DVD |
Ask the Dust (4 stars)
$29.99
Before playing Sonny Crockett in the movie Miami Vice, Irish bad boy Colin Farrell portrayed a very different American archetype—a broke and boozy writer desperately seeking his first big break—in Robert Towne's vastly underscreened Depression-era drama, Ask the Dust. Just as he did in his screenplays for Chinatown and The Two Jakes, writer-director Towne imbues this film with the nostalgic feel of a Los Angeles not yet overwhelmed by freeways, tacky subdivisions and fast-food chains. His story focuses on the hard-luck denizens of saloons and boarding houses. Farrell is Arturo Bandini, an aspiring writer with a very meager income. His muse arrives in the intoxicating form of Camilla Lopez, a tempestuous barmaid portrayed with great bravado by Salma Hayek. Their stormy love story plays out against a background of anti-immigrant hysteria, earthquakes, dust storms, poverty and alcohol-fueled despair. Bandini and Camilla roam from downtown LA to the beaches and, finally, to the desert. Cinematographer Caleb Deschanel's cameras deftly capture both the region's famously intense sunlight and the dusty scrim that covers LA like a blanket.
One-Twelfth of the Year at a Glance: August |
MOVIES: It's quite a month for snakes on planes—and we don't mean the ones that mess with Samuel L. Jackson in Snakes on a Plane (August 18), a movie so perfectly titled we won't even have to see it to know we had good time. No, we mean the Muslim hijackers who, with reptilian coldness, perpetrated the acts of 9/11. Now comes Oliver Stone's World Trade Center (August 9), and with it a shiver: Oliver Stone? Yet even conservatives have been raving about how respectful and powerful the movie—with Nicolas Cage, Michael Pena, Maria Bello and Maggie Gyllenhaal—is. Of course, that could just mean it's heavy-handed and sentimental. Even so, a must-see. Unless you're just not ready to watch national tragedy transmuted into entertainment. In that case, try Little Miss Sunshine (August 18), a quirky road-trip picture starring Greg Kinnear and Steve Carell. It scored huge at Sundance thanks to its offbeat humor and rich characterization. Title could use some work, though—we'll probably have to see it to know if we had a good time.
MUSIC: Sebadoh's benchmark lo-fi document, 1991's III, returns to circulation on August 8 after years out of print, along with a second disc loaded with rarities assembled by principals Lou Barlow and Eric Gaffney. Renowned hip-hop producer J Dilla died in February, but not before releasing Donuts, widely tapped as one of the year's top albums. Now, Busta Rhymes, Common, Pharoahe Monch, Black Thought and Madlib pay their respects on posthumous follow-up The Shining, due August 22. And now for something completely different: The Easy Star All-Stars follow up 2003's Dub Side of the Moon with Radiodread (August 22), a reggae reworking of Radiohead's OK Computer, featuring Toots & The Maytals and Citizen Cope, among others. Three cuts are already up at www.myspace.com/easystar.
BOOKS: The Looming Tower, New Yorker staff writer Lawrence Wright's account of al Qaeda's 9/11 operation, should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand the world we're in now. For those who don't, Japanese master fabulist Haruki Murakami offers blissfully bizarre escape in the 25 stories gathered in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman.
Get a Lifestyle! |
If you really, really like eyeliner and can't decide which song best accompanies your MySpace profile—Slayer's "Die by the Sword" or "Miss Murder" from AFI—there's a new Vegas-based brand that's got the lifestyle tees to complement your aesthetic. Lawrence Machado and Jason Mageau launched Malus Clothing this year and have already been befriended by an impressive roster of indie bands and kids with killer coifs. Vegas' prettiest punk darlings Valentine even posed for Malus promo shots, and word was their first annual fete (July 21, Icehouse) inaugurated the line as a glam-goth/pop-rock must-have.
www.malusclothing.com