Astralwerks Fatboy Slim has been cobbling together sample-rific singles for a decade now. It’s amazing how many of them became instant pop-culture classics: “Praise You,” “The Rockafeller Skank” and “Weapon of Choice,” fun even without watching Christopher Walken waltz his way through an empty hotel. Indifference to 2004’s “Palookaville” has rendered Slim irrelevant for the […]
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Don Peris – Go When the Morning Shineth
From Pennsylvania came the cold and The Innocence Mission. “Bright As Yellow” on the “Empire Records” soundtrack may have been the highest level of notoriety the dream-folk band achieved since beginning in the late Eighties. The band fell somewhere between adult contemporary and cult status with classic-rooted compositions tailor-made for NPR segues. Today, from a […]
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Michael J. Carey-Commotion
Indie Poetry “Commotion” isn’t likely to cause one. It’s roughly 45 minutes of Michael J. Carey reading his own poetry’ just his voice, with no other accompaniment’ and likely either will send you off to dreamland or push you squarely into irritability. Spoken word often fails to hold appeal beyond its small but loyal following; […]
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DJ Clue?-The Professional Pt. 3
onal Pt. 3,” even he’s not so sure, relying on guest stars (Kanye West, Snoop Dogg, Nas, et al.) for each of his album’s 18 tracks. This head-on collision of identity yields a real crisis: one of adhesion. There’s a lot of anger brewing here, but the tracks render much of it superficial. Numbers meant […]
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Clerks II
2006 Director Kevin Smith isn’t aging gracefully so much as slowly realizing that his “dick and fart jokes” don’t have the resonance at 30 as they did at 20. “Clerks II” has a stale, reductive air about it that can’t be shaken “? from its hey-look-at-me celebrity cameos to its obligatory, inane musical montage, […]
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1900: Collector’s Edition
1976/2006 Bernardo Bertolucci’s sweeping, staggering epic of Italian life, love and death is at last available for consumption in its five-hour cut. Paramount’s exceptional two-disc set provides a lush, lovely print that highlights Vittorio Storaro’s peerless photography, as well as an opportunity to appreciate Bertolucci’s unexpurgated, if erratic, opus that features a pair of […]
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Tom Brosseau-Grand Forks
L oveless Tom Brosseau’s fifth release is a thematic tribute to the Grand Forks, N.D., which flooded in April 1997, displacing some 60,000 residents; 10 years later, Brosseau mourns for his hometown’s suffering while celebrating its elasticity. It’s an honorable effort, and his heart is in the right place. If only it weren’t so understated. […]
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World Trade Center: Commemorative Edition
2006 Oliver Stone seemed a peculiar choice to direct a movie about 9/11, but “World Trade Center” proves the skeptics wrong. Stone’s most restrained work to date, the film details with poignancy the true tale of two Port Authority police officers (Nicolas Cage and Michael Pena) who were in the Twin Towers when […]
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The Descent: Original Unrated Cut
2006 Hard-edged and razor-sharp, the first hour of Neil Marshall’s cave-set nail-biter is some of the most virtuosic horror filmmaking of the last 12 months “? an expertly mounted exercise in slowly dawning dread. “The Descent” wobbles mightily as its narrative winds down, but the restored, bleaker final shot comes close to redeeming […]
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Invincible
2006 Movies about underdog athletes might be inspirational, but rarely are they inspired. Even so, “Invincible” is better than most. It’s stuffed with contrivance, all right, but this tale of gridiron heroics has genuine heart. It helps that the story happens to be true. In 1976, part-time Philadelphia bartender Vince Papale (Mark Wahlberg) pursued a […]