Pages tagged “issue 46”

DVD Release Date: Aug. 5
Director: David Leaf
Starring: James Brown,  Al Sharpton, Cornel West, Martin Luther King Jr.
Studio: Shout! Factory

Important footage of a legendary event

It might seem like hyperbole that a man—let alone a musician—could spare a city from almost certain devastation and chaos, but that’s the premise of The Night James Brown Saved Boston, the centerpiece of the three-disc I Got the Feelin’: James Brown in the ’60s. Armed with archival footage and the recollections of Brown’s band members and luminaries ranging from Cornel West to Al Sharpton, documentarian David Leaf makes a comprehensive and compelling case that Brown’s performance on April 5, 1968—and Mayor Kevin White’s grudging decision to broadcast the show live on local television—kept Boston from joining the litany of American cities that were coming apart at the seams in the aftermath of Martin Luther King’s assassination. But the story is much more than a point-by-point account of that legendary event, as time is spent charting Brown’s rise from poverty to his unexpected ascendancy as a self-made spokesperson for African-American empowerment. And for those who desire more proof of Brown’s mesmerizing charisma as a performer, the uncut broadcast of the Boston performance, a recording of a 1968 show at The Apollo, and a handful of television appearances will eradicate any doubts.

Release Date: June 3
Director/Cinematographer: Alison Murray
Starring: Murray, Derek, Todd Lewendon, Wendy Schale, Andrea Oliver, Steve, Lindsay Berniche, Travis, Firecracker, Aimee, Skot
Studio/Run Time: MJW Productions, 50 mins.

Up-and-coming director’s simple but affecting train-hopping doc

Before Alison Murray garnered acclaim for directing Ellen Page in Mouth to Mouth, she made Train on the Brain, a concise meditation on modern train-hopping. Murray illegally rode the rails across North America, sometimes in relative comfort and sometimes in filthy coal cars, with an assortment of young punks and self-described hobos. Train was originally released in 2000, and Murray’s greenness is apparent in her sometimes-facile narration, especially in her condescension toward the workaday slaves she espies from her freewheeling boxcar. But the characters—from Murray herself to the slant-smiled Todd—are indelible. When one of them does a funny dance in funny sunglasses for Murray’s camera, it’s just like a set piece from a Hollywood film, except it’s real, spontaneous and moving: These kids admirably prize freedom over comfort. And Murray, even in this neophyte work, is amazing behind the camera: She films the rolling American landscape with astonishing technical facility and painterly grace.

Watch the trailer for Train on the Brain:

Compelling new music balances flawed film

The National is an intensely necessary band right now. Pop has, in fact, begun to eat itself, with far too many artists to retain in our all-too-brief memory loops. The National seeks to retrain us in the art of listening. Their albums are beautiful, elaborate slow-growers, articulating uncertainty and angst with a coldly wistful humor. They operate with a kind of post-rock remove—they’re slightly scruffy guys who rarely, if ever, call attention to themselves outside the confines of the stage. Making themselves the subjects of a film, then, is a dangerous scramble to the edge of a limb. For a band with music that’s often described as “cinematic,” there’s a risk that replacing the visions listeners have fabricated in their own imaginations with images mandated by the band could be an intrusive, aggressive and unwelcome gesture.

Has LaMontagne ever not been mellow?

Ray LaMontagne’s grainy voice has regularly been compared to Van Morrison’s and Tim Buckley’s. On his third album, he initially comes across like one of those unnaturally sincere singer/songwriters, like James Blunt or Damien Rice. But there’s more to him than achingly pretty acoustic folk songs. “Hey Me, Hey Mama” is actually a lusty rag—slowed to a tasteful crawl, but convincing nevertheless, thanks to its jazzy banjo and LaMontagne’s laidback delivery. Even better is “Meg White,” a sweet love letter to the White Stripes drummer that lacks only a request for her to check “yes” or “no.” “Meg White, you’re alright,” LaMontagne sings, savoring the simplicity of the words. “In fact, I think you’re pretty swell.” On slower songs like “Sarah” and the title track, his voice proves his best instrument, which doesn’t make him any different from other earnest strummers out there. It does, however, invest these songs with a distinctively twilit poignancy.

Listen to Ray Lamontagne's "Meg White" from Gossip in the Grain on his MySpace page.

Holland enjoys herself on fourth album

Jolie Holland writes songs packed like retablos with autobiographical details and Dia de los Muertos figures, but it’s her voice that animates them. She slurs her words and blurs her phrasing, chewing her consonants and creating a distinctively drunken drawl. Holland’s fourth—and perhaps best—album (featuring contributions from collaborator M. Ward and guitarist Marc Ribot) foregoes the smoky speakeasy atmosphere of 2006’s Springtime Can Kill You for a more contemporary roots sound, which provides a more evocative backdrop for her signature vocals. Despite singing such despairing lyrics, she sounds more commanding and confident than ever on “Mexico City” and “Your Big Hands.” The bleak murder ballad “Love Henry” and “Fox In Its Hole” revisit her old noir-jazz vibe, but sound more connected to the here-and-now instead of some vague there-and-then. Holland half sings/ half laughs the closing cover of Guy Lombardo hit “Enjoy Yourself,” sounding like she’s truly taken that advice to heart.

Listen to Jolie Holland's "Love Henry" from The Living and the Dead:

My boyfriend Joe and I have been together for years—through high school, college at separate universities 120 miles apart, and beyond. Many people find this unusual, even unfathomable, so we’re frequently asked, “How do you do it?” My answer is simple, and three-pronged: Love, unlimited wireless plans and bad movies.

Two discs of delicious country-soul

As instantly, pleasingly right as the micro-genre's name implies, country-soul hits all the pleasure points on could want: sweet evocations, swaying choruses, cooing backup singers, horns that burst into sunbeams and descend into bottomless heartache in the same swoop, and pedal steels that do the same. Though blues is arguably the only missing link between these two sounds, that doesn't make their fusion any less glorious. On these two volumes compiled by German label Trikont (Dirty Laundry and the new, basically interchangeable More Dirty Laundry), collector/curator Jonathan Fischer lovingly lushes beyond Ray Charles, uncovering a teeming crate-dug niche perfect for the singles age.

DVD Release Date: Sept. 9
Director/Writer: Michael McCullers
Cinematographer: Daryn Okada
Starring: Tina Fey, Steve 
Martin, Amy Poehler
Studio/Run Time: Universal, 99 mins.

Fey and Poehler have been funnier

Science has given us nothing if not new life for the “you want to put what, where?” schtick. Baby Mama takes the age of fertility options and mines it for body humor, breezing by more subtly funny moments along the way.

DVD Release Date: June 24
Director: Anthony Mann
Writers: Charles Schnee, Niven Busch (book)
Cinematographer: Victor Milner
Starring: Barbara Stanwyck, Walter Huston
Studio/Run Time: Criterion Collection, 109 mins.

Greek tragedy in the old West

In A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies, the iconic filmmaker says that, of the four Westerns director Anthony Mann released in 1950, only “The Furies could have been a Greek tragedy.” There are also grace notes of King Lear and Dostoevsky present amid the film’s severe landscape. So it’s no surprise that, when The Criterion Collection added the first Western entry to its esteemed catalog, it opted for such an idiosyncratic choice. Rather than gunplay and granite-faced cowboys, The Furies instead simmers with land rights, hostile business takeovers, and the crackling Electra complex between Stanwyck and Huston. Huston plays cattle baron T.C. Jeffords, while Stanwyck plays his daughter, Vance. Alternately deemed a she-fox, unbridled filly and herd of stampeding cattle, Vance is intent on inheriting the family land—known as the Furies—until her father brings home a new bride and hangs her paramour. It’s then that we learn the adage, Hell hath no fury like Barbara Stanwyck scorned.

Watch the trailer for The Furies:

Engaging, scattershot follow-up to engaging, scattershot debut

Carving out a niche in pop electronica is like raising a banner to say, “License these songs!” Thanks to TV and film, artists like Imogen Heap, Kate Havnevik and Jem are heard constantly, but recognized far less. So, for music supervisors, Jem’s latest album Down To Earth is every bit as soundtrack-friendly as her 2004 debut Finally Woken. But for the rest of us, it’s every bit as uneven as that bracing debut. For each infectious groove—like the combustible banjo funk of “Crazy” or the Latin-flavored “I Want You To...”—there’s a tired trip-hop beat (“Keep On Walking”) or a treacly MOR ballad (“Got It Good”). Lyrical clunkers like “becoming a bitch is not what I got into music for” (“I Always Knew”) and  “I’ve got brains and a hot body too” (“Crazy”) induce winces, though the Welsh singer’s cool alto almost sells it. But when Jem’s good—as with throwback dance track “Aciiid!” and the beautiful piano and strings of “You Will Make It”—she’s very good. Your willingness to forgive the misfires may indeed depend on the (inevitable) accompanying onscreen visual.

Listen to Jem's "On Top of the World" from Down to Earth:

Cocoa Puffs fiend successfully tackles long-form fiction

Pop-culture addict Chuck Klosterman has polarized readers and critics with the unique brand of observational writing in his nonfiction books. His autobiographical glam-metal opus Fargo Rock City (2001) explored the effect of hair bands on a young man growing up in rural North Dakota. The 18 essays contained in Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs (2003)—arguably his most popular book—cover The Sims, Billy Joel, Saved by the Bell, evangelical Christianity and much else. Killing Yourself to Live (2005) is a road-trip book about places where rock stars died, but also an examination of three girlfriends from Klosterman’s past and their impact on his life. And Chuck Klosterman IV (2006) is mainly a collection of previously published articles and columns.

Platform: PS3, Xbox 360

Finally, a movie-inspired game that puts up a fight

Call me the imperfect weapon. Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Conspiracy transforms players into a bulletproof Hollywood assassin. Taking cues from the Bourne films’ breathless editing, the game propels you through frantic gunfights, car chases and melees. But somehow I’m not up to the task. As Jason Bourne, I regularly find myself catching one hunk of lead too many, sprawling bloodied across the marble floor of the Zurich International Airport. I find myself mired in epic fistfights. Falling over and over to aggressive enemies I retreat into a safe but sluggish rhythm—a hail of punches, turtling behind my forearms, then another flurry. Finally, my adrenaline builds and a Polaroid flash explodes in the back of my lizard brain. I nimbly sidestep my opponent, wrench his arm and slam him face-first into a nearby copying machine. But it’s no good. I barely catch my breath before another stooge corners me and cuts me down. This is a movie game, I tell myself incredulously. This is supposed to be easy. It’s also supposed to be awful. Surprisingly, Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Conspiracy is neither.

A welcome return to the musical borderlands

Drummer John Convertino inspires a bit of déjà vu with the rim clicks that open Carried to Dust’s lead track “Victor Jara’s Hands.” They recall the beginning of “Quattro (World Drifts In),” the second track on Calexico’s 2003 masterwork Feast of Wire.

For the past 30 years, Neil Young has been a patron of the Mountain House, a logger’s roadhouse hidden away in a redwood grove at the pinnacle of Kings Mountain, 40 minutes south of San Francisco. He immortalized the place in his Greendale DVD and “Unknown Legend” video, and today he’s in the rustic dining room moving a small mound of couscous around a plate with a salad fork.

Beloved folkie turns in reliably pretty effort but fails to turn heads

When people describe an artist as underappreciated, what they usually mean is that cynical journalists, merciless market forces and an uneducated listening public have conspired against this person. They blame, in other words, everyone except the artist. And they’re usually right to do so. But Dar Williams—who has been quietly adored by a relatively small but loyal fan base since she debuted on the folk scene in the early 1990s—is a more complex case.

I hunched sniffling and red-eyed over the sea of copied cassettes scattered across the peeling grey hardwood floor of my Athens, Ga., living room. Sick-to-my-stomach heartbroken, solid food was out of the question: A liquid breakfast would have to suffice. White-knuckle clutching a plastic half-gallon of orange juice I'd dumped out halfway then filled back up with vodka, I leaned back and took a long, deep slug. After a while, empty container in hand, I passed out on the floor.

Release Date: July 25
Director: Margaret Brown
Cinematographer: Michael Simmonds
Starring: Max Bruckmann, Stefannie Lucas, Helen Meaher, Joseph Roberson
Studio/Run Time: Cinema Guild, 80 mins.

Ebony and ivory converge at America's oldest Mardi Gras

Separate, but equal. This doctrine that governed segregation in the Deep South is the relic of another era. But not in Mobile, Ala., home of America’s first Mardi Gras celebration, which began in the port city in 1703 before migrating to New Orleans and greater symbolic renown. Three centuries later, the descendents of Mobile’s African slaves have their own celebration, and the members of old slave-owning white families enjoy a separate Mardi Gras. Director Brown, a Mobile native, takes her video camera inside the city’s mystic social clubs, masked balls and parade culture, charmingly anatomizing the enduring ways of eccentric Southern ritual. Unexpectedly, the 2007 Mardi Gras she documents ends up being a breakthrough, as seasonal “royalty” from both the white and black communities cross the color line in a decisive, rather than cursory, way, helping redeem decades of casual racism. It’s a quietly inspiring, affectionately told story.

More shadows and mirages from desert rock’s central shaman

American deserts spawn rich and convoluted musical chains. In the same way that the tangled Masters of Reality/Queens of the Stone Age/Desert Sessions/Kyuss clique corkscrews through the heart of hard rock, the Friends of Dean Martinez/Calexico/Giant Sand family tree entraps the live roots of modern Americana. Sixteen albums in, Howe Gelb’s visions are darker and still subtler than those of his musical cousins. With a rasp that often strangely resembles Shawn Mullins, Gelb’s raps are cooler than a caved gila monster’s stomach scales. Often hushed and challenging, his greatest device remains the tactical use of open space, delineated sharply by skeletal guitars and the loose insinuation of movement, as limber basslines sneak through “Muck Machine” and “The New Romance of Falling.”

A satirical smile-along on the popular social networking site

Is writing about Facebook a bit like dancing about architecture?

Perhaps so. But as Forbes has now named Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg the youngest self-made billionaire in history (a testament to Facebook’s more than 80 million active users), it seems that Facebook is finally ready for our literary attention.

Smile!
By: Bud Scoppa

On Brian Wilson’s alternately gorgeous and gut-wrenching seventh studio album, he comes to terms with his 40 years in the desert, simultaneously reconnecting with the California Dream he helped create as a boy genius, back before it all became too much and he retreated into madness. If the album tells us as much about the fervently dedicated support system—including wife Melinda and longtime collaborator Van Dyke Parks—that brought him to this moment of near-miraculous clarity as it does about the man himself, this subtext is a necessary part of the story.

Platform: Nintendo DS

Definitive point-and-click, first-person adventure jumps from CD-ROM to DS—newly tiny, still impossible

Although Myst is an undisputed classic I’d never played, I approached this DS port cautiously. For every gamer who raves about its immersive mystery and austere storytelling, another laments its withering difficulty and austere storytelling. The player must discover the secrets (why are these two brothers trapped in, like, magic books?) of an eerily unpopulated island. It turns out Myst’s boosters and detractors are both kinda right. Wandering the island alone—trying to make sense of various bizarre objects and arcane clues—is a one-of-a-kind experience. But I found myself stumped almost immediately, and as someone right between casual and hardcore on the gaming continuum, I can definitely say that Myst isn’t for casual gamers. Still, this seminal moment in gaming history is worth a go if you missed it the first time around, especially if you like high-concept, mostly silent art films, but wish you had to continually tap the screen while you watched them.

Platform: Windows XP and Vista

I will stop at nothing when electioneering

I’ve cast a ballot in two presidential elections so far, and both times, my guy lost. Surely, I’m not the only luckless voter who’s spent the past eight years bemoaning democracy’s lack of a do-over option. Fortunately, fantasy trumps reality once again, thanks to The Political Machine 2008, a turn-based strategy game that puts players on the campaign trail in a quest for electoral dominance.

The veteran actor—best known for playing geeky megalomaniac Dwight Schrute on NBC’s The 
Office—moves out of his perennial supporting-actor niche with new big-screen comedy 
The Rocker. It’s his first starring role, a natural 
opportunity to inquire about some of his other firsts.

An uneven but generally pleasant sketchbook

Maybe it’s the Dylanesque qualities of his voice that overset the bar, but Rodney Crowell’s current attempts to be topical are just too on-the-nose. In songs like “The Rise and Fall of Intelligent Design,” Crowell preaches to the presumably converted with more candor than craft. Crowell’s better moments are more personal. “Moving Work Of Art” features heartfelt vocals and effortlessly symmetrical lyrics. And, while “Closer to Heaven” begins with a fairly cranky list of Crowell’s likes and dislikes, the refrain is an endearing affirmation of a cozy spot in his life. Producer Joe Henry succeeds in putting a Lanois-lite polish on everything, adding a subtle but not overbearing gravitas to the songs that allows Crowell’s humor to slide through without clashing. In addition, Doyle Bramhall II and Greg Leisz gild the corners of the songs with noble guitar work that, at moments, is more intricate than the songs themselves.

Fumbling indeed

In 1993, Liz Phair, Björk, PJ Harvey, Belly, and The Breeders all released well-received albums, heralding that the decade of Women in Rock was underway—no matter how dubious that designation seems today. Yet none of them boasted the sales figures or overwhelming influence—ill or otherwise—of Sarah McLachlan’s third album, Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, which inspired not only the Lilith Fair tours but also the eventual sanitizing of that very movement. Fifteen years later, these dozen songs haven’t aged particularly well. Against programmed beats that sound tinny and lifeless, her vocals—artfully restrained on previous albums—sound bluntly emotive, and her once incisive songwriting turns Hallmark saccharine. This Legacy Edition includes a DVD as well as McLachlan’s live album The Freedom Sessions, which strips the songs to their acoustic essentials. Most sound better here than their studio counterparts, recalling the dark soulfulness of McLachlan’s 1991 album Solace, which remains her truest statement.

Previously unassuming Swede makes stab at over-the-top pop

“A Swedish massage to your ear”—those are the words that greet you at Tobias Froberg’s MySpace page, and his third full-length release works hard to exemplify this tagline. Always pleasant, often soothing and entirely innocuous, Turn Heads begins with a rollicking bit of twee pop on the appropriately titled “Blissful” and then shuffles into a series of dainty, soft-rock ballads and swirling piano-pop epics that threaten to leave you asleep on the masseuse’s table. Having garnered resolutely positive press for the ’60s folk-pop of 2006’s Somewhere in the City, here the shaggy Swede trades Paul Simon for Paul McCartney and inherits a generation of ’70s singer/songwriter clichés in the process. To his credit, Froberg carries it amazingly well, as very few songwriters are so adept at creating lushly orchestrated arrangements and swooning multi-part harmonies. But, despite his winning way with melody, he’s often just too ordinary, and his tendency toward easy rhymes and heartsick hooks extinguishes the subversive spark that separates the great singer/songwriters from the merely good.

[Above: The work of Shepard Fairey in Beautiful Losers]

Release Date: August 8
Directors: Aaron Rose, Joshua Leonard
Cinematographer: Tobin Yelland    
Starring: Rose, Mike Mills, Jo Jackson, Harmony Korine
Studio/Run Time: Sidetrack Films, 90 mins.

An unexpectedly moving bohemian rhapsody

No one as interesting as the artists in this concise-yet-comprehensive documentary can afford storefront rents in the Lower East Side anymore, but once upon a time, in the early 1990s, they could. The ragtag assortment of creative misfits who coalesced around Ludlow Street’s Alleged Arts Gallery took a punk-inspired approach to designing everything from skateboards and record sleeves to railroad cars, rock videos and movies. Mike Mills (Thumbsucker) and Harmony Korine (Gummo) may be the best known, but design-heads already know about the late Margaret Kilgallen and her Mission District-inspired pieces, or Shepard Fairey’s spooky “Obey” street posters. Directed by Alleged founder Aaron Rose, Beautiful Losers traces a familiar path from adolescent discontent to pop sensation (often via some brilliantly vernacular work’s use as advertising) but foregrounds the artists’ often painful yet awkwardly sweet stories. As Mills suggests, it’s mostly about saying all the things your parents refused to hear. Ah, anomie! The fountain of art.

Randy Newman’s sardonic first album covered father/son dynamics, childhood obesity and pork-barrel politics, and in less than four minutes told the story of a young couple from marriage to death. The record’s trenchant humor and chamber-pop melodies created a startling friction, establishing the signature sound of a precocious curly-headed slurry-voiced satirist who would go on to become one of America’s most important songwriters.

Not-so-sweet Matthew rages and rocks on 10th studio effort

Bob Dylan may have famously said “you don’t need a weather man to know which way the wind blows,” but Matthew Sweet knows different. Atmospheric and emotional pressure builds on this new album as the tightly wound singer/songwriter alternately rages and slogs through one predicament after another, questioning everything. Like Edgar Allan Poe before him and Noel Gallagher after, the Lincoln, Neb., native uses climatic conditions to measure his state of mind—which careens wildly between consternation and audacity, eventually ending up at acceptance, and a kind of psychic rebirth as he works through his own cycle of grief and confusion. Along the way he conjures sunlit days that are far from idyllic, for in the Sweet-ian universe, light obscures more than it reveals; it’s in the dark parts of the heart and mind that true revelation exists. Nobody else makes uncertainty sound half this good. His best outing since 1999’s In Reverse. 

Like Plimpton? You’ll mostly like Plimpton 2.0

Wall Street Journal sportswriter and NPR commentator Stefan Fatsis sets out to personally discover the workings of a militaristic, multimillion-dollar industry that treats human beings as living, breathing chattel: professional football.

Pop whiz poses cute, slips on messy feelings

Pure pop can be wickedly seductive, as Sweden’s Kristoffer Ragnstam well knows. On his fascinating second album, the intricate soundscapes promise relief from the mundane world, with fuzzy guitars, itchy rhythms, layered voices and juicy melodies converging for a familiar yet surprisingly fresh experience. Reflecting Ragnstam’s roots as a drummer, the peppy title track sports a hot, sample-worthy percussion break, while “May I Admire Her” erupts into a rousing chorus with arena potential. But mere escape isn’t the goal: His uneasy, albeit catchy, songs expose the tortured psyches of needy characters coping with terrible relationships and gnawing cosmic angst. In the bleary “Many Ways,” he tells a lover bluntly, “We only had fun thanks to alcohol”; on the gorgeous “Heard About My Own Death On The Radio” he wallows in self-pity to moving effect. Ragnstam’s inspired fusion of frayed nerves and pretty tunes gives Wrong Side Of The Room a serious emotional wallop.

Another trip inside the British psych-rocker’s vault

In the early ’80s, a record-store clerk in a sleepy Southern college town discovered Robyn Hitchcock via the English singer/songwriter’s band The Soft Boys. While a product of the punk era, The Soft Boys trafficked in a deeply unfashionable blend of psychedelia and jangly ’60s-style pop. Hitchcock, the band’s lyricist, sidestepped both politics and rote boy/girl pop narratives, opting instead for cracked, surrealist metaphors that were equal parts Syd Barrett’s twee madness and Bob Dylan’s stream-of-consciousness wordplay—all delivered with a voice like a loopier John Lennon.

It’s 2003 and I’m sitting in a Midwestern college auditorium with ratty orange seats. The air conditioner is cranked despite it being a cool March night, and that’s good, because I’m buzzed from pre-show beers and wearing a multi-layered thrift-store suit. “The battle of the bands only happens once a year,” my sagelike companion observed earlier in the day. “We should treat it with the respect it deserves.”

Isaac Brock’s high-school pal and first vanity label signing neither modest nor mousy

Except for a few of you, the name Sam Jayne probably has no special meaning. Some may recognize him as ex-leader of Olympia-based indie noiseniks Lync, as one of Modest Mouse frontman Isaac Brock’s oldest friends, or even as the cousin of late Alice in Chains singer Layne Staley. But most are unaware that Jayne is now six full-length albums into his career as frontman for the indescribably psychedelic Love as Laughter—and that’s a shame, one that his quartet’s latest offering, Holy, aims to correct. Jayne’s music is at once disorienting and familiar. It touches all the right “wrong” sounds (classic shaggy-dog Neil Young on “Kenny and Jim,” vintage Talking Heads on the vaguely funky “All Parts of Me,” and let’s not bend our brains too vigorously pondering what part of Margaritaville “Coconut Flakes” hails from), but the album combines them in ways that only someone operating slightly outside the boundaries of reality would ever dream.

Retro-classy solo debut from former mall punk

If you ever bought one of those Epitaph Records Punk-O-Rama compilations in the late ’90s, you might vaguely recall Devon Williams’ pop-punk band Osker. (They also played the house-party band in the movie Crazy/Beautiful.) And your jaw might crack the table when you hear the direction he’s taken on his solo debut. It’s not uncommon for lapsed punks to turn to country or folk (an urge Williams slakes as the guitarist for Lavender Diamond), but how often do they become ’60s pop-rockers with a penchant for syrupy chamber strings? Echoes of Williams’ old group can be heard in the rollicking cadences of “Stephanie City” and “Bells” but, mostly, Carefree is for fans of Cass McCombs, Belle and Sebastian and John Vanderslice. The production sparkles with reverb and cavernous drums, and from the marching strings of “Please Be Patient” to the harmonized girl-group “ooh-oohs” of “One and One,” Williams has found a context in which his lush tenor can soar.

Release Date: Aug. 22 (limited)
Directors: Tia Lessin, Carl Deal
Cinematographers: P.J. Raval, Kimberly Rivers Roberts
Starring: Kimberly Rivers Roberts and Scott Roberts
Studio/Run Time: Zeitgeist Films, 96 mins.

Intimate documentation of Hurricane Katrina

Like a Shakespeare adaptation, Trouble the Water’s plot will be unreassuringly familiar: levee breaches, failed bureaucracy, general awfulness. Even without adding to the well-covered Hurricane Katrina narrative, documentarians Tia Lessin and Carl Deal still get it completely right. Edited around home videos by Kimberly Rivers Roberts, a vivacious 24-year-old resident of New Orleans’ 9th Ward, and subsequent footage by Lessin and Deal, Trouble the Water is an intimate, necessary take on Katrina. Roberts shoots instinctively, portentously capturing the first windblown shingle as the storm builds. Though ignoring backstories until the third reel (and thumbnailing rich 9th Ward culture into the reductive bin of “poverty”), the filmmakers learn from the missteps of their sometime collaborator, Michael Moore, and keep the commentary implicit. (Kim’s reference to “this President Bush character, whoever he is,” is as scathing as it needs to get.) Trouble the Water doesn’t make sense of Katrina or the N’awlins diaspora, but it communicates them wholly.

Watch the trailer for Trouble the Water:

Shining a light into the long night of the soul

August Brill is an aging book reviewer. He lives in a haunted house.

Haunted by grief. Brill has recently lost the use of his leg in a car accident, beloved wife to cancer, son-in-law to divorce and precious granddaughter’s lover to murderers. Such tragedies, for any of us, threaten to cave in the soul.

Release date: Aug. 22 (limited)
Director: Andrew Fleming
Writers: Fleming, Pam Brady
Cinematographer: Alexander Gruszynski
Starring: Steve Coogan, Amy Poehler, Catherine Keener, David Arquette, Skylar Astin, Phoebe Strole, Elisabeth Shue
Studio/Run Time: Focus Features, 94 mins.

High schoolers get silly for silly high schoolers

Fusing transparently edgy gross-outs to “hey-let's-put-on-a-show!” teen-musical fare, Andrew Fleming’s Hamlet 2 is its own variety of stupid/smart back-to-school comedy. Crappy American accent or not, Steve Coogan is all bitchy obliviousness as talentless actor Dana Marshcz, who’s washed up as a high-school drama teacher in Tucson, Ariz. “You’ve produced nothing worth saving,” the school paper’s precocious critic tells him when the administration cuts Marschz’s program entirely. Occasionally, characters like Joseph Julian Soria’s intense Octavio and even Marschz himself (a recovering alcoholic in a crumbling relationship) show signs of depth as they stage Marschz’s Hamlet sequel, like maybe they’ll say something useful about race or sexuality or art. But it’s all a tease. Fleming and South Park writer Pam Brady go for gags, the final show a pastiche involving time travel, Jesus and the Gay Men’s Choir of Tucson. Amy Poehler is histrionic as an ACLU lawyer. Marschz's musical is glorious. The movie, though, is just alright.

Watch the trailer for Hamlet 2:

Veteran singer/songwriter proves it’s never too late to make a first impression

With the help of producer Joe Henry, Loudon Wainwright III has been excavating his own past, and he’s disgorged some hibernating gems from his first four albums, revisiting ghosts that haunted him 35 years ago. But the acerbic singer—one time pretender to Dylan’s mighty throne, and pater familias of singers Rufus and Martha Wainwright—didn’t just rehash his own history, he reinterpreted events from his messy biography, tearing the scabs off old wounds and letting them breathe fresh oxygen, turning his formerly sparse and spiny castigations about alcohol, diffident parenting and fame into something much more insightful and profound. Whereas the younger Wainwright was just pissed off and erudite, here his ruminations on the same events are more bittersweet, and flawed, putting a more human face on his formerly shrill denouncements of himself and those near—and not-so-dear—to him.

Shared sights and insights from a sharp-eyed music critic

Amanda Petrusich has been suffering from genre meld. In the old days, the charts made clear distinctions—rock, country, rap, soul, R&B. No more. How did it happen that so many musical acts can now no longer be easily categorized? How should a music writer describe modern sounds? Perhaps most vital, what’s next?