn as a high-class fixit woman. The only full-on miss here is Terence Blanchard's bleating score. It compromises every scene it intrudes upon. Grade: B
Artist: Télépopmusik. Album: Angel Milk.
Tracy Chevalier's debt to Vermeer is as plain as her simple, evocative prose in this imagined account of the artist's complicity with his subject and muse. The author's unspoken, and perhaps unintentional, debt to the writer Guy de Maupassant is equally profound, if more subtly summoned by the story's gently sustained sense of life's ironies, justices and injustices. This is a book best enjoyed, like some good paintings, in a single sitting.
Schlocky, stilted and didactic until it finds its Baz Luhrmann-meets-1984 doesn't-know-it's-a-musical musicality, and then it's a guilty pleasure. The usual Wachowski caveats apply: terrible college-dissertation dialog, particularly in scenes where characters debate each other dryly rather than have actual conversations, and a certain unrelenting fetish for gender-dissociative violence. V is basically Evita with a bang—a baroque, dated, contradictory, problematically compelling extended pop-operatic video. It's not exactly good, but it has some sweeping movements. Grade: B-
Soundtrack from the Motion Picture. Composer: James Horner.
Lyrical and slight, The Brief History of the Dead combines a magic-realist meditation on the afterlife with intriguing hints of science fiction, but the story ultimately flounders in the wake of author Kevin Brockmeier's endless similes and metaphors. Lovely as the imagery is, the omnipresence of the word "like" begins to whine like tinnitus. The penultimate chapter is so choked with purple, belabored visuals that it's practically one unicorn and a rainbow away from reading like a precocious teenage girl's diary. And the conclusion is an abrupt copout, period.
Author Peter Lefcourt charmingly acknowledges the datedness of this 1991 novel in the reprint's new foreword, but he doesn't touch on the usual timeless limitations of tomes about Hollywood—i.e., the unconvincing savoir-faux-familiar name-dropping and the informed cynicism and contempt for the industry at odds with a predictably unrealistic storyline and deus ex machina-tooled characters. Nevertheless, it's a light, upbeat read, and there are some decent laughs to be had at the expense of the typical parade of slutty starlets and irascible executives. Personal peeve: a lame romantic sideplot involving two thinly-written principals that does nothing but eat up whitespace.
Artist: Smashing Pumpkins. Album: Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness.
Artist: Persephone's Bees. Album: Nice Day (Remixes, Vol. 1) - EP.
Artist: Goldfrapp. Single.
Artist: Hooverphonic. Album: Blue Wonder Power Milk.
Artist: Natalie Walker. Album: Urban Angel.