Pages tagged “issue 17”

The Big Picture: New box set from one of the great American documentary filmmakers

Director: Errol Morris
Cinematography: Gates of Heaven: Ned Burgess; Vernon, Florida: Ned Burgess; The Thin Blue Line: Robert Chappell, Stefan Czapsky.
Studio information: MGM, 3 films on 3 discs.

Errol Morris is certainly one of the great American documentary filmmakers, and every time I revisit his first three films—1980’s Gates of Heaven, 1981’s Vernon, Florida, and 1988’s The Thin Blue Line—which are available on DVD in a new box set, I’m struck most by how firmly his technique was in place right from the start.

What’s most enjoyable about watching an Errol Morris movie for me is his absolute confidence in the medium. In the first two films he’s an invisible presence, neither seen nor heard, and in the third his voice appears only briefly at the end, in a recording of a telephone conversation. He doesn’t use any text on the screen to identify speakers, so we’re left with people telling their stories in their own words. And yet his movies have such attitude and conviction that they prove the power of cinema: like tiles of a mosaic, individual scenes may have a certain luster, but the real magic is in how they’re assembled.

Gates of Heaven is about pet cemeteries and the people who run them, visit them or live next to them. It’s frivolous on the surface but Morris subtly constructs themes of life and death, business and compassion, parents and children and, of course, people and their pets. The film is bizarrely ambiguous on whether these folks have crossed the line of sanity, but when Morris shows footage of back hoes digging up buried animals or caretakers practicing their electric guitars, it’s also unquestionably a comedy of fiascos and ironies.

He’s so good at getting people to talk that sometimes he accomplishes little else. His hour-long Vernon, Florida, is similar in spirit to Gates of Heaven, but it has a less cohesive net beneath its eccentric chatter. That’s a divide Morris has continued to straddle in his later films, sometimes developing a complex idea that transcends the individual parts—as in Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control—and other times he’s content to listen to people, plain and simple, as in his First Person Bravo series, which is now available on DVD. For television, Morris spices things up with a multi-camera contraption and stronger presence as an interviewer, but he still employs his favorite techniques—delaying important details and letting people reveal themselves gradually—like a musician returning to his best riffs.

All Morris’s films to date are enormously enjoyable, but in the most satisfying ones his careful attention to casual conversation serves a larger purpose, and there’s no better example than his third film, The Thin Blue Line, a riveting investigation of a Dallas police officer’s murder. Once again the characters tell their own stories, but each of them knows only a sliver of the bigger picture, and Morris pores over the clues like a film noir detective seeking the truth among the tales of late-night motels, hitchhikers out of gas, and the cruel hand of fate.

When the film was released, fate had another laugh: The Thin Blue Line famously got a convicted man out of prison after he’d wrongly served 11 years of a life sentence. Every filmmaker since who documents a miscarriage of justice surely has this film in mind. In his best movies, Morris cuts his interviews where they break naturally and fits them into a gradually sharpening picture. It’s a skill that serves investigators and filmmakers alike.

Gloriously distinctive series (at least for a while) in an overcrowded genre

Creator: Paul Attanasio
Starring: Daniel Baldwin, Ned Beatty, Richard Belzer, Andre Braugher, et al.
Studio information: A&E Home Video, 1056 minutes on 6 discs
Extras: 22 episodes in order intended by producers, one commentary, panel discussion, Barry Levinson acceptance speech

The police procedural is everywhere on TV, as omnipresent as home-makeover shows and ads for home-makeover shows; they’re the reality TV program of the made-up world. Never mind the characters, never mind the stories, never mind the bullets; they’re all the same, as generic as bar codes no matter the network or stars. Which is why Homicide, even at its worst, will forever play like TV at its best. It was different—Hill Street Blues a shade darker, a series in which life on the street felt more like death in the alley every single week.

It seems like forever ago that Barry Levinson and Tom Fontana’s show ran on NBC; it debuted after a Super Bowl and felt outrageous merely by its existence, as it was populated by the flawed, the chain-smoking, the hard-drinking and the harder-living. They were forthright screw-ups, good people haunted by the bad things they saw and could do nothing about.

Alas, its final season—now on DVD—isn’t Homicide’s best—partly because it’s the sole season not to feature Braugher, whose character had recovered from a stroke and decided it was time to hang up his badge. No matter the strength of some of the episodes or the direction (from the likes of Kathryn Bigelow, Joe Berlinger, Miguel Artera, Nick Gomez and Lisa Cholodenko), the show started to feel a bit too routine—more about the badge than the people who wore them. The cast had gotten prettier—and emptier. And the collection is missing its finale, Homicide: The Movie, which brought back most of the original cast for a proper, painful farewell.

Viva Wisonsin - 3.5 Stars
Freak Magnet - 2 Stars

A second look at alternative music’s hillbilly pioneers

Waaaay back in the ’80s, the Violent Femmes made being a hillbilly seem cool. Their folk-punk approach provided a musical outlet for fans of both R.E.M. and Black Flag, creating an unlikely strip of common ground. Fast-forward a decade and you find the trio soldiering on, recording a series of circa-1998 shows for what would become Viva Wisconsin, a live “greatest hits” album, then entering the studio two years later, to cut Freak Magnet.

On the live album, the Femmes sound ragged but oh-so-right, pounding their way through “Country Death Song,” “Hallowed Ground” and “Kiss Off” in perfect old-school alternative style. A few tracks—“Old Mother Reagan” and “Dahmer Is Dead”—lack pertinence with the passage of time, but overall, Viva Wisconsin serves as a true guilty pleasure. With sarcastic, solid originals like “Happiness Is” and “Hollywood Is High,” the boys try to achieve former glory on Freak Magnet, falling just short of success.

Now that the revolution has been televised, here’s the dogmatic play-by-play

At their best, Rough Guide volumes present a balanced consideration of facts and criticism. But under the ostensibly authoritative brand name, they assume the reader’s implicit trust in a single author covering a given genre. In the case of Peter Shapiro (who also penned guides to Disco and Drum ’n’ Bass) this seems a safe bet. Throughout the book he demonstrates a voluminous knowledge of hip-hop history and culture, peppering artist entries with sidebars on everything from mix-tape trading to wild-style graffiti. However, there’s a heavy feeling of “one man’s opinion” pervading the book. As a result, the reader most likely to thoroughly enjoy it is Mr. Shapiro himself. That’s not to say there isn’t much to admire here, as he gives props to everyone from old-school masters like Public Enemy to fringe artists like Three 6 Mafia, but one is advised to read with open eyes and ears.

Four Weddings director’s early effort tackles difficult issues

Director: Mike Newell
Cinematography: Gabriel Beristain, Michael Coulter
Starring: Anthony Hopkins, Jim Broadbent, Harriet Walter, Frances Viner
Studio information: Home Vision, 90 minutes
Original theatrical release: 1986

Though he gained international renown as the director of lighter-than-air comedy Four Weddings and a Funeral, back in 1986 Mike Newell made an early mark in theatrical film with this dark tale of a divorcé who becomes consumed by a friend’s child-custody battle with his lesbian wife. While sometimes clunky, the film is notable for standout performances by Jim Broadbent (as the cowed buddy) and Anthony Hopkins, whose seething bitterness gives it a decidedly unsettling tone. As the characters wend their way through a variety of painful emotional battles, the film considers a host of prickly issues: What’s a marriage? How can love so quickly turn to hate? What makes a good father? The answers are never simple, and the film’s greatest virtue is that it doesn’t attempt to offer pat answers.

The next generation of the Gram/Emmylou collaboration sparkles

Looks like Caitlin Cary’s found her real Gram Parsons. Since she left alt.country whiner Ryan Adams and his band Whiskeytown just a few years ago, Cary has released a couple solo albums and last year’s impressive Sweetwater, by indie supergals Tres Chicas. Meanwhile, she and fellow North Carolinian Thad Cockrell have performed together and appeared on each other’s individual works. But never have their voices sounded as in tune as they do on these 11 gems.

Begonias opens on a high note—Cockrell’s angelic sobs trading verses with Cary’s husky Linda Thompson croon on the lilting country rocker “Two Different Things.” It just gets better from there, until, a quarter of the way through, the two voices are floating just south of Heaven on the dreamy “Please Break My Heart,” its sublime pedal steel and piano conjuring fuzzy images of a lonely ’50s diner that never really existed. From its spare acoustic ballads (“Whatever You Want”) to its full-on honky-tonk barnburners (“Party Time”), its story-songs (“Conversations About a Friend”) to its pensive spirituals (“Big House”), Begonias comes as close as anything ever has to the sweet heartbreak of Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris’ early-’70s one-two punch, G.P. and Grievous Angel.

Jamband with loyal following stumbles in the studio

The Grateful Dead found it notoriously difficult to document their live magic in the studio. “You have to go to the shows, man,” they said, and they were right. With One Step Closer, String Cheese Incident faces a similar dilemma. They may be a jamband, but this isn’t a jam album, and the songs by themselves (though some toy with Middle Eastern rhythms and other exotica) are simply not strong enough to make me want to flick my lighter. Like Kings of Leon (whose own recent studio effort, Aha Shake Heartbreak, was similarly emasculated) String Cheese Incident needs room to stretch out. On songs like the appropriately entitled “Until the Music’s Over,” the group is just starting to build a groove when the darned thing fades out. It’s useful as an artifact of that really killer show, perhaps, but One Step Closer is no Workingman’s Dead and is ultimately forgettable as a standalone.

The sultry, lowdown sound of heartbreak and heroin addiction

Though sometimes dismissed as a “white man’s Miles Davis,” Chet Baker was an undeniably gifted jazz stylist, whose sensitive trumpet playing and languid singing technique are nicely represented on this excellent 2-disc set. The “trumpeter” disc starts with a warmly thrilling take on his signature tune, “My Funny Valentine” from his apprenticeship with the Gerry Mulligan Quartet, and continues with ample evidence of his rich tone and technical prowess, including the gorgeous “When Lights Are Low” with Al Haig, Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones. The “singer” disc features a peerlessly swinging take on “But Not For Me,” a stunning reading of Elvis Costello’s “Almost Blue,” and ends with a keenly melancholic reprise of “Valentine” from his final concert appearance. Underscoring his music’s bittersweet quality, Ernest Hardy’s liner notes make for often-heartbreaking reading, recounting Baker’s tumultuous, ultimately tragic life.

Recent opening act for Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson, unsurprisingly, finds Americana template a snug fit

The Greencards may hail from Great Britain (fiddler Eamon McLoughlin) and Australia (bassist Carol Young and mandolin player Kym Warner) but Weather and Water offers slice after juicy slice of Americana.

Although the men show their finesse with a few graceful instrumentals, it’s Young and her vocals that prove the clear standout, delicately adding ache and warmth to “The Ghost of Who We Were,” “Weather and Water” and the Patty Griffin-penned “What You Are.” The ’cards rely little on flashy romps, favoring moody, catchy lyrics and steady picking. A comforting, intimate blend of genuinely performed roots music.

Disarmingly anthemic power pop filtered through some unexpectedly theatrical Southeastern sun

Aaron Marsh possesses a soaring voice and supple style that at times seems to channel both Freddie Mercury and Jeff Buckley, but it’s the band’s not-so-delicate balance of outsized hard rock and intimate romantic pop that makes Copeland’s second full-length such an intriguing affair. While the noisy, riff-propelled “No One Really Wins” and near-metallic “Love is a Fast Song” play up the group’s obvious arena aspirations, such miniatures as the ethereal “Kite” and the drop-dead-gorgeous “Hold Nothing Back” are more appropriately suited to the Broadway stage. Both extremes work wonderfully, knit together by Marsh’s acrobatic—often astonishing—singing.

It’s spring 1989, and teenage curiosity-seekers have packed themselves into a high-school auditorium for an annual male “beauty pageant,” meant to be a humorous analog to the more serious female version. But of course, the strutting jocks are taking things far too seriously. Unintentional homoerotic overtones abound.

Into this burlesque strides a skinny freshman, previously known—if at all—as quiet, unfailingly sincere and, most of all, serious. But with a smirk on his face, no shirt on his chest, and—oh yes—sporting goggles, flippers and towel, this “swimmer” strides about the stage flexing his largely nonexistent muscles. The audience goes wild, and the Darwinian high-school hierarchy has been temporarily upended.

The freshman, one Sammy Beam, obviously doesn’t care one bit about popularity. As a result, he becomes the most popular kid at Chapin High School (the South Carolina alma mater he and I share) for at least the rest of the year.

Dangerous though it may be to judge character based on an event 16 years in the past, a few things haven’t changed: Beam, introvert to the core, isn’t afraid to stick his neck out, and he doesn’t like to be pigeonholed. And now, again, he’s popular almost in spite of himself. Of course, he laughs when I proffer this interpretation.

“I guess you could look at it that way,” says Beam, now better known by his musical alter ego, Iron & Wine, and a more grown-up ?rst name, Sam. “I prefer to look at it like it was a stupid, dumbass…” he chuckles, momentarily trailing off. “But yeah, I was into doing something interesting.”

Doing “something interesting” seems to have been the impetus behind In The Reins, the new collaborative EP from Iron & Wine and Tucson, Ariz., rock collective Calexico. There are 2,254 miles between Beam’s Miami home and Tucson, and almost as many between the four-track home recordings that put Beam on the map and his most recent effort, but one gets the sense he likes it that way.

“You make the best of the tools that you have,” he says of the early recordings, compiled on 2002’s The Creek Drank The Cradle and 2003’s The Sea & The Rhythm EP. “It was fun to do the home-recording stuff but it wasn’t what the whole thing was about. [And] I think it would be silly or really boring to put the same record out over and over again.”

Southwest, ho
Once word of Iron & Wine and Calexico’s collaboration leaked, tongues began wagging. How would the hushed, emotionally harrowing dynamics of Beam’s songs mesh with Calexico’s expansive, eclectic, Southwestern vibe? Quite well, it seems.

Beam’s songs were even flexible enough to accommodate an operatic interlude en Español adorning the loping 6/8 shuffle of opening track, “He Lays in Reins.” The part came courtesy of Salvador Duran, a local performer Beam met in a hotel lobby after the first night of recording and invited into the studio.

“[Salvador] starts making up some vocals and singing along, and Sam was just completely blown away,” recounts Calexico’s Joey Burns. “Salvador loosely translated them as being on this long road in somewhat of a struggle and a heartache. And Sam just thought it was perfect. It worked so well with the lyrics he had written.”

Although it’s not as obvious as Iron & Wine’s Woman King EP (released earlier this year), Beam says there’s a theme at work. “I thought it would be fun to pick some songs that had to do with some kind of entrapment, whether it was in a good way or a bad way,” he says. “‘In the Reins’ to me means a lot of different things. So each of them has to do with something in the reins of a relationship or mortality or these kinds of things.”

“They’re a bunch of my old songs that … would have never made it to an official release,” Beam adds. “I thought it would be fun to reinterpret those.”

Mortality certainly comes to the fore on the disc’s last track, “Dead Man’s Will,” a litany—presumably for surviving relatives—of what to do with the effects of someone recently passed, right down to “this bone.” Appropriately, a skeletal John Convertino marimba reinforces the whispered lines, among the first Iron & Wine lyrics anyone ever heard some five years ago.

Son of the suburban south
As Beam puts it, it’s been an “ugly road,” and a long one, since he and I last crossed paths in late-’80s suburban South Carolina. After graduating, Beam decamped for an undergraduate education in Virginia, where he met his wife, before getting his film bona fides at Florida State University. By the time most people caught up with him, Beam was teaching cinematography in Miami and recording in his spare time.

That changed when South Carolina-turned-Seattle friend Ben Bridwell (Carissa’s Weird, Horses) coaxed Beam to submit “Dead Man’s Will” for inclusion on a compilation accompanying the debut issue of art magazine Yeti. Many hearing the track assumed Beam was some sort of backwoods rustic, but the reality—if interesting—wasn’t quite as romantic.

Chapin, some 20-odd miles from Columbia, forms an interesting variant on the suburban motif. Driving through the area on Highway 76, the main two-lane drag, you’d think you were in the middle of nowhere. Yet every southward turn leads to a peninsula jutting into Lake Murray, containing impressive homes, largely occupied by Columbia’s corporate and professional class, and one lakeside golf course.

The kids at Chapin High School generally think well enough of themselves to poke fun at their rivals, further up the road, as rednecks and rubes. So it isn’t tarpaper-and-tin-roof shacks, but it’s certainly a representative slice of the modern South.

Although Beam, like many, initially ?ed his Southern aesthetic heritage—he chuckles about a high- school love of skate-punk—he’s returned to embrace the region’s distinctive imagery and cultural signi?ers in his work. EP tracks like “Red Dust” and “Prison On Route 41,” like many of his songs, trade in Southern imagery without lapsing into cliché.

At the same time, his film work has given him a solid grasp of how to structure his music, as Burns testifies: “I think he has a pretty good command of the way things naturally come together. So, whether it’s music or art or film, lyrically he definitely has a good sense of structure and phrasing and breadth and space. I learned a lot from working with him. There are a couple of tracks from our new Calexico record that I would love to get him on, just to get his genius on there.”

With such a fruitful collaboration and promising partnership, Burns and Convertino are looking forward to a joint tour. “The idea,” Burns says, “is to have both bands—Sam’s and our own—each do its own set, and at the end come together and do the EP and a couple extra tunes,” Burns says.

Although Beam readily admits “performing in general is not really my bag,” you can bet that the irreverent, risk-taking star of high-school pageants won’t miss it.

Q: What do you get when you cross one of the best lyricists of his generation with the producer responsible for the subtle texturing of Modest Mouse’s The Moon and Antarctica and Iron & Wine’s Our Endless Numbered Days?

A: An album that could very well be the best of 2006 if the first six tracks are any indication.

On Golden Age of Radio and Hello Starling, 27-year-old Idaho native Josh Ritter rose from a crowded field of dudes-with-guitars by crafting some of the most delicious lines in folk-rockdom (“All the other girls here are stars / You are the northern lights”) and delivering them in a cadence that carried as much gravitas as a young Springsteen. It was enough for the readers of Ireland’s main music rag, Hotpress, to vote him songwriter and male singer of the year, titles for which Ritter beat out a few other little-known names like Bob Dylan, Chris Martin and Thom Yorke. But if there was a flaw to 2003’s Starling, it was that while peers Joseph Arthur, Conor Oberst, Dave Bazan and even Sam Beam were experimenting with secret sauces in the studio, Ritter continued cooking with a recipe that’s been passed around for the last four decades.

Enter knob-twiddler Brian Deck and you have one of the young century’s heftiest batch of songs, buoyed by the blips and bleeps that transformed his Chicago blues-rock outfit Red Red Meat into folktronica pioneers Califone. With Deck halfway through mastering Ritter’s first album for V2, due next January, Paste visited the songsmith and his producer at Clava Studios in Chicago.

On songs like “Peter and the Dragon,” “Best of the Best” and “Good Man,” Deck’s stamp is instantly evident in the subtle wash of keys, shimmering Hammond and synthetic buzzes and whirls. But finger-picked guitar and mandolin provide a folky balance. “Girl in the War” sets the tone for an album focused on the failings of religion and religiosity. Ritter shakes his guitar at the heavens, singing, “the keys to the kingdom got locked inside the kingdom / And the angels fly around in there but we can’t see them / I’ve got a girl in the war, Paul, I know they can hear me yell / If they can’t find a way to help her they can go to hell.”

The AM rock stations of the ’70s that might’ve played “Lillian”—with its “la-diddy-da” chorus—were well before Ritter’s time. But, Deck chimes in, not before his producer’s time. Sam Kassirer attacks the piano’s high register, and Wurlitzer gives the song its shaggy, rock vibe.

The last song I hear is “Idaho.” And on this haunting song about his home state, a quiet, rhythmic guitar plucking is the only accompaniment Ritter needs.

Hometown: Auckland, New Zealand
Members: Jonathan Bree (vocals, guitar, bass, other instruments); Heather Mansfield (vocals, keyboards, other instruments.)
Fun fact: After they’re done touring, these Kiwis plan to settle in Pittsburgh. Why? “We met some very lovely new friends,” says Mansfield. “It’s quite a cheap place to live. And I think it’s really beautiful.”
Why they’re worth watching: Sheer fun from start to finish, The Brunettes have spent the spring and summer opening for The Shins and Rilo Kiley, charming the socks off U.S. audiences.
For fans of: The Cardigans, Mates of State, The Modern Lovers, ‘60s girl groups.

Upon encountering New Zealand’s Brunettes and their U.S. debut, Mars Loves Venus—with its perfect, bubblegummy, three-minute pop songs featuring constant “he said/she said” vocal interplay—you’d be tempted to conclude group principals Jonathan Bree and Heather Mansfield are a real-life couple. And you’d be right… three years ago.

“We started going out maybe six months after the band started,” Mansfield recollects. “Then we broke up, and our band broke up for a little bit as well.”

After the false start, the pair settled on a different dynamic for their partnership, which resembles Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra with the sensibilities of The Shangri-Las. “Now it’s very much like a brother and sister relationship,” Bree says.

Their tunes are silly at times—sporting titles like “Loopy Loopy Love” and “Too Big For Gidget”—not surprising for a songwriter like Bree who claims Jonathan Richman as a major in?uence. Twee though Bree may be, the effect is never less than convincing, particularly when backed by a pop orchestra of vibes, horns, glockenspiel and much more.

And as persuasive as the lyrical lovers’ spats seem, it’s now all in good fun. “I don’t think when we’re singing songs to each other we’re fluttering our eyelids,” Bree says, chuckling.

Hometown: Conroe, Texas (just outside of Houston)
Fun facts: The worst job he ever had was selling vacuum cleaners to suburban Austin housewives; he graduated dead last (237 out of 237) in his college class; he once dated a girl because she worked at Hooters. (“Working at Hooters was a pretty hip thing,” says Carll. “It’s gone downhill since then, but at the time it was like dating a Playmate. I was a young pup—she was a woman of the world.”)
Why he’s worth watching: His independently released second album, Little Rock, topped the Americana chart, an unheard-of feat for an unsigned artist.
For fans of: Townes Van Zandt, Ray Wylie Hubbard, Joe Ely, Steve Earle.

Hayes Carll’s throwback Texas-country sound testifies to just how little contemporary music he listened to in his formative years. Neither the quiet Houston suburb where he grew up, nor the dry Arkansas town where he went to college had much of a music scene, so his listening consisted of Kris Kristofferson and Townes Van Zandt records, rather than the latest alt.country emanating from Austin. “Essentially it just came from isolation, from living so far away from everything that I never caught on to what trends were out there or what was hip,” he explains. “I had a very select list of artists that I listened to … and none of them were born after 1960.”

A couple of those Texas legends lent their talents to Carll’s self-released sophomore album, Little Rock, a collection of 11 honky-tonk rockers and dusty ballads that firmly planted the 28-year old troubadour in the progressive-country tradition. Guy Clark co-wrote the brooding “Rivertown” and Ray Wylie Hubbard collaborated on the playful Southern-fried romp “Chickens.”

“I see so many writers these days who think that it all started with Pat Green or Ryan Adams,” says Carll. “These guys have some great things going on, but music doesn’t begin and end with them.”

Dischord: One DVD Set, Four Opinions

Inspirational, Celebrational!

Steve LaBate: As a preschooler in my ’hood there weren’t many cooler shows to be hip to than The Muppets.
Cory Albertson: What amazes me is how much of the adult humor I missed. When you’re that young all you care about is Gonzo blowing himself out of a cannon …
SL: Or Animal going Keith Moon on his drums. The show’s a bright spot on the continuum of smart, kid/adult comedy running from The Flintstones to Shrek.
CA: And they even touched on social issues. Miss Piggy was the first and only pig feminist.
SL: It was sort of like All in the Family meets SNL…
CA: Meets The Carol Burnett Show.
SL: With puppets.
CA: Who cavorted with campy ’70s stars like Florence Henderson, Jim Nabors and Twiggy.
SL: There are some great sketches here, too—like when Fozzie robs a saloon with fruits and vegetables. Plus Kermit’s hard-hitting celebrity interviews.
CA: And that choral number when Piggy thrusts her bosom in Kermit’s face. Remember, this was a primetime show in its day.
SL: Jim Henson was a genius. The Muppet Show band—Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem—has the most rock ’n’ roll moniker of all time. And you can’t beat the Swedish Chef, one of the most dynamic characters in television history.
CA: Don’t let Piggy hear you…
SL: She and Kermit were up there with the greats—Romeo & Juliet, Sid & Nancy. And Johnny Carson—God rest his soul—had nothing on Kermit as a host. I’d give this set 5 stars with a bullet.

Dear God, Why?

Statler: Waldorf, have you heard they’re actually releasing the first season of The Muppet Show on DVD?
Waldorf: What? I don’t care about your BVDs!
S: You fool, turn up your hearing aid. I said DVD.
W: Oh, DVD. Can you believe it? Now millions more will have to sit through all 24 episodes.
S: Please, no! Sanctuary!
W: I hear it’s even getting covered in these pretentious entertainment magazines.
S: Boooring!
W: Why would anyone want to see The Muppet Show again? Fozzie’s running gags and awful jokes—what was with that banana-in-the-ear bit?
S: That bear’s act reminds me of Charlton Heston.
W: Charlton Heston doesn’t tell jokes.
S: Well? … Hey Waldorf, have you ever thought there might be life after death? I was thinking about it in the cab on the way here.
W: Death Cab? Sounds like one of these new-fangled singing groups.
S: No, life after death, you fool. Do you believe?
W: Every time I leave the Muppet theater.
S: Waldorf, was there anything you liked about The Muppet Show?
W: Hmmm… Tough to say.
S: How about the Frog?
W: No.
S: The Pig?
W: Nah.
S: Well it must be the guest stars…
W: Nope. Well, there was Candice Bergen… that minx. Second thought, she’s no better than the rest of the animals on the show.
S: Well heck, there’s nothing left but the closing credits…
W: That’s it! Show’s over, let’s go home!

Iranian filmmaker turns lens westward

Cinematography: Seyfolah Samadian
Studio information: New Yorker Video, 83 minutes
Original theatrical release: 2001

Though it may sound strange, Abbas Kiarostami’s documentary about Ugandan orphans is a joyful movie. Invited by a local charitable organization to document the country’s plight, Kiarostami wanders with a digital camcorder through villages that appear populated mostly by women and children. And far too few women at that, given the sheer number of kids who’ve lost parents to the HIV epidemic. Although he allows us to glimpse this situation, Kiarostami refuses to view Uganda solely through the lens of disaster. Blending a sense of purpose with a thirst for cultural details, he segues with heartbreaking ease from the rhythms of African music to the percussive sounds of the coffin builders plying their trade, just an everyday juxtaposition for people in Uganda. But his camera continually returns to thickets of children who perform crazy dances or leap into view; they’re as eager to enter the frame as Kiarostami is to pack them in.

At first, he seems an unusual choice to direct this film, since he hasn’t previously made a movie outside Iran, but once Kiarostami sets foot on African soil his usual preoccupations are suddenly universal. His rapport with children, his fascination with the contrasts of wealth and poverty and his humanistic approach to people living in social collapse are as relevant here as they were in the Koker region of Iran. Despite the locale, ABC Africa is both new and familiar for those who know Kiarostami, and it’s a great introduction for those who don’t.

Biopic examines a ’60s activist/author who never lost his fervor

Directors: Deb Ellis and Denis Mueller
Studio information: First Run Features, 78 minutes
Extras: Bonus footage, biographies, trailer gallery, Zinn’s recommended reading list

Howard Zinn first heard the crackling truths of Woody Guthrie’s “Ludlow Massacre” on the eve of a cultural revolution. Sprouting from a working-class Brooklyn villa, he latched onto the emerging ethos of anti-Nixonism in the ’60s. After earning a pulpit of his own, he loudly called the American war machine to task.

You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train is an end-of-the-road homage to Zinn the historian, professor and activist, a man most likely to be remembered for his book, A People's History of the United States, and least likely for his arson charges while tenuring at Boston University.

Narrated by Matt Damon (who once, as Will Hunting, pointedly namedropped Zinn), the film serves primarily as a time capsule for a towering, albeit aged, leader of the New Left. It occasionally bends from biopic to polemic, but not distractingly so. The clout of Zinn’s worldwide impact still remains intact, begging us moderns to ground our future in the fugitive compassion of the past, rather than the unyielding and cyclical centuries of warfare.

Screen adaptation of London play reveals the equally complicated worlds of high math and relationships

Madness and genius have long enjoyed a certain uncomfortable kinship. Philosophers and psychiatrists continue to ponder the awkward relationship between profound creative thought and mental instability, but the correlation (and its implication) never gets any clearer. Still, it all makes a strange kind of sense: the most affecting breakthroughs are typically based on the kinds of fragile, unthinkable truths the rest of us instinctually shy away from. Maybe in order to think outside the box, you need to live outside it, too.

Proof details the career, descent into madness and premature death of graphomaniac Robert Llewellyn (Anthony Hopkins), a revolutionary mathematician tended to by his shaky, sardonic daughter Catherine (Gwyneth Paltrow, reprising her stage role from London’s West End). After Robert dies, Catherine’s sister, shiny-haired currency analyst Claire (Hope Davis) reappears, and Robert’s protégé, Hal Dobbs (Jake Gyllenhaal), begins scouring Robert’s notebooks, searching desperately for a moment of lucidity. Catherine is expectedly wary of Hal’s intentions, but, in a moment of post-coital bliss, slips Hal a groundbreaking mathematical proof. When she claims authorship of the proof, Hal is skeptical; meanwhile, Claire is unsure of Catherine’s mental steadiness, coaxing her to New York City, where plans for institutionalization loom.

Proof is based on David Auburn’s Tony- and Pulitzer Prize-winning play; adapted by Auburn and directed by Shakespeare In Love’s John Madden (who also led Paltrow in Proof’s London run), the film follows the script scrupulously, permitting only a handful of circumstantial tweaks. Typically staged on one set (the gently deteriorating back porch of the Llewellyns’ Chicago home), the film inflates the space, venturing on campus, upstairs and into an Armani dressing room—but barely. Proof is insular; its world is small. Gritty and tense, the film eschews largeness, avoiding swelling strings and fancy camerawork in favor of lingering close-ups of Paltrow’s harried face, eyes twitching and blank, or sad portraits of Catherine and Robert stabbing plates of limp spaghetti, debating time lost.

Both Madden and Auburn are intent on clarifying the author of the proof in question, dissipating, through extended flashbacks, the narrative tension they so artfully establish. Yet Auburn is oddly cagey about the specifics of the proof (Hal half-mumbles something about primes), and the obfuscation of numbers is maintained throughout—we are constantly reminded that math is the terrain of academics, reserved for the heavily guarded, non-inclusive inner circle of masterminds who lurk under bad haircuts and behind thick glasses. It’s unsurprising, then, that when the essence of the proof is finally explained, in the film’s final scene, Madden tugs the camera back and waves in music—obscuring, one last time, the sticky particulars.

Catherine, being female, undereducated and wary of institutions, is presumed incapable of true discovery; to an extent, she perpetuates the illusion that genius requires degrees and appointments, dismissively dubbing the textbooks in her bedroom “window dressing.” But Proof consistently challenges its own archetypes, and the central tension of the film—is Catherine crazy? Is she a genius?—is prodded relentlessly. Proof may pose the question better than the overly sentimental A Beautiful Mind, and more simply than Amadeus, but ultimately, it’s still unclear whether genius can ever actually exist independent of insanity.

Short-lived series picks up where equally short-lived Freaks and Geeks left off

In 2000 Judd Apatow, executive producer of one of the most beloved and short-lived series in recent memory, pitched a new show by evoking the title of his late show: “I want to make Freaks and Geeks,” he told Fox execs, “only funny.” Which was not to disparage Freaks and Geeks—a distillation of creator Paul Feig’s worst high-school memories—but to conjure warm feelings for the show that lived only a single semester on NBC, who eternally suspended the freaks and geeks before they had a chance to learn how to draw an audience. The result was a series just as short-lived: Undeclared, which moved from high school’s hallways into a college dorm and likewise ran for just one season on Fox before graduating to oblivion. It debuted to critical acclaim in September 2001 and was already in trouble by the following February, when Apatow sent out a note to TV critics that ended with the line, “Pray for us.”

Given how poorly Fox treated the show, perhaps we should’ve known Undeclared never stood a chance. Like Freaks and Geeks, it was too real for an audience suckered in by reality TV—painfully real, in fact, like a glimpse at old yearbooks in which we were horribly awkward, misguidedly arrogant and defiantly rebellious without having anything to rebel against. Its storylines were timeless (the blush of first love, or at least first sex; the schemes and scams of young adults too young to know better; being accountable for your actions without understanding the meaning of responsibility), and its characters were so familiar they looked like our own reflection. The audience not only related to Jay Baruchel’s Steven Karp or Carla Gallo’s Lizzie Exley, but knew them as though they were kin; and we’d all had roommates like handsome Lloyd (Charlie Hunnam) or resident assistants like creepy Lucien (Kevin Rankin). What we didn’t have were the guest stars: Ben Stiller, Will Ferrell, Kyle Gass, Amy Poehler, Fred Willard and, more or less, the cast of Freaks and Geeks.

Like the Freaks and Geeks boxed set, the four-disc Undeclared collection is wonderful, essential and cram-packed with extras—an especially nice bonus for a show that didn’t even appear in reruns. You get the unaired “God Visits” episode Fox thought too heretical (which is actually a rather subtle meditation on faith); an alternate version of an episode featuring Ted Nugent as a campus lecturer; the standard outtakes and deleted scenes; a Museum of Television & Radio appearance featuring cast and creator; and a concert from Loudon Wainwright, who played Steven’s divorced dad. Alas, so much still doesn’t feel like enough: You’ll spend just enough time with the freshman class to want to graduate with them, only to discover they were expelled by a network that flunked.

Slightly unhinged director crafts intense, slow-moving war story

The pace of Werner Herzog’s first film Signs of Life is so slow that Herzog himself now seems unnerved by it. “It’s the pace of life,” he sighs on the DVD’s clunky audio commentary. Tasked with defending an ammunition dump they know will never be attacked, wounded German soldiers wait out the end of the Second World War on a remote, sun-drenched Greek island. As boredom sets in, one of the soldiers snaps, taking control of the fortress and terrifying nearby villagers with a nightly display of fireworks.

The black and white film stock and the sparseness of the visual landscape give the movie the feel of an Ernest Hemingway novel. Like Hemingway, Herzog is a troubled soul who reveals his true nature in the actions of his protagonists. As such, Signs of Life is a quiet, but bold declaration of intent from an artist destined to become one of the primordial figures in modern German cinema.

Oddly selected and sequenced EP collection is still prime Stereolab

The Stereolab discography is the ultimate record-collector obsession. Through its 14-year career, the band has issued a mind-boggling array of LPs, EPs and singles, each release typically coming in more than one edition. But every few years Stereolab makes it easy for less-rabid fans to hear everything by assembling a “Switched On” compilation to gather rarities and B-sides. This 3-CD set (which also includes a DVD of music videos) is something different, collecting the band’s EPs since the mid ’90s in their entirety. There’s a ton of great music here, ranging from Moog-driven drone rock (the epic “Nihilist Assault Group”) to Stereolab’s peerless lounge pop (“Miss Modular”). The downside is that the tracks are sequenced seemingly at random, resulting in rude stylistic and chronological leaps. It also doesn’t help that many of these EPs led off with an album’s first single, meaning that people with a few Stereolab records will already have a half-dozen of these songs. Still, considering that between 1994 and 1998 Stereolab was functioning at a peak few bands could ever hope to match, there’s too much great music here to pass up.

Radio Mali’s acoustic masterpiece

Since he’s now retired from professional music, we have to take what we can get of famed Malian blues musician Ali Farka Toure. On the double-disc Red & Green, Nonesuch—the label that generously brought Toure’s music to the rest of the world with Radio Mali and Talking Timbuktu—remasters albums cut in ’79 and ’88. These untitled gems (names refer to the color of the original album sleeves) contain exquisitely minimal renderings of Toure’s interpretations of local Sonrai, Peul and Tamascheq styles, the last of which Toure believes to be a major influence on American blues. The melodic interplay of guitar, vocals and calabash reveals stripped-down sounds rich as Baaba Maal’s epic Djam Leelii—superb fullness rendered by minimal instrumentation. Songs like “Chérie,” although light on low end, exhibit the same tendency toward trance as other Islam-based folk styles a la gnawa. In the repetition of floating guitar lines, steady calabash rhythms and Toure’s piercing—at times mournfully beautiful—vocals, the strength of ten orchestras flows out of four able hands.

Texas storyteller Keen once again at the middle of his game

With a catalog stretching back over two decades, Texas tunesmith Robert Earl Keen has had his share of near-brilliant ?ashes alternating between the two bedrock poles of Lone Star songwriting: serious and screw-it. His latest leans toward the former, and while musically it’s one of his sharpest (credit guitarist/producer Rich Brotherton), the material isn’t quite realized enough to hold a listener’s interest like such early ’90s high watermarks as A Bigger Piece of the Sky or Gringo Honeymoon. At times engaging (the standout leadoff track, “For Love”), at times frustrating (a wasted cameo by Ray Price on the trifling “A Border Tragedy”), it’s ultimately a mixed bag from a talented but frequently uneven artist.

The Norwegian Air loses its chill

For a while there Röyksopp’s 2001 debut Melody A.M. was almost as ubiquitous as Moby’s Play, as both landed a track on every downtempo compilation in the racks. But Torbjørn Brundtland and Svein Berge took their time with the follow-up, and from the beginning it’s apparent they were ready to try something different. “Triumphant” opens with a dramatic piano figure and builds a wall of sound verging on bombast, setting the tone for a record of expansive and crystalline electro-pop. Vocals pepper roughly half the tracks, some from guest divas (Karin Dreijer on “What Else is There?” ably channels Björk’s intensity), but mostly from the guys in the producers’ chairs. Too fey and European to find a home on American radio, The Understanding is nonetheless perfect for a top-down ride to the beach. Huh, a summer record from the Arctic Circle? Well, in Röyksopp’s home, Tromsø, the June sun shines 24 hours a day, so why not?