In his typical romantic fashion, Nicholas Sparks brought us a story of young love tested by distance and time in his novel “Dear John.” Now, thanks to director Lasse Hallström, an adaptation of Sparks’ novel has hit the big screen, promising to bring with it plenty of tears.
Music has acquired a unique place in our society’s hypermedia atmosphere. Markets are segmented in more ways than you can fold a single sheet of paper, and mainstream markets borrow or buy trendy sensibilities only after a year or two of sustained appeal.
These days country music is often associated with cheese like Taylor Swift, Tim McGraw and Rascal Flatts. Because of this, it’s hard to give the genre the benefit of the doubt. More often than not, the only thing such artists ever add up to are catchy melodies and clichéd heartache.
Through all the genre-saturation hullabaloo generated by the Internet, there are two veins of sound most poised to identify themselves as the namesake of the current decade-plus in music history. Animal Collective’s digitalized experimentation has the most followers in both bands and fans, and its very literal technology-bound soundscape makes it an easy candidate for the title; but bands like TV on the Radio make a bold statement for a different form of otherworldly inventiveness, one not tied to the blips and bloops we associate with our own technological progress.
Folk music is one of the oldest, most diluded, yet prestigious genres of music. So as frustrating and understandable as it is to hear a good 10 genres ascribed to Midlake—psych folk, indie folk, progressive folk, contemporary folk, alternative pop, etc.
“Up in the Air,” a film about Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), who fires people for a living while in pursuit of reaching 10 million frequent flyer miles, is one of this Oscar season’s most talked about films. It has been noted widely for addressing issues concerning the recession, particularly that of unemployment.
As the cliché goes, the whole is often more than the sum of its parts. We as humans are not our biochemistry, a maze of neurons or our limbs. In art, the gestalt is the ultimate goal, the pinnacle of artistic vision. Pit Er Pat’s latest release sits at the opposite end of the spectrum.
What does it mean to see a film? To me, these types of questions are much more interesting and fruitful than the more widely posed “Does all cinema count as art?” As I see it, the point of talking and thinking about art is not to make art an an elite club to which the contents of the Louvre, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, “Madame Bovary” and “Citizen Kane” belong but “Hot Tub Time Machine,” R.
Monday, Feb. 1. Sadly for me, I’m the Jin to your Sun, stuck 48 hours in the past and 24 hours before the “Lost” season six premiere. I’ve got my web browser open to an article that has been mocking me for at least 12 hours. I check back periodically, hoping that some legal power has demanded that it be banished from the visible realm of the Internet, but alas, to no avail.
A high-powered career woman falls in love with a sports writer in “When in Rome.” Sound familiar? Maybe because the storyline steals plot details from the Hollywood classic “Roman Holiday.” Unlike the original version, though, “When in Rome” is just plain bland.
Back in 2001, a little known band named Fridge released their album Happiness.The album consisted of nine tracks with titles such as “Cut Up Piano and Xylophone” and “Sample and Clicks,” exemplifying the band’s ability to make musical ideas out of chopped and looped fragments.
Since the infamous “wardrobe malfunction” in 2004, there has been a significant shift in the direction of Super Bowl halftime performances. The trend is obvious in the six years since: Paul McCartney, the Rolling Stones, Prince, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Bruce Springsteen, and now the Who.
Lorrie Moore’s third collection of short stories begins with an epigraph, “It is not news that we live in a world / Where beauty is unexplainable / And suddenly ruined / And has its own routines. We are often far / From home in a dark town, and our griefs / Are difficult to translate into a language / Understood by others.
“Fat Men in Skirts,” produced by the Mercury Players Theatre and playing at the Bartell Theatre the weekends of Feb. 4th and 11th, goes for shock over substance. Upon entering the theatre, two understudies/ushers arbitrarily chose audience members to be “frisked.
Great music allows a collection of strings twanging, drums beating and bells shaking to be a medium through which the listener can bond with the performer. “Crazy Heart” attempts to give the complete picture of where soulful, personal music originates from—in this case, the hard-lived life of a country legend.
The official website of Beach House, the four-year-old, two-person “dream-pop” duo, brings you to a single image of the two acting like a pair of misfit, ironically swanky teens. You can’t see their faces. There is a sculpture of a head with multiple faces in between them, and Victoria Legrand’s hand is tucked into her pants next to her belt buckle, where “GIT SUM!” has been MSPainted in.
It’s really too bad that, at some indeterminate point in American cultural history, having a taste for world cinema became a signifier of either one’s sophistication or one’s pretentiousness. Equally unfortunate is the categorical division between American films and non-American films: To speak of works such as Fritz Lang’s “M” as being strictly “foreign” is to downplay the influence they have had on movies made right here in the good ol’ U.
A little more than a year after its Broadway run came to a close, the revolutionary rock opera “Rent” is being performed at Madison’s Overture Center. The cast features three of its original members from its first appearance off-Broadway: Anthony Rapp, Adam Pascal and soloist Gwen Stewart.
Emotional turmoil and chaos reign in Madison Opera’s production of Benjamin Britten’s “The Turn of the Screw,” playing in the Playhouse at the Overture Center this weekend. Based on the novella by Henry James, “Turn of the Screw” examines the life of The Governess (Grammy-nominated soprano Caroline Worra), who is sent to watch over two children, Flora (Jennifer DeMain) and Miles (Alistair Sewell).
In the frantic waning moments of “You! Me! Dancing!,” Los Campesinos! frontman Gareth Campesinos! hastily shouts, “And we’re just like how Rousseau depicts man in the state of nature: We’re underdeveloped, we’re ignorant, we’re stupid but we’re happy.
Another new semester has begun my friends, and even though you thought you may have left me and my worldwide literacy ambitions behind, I’m back again to needle you into reading just one more sentence, and possibly the sentence after that. I assume that after last semester most people want to shut the book on reading, never to open it again, and yes that pun was intended.
Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away (“Ready are you? Wh-wh-what know you of ready?” interjects Yoda backed by a dubstep beat), technology became so advanced that artists could take the creative work of countless others and splice them together in new, trendy ways.
Somewhere in the world, there is a very happy 13-year-old Evangelical Christian boy. After years of struggling to find a happy compromise between Bible-thumping religiosity and the bullet-riddled fight scenes of modern action flicks, Hollywood has finally melded the two together in the most maladroitly literal way possible.
In the two years leading up to the release of Transference—Spoon’s seventh studio album—Spoon has been faced with the lofty task of following up their own perfection. Their previous release, 2007’s formidable Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, was about as conclusive a punctuation mark as it gets, the full-bodied conclusion to the skeletal sketches they’d slowly perfected throughout the preceding 13 years.
Very few people would expect “The Tooth Fairy” to be a great movie. Still, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as a bad boy hockey player turned temporary tooth fairy could have made for a breezy 100 minutes of harmless movie fluff for kids.
The premise of “The Lovely Bones” draws you in with high ideas about murder, death and the afterlife. A girl who is brutally murdered remains halfway between here and the hereafter while she comes to terms with leaving her life, her family and her killer remaining on Earth.
When Cold War Kids released Loyalty to Loyalty in the fall of 2008, it was met with mixed reactions. There was no doubt the group had changed its tone since their first full-length album, 2006’s Robbers & Cowards, but reviews wavered on whether these changes were any good.
Josephine Foster’s archaic approach to music is thoroughly indicative of her background. She is an aspiring opera singer turned classically trained songwriter who can play guitar, piano, harp and ukulele. Her tastes lend her a sound predating pop music as we know it, making her an old-school traditionalist.
Madison’s cinema scene is excellent, relatively speaking. On any given weekend, no fewer than four local venues are playing films worth watching. Four Star Video Heaven (on North Henry Street) is the most inexhaustible movie rental joint I’ve ever patronized.
When associated with a successful act, it can be hard to break out of its shadow and make it on your own. Just ask Conan O’Brien. Anybody in this scenario is always faced with the rock-and-a-hard-place dilemma of the need to find a unique style while making use of the strengths that made past collaborations so successful.
At time of publication, it’s all but completely official: as early as Friday, Conan O’Brien will be removed as the host of “The Tonight Show” on NBC. He makes room for former host Jay Leno, who could find no love for his new show or giant chin in prime time.
In his 2009 release, Changing Horses, Ben Kweller left the alternative rock world of his early career and made his first venture into country music. While he performs amicably in his new genre, the decision to explore his alternative country and bluegrass interests has brought Kweller to a crossroads.
If a movie sells itself as the coming-of-age tale of an awkward teenage boy obsessively trying to lose his virginity, it had better offer an interesting twist on this tired and overused plot. “Youth in Revolt,” directed by Miguel Arteta, attempts to put a quirky and original spin on the overdone, panicky, adolescent quest for sex, wherever it can be found.
Another decade of music has come and gone. Every one—let’s say from the 1950s on—embodies shifts in cultural and technological influences allowing unique artists and stories to develop in pop music. And as much as change is resented in almost all forms, it is inevitable.
After just 10 songs, Vampire Weekend became the face of indie rock. Combining Paul Simon’s Afro-pop and cardigan sweaters, the four Columbia grads swept the nation with their smug grins stretched ear-to-ear and pretentious dispositions emblazoned on their polos.
0 false 18 pt 18 pt 0 0 false false false
and 
