Tag: Digital Media

William Fitzsimmons

Lions/Nettwerk Records

Lions is a towering achievement. A deeply personal record loaded with gravitas, the album feels like Fitzsimmons’ confessional or at the very least a reflection on life, love, death, moving on, and his relationships. From the opening strains of the gorgeous acoustic track “Well Enough,” where Fitzsimmons wonders about the mark he has left on the life of someone who is leaving his, to the chilling, ambient piano ballad “Speak,” which closes the record, the album is imbued with a deep, almost overwhelming introspection. Most of the album is made up of acoustic ditties and charming folk pop, and beautifully augmented lines like “But you took your breath from me” (“Took”) and “How long should I hold out the hope/That I’m still in your heart?” (“From You”). Fitzsimmons is fearless in peeling back the layers with a vulnerability so powerful that you can’t look away.

Angel Olsen

Burn Your Fire For No Witness/Jagjaguwar Records

Angel Olsen’s first release on Jagjaguwar is beautiful, haunting stuff. Whether she’s waxing philosophical about love lost in the acoustic opener “Unfucktheworld,” or marveling at our minuscule place in the universe on the crunchy rock track “Stars,” Olsen’s appealing vulnerability rises to the surface. Sinister stompers like “Hi-Five” hint insecurity, while on “Enemy” she matter-of-factly delivers the lines: “All the kindness that you’ve offered me/Doesn’t last/It’s just a thought I’ve had.” The tone of the album isn’t upbeat, but it stops short of being overly maudlin, and she goes from raucous (“High & Wild”) to languid (“Iota”) tracks in succession. The electric guitar ballad “White Fire” with its droning notes and Olsen’s vocals alternating between quiet and siren-like is perfect middle ground.

Greg Laswell

I Was Going To Be An Astronaut/Vanguard Records

Greg Laswell’s new album is more of a new perspective, with all but one of the songs on this album being songs he has already released. However the results of reimagining these tunes is worth checking out. Astronaut finds Laswell’s penchant for indie rock and folk pop toned down, with the majority of this record featuring just Laswell and his piano. “What a Day,” is a somber piano-led piece, while “How the Day Sounds” benefits from the addition of an acoustic guitar and subtle strings. Laswell’s plaintive vocals have a  marked effect on the album’s mood—particularly on the beautifully morose “Off I Go” and “Take Everything.” Astronaut’s title is taken from a lyric in “December,” and it captures the album’s ethereal vibe, making it an oddly appropriate soundtrack for being lost in space.

Is there any way to appropriately review 300: Rise of an Empire? This is a movie that has—whether it knows it or not—no ideology or purpose or ambition to be anything but a blood-and-guts spectacle on a massive scale. In fact, the blood and guts are so prevalent and unsparing they grow monotonous.

Sure, there are serious voiceovers uttered by Queen Gorgo (Lena Headey) that hint at higher thinking—the power of a people and the rules of nation-states and uniting against a common enemy and blah blah—but those voiceovers become as monotonous as the action, especially when they interrupt the climactic swordfight (which, by the way, is monotonous).

At least 300: Rise of an Empire’s predecessor, 300 (which can be thanked or blamed for making Gerard Butler a household name), had visuals we’d never seen before. If nothing else, it provided visceral thrills simply because it looked spiffy.

But 300: Rise of an Empire is muddled, stupid and pointless. It tells the story of Persian God-king Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) and his desire to rule Greece by having the Persian navy transport soldiers to Greek shores who then kill the hell out of every man, woman, and child.

The Persians are led by a disaffected Greek, Artemisia (Eva Green), who has great reasons for wanting to destroy her home country. She was sold into slavery at a young age and rescued by a Persian who taught her to fight. She gained the favor of the Persian king, and with his son (that’s Xerxes) is going to wreak havoc.

I think. I mean, none of that matters. This movie is just an exercise in bloodletting. At least we’re living in a time when blood can be recreated with computers because the cleanup on set would have taken longer than shooting the battle scenes had the filmmakers used practical stage blood.

Imagine doing a take in which four soldiers are beheaded, gored, a femoral artery is severed and an arm sliced off at the elbow. The amount of vital fluids spilled in each battle scene must be more than several hundred industrial-sized bucket loads. The makeup effects would have cost more than the talent they were tasked to make up.

One Greek who manages to stay fully limbed is Themistocles (Sullivan Stapleton), the leader of this six pack-having crew of motley swordsmen. Question: Why does a guy who lives his life at war keep taking off his helmet when he sees his greatest enemy across the battlefield?

Why don’t these men wear armor? Mythology and history be damned, put on some armor! It makes a sword to the chest easier to deflect. But whatever. It’s hard to care much about any of it when the filmmakers are more interested in stunts that defy the laws of physics and creating a blood spatter pattern that ends up on the camera lens. If that’s your idea of a great flick, please enjoy. If not, avoid it. Or if you must go, count how many times the Greeks tell each other they’re Greek and wait for the odd remix of Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” during the closing credits.

Playing this week

3 Days to Kill
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

12 Years A Slave
Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6

About Last Night
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

American Hustle
Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6

Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues Supersized
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Endless Love
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Frozen
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Gravity
Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6

Her
Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6

The Lego Movie
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

The Monuments Men
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Non-stop
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Philomena
Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6

Pompeii
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Rear Window
Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6

Robocop
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Ride Along
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Son of God (Hijo de Dios)
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Stalingrad
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

The Wind Rises
Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6

Winter’s Tale
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

The Wolf of Wall Street
Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6

Movie houses

Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6
979-7669

Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX
244-3213

I’m tinkering with a new free app, and I’m totally hooked. I’m looking at my iPhone every five seconds to see if there’s a number next to the app icon, evidence I have the all-important new “notification.” I’m opening the app every five minutes to see if my feed has updated. I’m telling all my friends to get the app so it’ll be more fun for me. I’m doing all this to the extreme annoyance of my wife, who thinks I’m dangerously addicted to my smartphone.

I happen to be talking in this case about a new, locally developed social media/music application known as musx (pronounced myoo-ziks). But to be honest, this is a good description of my behavior with most social media apps. Good old @shea_gibbs on Twitter? I’ve “rebranded” myself twice and the posting history is so erratic you’d think I have a debilitating case of knuckle gout. Pinterest? I can’t even remember my username and password. Pinterest is still a thing, right?

So yeah, the future of musx for me is about as clear as the Cloud, but I’m certainly enjoying it right now. Developed by co-founders John Reardon and UVA law student Eddie Sniezek, both originally from the D.C. area, and supported from the industry side by Chris Keup, a producer/songwriter whose White Star Sound Studio is just outside Charlottesville, the app is a clever mash-up of a streaming music player and a social media-based music-sharing destination. It draws on YouTube content to allow users to find songs they want to share with their musx friends and provides a space for comments below the video-enabled player.

“Music is inherently social, but people share music in a different place from where they listen to it,” Reardon said. “That disconnect is why we left our jobs to pursue the app.”

Take all your friend’s Facebook updates about what they’re listening to on Spotify, for example. At worst, they can be annoying, maybe even pedantic—a bunch of people whose opinions on music you could take or leave showing you how cool they are by broadcasting what they’re listening to while they do data entry from nine to five.

Reardon isn’t willing to go that far (read: he’s not as big a jerk as I am), but he agrees it’s the lack of context provided by those posts that keep them from being effective. First, sites like Facebook don’t offer a fully functional music player alongside your friends’ recommendations. On musx, you can take a rec, click on it, and drop it into your queue or a playlist. Then you can listen to it at your leisure, “like” it, re-share it, comment on it, or pass it along through some other media outlet.

Second, musx is designed specifically for music sharing. Everyone you follow on the app should be someone whose opinion on music you’re interested in. It offers an easy way to weed out your little sister’s catalog of Katy Perry hits.

“Once you empower the person to elect to share something, you provide that context,” Reardon said. “On Facebook…it is totally diluted and means nothing to us. Why listen to one song as opposed to the 15 others someone just posted about?”

But, musx isn’t perfect, either. It was launched on February 13 for iPhones (with Android and web versions to follow), and glitches are still being worked out. Minor layout and button-clicking problems aside, the first big ding on the music player, for me, was that it lacked continuous play functionality when I put my phone to sleep or used another application. Reardon assured me this was intended to be a feature of the app and would be corrected. Still waiting, at least at press time.

Another hurdle? The success of the app is highly dependent on the number of people using it. It also helps if those people happen to like cool music. When I first created an account, Weezer’s “Say It Ain’t So” held the top spot in the popular songs category for a good 12 hours. Great song, but the last time The Blue Album was getting consistent airtime on my player was 20 years ago. Reardon said this chink in the digital armor might have been in part due to the app being picked up by several overseas publications and downloaded in more than 80 countries.

“There are people that are the tastemakers, but there are also people who are just using the app to listen to music,” he said. “That’s good to see.”

Reardon and the other musx principals have been tweaking the algorithm used to create the “popular” feed, and he’s confident “Surf Wax America” won’t be the next track to hold the top spot.

While musx relies exclusively on YouTube content for now, Reardon said the team is close to finalizing an update that will allow SoundCloud searches as well. He said users will be able to find just about anything they want once that’s complete, but what of all this streaming of free music? Who’s making a buck here, and who’s getting left out? Reardon said the app won’t rely on paid upgrades anytime soon, and he insists advertising will always be strictly music focused and stay out of the user’s way. Making sure there’s a seat at the soundboard for industry-types is Keup’s job.

“As a songwriter and producer, streaming services are a terrifying frontier,” he said. “But I feel we are coming at this from a well-meaning place. We are going to enable everyone, from the content creators to the venues, to conduct their business more efficiently.”

If they’re successful, they’ll be in the minority. Reardon readily admits apps have a high failure rate, and music apps perform even worse. Regardless, it stands to be a pretty fun ride. I wonder if I’ll be there to see it all.

Download the musx app here and tell us about it in the comments section below.

There’s a line in the song “So Lonely” by The Police that seems relevant when discussing the Academy Awards: “No surprise, no mystery.” Was anyone surprised that Chiwetel Ejiofor, who gave the best performance in the most important movie of 2013 (that’s 12 Years a Slave), lost out to Matthew McConaughey, who gave a nearly-as-good performance in Dallas Buyers Club?

Was anyone surprised that Alfonso Cuarón won Best Director for the paper-thin, no-character-development, seen-it-before Gravity over 12 Years a Slave’s Steve McQueen? Nah. (Or at least probably not.) Remember when considering your Oscar chances, kids: Space adventures beat the suffering of millions of people.

Maybe that’s the cynic in me, but at least some things about the Oscars did surprise: Jared Leto’s hair was wonderful. Ellen DeGeneres’ pizza gag—which tanked on multiple levels—was saved for a moment or two by Brad Pitt, who started handing out paper plates.

Then there was John Ridley’s win for Best Adapted Screenplay. The win itself isn’t a surprise, but it did surprise me that a guy who used to be a sitcom writer (and wrote the story for David O. Russell’s early movie Three Kings) would become one of the most sought-after scribes in Hollywood. Lesson to Ted Cohen and Andrew Reich, creators of “Work It,” ABC’s famously unfunny 2012 men-in-drag sitcom: There’s hope for you.

Other surprises: The tone deaf (literally) performance by Bette Midler of the 1980s tearjerker “Wind Beneath My Wings.” (At least they kept the period keyboard sound that dates the song so badly.) John Travolta’s odd hairline was upstaged only by his garbled pronunciation of Idina Menzel’s name. Menzel sang “Let It Go,” which beat Pharell’s superior “Happy” for Best Original Song. (His performance was better, too.)

All that griping leaves out one salient point. The Academy got something right in an era when it gets so many things wrong. As my friend and fellow film critic Kristofer Jenson said on Twitter last night, “12 Years a Slave wins. I don’t tell you this enough, society, but I’m proud of you. #Oscars.”

It’s important to note that, for once, the Academy, as they loftily call themselves, made the correct choice. I’d been bracing for a Gravity win for Best Picture of the Year (or worse, American Hustle) and was pleasantly surprised to see a beautiful—if heartbreakingly difficult—picture such as 12 Years a Slave get the recognition it deserves.

And “deserves” is a difficult word for awards such as the Oscars. This is the same rich-people-partying larf-fest that encourages the world’s most doofus-like selfie be retweeted more than any other photo in history (see above).

Such is life, and it’s the little victories that count. The Oscars are a sham, but they’re a sham that rewards people like Steve McQueen, Slave’s director. That picture’s big-name producer, Brad Pitt, had the good taste to step aside and let McQueen talk after a sincere introduction. And if the trade-off is that a dumb photo is in the headlines this morning, that’s OK. At least Lupita Nyong’o, Best Supporting Actress winner for 12 Years a Slave, made it in the pic.

By now we’re all familiar with Luc Besson’s oeuvre, right? You may remember him as the writer responsible for resurrecting Liam Neeson’s career with Taken, a movie in which young women can do nothing for themselves while older men beat the shit out of other men who would do the women harm.

With Taken, Besson sort of launched the older-white-guy-as-killing-machine genre that had previously been ruled by younger guys in the 1980s (yes, Stallone and Schwarz-
enegger were young once). Neeson has made it his bread and butter. Following Taken, Neeson made Taken 2, The Grey, Unknown, and coming soon, Non-Stop.

Besson has moved on, sort of. Whereas once all the women in his movies were helpless, they now kick ass (The Family, which is a terrible movie) or avoid it altogether (3 Days to Kill), unless they’re Amber Heard, in which case it’s unclear what she does (again, 3 Days to Kill).

This time around the old white guy is Ethan Renner (Kevin Costner), a secret agent lifer who kills with speed but usually leaves a mess. Vivi Delay (Heard) is running an operation to kill The Wolf (Richard Sammel) and The Albino (Tómas Lemarquis)—it should be noted that these names are said throughout the movie with straight faces. Ethan blows killing The Albino in the opening minutes, but that’s because he has undiagnosed brain cancer and passes out during a foot chase. He does, however, shoot The Albino in the ankle and leave him with a limp.

Fast forward: Ethan is diagnosed, told he’ll die in three months, and he subsequently retires and moves to Paris to spend his remaining time with his estranged wife Christine (Connie Nielsen) and daughter Zooey (Hailee Steinfeld). Neither of them is thrilled, but Christine agrees to let him back into their lives because of his illness. She makes Ethan promise he won’t tell Zooey he’s dying and that he’ll never go back to the life. He agrees to both.

If only life were so simple! Vivi has other plans, and like Michael Corleone, Ethan finds himself pulled back in. Soon he’s tracking The Albino and The Wolf while dispatching lots of bad guys and beating French dudes who make fun of him for wearing what, to them, look like cowboy clothes.

3 Days to Kill wouldn’t be so awkward if it knew what to do with itself. Like lots of Besson-written movies, it treads uneasily between super violence, drama, and clumsy comedy. It also, like lots of Besson movies, treats the young women as objects to be ogled or saved, except for Heard’s Vivi, whose character makes no sense. More than once she sends Ethan to kill some guys but then kills them herself. So what’s his purpose? Or hers?

In addition to father-daughter storylines, there’s also a marriage storyline, a how-do-we-raise-kids storyline, an African family squatting in Ethan’s apartment, and Ethan’s hallucinations resulting from an experimental drug regimen. And, last but not least, The Albino drops an elevator on a woman’s head in the first five minutes of a PG-13 comedy.

Playing this week

12 Years A Slave
Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6

About Last Night
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

American Hustle
Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6

Endless Love
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Frozen
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Gravity
Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6

Her
Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6

In Secret
Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6

The Lego Movie
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Lone Survivor
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

The Monuments Men
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

The Nut Job
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

On the Waterfront
Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6

Philomena
Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6

Pompeii
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Robocop
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Ride Along
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Winter’s Tale
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

The Wolf of Wall Street
Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6

Movie houses

Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6
979-7669

Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX
244-3213

The Presidents of the United States of America

Kudos to You!/Self-released

If you’ve been part of The Presidents of the United States of America bandwagon for any length of time, you know how much of a hoot these guys can be. With the first new album in six years, The Presidents prove to be as irreverent and fun as ever. Kudos to You! features heavy doses of punk, rock, alternative and grunge stylings, and vocalist/bassist Chris Ballew is as silly as ever. It’s impossible not to smile while listening to this album. There are odes to insect wars (“Flea vs. Mite”), cop cars (“Crown Victoria”), and U.S. states (“Ohio”), and on “Poor Little Me,” the band demonstrates its skill in harpooning just about every country break-up song cliché ever written. And who doesn’t love a good song about a fly’s desire to land on ice cream and poop (“Slow, Slow Fly”), or those rubber little monster toys kids put on their fingers (“Finger Monster”)?

Xiu Xiu

Angel Guts: Red Classroom/Polyvinyl Records

Fair warning, the latest record from Xiu Xiu is extremely hard to listen to. Angel Guts: Red Classroom is a descent into fear, loathing, isolation, pain, and darkness that is almost unbearable. Throughout the album, the timbre of singer Jamie Stewart’s vocal is the narrative thread that binds the harrowing collection of songs together. On “Lawrence Liquors” he whispers as though looking over his shoulder in fear of an assailant, “El Naco” is one of many tracks that finds him not screaming, but screeching at the heavens, and on “Archie’s Fades” the mood is so ominous that it’s hard to know whether his vocals tremble from rage, fear, or pain. Stewart sounds like he is on the brink of madness from start to finish and just as likely to be reveling in his demons as he is trying to exorcise them. This is a bold, if deeply unsettling, artistic statement from the perpetually avant garde group.

Graham Colton

Lonely Ones/United for Opportunity

If you are a fan of creative left turns, then the latest by Graham Colton should interest you. Gone is the acoustic-led edge that populates much of his previous work, and in its place is a modern pop aesthetic that gives a few nods to the past as well. Driving, riff-heavy numbers like the ebullient opener “Mixed Up” give the album its pep as does the uplifting “Hands Untied.” Colton’s vocals are clearer and cleaner than ever on the ballad “Another Night” and the piano rock number “Summer to Me” sounds like an ’80s-era love song reborn. Colton’s emotional flair hasn’t disappeared—as the moody, ambient track “Arms” can attest, and likewise the weighty content of “Funeral” is anything but disposable.

Right-click and “save link as” to download Graham Colton’s song Born To Raise Hell.

We’ve reached a point in the movie business when we’re so devoid of new and good ideas we’re recycling old and bad ideas. Such is the case with Endless Love, a remake of a 1981 Brooke Shields-starring soapfest that is remembered for making a decent amount of money, for an early appearance by Tom Cruise, and for the No. 1 single featuring Diana Ross and Lionel Richie. Everything else about the movie should be forgotten.

Let’s be clear about this Endless Love update. It’s silly, knowingly dumb, and completely outrageous. Characters speak in ways no human being would really speak, people do things no person would do, and events take place that are beyond ridiculous.

At least no one intentionally sets a house on fire as in the 1981 film. And among the things the movie gets right are a teenager’s ability to get sucked into a whirlwind romance and start behaving erratically. It also understands how a 17-year-old can feel strongly about something one minute and change his mind entirely in 30 seconds.

That’s all a longwinded way of saying cut Endless Love a break. David (Alex Pettyfer) and Jade (Gabriella Wilde) are the endless lovers, and everyone else plays his or her part in this over-the-top bordering-on-melodrama silliness. Bruce Greenwood, as Jade’s father, Hugh, and Joely Richardson as her mother, Ann, are way, way better than this material deserves. Give them both credit for sacrificing their pride for this racket. A screenplay this silly needs actors who commit.

See, Jade and David are in love because she has a dead brother she’s still mourning (as is her family), and he’s in the right place at the right time. Jade never had any friends in high school—suuuuuuuure—and for a graduation present her parents throw her a party. David has been rolling his tongue back into his head every time he sees her for nearly four years, and because of dumb luck in the form of a meet-cute, he rescues her party from the clutches of a bunch of olds her parents invited.

There’s a dance party, a power outage, and making out in a closet. And dad’s ire. Jade begins acting irrationally—i.e., not being under father’s control—and he decides to take Jade and the family, including her brother Keith (Rhys Wakefield) and his girlfriend Sabine (Anna Enger), to the lake house.

Little does dad realize this is the age of the iPhone, and soon David has joined the family. It gets sillier from there, but here’s the thing: That doesn’t matter. Anyone willing to plunk down $11 for Endless Love knows exactly what they’re getting into. The audience I saw Endless Love with loved it endlessly, and the critics thought it was stupid.

So it goes. This is one of those instances when it’s best to view a movie on its own terms, especially when it’s good at living up to its end of the bargain. It also plays by the rules it sets. You get what you pay for, but if you end up at the multiplex to see Endless Love, you probably want what you’re buying.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8ODZ_fp6_c

Playing this week

12 Years A Slave
Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6

About Last Night
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

American Hustle
Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6

August: Osage County
Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6

Dallas Buyers Club
Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6

Frozen 3D
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Frozen Sing-Along
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Gravity
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Her
Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6

Labor Day
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

The Lego Movie
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Lone Survivor
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

The Monuments Men
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

The Nut Job
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Philomena
Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6

Robocop
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Ride Along
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

That Awkward Moment
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Vampire Academy
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Winter’s Tale
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

The Wolf of Wall Street
Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6

Movie houses

Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6
979-7669

Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX
244-3213

The poster for George Clooney’s The Monuments Men has that wow factor. Not the poster itself—a bunch of guys standing next to each other smirking or stony-faced is kind of dull. But look at the names on the left. Clooney. Matt Damon. Bill Murray. John Goodman. Jean Dujardin. Bob Balaban. Hugh Bonneville. Cate Blanchett.

Now, that’s a cast. How was this movie not released in November or December last year to qualify for Awards season?

The answers come quickly once the picture starts rolling. The Monuments Men suffers from the same affliction as Clooney’s last few directing efforts, starting with Leatherheads: a crippling lack of stakes, an uneasy grasp of comedy, and a lackadaisical touch with the drama. What happened to the man who helmed Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and Good Night, and Good Luck?

The story itself is a worthy one. Frank Stokes, sometime in 1943, pitches President Roosevelt on the idea that the great works of art Adolf Hitler is stealing for his in-the-works Führer’s Museum need to be recovered. Roosevelt agrees, and because there are no young men available for the job—they’re all fighting the war—it’s up to Clooney and a gang of olds to the do the work themselves. That explains how guys such as Goodman, Murray, and Balaban end up in basic training.

Problems in the movie’s tone spring up immediately. The score, by the normally reliable Alexandre Desplat, is too military bouncy and cheery, and at all the wrong times. It seems as if Desplat and Clooney were going for a tribute to Elmer Bernstein’s music from The Great Escape, but instead wound up with outtakes from his score for Murray’s role in Stripes.

Another problem is the ease with which the Monuments Men accomplish everything. There are no stakes. When Damon, who speaks French (poorly), goes to France to liaise with a curator he knows, he’s greeted with a wave and a smirk by a couple of French Resistance volunteers. Voila! Infiltration complete!

Then there’s the sequence in which Bonneville, as an English lieutenant, asks a captain for a ride to Bruges to check on the status of Michelangelo’s “Madonna and Child.” The captain says “no,” so Bonneville rides a bike into town and avoids the Germans easily, because, you know, why not?

There are powerful moments, as when Murray receives a phonograph message from his family back home and Balaban surprises him by playing it over their camp’s loudspeaker, all while Clooney and his co-writer Grant Heslov (playing an army doctor) try to save a mortally wounded soldier.

But most of Clooney’s directing choices seem inspired by the Steven Soderbergh school of cool—which is the school that made all the Oceans pictures. Clooney would have been better off borrowing from the Soderbergh who made Out of Sight—arguably Clooney’s best movie as a star—and certainly a movie that understands the delicate balance between humor and violence.

Would Soderbergh have had a character step on a land mine and say he’d done it because it was a slow day? Would he have miscast Blanchett? Probably not. The Monuments Men has the elements of a great motion picture but those elements are, unfortunately, obscured.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CreneTs7sGs

Playing this week

12 Years A Slave
Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6

About Last Night
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

American Hustle
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

August: Osage County
Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6

Dallas Buyers Club
Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6

Frozen 3D
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Frozen Sing-Along
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Gravity
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Her
Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

I, Frankenstein
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Inside Llewyn Davis
Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6

Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Labor Day
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

The Lego Movie
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Lone Survivor
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

The Nut Job
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Philomena
Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6

Robocop
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Ride Along
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Saving Mr. Banks
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Sleepless in Seattle
Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6

That Awkward Moment
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

Vampire Academy
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

The Wolf of Wall Street
Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6

Movie houses

Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6
979-7669

Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX
244-3213

Bid boredom adieu with seven subtitled screenings at the University of Virginia’s French Film Festival. Award-winning Cameroonian director Jean-Pierre Békolo leads discussions on his filmmaking practices in the sci-fi erotic thriller Les Saignantes and the controversial political drama Le Président. Additional films run the gamut from a star-studded melodrama (De Rouille et d’Os, featuring Marion Cotillard) to a charming animated feature (Le Chat du Rabbin).

Wednesday 2/12 through 2/16. Free, times and venues vary. For info visit pages.shanti.virginia.edu/2014_UVA_FFF. 

Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings

Give the People What They Want/Daptone Records

Give the People What They Want is an apt title because this 11-piece outfit knows its audience through and through. Once again, Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings deliver the goods by skillfully combining ’60s-era Motown, soul with the verve of ’70s-era funk, and R&B to perfection. Jones is at her sassiest on numbers like “Retreat!” singing lines like “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned/I’ll make you wish that you’d never, ever been born,” and on the old school rocker “People Don’t Get What They Deserve,” you feel the same electricity that ran through the Tina and Ike Turner classic “Proud Mary.” The album is heavy on relationship themes—“Get Up and Get Out” has Jones embarrassed that she has let a no-good ex back into her life, while “Making Up and Breaking Up” highlights a similar turbulence. The album’s best moment comes on “Now I See” when Jones’ powerhouse vocals are augmented by roiling drums that signify thunder in an angry take down of an old friend. It gives you chills, and so will this record.

Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks

Wig Out at Jagbags/Matador Records

Wig Out at Jagbags is a random mess, but given the title of the record that’s no surprise. The focus is simply on each song as its own entity, rather than trying to bring it all together in a cohesive sound or narrative thread. In that sense, the album is brilliantly executed. “Planetary Motion” rides on classic rock sensibility reminiscent of “American Woman,” while “Lariat” is a jangly pop number featuring clever wordplay and a shout-out to the ’80s as the best musical decade. “J Smoov” mashes R&B, modern rock, ’70s-era pop, and a trumpet solo together like it’s the most natural thing in the world, and then Malkmus goes primal with his vocals on the sinister rock track, “Scattergories.” Wig Out suceeds in its devil may care, dance-like-nobody’s-watching sensibility, and with song titles like “Cinnamon and Lesbians,” it’s clear that Malkmus & the Jicks are going for a messy band of joy.

Warpaint

Warpaint/Rough Trade

Damn, but this is a sexy record. Amped with ambient, down-tempo, acid jazz, trip-hop, hip-hop, rock, and psychedelic tracks, not to mention the echoing, ethereal vocals of Emily Kokal and Theresa Wayman, it is impossible not to be drawn in to the dark, otherworldly beauty of this record. The album has an alternately intimate yet wholly abstract feel to it. Tracks like “Love is to Die” and “Feeling Alright” dish out commentaries on the power of love, and the psychedelic hip-hop of “CC” takes it a step further in lyrics such as, “I’ve been holding out for this one/Holding out for love/You’ve got me/So sick/Spinning/Dizzy.” The cut-and-paste lyrical framework of tracks like “Disco//very” hints at a meandering stream of consciousness, while the closer, “Son,” features an almost warlike drum beat and a gradual fade as though to suggest the titular character is walking into the unknown future.