Tag: Digital Media

The agenda of director Jay Roach’s new movie is obviously not to mine the finer nuances of American electoral procedures. This might come as a shock or a relief, depending on whether you go into The Campaign remembering Roach as the politically-minded maker of HBO’s Recount and Game Change or you only know him from the Fockers films. In any case, now Roach has split that difference. His agenda, for what it’s worth, is lowbrow bipartisan spoofery.

Well, America, what is it worth? In The Campaign, Will Ferrell plays an entrenched North Carolina congressman challenged by an unlikely opponent in the form of Zach Galifianakis. Unlikeliness, of course, used to be the Galifianakis touch; here it’s a dull nudge, or whatever you want to call a weary reprise of the prissy oaf he played in Due Date. Meanwhile Ferrell looks to have hauled out his old George W. Bush impression, and sensing the staleness, hosed it off with a splash of randy John Edwards. The setup alone is a bloodless, been-there farce. But maybe that sends a message of safety and security. So can it count on your vote?

With strings pulled by callous sibling super-funders modeled on the Koch brothers and played by John Lithgow and Dan Aykroyd, the candidates’ contest escalates from gaffe-intensive buffoonery to the brinksmanship of outrageously dirty mud- slinging. Among a clutter of pundits tediously playing themselves, Jason Sudeikis and Dylan McDermott show up as rival campaign managers, respectively servile and shark-like. Before long it’s a slog, quite like a real campaign but otherwise too broad a cartoon and too soft a satire, full of cheap shots at easy targets and many scattered bits of uninspired vulgarity. (Inspired vulgarity would be fine.)

Writers Chris Henchy and Shawn Harwell try to repurpose the usual campaign movie clichés as punchlines but can’t fully forsake their pieties; Roach and his complacent stars take that cue to churn out a film whose sentimental fizzle-ending “heart” seems as much of a cynical calculation as the politically corrosive corporate profiteering it limply sends up. Ultimately this sort of thing is best on cable, and eventually channel-surfed away from. Richer parodies remain available on “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report,” as does the parody that writes itself, regularly, in current events.

Someone, somewhere may think the timing of The Campaign’s release is politically motivated. Although scarcely issue-driven, or challenging in any real way, it does seem to have gotten shoved into the doldrums of the August dumping-ground, between peak summer blockbusters and autumn’s onset of prestige pictures. At best it offers a vacation of sorts, some recuperative last laffs before the grim home stretch of real-life campaigning carries us into November. And if the it’s-all-a-joke mindset feels neither constructive nor cathartic, it does have the dubious virtue of staying forever unserious.

The Campaign/R, 88 minutes/Carmike Cinema 6

Movie houses
Carmike Cinema 6 973-4294
Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6 979-7669
Regal Seminole Square Cinema 4 978-1607
Vinegar Hill Theatre 977-4911

The feature debut from writer-director Benh Zeitlin, working with playwright Lucy Alibar and a New Orleans collective, rides in on a murky flood of festival hype. And what caused that anyway? The inevitable Sundance-stamped confluence of poverty porn and indie quaintness?
Wow, already this is sounding cynical, but Beasts of the Southern Wild has a habit of inviting audience push-back. For starters, it’s called Beasts of the Southern Wild; right away one senses some amateur anthropology going on, apologized for or at best compounded with amateur poetry. Still, the amateur operates from love, and Zeitlin has that. However patronizing, his reverie aches to be watched, and on as large a screen as possible. It says: Behold!

Newcomer Quvenzhané Wallis steals the show as a brave 6-year-old who yearns for her missing mother, copes with her ailing father (Dwight Henry), and navigates the archly magical-realist realms that lurk amid the muck and grit of her doomed, levee-locked Louisiana bayou. Hushpuppy is her name, and she dwells in a fishing boat rigged from a pickup truck’s rusted rear-end, and she is tough and tenacious, and she has visions of melting ice caps. Behold: the innocence, the resilience, the retrospectively peculiar-seeming fortitude of childhood, galvanized by apocalyptic anxiety. Too much?

Wait, there’s more. Her father is called Wink, as if the movie were just kidding when setting him up as an epitome of rough parental neglect, for in fact his declining health reduces—nay, enlarges—him to a heap of tender devotion. Meanwhile, the aura of romanticized dysfunction extends to the entire community, seen drunkenly and communally weathering an allegorical storm and subsequent flood. Presumably the beasts in question aren’t just Hushpuppy’s half-imagined pack of enormous prehistoric wild boars (set free from that melted ice), but also the central characters themselves—poor, black, modernity-deprived, and too-preciously resilient. In which case, are we not saying that they are animals? At any rate they are marginal to our society, and best kept that way, so as to be fawned over through a magic movie magnifying glass.

To authenticate his and Alibar’s laboriously folkloric calculations, Zeitlin uses nonprofessional actors. Good idea, as the last thing this needs is actors seeming actorly. But playing with regular folks can, and does, backfire because, well, they’re not professional actors. Not helping matters, Wallis gets a voiceover narration full of aphoristic wisdom and philosophy-jive, which only betrays the great cinematic discovery of her face and unflatteringly emphasizes the film’s theatrical origins. As for originality, it’s here, but in quotation marks.
Preferring pseudo-mythology to political seriousness, this amounts to a flamboyant indomitable-spirit demonstration, with undeniable vitality, but also a sort of heavy, beastly dullness. Zeitlin has talent and guts, yes. Ultimately, though, he inspires not wonder or awe so much as our awareness of the pride he takes in his own presentation.

Beasts of the Southern Wild/ PG-13, 93 minutes/Vinegar Hill Theatre

For years, local music fans only knew Adam Brock as a drummer, the powerful force behind bands like The Nice Jenkins and Invisible Hand. But it’s always been clear that Brock was capable of more. His clear and exuberant singing voice added a perfect pop edge to his bands’ tunes, and his enthusiastic taste as a record collector ran towards the eclectic and the ornate end of the pop-rock spectrum: the Zombies, the Kinks, Sparks, and Harry Nilsson.

In 2009, Brock finally made his debut as a frontman, with a solo project called Borrowed Beams of Light. Over the past three years, this side project has included enough other members to qualify as a Charlottesville supergroup, and at its best threatens to overshadow the popularity of his other projects. The debut EP, followed by a split single and full-length album, won acclaim from many fellow musicians, as well as a devoted following among the rock DJs at WTJU.

The Beams are now preparing to release a new EP, a six-track record entitled Hot Springs. The list of studio personnel is an odd summation of the groups’ history; half the tracks were recorded by the original duo of Brock and his former Nice Jenkins bandmate Nate Walsh performing over simple drum machine backing—the remaining songs are fully fleshed out by the Beams’ current live band, which includes Jordan Brunk (another former Jenkin) and Marie Landragin of the retro-metal act Corsair, as well as Dave Gibson and Ray Szwabowski. The basic backing tracks were laid down at White Star Studios in Louisa County, and then fully fleshed out in smaller recording studios in the apartments and practice spaces of various band members.

For a record with such a patchwork recording history, Hot Springs is remarkably coherent; a testament to the consistency of Brock’s talent and aesthetic vision. His greatest skill as a songwriter and performer has always been the ability to put forward in odd, obscure, or downright impenetrable narrative conceits and conceptual whims in the form of breezy, largely unchallenging power-pop. Fancy breakdowns, odd turns of phrase and left turn bridges abound, but the end result is approachable and charming, even if they often sound more like an eclectic rock band playing with the idea of pop music than anything that might have actually appeared on the Billboard charts in the past 30 years.

The opening title track is bombastically catchy, with all of the manic hooks that Beams fans have grown to expect. “You’re such a lovely girl/to melt this awful snow!” Brock chatters, but it sounds less like a come-on than an insistence on the song’s own hook itself. “Wing Stroke” is stripped-down and simpler, but may be the record’s high point; yowling, yelping lines are interspersed with clear, straight-forward ones, as Brock wildly intones “I could waste my days in here/I might drink my weight in tears.” “Fine Lines” concludes the side with a credible soundalike of Roxy Music or vintage Bowie.

The B-side is more relaxed and glam-influenced, proving the band can still keep the quality control high even when they calm down a bit. Throughout, Marie Landragin’s harmonized guitar solos are the most anachronistic part of the record, but also the most enjoyable. Many of the songs are interspersed with confusing spoken-word snippets and vocal field recordings, never taking center stage but often adding texture and character. The EP concludes with “Simple Century,” which has a heavy early ’90s adult contemporary vibe. An aesthetic that I indelibly associate with “grocery store music”—which would almost be funny if they didn’t play it totally straight-faced; surprisingly, the style actually works to the song’s advantage.

This 45rpm 12″ record, issued by Harrisonburg-based Funny/Not Funny Records, is the Beams’ first vinyl-only release, though all copies come with an mp3 download code. “With a CD pressing, often the minimum amount you can do is in the thousands—and it’s actually cheaper in total to get, like 5,000 CDs than a few hundred.” Brock explains. “I just didn’t have it in me to fill the rest of my basement with another dozen boxes of unsold CDs.” Hot Springs is limited to 333 copies of the LP, but more download codes are planned; once the vinyl edition is depleted, the band may sell download cards featuring a miniature facsimile of the EP’s excellent cover art by prolific local artist and musician Thomas Dean.

Borrowed Beams opens for Dr. Dog at the Jefferson tonight. Brock relishes the idea of playing for a larger, potentially sold-out crowd: “There’s something nice about playing a bigger room. I think it works best for the type of music we’re playing. Plus, we’re all in our 30s now, and there’s only so many years of your life you can spend playing shows for three stoned kids in a living room and then crashing on the couch.” Although Hot Springs’ proper release date isn’t until August 14, those who have pre-ordered the record through Funny/Not Funny will be able to pick up their purchases at tonight’s show.