“Trouble the Water”
My colleague Andrew O’Hehir has already written eloquently about “Trouble the Water,” Tia Lessin and Carl Deal’s superb documentary about survival and reinvention in post-Katrina New Orleans, which opened last week in New York and Los Angeles. But “Trouble the Water” opens in more theaters across the country this weekend (with others to follow in the coming months), and if, in preparation for the grim Republican National Convention proceedings this week, you want to get a better sense of what being an American really means, this is the picture to see. Lessin and Deal don’t just follow Katrina survivors Kimberly Rivers Roberts and her husband, Scott, around with a camera: Their film consists largely of footage shot by Roberts herself before, during and after the storm, which forced the Robertses out of their house in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward and into an odyssey that involved shepherding fellow storm survivors through a land that suddenly looked nothing like home. “Trouble the Water” is a document, both defiant and celebratory, about people who refused to be displaced in their own country, even when their country had forgotten about them. – Stephanie Zacharek
“Binding Energy” by Daniel Marcus
The characters in this collection of moody stories have ordinary troubles: loneliness, grief, guilt. They just happen to live in various futures, some technologically advanced, others postapocalyptic, and have to contend with things like needy voice mails from dead boyfriends. The effect is disconcerting, Raymond Carver crossed with William Gibson, yet somehow perfectly suited to the waning days of cool summer. – Laura Miller
“Television Under the Swastika” on DVD
As the gardening show begins, Erich peeks over the back fence and says, “You’ve finally come to visit my garden, Rudolph!” Cheerfully dismounting his bike, Rudy responds, “Yes, I’m here. Heil Hitler!” Welcome to the forgotten Nazi pre-history of television, exhumed to mesmerizing and terrifying effect by German documentarian Michael Kloft, director of the bloodcurdling title “Goebbels Experiment” and several other films about the Third Reich. As Kloft’s 1999 film “Television Under the Swastika” — now available in North America on DVD from First Run — demonstrates, TV didn’t begin with its cultural ascendancy in affluent postwar America. It began as a propaganda tool in Hitler’s Germany, which had a state television service from 1935 to 1944, broadcasting the Nuremberg Rallies and demented anti-Semitic speeches alongside beauty tips for Aryan brides, a variety show shot in a rooftop beer garden, live events from the 1936 Olympics (watched by an audience of 160,000 at public “television parlors”) and time-wasting interviews with low-level bureaucrats: “I can’t tell you how much our Strength Through Joy program has accomplished!” As the Allies closed in on Berlin, Nazi TV broadcast its last shows, including a fitness program for amputees still eager to serve the Führer. – Andrew O’Hehir
The Week That Was’ “The Week That Was”
If you’re bored with the same old easy-listening alternative rock, most of which sounds like some gentle, inoffensive blend of Coldplay, Wilco and Earlimart, then The Week That Was, a solo effort by Field Music’s Peter Brewis, offers a welcome change of pace from the likable but unimaginative, melodic norm. This is the sort of release that feels refreshingly uncategorizable yet hauntingly familiar, like the ambitious but slightly antisocial child of Kate Bush and Pink Floyd who refuses to play nicely. The 32-minute LP presents a deeply unpredictable, unfathomable progression of songs, from the relentless drums and early-Genesis sound of “Learn to Learn” to the Beatles-y ballad “Come Home.” There’s supposed to be some sort of unfolding crime mystery inspired by Paul Auster here, but good luck unraveling that one. Even after several listens, these songs will leave you scratching your head and wondering, “That was interesting but … what was that?” – Heather Havrilesky
“Kraftwerk and the Electronic Revolution” on DVD
The cliché that German people are like robots had to come from somewhere. Most of the credit (or blame, if you like) for that stereotype should probably go to the wide-ranging influence of electronica pioneers Kraftwerk, whose fascinating rise out of Germany’s experimental krautrock-meets-space-music scene in the ’70s goes under the microscope in Prism Films’ three-hour documentary “Kraftwerk and the Electronic Revolution,” released this week on DVD. The word “influence” hardly covers the saturation that Kraftwerk founders Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider’s modest output achieved worldwide. How many other bands can claim both Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” and 50 Cent’s “In Da Club” as direct descendents? The doc busts open an archive of low-tech videos of early performances and interviews with geeky German rock critics, avant-garde musicians and former Kraftwerk-er Karl Bartos that sets the band in musical and historical context like a jewel. By keeping such a wide focus, the film suggests that the robot-men reconstructed Post-WWII German identity without imitating American pop. “We were pretty much aware that we weren’t raised in the Mississippi Delta,” quips Bartos. Kraftwerk’s style emphasized a Teutonic affinity for futuristic tech and celebrated a past that seemed to have ended around 1933, which is when you-know-who started doing you-know-what to 6 million people. Better to be seen as robots, Kraftwerk must have reasoned, than as Nazis. – James Hannaham
“Intervention With Kristin Chenoweth”
Never mind Broadway. The best musical number of the year may be found free of charge on funnyordie.com: a hilarious parody of the overwrought show “Intervention” in which Kristen Chenoweth musically “‘splains” the perils of meth addiction — and, as a side benefit, outs the addict to his family. “Consider this your subpoena,” she trills. “It’s time to stop doing tina.” (“Tina” being one of meth’s many pseudonyms, along with “poor man’s cocaine.”) Chenoweth is already a dependable delight on “Pushing Daisies,” and here she harnesses her ear-splitting soprano and shatterproof perkiness toward truly dangerous ends. By the time she’s thrown her tiny body into the waiting arms of the addict’s family, you may never be able to watch a musical again. Or refrain from rhyming “lunch” with “white crunch.” – Louis Bayard
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“In the Woods” and “The Likeness” by Tana French
I’d heard good things about Tana French’s first novel, “In the Woods,” so when a paperback copy arrived with her latest, “The Likeness,” I decided to check out the first chapter. I came to four days later with unwashed hair and a massively backlogged to-do list. Although technically crime fiction (the narrator of each book is a police detective), French’s fiction is hypnotic and truly mysterious in a way I associate more with Donna Tartt. There’s something fundamentally unsolvable about these stories, which makes them all the more compelling. – Laura Miller
Irma Thomas’ “Simply Grand”
Irma Thomas has been on the R&B scene for about as long as Aretha Franklin and Etta James have, although widespread recognition for her warm, enveloping tone and expressive but underplayed phrasing has been slow in coming: She finally won a Grammy, her first, in 2007 for “After the Rain.” But if you haven’t yet discovered the singer who has earned the nickname “Soul Queen of New Orleans,” the brand-new “Simply Grand” is as good a place as any to start. The idea was to match Thomas with piano accompaniment from the likes of Dr. John, Randy Newman and John Medeski, and the result is a bold, refreshing record that provides a respite from the noise and clutter of everyday life — perfect for these last days of summer. – Stephanie Zacharek
Lech Majewski films on DVD
Polish-born artist, filmmaker, theater director and all-around Renaissance man Lech Majewski is somewhere on the outskirts of conventional cinema, where it bleeds into the art world. He remains little known to film buffs, despite having produced a body of work that occasioned a 2006 Museum of Modern Art retrospective, but now Kino International has brought four of his films to DVD for the first time. Majewski isn’t much interested in conventional narrative structure, but the best of his movies do have stories and characters; his 1993 “Gospel According to Harry,” a blank, bleak social satire, features future “Lord of the Rings” star Viggo Mortensen as a suburbanite golf-playing husband visited by a George H.W. Bush-style president, Liz Taylor and an omnipotent IRS agent. Oh, also, the oceans have dried up and the whole country is buried in sand. Majewski’s masterwork to date, though, is the surpassingly beautiful 2004 love story “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” told entirely through the lens of an amateur filmmaker (Chris Nightingale) as he documents his romance and voyage to Venice with a gorgeous English-rose art historian (Claudine Spitale) who has urgent reasons for seeking to decode the symbolism of Bosch’s eponymous painting. It’s a lush, riveting and remarkably sexy tear-jerker. – Andrew O’Hehir
Daniel Mendelsohn’s “How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken”
Memoirist and critic Daniel Mendelsohn gives the lie to anyone who thinks classics professors who have taught at Princeton can’t review pop culture without stuffiness or condescension. His essays, published mostly in the New York Review of Books over the past decade or so, and now collected in “How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken,” tackle Almodóvar, Pinter, Sophia Coppola and 9/11 films, among other subjects. He synthesizes his interests in Greek literature, mass culture and homosexuality, and illuminates new and old without undue bias. He handles these tricky figures and works of art with thoroughness, uncommon wit and a consistently rational tone that cuts through B.S. like a bejeweled katana. But despite his way with a sharp assertion, Mendelsohn never takes gratuitous potshots, not even when they seem inevitable, as in his dissection of Dale Peck’s notoriously snarky book “Hatchet Jobs.” While his attachment to the primacy of authorial intent can make his theater criticism feel a tad old-fashioned, his arguments are always passionate, sound and persuasive; his insights, keen and delightful. My favorite: Of Jack Twist’s wife in “Brokeback Mountain,” he writes, “her increasingly elaborate and artificial hairstyles serv[e] as a visual marker of the ever growing mendacity that underlies the couple’s relationship.” – James Hannaham
Neil Patrick Harris and Will Arnett on “Sesame Street”
Forgive me if I’m a little distracted while pouring the Cheerios this morning. It’s just that “Sesame Street,” now in its 39th season, has me all a-flutter. Sure, for my 4-year-old, it’s all about that tomato-hued pain in the ass Elmo. But for me, it’s Neil Patrick Harris, singing and dancing at a level that’s almost too sexy for the early-morning preschool set. I’m besotted with his winged, well-dressed Shoe Fairy. And if Harris weren’t enough to make me go sweeping the clouds away, there’s comedy’s favorite jerk, Will Arnett, consorting with Muppets as an inept magician. The “Arrested Development” obsessive’s ship has finally come in! My daughter may be learning her numbers; her mom is definitely honing her appreciation of hilariously charming celebrities. – Mary Elizabeth Williams
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Estelle with Kanye West, “American Boy”
Whether it’s Wallis and Edward or Bush and Blair, let’s face it: America and England can’t keep their hands off each other. But has there ever been a silkier celebration of transatlantic flirtation than Estelle’s deliriously jet-setting “American Boy”? As the U.K. rapper spars playfully with a smooth-talking Kanye West, the two seduce on a level that’s more sartorial than sexual. She wants to go shopping in New York; he dazzles like a London bloke in a “suit bespoke.” Their romance of sneakers and Ribena makes for that classic blend — elegantly English beats and expletive-loving, in-your-face Yankee wordplay. “Would you be my love?” Estelle sighs, intoxicating as a Stoli and tonic, irresistible as Big Ben or the Brooklyn Bridge. If it’s possible for a song to be good-looking, this one’s drop-dead gorgeous. – Mary Elizabeth Williams
Jonas Brothers, “Burning Up”
I’ll be honest: I miss boy bands. Bully for art rock sensations like Gnarls Barkley, but the backlash against ‘N Sync and the Backstreet Boys left me with a gaping hole in my 13-year-old soul for saccharine, ridiculously engineered songs in which I was the primary character. To boot: the Jonas Brothers’ first single, in which a trio of gorgeous brunette siblings primed by Disney tell me about how I am killing them with my lack of love and, um … making them go under? Hell if I know what this song is about, but this cut off their third (yes, third) album, “A Little Bit Longer,” is a three-minute jaunt into superstupidity that makes me believe in the power of summer pop. The only burning question left is: Which Jonas do you like best? I choose Joe. – Sarah Hepola
Ida Corr, “Let Me Think About It”
A summer song isn’t simply a song that comes out in the summer — it can be a hit that peaks in the spring but has legs, and keeps resurfacing, maybe until Labor Day. Armed with a bumptious groove unafraid to spread its legs, “Let Me Think About It,” Danish disco nobody Ida Corr’s incredibly plastic and infectious collaboration with Dutch DJ Fedde le Grande, a smash in Europe last year, topped the U.S. dance chart for five weeks in March, and descended very gently as the temperature rose. But its irresistible frivolity said heat, and its subtle paean to frustration said desire, so it stuck around, accompanied by a video homage to Robert Palmer featuring 17 copies of the singer strutting around in purple-fringed lingerie, rose-colored shades and a Sly Stone fright wig, looking like a battalion of Beyoncé fembots. Most things about the song (let alone the video) ring gloriously fake and silly, from the farty synth-horn blasts of its hooks to Corr’s breathy declaration that she’s “the true way to ecstasy.” But the chorus deftly gives voice to Corr’s understandably ambivalent would-be lover, providing a wry counterpoint to all the tomfoolery. As of August, “Let Me Think About It” lingered unequivocally in the dance Top 10, with 40 weeks on the chart. Nice legs. – James Hannaham
Duffy, “Rockferry”
When I listen to “Rockferry,” one of the singles from the debut album of Welsh pop star Duffy, I catch echoes of everything I loved on the radio as a little girl in the mid-’60s: girl groups, English songbirds who’d crossed the pond to grace our airwaves, any band or singer who sounded even remotely like the Beatles (as so many, at the time, did). I love the way Duffy’s mellow, golden-honey voice slips its way past the echoey piano chords that open the song, and the way her sturdy phrasing stands so bravely in the face of the agonizing heartbreak that’s surely just around the corner. “Rockferry” sounds like summer to me, because even coming through stereo speakers, it captures the idea of a rich, lush sound resolutely pushing its way through a little transistor radio — the one your big sister doesn’t know you’ve borrowed. – Stephanie Zacharek
Beck, “Gamma Ray”
Amid all the histrionic vocals and busy beats blasting from the radio speakers, it’s a relief to hear something as minimal and chill as Beck’s “Gamma Ray.” Tense but boppy, “Gamma Ray” is propelled by a hypnotic, killer riff. Beck’s vocals sound like they’re emerging from a block of ice even as he sings about the sweltering heat. But this is no idyllic Beach Boys-style ode to summer; moody lyrics reference heat waves and melting icecaps, and Danger Mouse’s brilliantly modern take on psychedelic production swathes the impossibly catchy melody in prickly unease. All of which might just make “Gamma Ray” the perfect song for this bummer recession summer. – Joy Press
Sharleen Spiteri, “Don’t Keep Me Waiting”
Shouldn’t a woman named Sharleen Spiteri be working the Clinique counter at the Macy’s in Paramus, N.J.? In fact, she’s a Scottish singer who has stepped out from behind her longtime band, Texas, to release a splendid solo album, “Melody,” that has climbed to the top of the U.K. charts and, by rights, should be doing the same here. The jauntiest cut is “Don’t Keep Me Waiting,” which weds an irresistible hook to a Mersey beat, while keeping Spiteri’s lustrous voice front and center. The song concludes with that de rigueur staple of summer music — the “na na na” chorus — and provides definitive evidence that Dusty Springfield is alive and well. – Louis Bayard
Tilly and the Wall, “Falling Without Knowing”
Did Tilly and the Wall beam themselves here from the ’80s? The song “Falling Without Knowing” in particular throws a girly voice in front of an echo-filled, bouncy new wave sound. This is a tune as lightweight as a summertime soap opera, filled with upbeat, weak-in-the-knees love, a cross between the Go-Gos’ “Head Over Heels” and the Cure’s “Pictures of You.” “Falling Without Knowing” belongs on an episode of “Veronica Mars”; it’s the sound of a giggling teenage girl doing that awful “Footloose” dance barefoot on the beach (not unlike the dancing here), while sucking on a cherry popsicle. But don’t we all crave a little nostalgic taste of bubble-gum romance in our crusty, old lives? I know I do. – Heather Havrilesky
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“Explorer: Zoo Tiger Escape” on the National Geographic Channel
You can keep your “Shark Week.” For pure chills and fever, give me a tiger: purring, subtly massive. And — oh, yeah — treacherous. Never more so than on Christmas Day 2007, when a 243-pound tigress named Tatiana burst the confines of her San Francisco Zoo enclosure and mauled three young men, killing one. The bizarre assault is re-created in National Geographic Channel’s “Explorer: Zoo Tiger Escape,” premiering Sunday at 10 p.m. EDT. It’s the rare wildlife doc that plays like a true-crime show. How did Tatiana get past a moat and a wall that had held generations of tigers before her? How did she become the first escaped animal from a U.S. accredited zoo to claim a human life? And how can zookeepers keep it from happening again? A particularly urgent question, given that more tigers now live in captivity than in the wild. — Louis Bayard
Moustafa Bayoumi’s “How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?”
True or False: Muslims are responsible for 9/11. If you answered “True” rather than “False! It was extremist al-Qaida operatives of Saudi origin!” then Moustafa Bayoumi’s “How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America” ought to rise to the top of your reading list. As a way of helping to clarify, for a non-Arab audience, the difference between Muslims and terrorists, Bayoumi, an English professor at Brooklyn College, etches seven profiles — “portraits,” he calls them, to avoid negative connotations — of young Arab Brooklynites going through the stress, pain and, frequently, irony of becoming “the new blacks,” as one interviewee put it. Sami joined the U.S. Marines in early 2001 and did two mind-fuck tours in Iraq. Yasmin, a devout Muslim, fought her high school for the right to hold office in student government without having to go to dances. Omar interned at Al-Jazeera and can’t get a media job; he suspects the Western media has blacklisted him. Rasha and her family spent several months as detainees, held without charges. Politics aside, these are great stories about people who might be your neighbors, and Bayoumi delivers them with urgency, compassion, wryness and hints of poetry. You may walk away from the book with a much greater understanding of Arab-American life, but you’ll feel that’s simply because you’ve hung out with Bayoumi and friends, snarfing down Dunkin’ Donuts or puffing on hookahs, talking about vital issues. – James Hannaham
“The Two Coreys” on A&E
A cautionary tale for fame-obsessed teenagers everywhere, “The Two Coreys” (10 p.m. Sundays on A&E) explores the tragic love story of Corey Haim and Corey Feldman, former child actors who’ve been best frenemies since they starred together in “Lost Boys.” After suffering through some dark times (both report that they were molested when they were 14 years old by different, unidentified individuals) and careers in decline, the Coreys have struggled over the years. Despite his unnervingly insecure appearance on “The Surreal Life” a few years back, Feldman now appears to be happily married and productive, while Haim continues to battle addiction and loneliness. Whether they’re in couples therapy together or on the set of their “Lost Boys” remake, the accusations, tears, insults, betrayals and dark nights of the soul that were filmed for this show’s second season absolutely defy description. Suffice it to say that “The Two Coreys” is a glorious train wreck of ego and lost fame, awful and stupid and funny all at once. The fact that these two take themselves very, very seriously just makes the whole thing all the more tragic. – Heather Havrilesky
“Sparrow,” Original Motion Picture Soundtrack CD
“Sparrow,” Johnny To’s gorgeous pickpocket movie (and homage to old Hong Kong), hasn’t yet been released in the United States. But by using a little ingenuity (and being somewhat fearless about the dismal dollar-to-euro conversion), you can at least have the music: Xavier Jamaux and Fred Avril have composed one of the most stunning movie scores I’ve heard in years, one that blends Latin and cool jazz with billowy orchestral washes of sound, with a little “Young Girls of Rochefort” tossed in. Jamaux and Avril never let us forget we’re in Hong Kong, though: In the album’s liner notes, To is quoted as saying that he wanted the “‘exotic oriental’ sound that was popular in Western movie soundtracks in the 50s to accompany Asian settings or characters,” and it sounds as if Jamaux and Avril, with this sophisticated and beautifully crafted score, followed his instructions to the letter. The soundtrack is currently available from Amazon France, which is easy to use, even if you don’t know French. We can’t let the French have all the good stuff, can we? – Stephanie Zacharek
“Barchester Towers” and “Framley Parsonage” by Anthony Trollope, read by Simon Vance
If you’re budget-strapped yet unwilling to settle for a “staycation” this summer, then you, like me, have probably been spending a lot of time on buses. My fail-proof method for turning the ordeal into a respite is to load up my iPod with Trollope’s long, deliciously engrossing comic novels of life and gossip in a 19th century English cathedral town. Though the stakes in the high-church/low-church scuffles are now irrelevant, the quarrels, romances, intrigues, ambitions and follies of Trollope’s characters never get old, and his witty, ironic, blithely intrusive voice is a treat for anyone weary of dodgy first-person and “free indirect” narration. Nobody does it better than Simon Vance, either. (The audiobooks, from Blackstone Audio, are more affordable with an Audible.com membership, which gives you a credit good for one book in exchange for each modest monthly subscription fee.) – Laura Miller
“Girl on the Bridge” on DVD
Paramount Pictures recently shoveled out a pile of films never previously available on Region 1 DVD, and as is customary with such budget editions, the transfers are mediocre and the special features nonexistent. As is also customary, there are treasures and oddities galore amid the slush — the wife-swapping dramedy “Serial,” with Martin Mull and Tuesday Weld! Shirley MacLaine as a tormented Brooklyn gentrifier in “Desperate Characters”! But I’m most surprised, and delighted, to see “Girl on the Bridge,” a strange, seductive black-and-white film made in 1999 by French director Patrice Leconte. A self-conscious imitation of prewar French cinema by the likes of Marcel Carné or Jean Vigo, it stars Vanessa Paradis as the eponymous would-be suicide, rescued from her perch above the Seine by a carnival knife thrower (the great Daniel Auteuil). Of course he falls in love with her, but will he tell her before it’s too late? — Andrew O’Hehir
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“The Time of My Life: Writers on the Heartbreak, Hormones, and Debauchery of the Prom,” edited by Rob Spillman
What did the cool kids do on prom night? — I mean the really cool kids, the ones who were cool after they got out of high school? Writers like Cintra Wilson, Mike Albo and Pam Houston offer contrarian takes on the cultural ritual, but the best is Susie Bright’s reminiscence of her swim club’s annual banquet. How many teenage girls point to the highlight of their big dance as getting a chance to pat the fluffy tail of a bunny in the Playboy Club? – Laura Miller
“I Got the Feelin’: James Brown in the ’60s” DVD box set
James Brown’s jaw-dropping, leg-splitting, ankle-busting, vocal-cord-snapping 1964 performance of “Out of Sight” in “The T.A.M.I. Show,” though not the main focus of the three-DVD set “I Got the Feelin’: James Brown in the ’60s” (Shout Factory), is a moment as electrifying as the Beatles’ appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” 10 months earlier, yet curiously less well known. It also represents one of the clearest demonstrations of the Godfather of Soul’s intense style — a frenetic soul voodoo ritual smelting anguish into ecstasy and pouring out as hot, sublime show business. Even Disc 1′s documentary “The Night James Brown Saved Boston,” a moving portrait of Brown’s riot-stopping Boston Garden concert on April 5, 1968, the day after MLK’s assassination, can’t touch the pure, expressive explosion of “Out of Sight.” Ironically, Brown did not believe in nonviolence, and later, he saw something good in Richard Nixon that many of his fans did not. The Boston concert was planned before King’s death, and when fans found out it would be simulcast, many demanded refunds; Brown lost about $50,000, but he respected King enough not to raise hell about that. The second DVD is the PBS broadcast of the concert itself. The third, “Live at the Apollo ’68,” shows us a decaying video of the same set in March 1968, mere days before nationwide rioting and strife would radically alter the meaning of jams like Brown’s “I Can’t Stand Myself,” “That’s Life” and “Get It Together,” and black America would put him, for a few years, on King’s empty throne. – James Hannaham
Jaclyn Smith on “Shear Genius”
“Shear Genius” (Wednesdays at 10 p.m. EDT) may be the weakest of Bravo’s professional reality competitions — the contestants are almost uniformly uninteresting, and the hairstyles they create are almost uniformly ugly. Even so, its host, former “Charlie’s Angels” star Jaclyn Smith, stands out as a kinder, gentler alternative to Bravo spokesmodels Heidi Klum and Padma Lakshmi. For some crazy reason, Smith has great wells of compassion for these bad people with their bad hairstyles. When she informs a hairstylist that it’s his or her “final cut” at the end of each episode, Smith’s eyes invariably well up with tears and her voice wavers as she carefully chooses a few comforting words as a send-off. Forget Klum’s curt “auf Wiedersehen” and Lakshmi’s indifferent “Pack your knives and go” — Smith’s tearful goodbyes seem to remind us, “What could be more human than empathizing with the untalented?” – Heather Havrilesky
“The Furies” on DVD
In this superb, bracingly bitter 1950 Anthony Mann western, Barbara Stanwyck plays Vance Jeffords, the daughter of a rich rancher (Walter Huston, in his last movie) who assumes she’ll inherit her father’s land upon his death. When she learns there may be competition, watch out: Stanwyck, one of the great actresses of any era, gives a performance that brings some mighty unflattering human traits (ruthlessness, greed) into the light so we can get a closer look at them — then she dares us to pass judgment. As Stanwyck plays her, Vance is both unlikable and unnervingly sympathetic. When her father returns from a long absence bearing a gift of pearls, she flings them to the floor — they’re what all the dull, average girls willingly settle for. What she really wants is the diamond necklace he has tucked away in his other pocket: Those stones are just as hard as she is, but not nearly as dazzling. – Stephanie Zacharek
“Lewis Black’s Root of All Evil” on Comedy Central
Which is a greater threat to the body politic? Oprah or the Catholic Church? Bloggers or ultimate fighters? Kim Jong Il or Tila Tequila? Worming its way into this heart of darkness is “Lewis Black’s Root of All Evil,” a weekly Comedy Central kangaroo court (just entering its second season; airing Wednesdays at 10:30 p.m. EDT) in which mock attorneys track the damage done to our culture by the likes of Dick Cheney, Paris Hilton and YouTube. The outrage is contagious, the cultural commentary often spot on, and maybe the only thing holding the show back is the way it straitjackets Black, a fruitfully apoplectic comic who should be allowed to say “fuck” as much as humanly possible. Nobody says it better. – Louis Bayard
John Gianvito’s “Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind”
John Gianvito’s “Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind” isn’t a documentary or a fiction film or any other normal kind of movie. It’s an hourlong tour of grave sites and other historical markers, inspired by Howard Zinn’s “People’s History of the United States,” with no narration and very little on-screen text. It could be called an alternate history of death in America. The grave sites belong to American radicals, revolutionaries, labor leaders and other renegades, from colonial times to the present. Gianvito devotes a little meditative chunk of time to each of them, capturing not just the final resting places of Eugene V. Debs and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Malcolm X and victims of the Homestead strike and King Philip’s War, along with others almost entirely forgotten by history, but also the grass, trees, light and life that carry on around them. The effect is hypnotic, transcendent and highly mysterious. It’s as if Gianvito, a longtime film curator at Harvard and now a professor at Emerson College, has distilled an atheist vision of spirituality, or made the most clear and accessible avant-garde film in cinematic history. – Andrew O’Hehir
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Vincent Kartheiser as Pete Campbell in “Mad Men”
There are plenty of reasons to look forward to the second season of AMC’s acclaimed drama series “Mad Men” (premieres 10 p.m. EDT Sunday). But while relishing scenes between Don Draper (Jon Hamm) and his wife, Betty (January Jones), or Draper and his cad of a boss, Roger Sterling (John Slattery), this season I find myself most drawn to scenes that feature Draper’s ambitious underling Peter Campbell. Vincent Kartheiser does a great job with Campbell’s sometimes awkward, sometimes smooth, sometimes downright pathetic antics, revealing his dark urges, vulnerable turns and outright confusion with stunning authenticity. Kartheiser’s flexibility as an actor is on particularly fine display in the second episode of the season, when Campbell’s desperate search for some guidance during a crisis is utterly heartbreaking. – Heather Havrilesky
Daft Punk’s “Electroma” on DVD
Circa 2001, the French electronica duo Daft Punk, from whom Kanye West cribbed last year’s huge smash “Stronger,” decided that they were robots. At all public appearances, D.P. members Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo wore chrome helmets with opaque glass where the eyes should go, and sometimes, incongruously, animal masks that went over their entire heads. In 2006, they made an 82-minute feature film, “Electroma,” about two androids — stand-ins for Bangalter and de Homem-Christo — on a quest to become human. Unlike most films featuring musicians, the glacially paced, Tarkovsky-meets-Kubrick road movie features none of the band’s own songs (though there’s some Curtis Mayfield, Chopin and Brian Eno), no dancing and no dialogue. The film, now out on DVD, does include a host of striking, unsettling images — slow pans of American towns populated by robot families, all clad in Daft Punk helmets; a scene worthy of oddball photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard in which the androids’ human masks, made of latex, melt in the sun; a sequence of gorgeous shots of the two traversing a desert, Gus Van Sant-style, as the landscape seamlessly morphs into a nude; and a robot-assisted suicide. Bangalter, happy that “Electroma” has become a “midnight movie,” claims the film “does not require your brain to function.” It may, however, fry some of your circuitry. – James Hannaham
“Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth” by Xiaolu Guo
In this slim but beautifully detailed novel, a peasant girl leaves her small farming village in China to make it big as a film extra — or maybe even a screenwriter — in Beijing. This is the second English-language book by Xiaolu Guo (she was herself born in a fishing village in China, and now lives in London and Beijing), and it’s a marvelous example of how to pack layers of emotional richness into a surprisingly small number of pages. Xiaolu originally wrote “Twenty Fragments” 10 years ago, revising it slightly upon its translation into English, partly to acknowledge (as she notes in the book’s afterword) that China and Beijing have changed so much in the intervening years. Regardless, this is a work of fiction that’s both fresh and timeless. – Stephanie Zacharek
Carl Theodor Dreyer’s “Vampyr” on DVD
One viewing of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1932 “Vampyr” definitely isn’t enough; whether you want to call it a seminal erotic-horror film or a formalist avant-garde dreamscape (and it’s both), this nonnarrative shadow play set in a haunted village is likely to leave contemporary spectators dazzled but almost completely baffled. Fortunately, with the Criterion Collection’s new two-disc DVD edition — based on a 1998 restoration of this nearly lost and much-damaged oddity, far from perfect but the best we’re likely to see — you can bone up with critical essays by Mark Le Fanu and Kim Newman, peruse Jørgen Roos’ 1966 Dreyer documentary, and then watch the damn thing again. Although he’s a canonical figure in cinema history, Dreyer is rarely seen and poorly understood by modern filmgoers (myself included). His reputation rests largely on his 1928 silent masterwork “The Passion of Joan of Arc” and his 1955 Christ allegory “Ordet,” but “Vampyr” — not quite a sound film and not quite a silent, not quite a vampire film and not quite an exercise in Freudian-Jungian symbology — is now revealed as a work of technical wizardry and exquisite strangeness. – Andrew O’Hehir
Sugarland’s “All I Want to Do”
When I want to get my family singing from the same page, I just put on Sugarland’s new single, “All I Want to Do”: My kids will “doo-oo-oo-oo-oo” till dawn. Hell, I will, too. Oh, sure, by the 29th go-round, it’ll be annoying — really annoying, like the Crash Test Dummies’ “Mmm-mmm-mmm-mmm” — but for now it’s succulent summer pop, with just enough twang to sweeten the bang. No point in stopping there, either. Sugarland’s new album, “Love on the Inside,” offers fattening slices of anthem rock (“Take Me as I Am”), honky-tonk (“It Happens”) and heartbreak ballad (“What I’d Give”), not to mention a shout-out to alt-country legend Steve Earle — all caramelized by Jennifer Nettles’ blistering vocals. Want me some Sugarland in my bowl. – Louis Bayard
The return of “Burn Notice” on USA
Bliss is returning from vacation to find two new episodes of “Burn Notice” (Thursdays at 10 p.m. EDT), a comedic drama about a yogurt-noshing former spy, queued up on your TiVo. This season proves to be even sharper and fresher than the first, especially a scene in which the hero, Michael (Jeffrey Donovan), gets guilted into a family therapy session by his mom and takes to it like a fish to water — much to the chagrin of his mom, who realizes she’s not as keen on “communication” as she thought. – Laura Miller
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