By the opening scene it's clear Joachim Trier's Reprise (in theaters today) will be a cliché-riddled romp through exhausted subject matter. And by the closing scene, most will be left wondering just why, despite the many obstacles, it is so enjoyable.
Trier, a popular short-film director, has set the familiar story line of young writers in friendly, unspoken competition for fame and glory in his native Norway. The two would-be authors, best friends Phillip (Anderson Danielson Lie) and Erik (Espen Klouman-Hoiner), are set on the literary life, and, as bright, hopeful young things, carry with them wild fantasies of sipping espressos in Parisienne cafés as oversexed success stories. Of course, as the template to this story dictates, only one can find that success (and the several neuroses that accompany it)—the other must wallow in his best friend's shadow and the confirmed suspicions that his abilities are less than spectacular. Tiring, right? Thank God, everyone's handsome. And not only handsome. Actually good.
Fondly I recall my first taste of Vice, which transpired during a Sunday afternoon at a seedy watering hole in Toronto, Canada. My friends and I had driven up from Chicago to attend an all-night bacchanalia that Friday, and with no sleep between then and Sunday, we were if nothing if not completely cracked out (ahem, figuratively!). At the bar I found a copy of the free Montreal glossy, which back then was still relatively unknown to Williamsburg hipsters. Now, whoever said that the printed word has an ability to change the world (at least, my world) knew what was up. During my first reading of Vice, I laughed so hard I nearly peed in my pants. This was a decade ago, during my pacifier-sucking rave days. I like to think I've grown up some since then—it's clear the guys at Vice have. Enter their first feature-length film, Heavy Metal in Baghdad.
NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH WINEHOUSE, WHO IS THE CRACK-ROCK FAIRY Duffy's latest
Though she runs the risk of becoming just another alabaster-faced singer in the fickle shuffle of Stereogum sweethearts, newbie Welsh songstress Duffy proves she just may have some staying power with Rockferry (May 13, Mercury). Though not exactly a trailblazer of the genre (the album's essentially a pop-by-numbers transliteration of Motown standards), Duffy's crooning still provides a fresh alternative to the rehab melodrama of Amy Winehouse and the mushy gospel of Joss Stone.
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Of course things didn't work out. And of course he's not going to Just Get Over It.
Local H's Scott Lucas gets good when things are going nowhere; he's made failure his métier. His one universally acknowledged hit was called "Bound for the Floor." After dragging the word copasetic up and down rock radio playlists back in 1996, the frustrated underachievers about which Lucas sang set their sights on settling for less. And life imitated art, or prophecies fulfilled themselves. The group's best album—1998's Pack Up the Cats, a concept piece about a small-town act that fucks up its big break—got waylaid when their label restructured. The two-man band then saw half its line-up turnover. Its excellent treatise on has-beens, 2004's Whatever Happened to P.J. Soles?, may already be out-of-print.
Break out the bulletproof bulbs: Twelve Angry Months (Shout Factory, May 13) is Lucas' long-term relationship record. It skips right past the silly love songs, forsakes matrimony for acrimony, forgoes hand-holding for the finger. It starts at the end and stays there.
Though they hail from New York, electro-pop duo Shy Child has had a much better run across the pond; their third album, Noise Won't Stop (Kill Rock Stars), launches in the U.S. May 22, but has been out (and well-received) in the U.K for almost a year. Some of their overseas success is likely due to touring with high-flying English acts like the Klaxons, and their performance for a Stella McCartney musical-chairs-themed runway show at a London fashion event couldn't have hurt their profile, either. Plus, they use anachronistic yet timeless props like a keytar and cowbells.
But it's tempting to scrap these explanations for a more straightforward one: simply put, Shy Child's music seems well-suited to Europe. The clubby, bouncing synth-rock conjures up visions of snaggle-toothed adolescents in mesh tank-tops, sipping alcopop, and bouncing their spiked-and-frosted heads to the beat. And, in a bizarre twist, Shy Child almost makes the scene seem like one worth belonging to.
In spite of Canadian Leslie Feist's excellent work both as a solo artist and as a member of Broken Social Scene, I've recently had trouble thinking of her as anything but an iPod Nano spokesperson. Setting aside any silly philosophical or aesthetic grievances about "selling out," the ad (which features her singing her hit "1, 2, 3, 4" on the screens of apparently bottomless stack of the gizmos) has had the sad effect of reminding me of my silver video-compatible iPod Nano that mysteriously disappeared at work one day a few months ago. Not a huge deal, except that I could never figure out how the hell I lost it—one day at work I listened to it when I ducked out for lunch and it had vanished by the time I was ready to go home that evening. After falsely accusing several colleagues at Radar HQ and getting into more than one vicious fistfight (I won them all, fortunately), I was no closer to solving the mystery. But because I still held out hope of finding it, I refused to buy a new one. It was just one of those deeply annoying things.
Casting aside these glum associations, I went to see Feist play at Manhattan's Hammerstein Ballroom last night. Time to move on past lost gadgets and appreciate a supremely talented indie artist, I decided.
Though all the major movie studios are primed to unleash their big-budget summer blockbusters on the undernourished masses, the selection of tween male fantasies flicks on the menu (Speed Racer, The Incredible Hulk, Sex and the City) may prove to be especially bad. Not so with Iron Man, and Hollywood's transformation of Robert Downey, Jr., into a full-fledged action super-bad-ass. Yes, that's the heavy riffage of the Black Sabbath tune of the same name in the trailer, and yes, it is a good indicator of the fist-pumping antics that the film has in store.
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MY HEROES HAVE ALWAYS BEEN STONERS Patoski's latest
Take a long, deep breath and inhale, little hippies—Willie Nelson turns 75 today. And the prank-playing, joke-telling, weed-smoking outlaw-hero cowboy-crooner of a million gigs and a billion more road miles (the craggy, well-worn face says it all), is doing just fine. Last Monday, in Amsterdam (natch!) Willie and Snoop Dogguested at each other's shows, and, not missing a beat, today he's planning to return and celebrate with a few close friends and family.
Fans, meanwhile, can rejoice with Joe Nick Patoski's biography Willie Nelson: An Epic Life, a swift but sprawling masterpiece detailing Willie's World as he went about the business of making country music cool again. Patoski—who has known and written about Willie for more than 35 years—takes the reader from Nelson's Depression-era upbringing to his impending fame to his infamous IRS battles and, ultimately, to his American hero status. Along the way, of course, it's been an enviable life of whiskey, women, and weed.
The thought of another baby-related comedy is probably as nauseating to moviegoers as the worst bout of morning sickness—or even the thought of a Juwanna Mann sequel, for that matter. Still, writer Michael McCullers (of the regrettable Goldmember) challenges Diablo Cody and Judd Apatow's ownership of the genre with the tidy Baby Mama (April 25)—a career gal-meets-baby story loosely remnant of 1987's Baby Boom, but with fewer shoulder pads, tons of Jamba Juice jabs, a squirrel ultrasound, and more references to the taint than thought possible in a PG-13 movie.
JENNA'S ARMY Jameson and the stripper-ghouls(Photo: Lia LoBello)
On-the-make actress Jenna Jameson made an appearance at a Manhattan screening of her new film Zombie Strippers Thursday night, much to the delight of legions of whooping horny dudes and the accommodating girls that date them. Oh, and me (pics after the jump)! Anyway, Radar caught up with the charming porn empress, who said the film's producers had labored for a full six months to get her to sign on for the film. Once she finally got time to read the script, however, she knew the role was for her: "The part required me to be a bitch," she said. "I knew I could do that." After discussing a few other talking points—making the movie was "a ton of fun" and was something she "hoped to do again"—Jameson let us in on a secret: she's an avid reader of Radar! Score! (In your face, Foreign Affairs.)
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Look, we're talking about rock and roll here: It's a Logan's Run-like place where not only are you not supposed to be producing relevant music past the age of 30, you're supposed to be farmed off to a retirement of state fairs and Hall of Fame "jam sessions" if you still insist on picking up your instrument. If you're an exception, maybe they'll let you produce a couple of late-in-life, critically acclaimed "masterpieces" before you can shuffle off and die in something resembling peace. So what on earth does Nick Cave—a 50-year-old man—think he's doing by making such a life-affirmingly pure rock and roll (and it needs the roll) album as Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!?
And as importantly, why aren't there more people like him around?
There's no shortage of niche writers in the Rich family. Father Frank writes pithy, controversial columns for the New York Times, and thanks to a well-received book of short humor pieces, younger brother Simon's been dubbed the "funny one." It's not strange, then, that Nathaniel Rich, a senior editor at the Paris Review, would try his hand at becoming the family's next literary superstar. But after reading his novel The Mayor's Tongue (Apr. 17, Riverhead), it's fair to wonder if the clan—or the canon—truly needs another writer in the family.
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Not until two minutes into "Silence," the first track from Portishead's long-awaited new album Third, do we hear the first ghostly lyrics from reclusive singer Beth Gibbons: "Tempted in our minds / tormented inside life / Wounded and afraid—inside my head." And it's immediately obvious that there will be little if any departure from her band's signature down tempo gloom. Ten years after the release of their last recording, 1998's Roseland NYC Live, it's clear the Bristol trio haven't cheered up ... at all.
Someday, Cloud Cult's adenoidal ringleader Craig Minowa will be confronted with the concept of "schadenfreude." And it will confuse and frighten him. Because, while the blissed out art-rocker does aching sincerity the same way Belgium does chocolate, he simply does not traffic in the kind of work-a-day bitterness that most of us take for granted (or, in the case of Radar staffers, as a job qualification). Consider this: his Minnesota-based band recorded their last album, Feel Good Ghosts (Tea-Partying Through Tornadoes) using geo-thermal power, donated the proceeds to enviro-charities, and performed with onstage interpretive painters. Oh, also: pretty much every song was a shattered elegy to Minowa's deceased infant son. Good times.
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A warning (of sorts): Mountain Battles (4AD, Apr.8) sounds like it came from the clouded minds of exalted 40-something indie-frumps who were hotboxing a 1982 Datsun in a Dayton, Ohio, parking lot. Which is only to say The Breeders' latest album is a little bit odd, and a little bit giddy—but it's also pleasantly inspired.
Coming off of the very successful (and far too lengthy) Pixies reunion tour, Breeders leader Kim Deal has reconvened the band to produce their fourth album—their first in six years (the better-than-remembered Title TK), and their second in 15 (the era-defining Last Splash). By the time we see the fifth, we'll undoubtedly be living in a world with a stable, democratic Middle East, and without polar icecaps.
