Month: October 2006

It’s one thing to buy a band’s album; it’s another thing entirely to buy them new instruments. (Isn’t that what parents are for?) But something in the Decemberists, a sort of homely ensemble of indie balladeers from Portland, Oregon, must bring out the inner nurturer in their followers. When the band’s tour van and gear were stolen a couple years ago, fans helped raise cash to get the band back on its feet. And how did the Decemberists repay that generosity of spirit? By signing to a major label and making The Crane Wife, a delicate, multilayered set of songs inspired by history and literature, and influenced by a host of musical forebears, including Robyn Hitchcock, Elliott Smith, Neutral Milk Hotel, the Waterboys, and the Handsome Family. 612-332-1775; www.first-avenue.com

Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers, and Bastards, CD available November 21
This is what we want for Christmas, even if the leathery, Beetlegeuse-ish Waits is more a Halloween kind of guy, and even if we probably can’t wait that long. A career retrospective (not a greatest-hits collection), this three-disc set compiles twenty-four rarities and thirty new songs by an artist absolutely without peer. In other words, Orphans offers a treasure trove for longtime fans and a splendid introduction for new converts. Many of the tunes from Waits’ catalog of spooky, minstrelesque ballads—concerning such subjects as love, death, dogs, and booze—would sound like sweet little carnival gems if they weren’t sung in the gravelly croak of a well-marinated carny. And plenty manage to be beautiful all the same, wrecked pipes be damned. Then there’s Waits’ version of bonus tracks: his bizarre interpretations of songs by folks like the Ramones, Daniel Johnston, and Leadbelly.

The SPCO hits the road for a three-week tour of the Twin Cities, celebrating the works of that cranky genius Beethoven, a man whose love life was a series of trysts with one married lady after another. Commitment phobic or just unlucky in love? Either way, he died single after channeling his romantic energy into a body of work that seems crafted for the heart as much as the ear. This year’s festival is devoted to his symphonies—all nine get a workout—as well as the piano concertos. For its finale, the SPCO will wrap things up with a performance of Ode to Joy at the Basilica of Saint Mary in Minneapolis, which ought to really get the bells ringing in the old Beaux Arts landmark. 651.291.1144; www.thespco.org

Formed by young, classically trained musicians, Carolina Chocolate Drops aim to carry on the tradition of Southern black string music, which largely died out with the birth of the recording industry and the ascendance of the blues. Most folks today think of old-timey music as bluegrass played by white people from Appalachia, but historically, the music belonged equally to African-Americans from the Carolina Piedmont (central North and South Carolina). The banjo, which originated in Africa, is at the band’s center, but the mix also includes guitars, fiddle, harmonica, and the occasional fife, snare drum, or jug. Some of the Drops’ tunes are slow and soulful, but many are stomping party tunes, designed—just as when the music was born—to keep the audience dancing. The Drops’ performance here will be filmed by John Whitehead, a local at work on a documentary chronicling the black string renaissance. 416 Cedar Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-338-2674; www.thecedar.org

In many ways, Maine is something of a coastal Minnesota. It has loons, moose, and a stump-studded northwoods. It has a Plymouth, an Orono, a Medford, and a Northfield. We have Granite Gear; they have L.L.Bean. It’s like the two states were separated at birth—by glaciers. But you don’t hear much about the hot Maine music scene. The state’s only star of note is Ray LaMontagne, a guy with a mythical-sounding backstory: One night, after his shift at the shoe factory, he hears a Stephen Stills song on the radio and has an epiphany: He should make music, not shoes! So he quits his job on the spot and starts writing songs. Minnesota has produced Prince, the Jayhawks, and Bob Dylan, and LaMontagne’s sound borrows a bit from all three, as evidenced by his rootsy, sexy 2004 debut, Trouble. The fellow is notoriously shy, which has made touring difficult, but perhaps he’ll feel at home here. 651-989-5151; www.hennepintheatredistrict.org

Director Richard Linklater’s love of the 1970s may have reached its zenith with this film, which would fit well with the paranoid classics Coppola, Pakula, and Altman made some thirty years ago. Adapting (with author Eric Schlosser) the controversial non-fiction account of the fast-food industry, he avoids the hysterical polemics of, say, Michael Moore, for a much more engaging—and infuriating—story. The film follows a teenaged worker at the Mickey’s chain undergoing a political awakening; a burger exec facing a crisis of corporate faith; and a group of Mexicans whose lives are wrecked so that we may eat cheaply. “The machine don’t give a shit,” one character laments, and like the cows in the meat-processing plant, the people of Fast Food Nation are, in fact, devoured by the system.

Even though chronic hay fever keeps him from service in the Marines, Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith tells everyone that he’s fighting overseas. All the while, he’s hiding out in a distant city, working in a munitions factory. When a group of down-on-their luck leathernecks hear the truth, they usher poor Woodrow back to his hometown for a hero’s welcome to ease his mother’s worried heart. Arguably Preston Sturges’ masterpiece, Hail the Conquering Hero is a film so ripe for remake it almost hurts. In classic screwball fashion, it takes on patriotism, the media, and politicians who manipulate war for their own benefit—and in the process, lampoons contemporary wartime culture in an almost frighteningly prescient way. Part of the seven-disk series: Preston Sturges: The Filmmaker Collection.

At first, it just sounds too good to be true. But as rumors persist that the independent film Home for Purim is generating Oscar buzz, the entire cast and crew—triumphs of mediocrity, each and every one of them—slowly begin to unravel. Christopher Guest’s mockumentaries are always good for an evening of belly laughs, although his acerbic wit seems to have evaporated in his last two films and been replaced by mawkish sentiment. With For Your Consideration, Guest is back in form, skewering a subject well worth roasting: Hollywood and its obsession with self-congratulation. He has rounded up his crew of stalwarts—Michael McKean, Harry Shearer, Eugene Levy, and the brave Parker Posey—and brings in Ricky Gervais, creator of The Office, who could raise the embarrassment level to new highs—or drop it to new lows, depending on your outlook.

Vigorously booed at the Venice Film Festival, acclaimed as masterpiece by others, this time-travel extravaganza hits our shores after six years of labor from director Darren Aronofsky (Pi, Requiem for a Dream). Wildly ambitious in its scope, The Fountain takes place over a thousand years and weaves together three stories, with the same actors helming each thread. Rachel Weisz (the good wife of Mr. Aronofsky), fresh from her Oscar triumph in The Constant Gardner, brings her sexy intelligence to the role of a woman trying desperately to finish writing a book while fighting a life-threatening disease. Studly Hugh Jackman is the man who flies through time and space to tap into the “tree of life” in an attempt to save his beloved. Along the way, he becomes a sixteenth-century conquistador, a modern-day scientist, and a bald guy floating in a bubble ship through space in the 2500s. Looking both daring and outlandish (not to mention all its New Age claptrap), The Fountain could be Aronofsky’s Matrix … or his Battleship Earth.

We don’t know Kazakhstanis from Martians, but something tells us they’re not the backwater, Jew-loathing whoremongers that writer-producer-star Sacha Baron Cohen makes them out to be. Borat is a mock documentary in which the titular hero, a Kazakhstani television personality, comes to the U.S. on a cross-cultural mission and winds up crossing the Southern states to get to California—and Pamela Anderson, whom he wishes to marry. Despite some funny moments—including a grotesque, buck-naked wrestling match between Borat and his overweight manager—Borat’s broad humor often collides with downright insulting material. Filling his movie with real-life footage of Southern bigots as well as obviously staged moments (a book signing and attempted abduction of Pamela Anderson, a ride in an RV full of idiotic frat boys), Cohen and his fellow screenwriters ask you to laugh with (and at) a creature devoid of redeeming virtues. Ultimately, Cohen isn’t merely shooting fish in a barrel—he’s throwing in a stick of dynamite.