Pride & Prejudice melts the heart, My Morning Jacket rocks the house, the White Stripes return with a cool cover tune.
Underwhelmed by the new Harry Potter film and nursing strong reservations about Joaquin as Johnny, I took the lady to see Pride & Prejudice, hoping good reviews would prove truer than a truly dreadful trailer. I'm glad I bothered.
Pride & Prejudice (Focus Features)
I have no idea who Joe Wright is, but from the evidence here, he's a director who loves the classics but doesn't want his literary adaptation to feel too stuffy. That means elegant, moving cameras in the style of Robert Altman and total immersion into the period — the costumes look great but not so as you sit around gawking at them. I'm not convinced about Keira Knightley — she has great moments here and there but others where she wobbles like an awkward teen — but as her love interest, Matthew MacFadyen is exactly right. Men start off stoic and open up their hearts slowly — when they do, it's extraordinary. That sort of romantic cliché rarely happens in real life — in that world, the stoic guy just turns out to be a closed-off ass — but here it's sweet and inevitable.
Ballets Russes (Zeitgeist Films)
Of all the different types of happiness I get from watching movies, none touch me as purely as a terrifically choreographed dance number. It's like laughter that moves, love that's flawless — it can almost move me to tears. The men and women of the Ballets Russes, perhaps the 20th century's greatest dance troupe, gave such pleasure for years on the stage, and many of them are still alive to tell their stories. They do this in an overly PBS way in this documentary, which adds a patina of Quality to a subject that doesn't need any more stuffiness. Fortunately, the stories and the personalities win out.
Get Rich or Die Tryin' (Paramount)
The perfect picture book to accompany the lie of the ghetto fantasyland gangsta rap has been selling since before its audience was born.
My Morning Jacket, Z (ATO/RCA)
Wilco is a talented American band burdened with Jeff Tweedy's pretensions to turn his songwriting experiments into Important Artistic Mutterings. My Morning Jacket is a talented American band unburdened by Jim James's desire to shed his jam-band aspirations and fly off into the mystic. Like the Band before them, they hone their sound until it achieves total warmth — it's not a mission but a community they're after. (One of the best songs gives thanks to a singer who helped James through a tough day; can't get much more generous and kind-hearted than that.) In the past, James wallowed in a luxurious pool of his own self-pity, but here he's getting cryptic, funny, transcendental. It's a good bet that pot won't enhance any of this very much at all.
Bloc Party, Silent Alarm (Vice)
I'm sorry I missed 'em live — this is the sort of band where a concert performance can really help fill in the blanks on an interesting sound that never quite adds up to more than that. Their guitars snap like switchblades, electric eels, what have you. Kele Okereke sings in the polished punk style beloved by all current U.K. bands, and he gets his anger and sadness across convincingly. Since their sonics are all in place, what's missing is the content — there are a couple Bush-bashing songs on here, but the messages don't come across as loudly as the manic rhythms. This album got my attention, but I'll reserve judgment until the next one.
Wolf Parade, Apologies to the Queen Mary (Sub Pop)
Starts great, ends great, the middle sags. Whether fearing the modern world or toasting the sons and daughters of hungry ghosts, they have an ironic cool that I can take or leave. But I'd rather dwell on the positive — which is their Modest Mouse-derived sense of the quirky. (Thank producer Isaac Brock for that.) Even though their hooks can't be counted on, they never stop pounding their ideas through the floor. (Thank drummer Arlen Thompson for that.) They get by on mystery more than tune, not surprising with a new band. Quirky and undeniable at the same time — that's the next objective.
Living Things, "Bom Bom Bom" (from Ahead of the Lions, Jive)
Their album cover hearkens back to Love's peace-love-dope Forever Changes cover from way back in '67. But the music couldn't be more different — Lillian Berlin and his brothers are angry about the Iraq War and they want to groove about it. Unlike last year's protest music, there is a resigned contempt to this song, its bitter defeat assured and not getting any better by the day. It echoes Sam Mendes's Jarhead in that it treats nihilism not as a clever pose but as a disappointing final destination. It works first as sleazy dance music, which is more insidious than anything Springsteen could come up with huffing and puffing. I just hope these guys actually bother to vote — and keep bothering.
The Strokes, "Juicebox" (from First Impressions of Earth, RCA)
What better way to write a catchy piece of junk than by digging into your desperation and anxiety that, maybe just maybe, everybody's over you? The Strokes are hardly the Antichrist and they ain't the next big thing — they're just this band, see? And here they stand up just fine against the new young turks that are snottier and gnarlier than they are. This band was meant to be disposable — they'll be all over VH1's I Love the '00s — and without apology they french-kiss that reality. After all, if I hear the lyric correctly, they've got a city to love.
The White Stripes, "Walking with a Ghost" (from Walking with a Ghost single, V2)
In only took me about 10 listenings to realize that the woman singing this Tegan and Sara cover wasn't a woman — it was Jack White turning that always-feminine voice a couple turns more towards the girlie. He can pull it off — there's something brutal about his singing that evades accusations of wussiness. The original used to perked up my ears, but White gives it oomph. That's what he does, that's what he always does — he makes everybody else seem like they're not investing themselves fully in their art.
She Wants Revenge, "Tear You Apart" (from She Wants Revenge, Geffen)
'Cuz, really, you need one more Joy Division band in your life. You're angry, you're punk in a trendy kinda way. You want music with attitude because that's what it's all about when you're young. You fear girls and you need snarling men to make you feel better. You'll grow out of it.
Consumables is a biweekly overview of popular culture.
