Joe Carnahan’s Smokin’ Aces is a pretty bad movie… a wannabe-Tarantino cynical shoot-’em-up that fancies itself way more clever than it is.
But it contains one of those elevating Jason Bateman appearances I mentioned in my State of Play review.
Monthly Archives: April 2009
Song of the Day #271: ‘God Give Me Strength’ – Elvis Costello
Costello put all of his recent vocal training to good use on his next release, a collection of crooner ballads written with Burt Bacharach. This is far and away the squarest release of his career — even The Juliet Letters feels like punk next to this one.
But it’s definitely a solid song collection. Songs such as ‘Toledo,’ ‘This House is Empty Now,’ ‘In the Darkest Place’ and today’s Song of the Day are right up there with Costello’s best solo work. My biggest fault with Painted From Memory is the production, which is much heavier on the Bacharach than the Costello. The backing vocals alone make this a rather labored listen.
Song of the Day #270: ‘It’s Time’ – Elvis Costello
Costello followed Brutal Youth with Kojak Variety, a forgettable covers collection that felt more like a contractual obligation than a new Elvis Costello album. But a year later he was back with the strong All This Useless Beauty, an elegant collection of songs he’d mostly written for other people.
Some had been recorded by other artists, some had been turned down, some were written new for the album… the whole concept was kind of half-baked from the start. The important thing was that Costello was back with a new batch of original material, keeping up the enviable pace of one release per year that he’d maintained since his debut.
State of Play
It’s always strange to watch a film set in a place or milieu with which you have intimate familiarity. I remember seeing the Kevin Costner thriller No Way Out when I lived outside of Washington D.C. and the whole crowd murmuring when he hopped on a non-existent Georgetown Metro stop.
State of Play gave me that feeling in spades, as it’s set in a newsroom and deals with the struggling newspaper industry and the locking of horns between print and digital media — all things I deal with on a daily basis. So it’s full of scenes that ring true (the sloppy desk of Russell Crowe’s seasoned reporter character, the cartoony redesigns being forced on the paper by a corporation focused only on the bottom line) as well as scenes that are laughably false (a blockbuster story appears to go from the reporter’s typewriter to the front page without intervention by an editor or a lawyer, the Web department in a modern newsroom is confined to a handful of people in a side room marked with a sheet of typewriter paper).
Song of the Day #269: ‘Only the Lonely’ – Frank Sinatra
I think I’ve mentioned this before, but there are few albums that throw me back in time as effectively as Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely. That baby is a time machine… I pop it in and crank the dial back to 1982 where a 10-year-old boy sits in a North Miami house thick with the delicious aroma of wine and London broil.
They say the sense of smell is tied directly to our memory bank and that nothing takes you back like a familiar odor. But in this case, it’s the sound of these songs that transports me so powerfully that I can remember the smell of that place, and the feel of it — warm, cozy, safe. Sinatra is the sound of a happy childhood.
Meet Me In Montauk 