Wrecking Ball album review
"Hold tight to your anger and don't fall to your fears," Bruce Springsteen snarls on the defiant title track of Wrecking Ball (***½ out of four), a raging state of the union address enveloped in rootsy folk-rock.
The album, already widely streamed and leaked will not officially be available until Tuesday, is his angriest and most politically pointed to date, stomping with fury yet crackling with jubilation as its protagonists scramble for lifelines out of a tattered and toxic economy.
While not his strongest outing, Wrecking soars on familiar strengths: passion, roadhouse swagger, muscular melodies and a fighting spirit.
Springsteen keenly captures the current plight of the nation without stamping an expiration date on his songs.
The messages — biting, unambiguous and in language often drawn from the Bible — focus on unemployment, crooked banks and the decaying American Dream.
Rage and despair fuel these tunes, but an uplifting chorus is always just around the corner.
On a tear to raze Wall Street and raise Main Street, Springsteen grapples with Everyman frustration and dread in the same deft and direct manner deployed on 9/11-themed The Rising.
He confronted similar subjects on Nebraska and The Ghost of Tom Joad, but Wrecking is less darkly poetic, more emphatic and plain-spoken. Its populist anthems are unlikely to be misinterpreted and appropriated by Republican candidates. President Obama, however, has a ready-made campaign playlist.
While Springsteen and the E Street Band will tour starting this month, Wrecking is a solo album with a slew of sidemen.
The late Clarence Clemons shines in a stirring sax solo on Land of Hope and Dreams and a quieter contribution on the title track, and drummer Max Weinberg pops up on two tunes.
Other E Streeters are missing in action. Instead, Springsteen heavily relies on players from 2006's We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, Wrecking's closest cousin in his catalog.
For all its joyous noisemaking and impassioned calls to action, a thread of resignation runs through Wrecking Ball.
In Jack of All Trades, Springsteen sings, "The banker man grows fat, working man grows thin/It's all happened before and it'll all happen again."
Maybe so, but for now Springsteen offers inspiration and motivation for anyone inclined to join his struggle against injustice and escapism for those content to ride out the storm.
Project X movie review
Project X, a movie about a teen party gone horribly wrong, would be every parent's worst nightmare if it weren't so inane.
It's billed as a comedy, but there's not a laugh to be had during the frenetic mayhem. There is also no plot beyond debauchery, nor characters beyond cardboard cutouts.
Basically, it's a setting, and a familiar one: a suburban home teeming with drunken, druggie, hedonistic, irresponsible high-schoolers.
Herein lies a heinous, misogynistic movie filled with faceless crowds and nary a character who resembles an actual human being.
Then there's a ridiculously corny romantic ending, à la John Hughes movies, tacked on as if to atone for all that went before.
As a spoof, it fails miserably. Its one-note concept is carried out in the most derivative fashion, employing the overused "found footage'' technique (Cloverfield, Paranormal Activity movies), in which someone has a camera rolling within the film, documenting every casual conversation, as well as every catastrophe, as it occurs.
Here, it simply provides an excuse for muddy-looking camera work.
A shy guy named Thomas (Thomas Mann) is having his 17th birthday, and his supremely annoying pal Costa (Oliver Cooper) decides to stage a party that will vault their status from dweebs to cool guys who can score with the hottest babes.
Costa sends an e-mail blast and posts the party on Craigslist. That's perhaps the only vaguely fresh element: invitations gone viral.
The party draws a couple of thousand boors and bimbos, and nearly every imaginable horror occurs, including a Mercedes sunk into a swimming pool and a neighborhood set on fire.
Almost every terrible outcome is predictable.
As supposed evidence of originality, a dwarf is stuffed into the oven and the family dog is set aloft with helium balloons. Amid the carousing are the requisite jokes about coitus interruptus and defecation.
Perhaps a better title would have been There Will Be Vomit.
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