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It was cosmically appropriate that our review copy of The Handsome Family’s sixth disc, Singing Bones, arrived the day that Johnny Cash died. The New Mexico husband-and-wife duo of Brett and Rennie Sparks are true artistic children of the Man in Black, mixing traditional roots music with postmodern macabre about haunted all-night chain stores and doomed expeditions down bottomless pits. Brett’s deep bass is a perfect complement to Rennie’s lyrics, which aren’t so much standard verse-chorus-verse as melancholy story-poems with a dark, dry humor Flannery O’Connor would have appreciated. Bones is rich with somber alt-country, recorded and mixed entirely in the Sparks’s living room. Turn down the lights, knock back a whiskey and sing along.
400 Bar, 400 Cedar Ave., (612) 332-2903, www.400bar.com

Born Clive Powell in Manchester, England, Georgie Fame rose to, er, fame as a footsoldier in the sixties British Invasion, fronting the Blue Flames on a string of modest hits including a cover of Mongo Santamaria’s “Yeh Yeh” that went to number one in England, knocking out the Beatles’ “I Feel Fine.” Admirably, he never stuck to just one style, but mixed up jazz, rock, pop and R&B, and helped introduce ska to Londoners. The next couple of decades found him struggling, but by the nineties Fame had found his groove again, playing organ on Van Morrison’s Clinton-era albums and building up a solid body of his own work in the jazz style known as vocalese. He’ll play the AQ with Wisconsin-based jazz pianist and musicologist Sidran, whose Go Jazz label put out Fame’s acclaimed recent albums Poet in New York and Cool Cat Blues.
AQ, 408 St. Peter, St. Paul St., (651) 292-1359, www.mnjazz.com

Dido takes life at a slower, more deliberate pace than the rest of us—and it seems to work for her. Remember No Angel? That was her last (and first) record, the 1999 chartbusting album that featured, most prominently, the song “Thank You,” which the evil Eminem sampled improbably in 2000 on his psychopathic tune “Stan.” It was a great song that became a calling card for an album that we still keep close at hand, a trip-hoppy classic of the modern torch-singer genre. Now Dido finally follows up with an album that’s touted as an even stronger CD. We’re not entirely convinced, but then we haven’t spun the new one a thousand times like we have the first. Prospects are good, though. Listen especially for “White Flag” and “Don’t Leave Home,” Best of Show for this enchanting ingénue.

Back for their first proper album in three years, Glasgow’s finest exporters of sensitive, bespectacled pop have lost two founding members, switched labels and picked up a superstar producer in Trevor Horn, whose previous credits range from Rod Stewart to Yes to Tatu. None of these events has significantly changed the band’s sound, which is good. Horn gives Catastrophe a certain amount of orchestral lushness, but the heart of B&S remains Stuart Murdoch’s songwriting—heart-on-the-sleeve emotionality that’s utterly soaring at its best and twee at its worst—it’s no wonder he’s so often compared to Morrissey. There’s a bit of both on Catastrophe: “If She Wants Me” is a lovely piece of glossy, sophisticated pop, and “Stay Loose” filters the New Pornographers through skinny-tie new-wave-era Joe Jackson. But then there’s the earnest “Lord Anthony,” an anthem about a bullied schoolboy, which is Exhibit A in what makes Belle & Sebastian irritating to those who aren’t true believers.

It’s not an uncommon irony in mystery fiction that a detective so brilliantly able to perceive the hidden connections of the world still can’t make sense out of his own personal life—in fact, it’s a difficult cliche to avoid. But Cracker’s criminal psychologist Eddie “Fitz” Fitzgerald—an alcoholic, sarcastic, arrogant gambler—is a surpassing example of the form, both because of the sharpness of the series’ writing and the consistently great performance of Robbie Coltrane. The big Scottish lug has long been one of our favorites, an actor with an impressive range for both drama and comedy, and he breathes bristly life into the brilliant train wreck of Fitz, who you can’t bring yourself to like, but can’t stop watching. Originally made for Britain’s ITV, this three-disc DVD collects the three two-hour stories of the show’s first season. Coltrane would quit the series three years later citing fears of typecasting; his current role as Hagrid, the lovable hairy half-giant in the Harry Potter films, couldn’t be more different.

Roman Polanski’s first full-length movie got him so much attention worldwide that he was able to escape the stifling Polish studio system for France and Hollywood, where classics like Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown still lay in his future. Between Knife’s language barrier and the higher profile of his later work, it’s no wonder that his debut’s been largely forgotten. But this claustrophobic thriller, set almost entirely on a small seagoing yacht where jealousy reigns and three is definitely a crowd, is well worth a new round of discovery. The DVD is worth it just for Knife, but the second disc, collecting Polanski’s early short films, is a nice treat. Especially since it reveals that Polanski’s familiar obsessions with paranoia and violence were present in potent form in what’s literally the first minute of student film he ever completed, a simple yet chilling scene involving an efficient and anonymous stabbing.

Nothing against Ken Burns, but this public-TV series looks about a hundred times more interesting than Jazz, which was earnest and informative but lacked that je ne sais quois you get when a documentarian knows and loves his subject long before he makes a movie about it. Here, that’s not a problem. Scorsese has a lifelong passion for this music, as do the six other directors involved in The Blues—including Wim Wenders, Clint Eastwood, and Mike Figgis. Rather than a broad historical overview—which someone really ought to do, but maybe next time—the series is a loose-linked collection of seven idiosyncratic trips through the music. We’re especially looking forward to Wenders’s segment, profiling three of the genre’s lesser-known geniuses: Blind Willie Johnson, Skip James, and J.B. Lenoir. The TV series is the flagship of a flotilla of ancillary releases, including a book, DVDs, and nearly two dozen compilation CDs including a five-disc box set; basically, if you have any interest in roots music (and you should), this is a golden opportunity to start exploring.

Fargo excepted, Joel and Ethan Coen have had their greatest popular success with lighthearted, goofy comedies like Raising Arizona and O Brother, Where Art Thou? And that seems to be where they’re headed for their next couple of films. Due in 2004 is their remake of the Alec Guinness/Peter Sellers heist lampoon The Ladykillers, and this month sees the release of Intolerable Cruelty, a 1940s-style screwball comedy starring George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones as a shyster lawyer and gold-digging serial divorcée entangled in a web of seduction, love and revenge. It looks like the Coens’ most mainstream film yet. How mainstream? For one thing, the $60 million budget is more than any of their previous films have made. And there’s the full-page ad on the back page of this month’s Glamour. You can be sure that didn’t happen with Barton Fink. We’ve got high hopes for this one, not just as a new work from the Coens, but as a romantic comedy that might make us forget about recent genre junk like Sweet Home Alabama.

Why isn’t there an official touring film series that collects each year’s Oscar short-subject nominees, which most people never get a chance to see? It seems like a no-brainer, but maybe that’s why we don’t work in marketing. For now, we’ll happily make do with programs like this, a nifty assemblage of nineteen films from eight countries, compiled by animators Mike Judge (King of the Hill and Beavis & Butt-head) and Don Hertzfeldt. Highlights include the avant-garde English claymation Ident, and a snippet of the 1957 space documentary Mars and Beyond, a Disney-imagined view of Martian life that helped the space program get off the ground. Hertzfeldt steals the show with his brilliantly funny, Oscar-nominated Rejected, a satire of commercial advertising work and cutesy TV promos that collapses into total mental breakdown. Here’s hoping next year’s installment has this much good material. (Hertzfeldt will be at the show’s opening night, October 8.)
Oak Street, 309 Oak St. S.E., (612) 331-3134, www.oakstreetcinema.org

Georges Lopez teaches. The point of Nicolas Philibert’s documentary, filmed for six months in Lopez’s little one-room schoolhouse in rural France, is to show us exactly what that means. Surrounded by a gaggle of kids ages four to ten, the stern but grandfatherly Lopez clearly lives for his work—and indeed, he literally lives above the schoolroom. He is retiring next year, we learn, and what that means for his life is anyone’s guess. To Be is charming but never cutesy, though it’s hard to resist a four-year-old named Jojo who has trouble finishing his coloring and can’t resist playing with the photocopier. The film begins slowly and doesn’t build toward any overt narrative point, the better to create a depth of characterization that makes perfectly clear the bond between Lopez and his charges. It’s the sort of film that makes you suddenly remember your favorite grade-school teacher and want to send him or her a little note saying Thanks for helping me learn to tie my shoes. Maybe you ought to invite them to this movie.
Bell Auditorium, 17th St. S.E & University Ave. S.E., (612) 331-3134, www.ufilm.org