TITLE: Jack Reacher
STARRING: Tom Cruise, Robert Duvall, Rosamund Pike, Werner Herzog, Richard Jenkins
DIRECTOR: Christopher McQuarrie
STUDIOS: Paramount Pictures, TC Productions, Skydance Productions
RATED: PG-13
RELEASED: December 21, 2012

By Chris Kromphardt
Staff Writer, Justice Administrator

Jack Reacher is a fun, loose adaptation of Lee Child’s novel One Shot that should please most fans of the title character, while drawing in plenty of new fans. If the film does well at the box office, it will probably the first of a whole run of films based on Child’s bestselling series. If it flops, then this one shot still stands on own merits, namely the action and opportunity to see a great fictional hero finally brought to life.

 Jack Reacher is basically military police-Batman. He has no powers beyond his strength, training, and intellect, but he uses his brain and brawn to take down challenges no ordinary man would stand a chance at. Part of the beauty of the novels is following Reacher as he disassembles the task at hand. Whether he goes looking for trouble, or trouble just happens to find him, give the man free use of his hands and brain and someone is getting their ass handed to them. Just like Batman, only Reacher has no compunctions about killing the bad guy.

Reacher is a natural character to build a movie around, just like James Bond and Jason Bourne before him. And yet, after 17 novels and counting, he’s just now making his silver screen debut. Part of the problem is the disassembling nature of Reacher’s method—it’s great reading if you’re privy to his thoughts and analyses, but it’s dull watching a guy weighing every option before letting loose. To combat this risk, the filmmakers wisely spruced up the story with some car chases and revised the final showdown to emphasize Reacher in executing rather than planning mode.

None of these changes upset me, a fairly new fan. I’ve gone through four Reacher novels in the past 18 months: The Killing Floor, Die Trying, One Shot, and my favorite so far, Gone Tomorrow. Everything that was important to telling the basic story Child tells in the novel has its counterpart in the film. This brings me to the second reason it’s hard for Reacher to translate to film—he’s such a unique character, particularly his size. Picture Brian Urlacher, linebacker for the Chicago Bears. 6’4”, 258 pounds. Can he act? Hell no. And yet, that’s roughly the size Reacher is in the novels. It would be impossible, a joke, for the filmmakers to try to match his size. So instead, wisely, the filmmakers abandoned that conceit in recreating Reacher and instead sought to translate the unstoppable essence of the character.

Tom Cruise on paper is hardly unstoppable. He’s got Little Man Syndrome and is crazy and always has to run in his movies, and this makes him an awesome butt of every joke ever. But he clearly believes he can do everything Reacher can, and that makes him a surprisingly apropos choice. The entire time I’m watching this movie—and this is partially thanks to some subtle tweaks made by the filmmakers to underpower the character—I’m buying Cruise as MP-Batman.

For this fan, that’s good enough. Now get cracking on an adaptation of Gone Tomorrow!

RATING: 6/10

Front page image from nydailynews.com. Images 1 and 2 from rottentomatoes.com.
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ARTIST: Linkin Park
ALBUM TITLE: Living Things
RECORD LABEL: Warner Bros. Records
RELEASED: June 26, 2012

By Chris Kromphardt
Staff Writer, Justice Administrator

There’s nothing particularly memorable about Linkin Park’s new album, which after 2010’s polarizing A Thousand Suns is a marked disappointment. The band had a chance to push boundaries and continue to redefine their distinctive “hybrid theory,” and while Living Things is not a bad effort, it’s also not an interesting one.

This site saw a reaction to my largely positive review of Suns that was, in a word, jaw-dropping. Apparently there exists quite a gulf between people who consider themselves longtime LP fans, with one side feeling betrayed by the band’s experimental nature on display and the other — myself included — impressed by their willingness to explore what the band’s capable of.

Unfortunately for fans like me, there is very little of that same willingness on display in Living Things. On Suns, the band varied their vocal approach; while one might argue that they’d always used this approach, pointing to their two-singer modus operandi, they pushed that envelope even further, with Chester Bennington using his beautiful singing voice on songs like “Iridescent” in a way fans, familiar with older songs like “My December,” always knew he could. On top of that, the album interspersed audio clips of speakers like Martin Luther King Jr. and Mario Savio among the songs, further developing the somewhat abstract theme of revolution.

One consistency for Linkin Park in all of its work, especially this new album, is its instrumental variety. Whereas Suns transcended this idea by employing vocals-as-instrument in a brand new way, Living Things does it in earnest with impressive beats backing nearly every one of its songs. The band has always known how to catch a listener’s ear instantly, and on several songs they do it in a way that increasingly utilizes electronic music. In this respect the band truly pushes its self-stylized hybrid approach to crafting songs. Additionally, “Powerless” joins the band’s impressive pantheon of album-closers, including “Pushing Me Away,” “Numb,” and “The Little Things Give You Away,” that shows that the band — Sun’s excruciatingly melodramatic “The Messenger” notwithstanding — can still shut it down in style.

The album suffers where Suns mostly succeeded though, and that’s in the vocals. Bennington and emcee Mike Shinoda feature on nearly all of the songs here, but they don’t quite capture the seamless fusion of their unique styles as they have to perfection before on, say, Minutes to Midnight’s “Bleed It Out”; rather, one singer or the other seems unnecessarily foisted into some songs, notably the first single “Burn It Down,” a real banger fronted by Bennington until, oh there’s Mike rapping all of a sudden, completely sapping the song of its entire pumped-up mood. Similarly, “Victimized” is this album’s “Wretches and Kings,” with Bennington’s mindlessly petulant howling an all-too-painful reminder of the band’s nü-metal beginnings — and excesses — that for whatever reason it refuses to abandon.

All in all, Linkin Park has done too good of a job winning me back with songs like “Numb/Encore” off the Jay-Z mash-up album Collision Course and albums like Minutes and Suns that showcase a band truly interested in pushing themselves musically. But Living Things is just, well, boring. Even at 37 minutes, a return to the economical form of Hybrid Theory and Meteora, Living Things feels too long. But I’m still interested in what the next iteration of the hybrid theory the band will come up with next time around.

RATING: 5/10

Photos by James Minchin, courtesy of Warner Bros. Records.

ARTIST: Norah Jones
ALBUM TITLE: Little Broken Hearts
RECORD LABEL: Blue Note Records
RELEASED: May 1, 2012

By Chris Kromphardt
Staff Writer, Justice Administrator

You’d think that the opportunity to work with as iconic a producer as Danger Mouse again wouldn’t have Norah Jones quite so melancholy, but the work on display in Little Broken Hearts is some of her most heartwrenching to date. Jones has long been a favorite pop act of mine thanks to her voice and catchy melodies, but this time around she sounds like she’s got a little something more to say.

Maybe it’s the producer. The two have worked together before—she did vocals on a couple tracks for the largely instrumental, spaghetti-Western themed album Rome Danger Mouse did last year with composer Daniele Luppi—and, per the James Mercer-model, now the two have put together an album that is absolutely more than the sum of its parts.

Danger Mouse is getting harder and harder to classify. While his music always sounds like it’s of another age, it’s never the same age and the shtick is getting less on-the-nose. True, Rome went a bit heavy on the spaghetti sauce, but really, you could do worse than idolizing Ennio Morricone, not to mention bagging vocals from the likes of Jones and Jack White; and true, while his first collaborations with Cee Lo Green were what, along with The Grey Album, made his a household name, both Gnarls Barkley albums took the funky aesthetic a notch or two too far. Lately, though, his Broken Bells project with Mercer and the most recent Black Keys’ albums are among his best work, which is not surprisingly among the best music anyone’s releasing. And now you can add Little Broken Hearts to that list.

It’s worth asking what makes the collaboration work. Jones’ songs are usually accompanied by the jazz staples — simple strumming of a guitar, stark, sparse drums, a bass line — over which she croons pleasantly. She’s like John Mayer—the kind of artist you and your mother can agree on.

And yet the title track of the album has her singing over a noir-evoking beat, “Little broken hearts of the night/slowly picking up their knives/on their way to the fight/tonight they want revenge.” Here’s a woman who has more to say than her heart being drenched in love, and it’s not just the one song. Jones does a phenomenal job channeling two women who can sing the hell out of a broken heart scenario — Neko Case and Adele. On “4 Broken Hearts,” hers are nearly indistinguishable from Case’s smoky tones, and while Jones can’t quite belt like Adele (who can?), she confidently explores her upper register. It’s hard to deny Mouse some of the credit for evoking the kind of passion that’s on display.

To close on a personal note, I should say that I’ve never thought Danger Mouse’s “auteur” approach to producing was bullshit, but it was premature. Most directors improve as they age and accumulate experience, and the best ones will experiment with the mold they’re often cast in. So far he’s found magic with several artists who, while not nobodies, might not have pressed back with a strong personality. The next major test to his auteur status will be when the Danger Mouse-produced U2 album finally sees the light of day, and we’ll see how his vision stands up against likes of Bono and The Edge.

RATING: 8.5/10

Front page image from quebec.huffingtonpost.ca, interior photo from chron.com.

By Chris Kromphardt
Staff Writer, Justice Administrator

Skottie Young lives 10 minutes away from the town in which I grew up.

Allow me to amend that: recently-named Eisner Award winner Skottie Young lives in the Illinois town that’s home to my high school’s arch rival football team. Think Friday Night Lights, only with cornfields instead of cattle ranches, and you’ve got an idea about how I view this place. It hurts me to say nice things about it.

Normally, having a comic artist living near you might not be anything to make a fuss about. But both towns are what I like to think of as suburbs of the suburbs of Chicago, small enough that the high schools drew from “feeder” junior highs — needless to say, not too often does something exciting happen.

I first found out that Young had moved nearby a few years ago on a trip back home to my local comic shop. For a while this was always just something kind of cool to me and other people back home who read comics. However, that changed when Young won the Best Penciller/Inker Eisner last Saturday for his work with writer Eric Shanower on Marvel’s string of mini-series adapting L. Frank Baum’s Oz novels. By change, I mean that once again, I was faced with explaining to people why I like comics.

In a piece I wrote last summer that got mentioned on Newsarama, they took a shot at the title of my column. “Comics still need defended?” they scoffed. While it’s probably easy to take a stance like that when you write for a big-name comics web site, in the real world it’s a little different. In my experience, people who don’t read comics generally don’t get comics. They wouldn’t get, say, why I nod my head in recognition when I read something like Brian K. Vaughan extolling how the “very pure, undiluted creative vision” of comics is part of what makes it “the best form of storytelling ever created.” Needless to say, anytime I get it in my head that I’ve got to persuade someone of the merits of comics, I’ve got my work cut out for me.

This includes my mom. When I first heard Young had won, I called home to tell her because, as a reporter for a county — I told you they were small towns — newspaper this was the kind of human-interest story I knew they like to run. Describing the Eisner as “comic’s Oscars,” I launched into how cool it was that a guy who lived nearby had won and that the paper should totally do a story. “Chris,” she told me, “that’s nice and all, but it’s 11 o’clock at night and I don’t care right now. I’m going back to bed.” Twitter keeps different hours than a reporter for a small newspaper, I guess.

We touched base again a few days later, after my mom had had a chance to pitch the idea to her editor — to have been a fly on the wall at that meeting, listening to two middle-aged women talking about comic book artists, would have been incredible — and began talking questions should Young agree to an interview. And while we talked, I realized I was again doing something I’ve always struggled with: expressing what makes comics special. Why I had gotten excited in the first place to find out that a guy who lives in the cornfield-town next to my own cornfield-town who makes his living working on the bazillionth iteration of the Oz stories had won an award.

I still can’t explain it to my satisfaction. Perhaps Stephen King was right when he wrote, “[W]ords shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they’re brought out.” Perhaps it’s because comics are by design more than words: they’re words accompanying pictures, inert on the page but waiting for the reader’s imagination to give them life in the mind.

All I know is, so long as I keep getting excited by even the most trivial in comics, I’m going to keep trying to explain why.

Front page photo from conventionscene.com, interior photo from Skottie Young’s official Facebook Fan Page, Ozma of Oz cover from comicrelated.com.

ARTIST: Foo Fighters
ALBUM TITLE: Wasting Light
RECORD LABEL: RCA
RELEASED: April 12, 2011

By Chris Kromphardt
Staff Writer, Justice Administrator

“These are my famous last words!” Dave Grohl howls on “Bridge Burning,” the opening track of the Foo Fighters latest album, Wasting Light. That declaration is, of course, untrue, but now that Mr. Grohl and company have your attention, they’re not about to relinquish it. The title Wasting Light suggests an urgent demand for your attention, and it suits, as this is one of the Foo Fighters’ most aggressively infectious albums in some time.

The Foo Fighters began a bit of a mellowing phase around the time of their double-album In Your Honor, which featured half rock songs along the lines of what you’d expect from them, and half more stripped-down, acoustic songs. The approach worked, particularly on songs like a duet with Norah Jones called “Virginia Moon” that showcased Grohl’s trademark growl reduced to barely a whisper. The Fighters’ next album, 2007’s Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace, was a bit of a blend of the approaches on IYH, and while a solid effort, winning the Grammy for Best Rock Album and notching hits like “The Pretender” and “Long Road to Ruin,” it lacked the balls-to-the-wall, manic energy fans had come to expect. Fortunately, WL sees the Foo Fighters return the balls to where they belong: firmly on the wall from the word “go.”

While more of what fans like is always good, it’s also important for a band to grow. “Everlong” and “Learn to Fly” are awesome, but we don’t need those songs repeated ad nauseum until each new album sounds exactly like the previous ones. And the Foo Fighters, bless ‘em, have managed to broaden their sound just enough so that it’s fresh and new again. Probably the best example of this is the song “Arlandia,” where Grohl borrows just enough from Queens of the Stone Age frontman—and fellow Crooked Vulture—Josh Homme to embolden the track from a good song into one that wrenches in to your brain, and one that I think could enter the Foo Pantheon in time.

Presenting here a slew of tracks that instantly feel like old friends, the Foo Fighters have crafted another great album. The first single should effectively “Rope” (pun intended) fans back in after a four-year interim between albums, and they won’t be disappointed by the intensity they’ll find here. I sure wasn’t.

RATING: 8/10

Visit wastinglight.foofighters.com to listen to Wasting Light before it is released, on April 12.

Front page and interior photo by Steve Gullick. Courtesy of RCA.

ARTIST: Rise Against
ALBUM TITLE: Endgame
RECORD LABEL: DGC/Interscope Records
RELEASED: March 22, 2011

By Chris Kromphardt
Staff Writer, Justice Administrator

Rise Against has long been a committed member of a group of contrarian rockers, which includes Rage Against the Machine and Against Me, who were so adamantly against something—the Man, likely—that they needed to adopt band names that really drove that point home.

Over several albums, they have rarely varied from their instantly recognizable song template—soaring vocals, passionate yet frequently platitudinous lyrics, and solid rock instruments. Theirs is an easily accessible type of hardcore, mixing screaming and loud instrumentation with familiar song structures; this approach to making music is further demonstrated by songs like the excellent, yet kinda emo “Swing Life Away.” For a band so antsy to be contrarian, Rise Against is remarkably—and Orwellian-ly—adept at branding themselves as the casual rock fan’s hardcore band.

None of this is negative criticism; I love Rise Against. Their music contains just enough piss-n-vinegar raging against the machine to scratch the radical itch developed during my teenage years that I never quite left behind. For me—someone who grew up in a small town just outside the Chicago suburbs—listening to Rise Against provides the same kind of vicarious thrill I get from rap like Eminem or Kanye West: an intense yet still safe pseudo-identification with a counter-culture of which I could never be a part.

Endgame is more of the same Rise Against I’ve always loved, and that’s a great thing; why mess with a winning formula? 2008’s Appeal to Reason was probably Rise Against’s greatest divergence from style, but even that was only evident in a few songs, particularly “Hero of War.” Endgame, then, is a return to the all-systems-go approach perfected in 2006’s The Sufferer and the Witness, a subgenre felicitously dubbed “melodic hardcore”: lack of dissonance characterizes these twelve songs to a “T”. There aren’t really any standout tracks either way — I’ve listened to Endgame beginning to end at least four times, only repeating a few songs, because each one’s solid. That in itself is an accomplishment — a well-paced album that rocks from start to finish.

If you listen to rock music, you probably already know whether or not you like Rise Against. With this review, I probably won’t persuade anyone to abandon those notions. But maybe, if you’re musically omnivorous, you’ll give Endgame a shot and perhaps appreciate the unique balance a band like Rise Against strikes between rock purists and an accessible sound.

RATING: 7/10

Front page photo from alterthepress.com, interior photo from interscope.com.

TITLE: Paul
STARRING: Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Jason Bateman, Kristen Wiig, Seth Rogen
DIRECTOR: Greg Mottola
STUDIO: Big Talk Productions, Relativity Media, Working Title Films, Universal Pictures
RATED: R
RUN TIME: 104 minutes
RELEASED: March 18, 2011

By Chris Kromphardt
Staff Writer, Justice Administrator

2011 is shaping up to be the Year of Rampant Spielberg Fanboy-ism, and Paul, the latest film to star the British comedic pair Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, is the first homage out of the gate. It is the pair’s first collaboration since 2007’s Hot Fuzz, and the first without director Edgar Wright, who was occupied with directing Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. However, as eagerly anticipated as Paul has been by fans of both Pegg and Frost and Spielberg, perhaps its release in March—sandwiched as it is between the tail end of the deluge of Oscar-nominated films and the beginning of the summer blockblusters, and usually a dumping ground for movies that do not quite fit into either of these categories—is a sign that Paul might not be the film fans had been hoping for.

Granted, Paul may have been fighting a losing battle from the beginning. The other movies that qualify 2011 as the YoRSF—this summer’s Super 8 and the holiday season’s first installment of Tintin—are being released in more traditional times of the year for big movies, and feature the involvement of the man himself, Steven Spielberg, who seems to be staging a return to making the types of high-adventure movies that made his a household name. But Pegg and Frost have a devoted following of their own, accumulated thanks to films like Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz and the television series Spaced, so Paul faced greater expectations than simply being a send-up to Spielberg. Because of this fan base’s lofty expectations for Paul to be on par with their previous films, the filmmakers had their work cut out for them; consequently, the (almost) lack of Spielberg cannot be completely blamed for Paul’s failing to hit the mark.

Paul tells the story of two friends who are acting out one of their biggest dreams: traveling from their homes in Britain to America to visit San Diego Comic Con and tour the American Southwest, checking out Area 51 and other extraterrestrial landmarks. Their expedition is interrupted by the arrival of Paul—voiced to stoner perfection by Seth Rogen—an alien who crashed to Earth during the Forties. Paul, who’s been serving as a veritable PR representative for all-things-ET in pop culture during the last 70 years, senses he has worn out his welcome on Earth, and enlists our protagonists to help him flee the planet. Along the way they meet up with a fundamentalist Christian—a, at the risk of redundancy, weird Kristen Wiig—and are chased by federal agents, played by Jason Bateman, Bill Hader, and Joe Lo Truglio.

Paul’s not a bad film by any stretch of the imagination, but it is a disappointing one. The cast has proven comedic chops, and previous collaborations by Pegg and Frost, while parodies, were engaging—the characters were of course funny, but you also cared for them and were interested in what they were doing. That is not so much the case with Paul, where once the characters and plot are set in motion things just kind of coast. Perhaps this is partially due to Wright—Pegg and Frost’s friend and frequent collaborator—not being in the director’s chair. A change in the chemistry that produced the brilliant humor of Shaun of the Dead may be the proximate cause of Paul’s, well, unremarkableness.

And that is Paul’s most salient feature: in a year where it is popular to harken back to some of Spielberg’s most iconic films, it is not enough go small and safe. You have to shoot for the stars.

RATING: 6/10

All photos from rottentomatoes.com.

TITLE: Rango
WITH THE VOICE TALENTS OF: Johnny Depp, Isla Fisher, Ned Beatty, Abigal Breslin, Bill Nighy
DIRECTOR: Gore Verbinski
STUDIO: Nickelodeon Movies, Industrial Light and Magic, GK Films, Blind Wink. Distributed by Paramount Pictures.
RATED: PG
RUN TIME: 107 min
RELEASED: March 4, 2011

By Chris Kromphardt
Staff Writer, Justice Administrator

It seems to be the thing with American animated films—previously the now all-but-extinct ones with hand-drawn animation and now those with the near ubiquitous computer-rendering—that they’re crafted to appeal to both kids and adults. Whereas animated films from Europe and of course anime may not hesitate to tackle more complex and adult stories, in America the story is almost always told simply enough that young children can follow along. Of course, the level of detail and control that animation enables means that filmmakers can throw in the occasional sly wink or innuendo to keep older audience members engaged.

Rango’s a little different, however. This fact, for me, was hinted at in the first trailer that I saw. Seeing a chameleon that looked like one of those journo-lizards in the bar in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, wearing Raoul Duke’s Hawaiian shirt, voiced by Johnny Depp—I knew this was going to be a movie I had to see. Coupled with some of the most gorgeous animation this side of Avatar—courtesy of Industrial Light and Magic—Rango’s a film that fits into a rather rare niche of American cinema: the animated film that puts the grown-up audience first.

This, of course, is not to say that Rango’s like Aqua Teen Hunger Force or Beavis and Butt-head Do America or, thank God, Team America: World Police. Rather, through its clear homages to the western genre and its brilliant subversion of those archetypes, Rango dares to take itself seriously. Not so much that it’s an austere film at all, far from it, actually. It is a movie for people who love movies.

Image from rottentomatoes.com.

Like most Westerns, Rango doesn’t have an overwrought plot. Previously terrarium-raised and with only toys for companionship, Rango finds himself somewhere—outside Barstow—in the Mojave Desert after a freak car accident rips him from his sheltered life. Having honed his performance skills as a way of keeping himself entertained—and, as a chameleon, he’s a natural at assuming roles—Rango is able to win over the locals of the desert town of Dirt with his bravado and charisma, and takes up the mantle of sheriff. A dwindling water supply provides the ostensible conflict, and to say much more would spoil the treat of watching the story unwind.

Rango is voiced by Johnny Depp (also the lead in Fear and Loathing) and I can’t imagine any other actor playing the role. It’s great to see him really sink his teeth into a role in a way he hasn’t done since Captain Jack Sparrow, and he’s perfect with Rango’s schizophrenic inhabiting of role after role. Ned Beatty, who after this and Toy Story 3 appears to be the go-to-guy for voicing malevolent characters in animated films, plays the Mayor, and a swath of other big names—from Alfred Molina to Isla Fisher to Bill Nighy to Timothy Olyphant—round out a cast that is just superb. The only problem sound-wise with Rango is that sometimes it is a little hard to understand what some of the characters are saying. There was an entire song sequence where I didn’t understand a word.

I have a hunch, and while I can’t confirm it I still think it’s pretty sound. It goes like this: given the number of people who worked on both this and the Pirates of the Caribbean flicks—Depp, Nighy, director Gore Verbinski—Rango became a pet project for that crew. With its delightfully weird cast of misfit characters, coarse dialogue, and almost hallucinatory method of storytelling, this is, as I said at the beginning, not your standard animated film. However, thanks to the marquee-quality names attached to it, I think Rango may find a place among mainstream audiences, much as, say, The Nightmare Before Christmas did: an irreverent story that utilizes the unique possibilities of animation to tell a truly memorable story.

RATING: 8/10

Front page image from getthebigpicture.net.
For more from Johnny Depp, check out The Tourist and Alice in Wonderland.