Artist: Walter Meego. Album: Voyager.
Insofar as Oliver Stone's W. is as disappointing a film as its namesake is a president, the exercise may be said to sustain some sort of meta exegetic verisimilitude. On its own terms, however, the movie simply doesn't rise to the level of its constituent talents. The screenplay frequently feels like a series of familiar leftist-blog snarking points, and Stone's movie-of-the-week direction and the chintzy production values don't do much to enrich or inform that impression. The supporting cast is an embarrassment of riches: clearly numerous purported "liberal media elite" wanted to take part in this barn-burning; but in the absence of either historical sweep or topical immediacy, the film feels strangely becalmed, stranded in some basic-cable Bermuda Triangle. What little Stone does to enliven the proceedings—portraying Texans through a haze of gluttony that recalls the final line of George Orwell's Animal Farm—just feels lazy and passive aggressive. Only Thandie Newton's monster-in-the-closet creepshow portrayal of Condoleezza Rice—suggesting she wandered in from a Michael Jackson video directed by Tim Burton, and rendering Jennifer Jason Leigh's Kate Hepburn riff in The Hudsucker Proxy a lithium stupor by comparison—aspires to a level of oddball hatchetry that, failing authenticity, sustains amusement. You almost wish she and Dubya could have starred in their own hyper-hypo office-stalker rom-com, away from the dour demands of pseudo-factual rectitude. Grade: C-
Artist: Ennio Morricone. Album: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack).
Artist: Gogol Bordello. Album: Super Taranta!
Body of Lies is distinguished not so much by what's onscreen as who's behind the scenes: Ridley Scott—no stranger to this terrain, having covered it both exceptionally (Black Hawk Down) and with qualifications (the sumptuous but narratively challenged Kingdom of Heaven). Lies doesn't straddle those efforts; it's more interested in bridging Syriana and the later Bourne movies. Its ultimate failure to do so, given its pedigree, is a sticking point. While Scott's participation ensures that the performers and locales are more specific and vivid than Hollywood's usual "over there" fare, the episodic and occasionally preachy screenplay could really just as easily have been rendered by the more bombastic Scott-eur, Tony, in generic "prestige" mode. The result is a serviceable but forgettable political thriller—although Mark Strong deserves notice for his sleek, imperious supporting turn as a Jordanian superspook whose charismatic scene-stealing presence only serves to underscore that the film is bent on following the wrong leads. Grade: B-
Artist: Weezer. Album: Weezer (Red Album).
Artist: Uh Huh Her. Album: Common Reaction.
Artist: Band of Horses. Album: Everything All the Time.
Artist: The Decemberists. Album: Picaresque.
Artist: Youth Group. Album: Casino Twilight Dogs.
Artist: Seabear. Album: The Ghost That Carried Us Away.
Artist: Black Lips. Album: Good Bad Not Evil.
Artist: Ola Podrida. Album: Ola Podrida.