Spokenlore Blog

by :Mikael Wood

This London-based crooner emerged in the early ’00s as the face of Britain’s 2-step scene, but on his fourth full-length Craig David doesn’t sound tethered to any one sound in particular: In opener “Hot Stuff” he channels disco-era Michael Jackson over a sizable sample of David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance”; “Friday” has an old-school funk flavor; “Don’t Play With Our Love” rides a tasty Latin-jazz groove, in a nod to Havana, where the album was recorded. Though Martin Terefe’s production features loads of ear-tickling detail—check out the furious horn chart in “6 of 1 Thing”—David’s strongest vocal performance comes in the CD’s most stripped-down cut, “Just a Reminder.” It’s perfect for Robin Thicke fans worried that Thicke’s upcoming disc won’t include another “Lost Without U.”

by :Chuck Taylor

Josh Groban’s third live DVD chronicles one stop during his 2007 tour in support of 2006 set “Awake,” with a host of creatively retouched arrangements, world music instruments and towering vocals, testifying again that the tenor-tainer is far from your average pop star. “Awake Live” features 20 visual performances, with an accompanying audio CD sampling nine of them. The CD tracks demonstrate Groban’s far-reaching versatility: “Machine” verges on raucous with its driving jazzy template, anti-apartheid anthem “Weeping” makes a dramatic call for global peace, and an extended version of latest hit “Awake” turns lyrical morning dew into a pounding thunderstorm of emotion. The album’s highlight, a five-minute take on 2007’s “February Song,” somersaults with one soaring build after another—as frenzied as a ballad could ever be. A dazzling display.

by :Jill Menze

She’s a two-time recipient of the Nobel Prize for Super-Foxiest Female Ever. Does stunt-doubles for Jackie Chan on the weekends. Out super-freaked Rick James. Is there anything Robyn can’t do? While these accomplishments intoned by the booming voice in the intro to “Robyn” might be a stretch, there’s no contesting the Swedish singer’s pop music power. “Robyn” finally sees its U.S. release: From the cheeky hip-hop of “Konichiwa Bitches” and the warped bass underpinning her cover of Teddybears’ “Cobra Style” to the Kylie Minogue-esque “With Every Heartbeat” and sweeping strings carrying “Be Mine,” the album holds 14 sassy and sweet dance pop gems. So when that thunderous voice instructs you to “Please, turn it the fuck up,” you best listen.

By Chuck Leddy

The Man Who Made Lists:

Love, Death, Madness, and

the Creation of “Roget’s Thesaurus”

By Joshua Kendall

Peter Mark Roget, the 19th-century British polymath whose famous compilation of synonyms was for decades a part of every writer’s bookshelf, seems like the worst subject imaginable for a biography. In “The Man Who Made Lists,” Boston journalist Joshua Kendall does his best to enliven his subject, but Roget’s life could often be described with one of the following synonyms from a 1998 version of his thesaurus: “boring,” “uninteresting,” “vapid,” “vacuous,” “prosaic.”

Starting at age 8, Roget would compile lists of words, an obsession that became a lifelong method of bringing order to his sometimes-chaotic world. Kendall views Roget’s habit of list making as “the primary means by which he preserved his own sanity” in dealing with “the early death of his father and the emotional instability of his mother.” Alas, since Roget himself seemed preternaturally unable to express his own emotions, Kendall’s attempts at psychoanalyzing his inner life often seem as untethered as balloons drifting into the sky.

Kendall’s efforts to depict Roget’s romantic life are both sad and funny. As a successful doctor, Roget should have been a great catch in Jane Austen-era England, but his skills at wooing left much to be desired. Kendall recounts how one woman was initially attracted to the young doctor, describing him as “superior to most men” (which sounds a bit lukewarm). But she soon found herself bemoaning Roget’s “want of ardour,” a lack that “weighs with a deadly weight upon my feelings and produces a forced revulsion.”

Roget ultimately did marry; his bride, Mary Hobson, appreciated his aloofness, which apparently rivaled that of a glacier. Kendall does his best to explain Roget’s attraction to Mary, but romantics may be underwhelmed: Roget “was delighted to have found a woman happy to spend the evening taking an algebra lesson from him.” OK, he was no Don Juan, but he sure could impress the ladies with those linear equations.

Kendall tries to insert some international intrigue into Roget’s life. When Roget was staying in Geneva in 1803, he nearly found himself detained by a French government about to go to war against Great Britain. Roget escaped across the border, but Kendall’s efforts to make this episode seem like a mano-a-mano confrontation between Napoleon Bonaparte and Roget don’t quite work. Kendall tells us that during “Roget’s extended nightmare” trying to return home, he “feared that Napoleon had somehow tracked him down.” Readers may be left wondering whether capturing a less-than-dangerous British list maker was atop Bonaparte’s to-do list.

Roget is best known for his famous “Thesaurus,” which has sold almost 40 million copies, but Kendall isn’t able to shed much light on how Roget worked out the details of his project. The first draft, we’re told, was written in 1805, and the work - which contained exactly 1,000 headings - finally saw publication in 1852, but we learn little about Roget’s process of composition or how his magnum opus changed over those 47 years. Unlike Samuel Johnson, Kendall notes, whose famous dictionary was a collaborative effort, Roget worked alone.

As for Roget’s goals, the author is (for once) fortunate to have Roget’s own words, from his thesaurus’s introduction: “My object . . . is not to regulate the use of words, but simply to supply and to suggest such as may be wanted on occasion, leaving the proper selection entirely to the discretion and taste of the employer.”

Even Kendall is forced to admit that Roget lacked insight about himself. In attempting to overcome the limitations of his subject, he has given himself a Herculean task that would leave any biographer frustrated.

by : JUSTIN CHANG

Like a lush tropical getaway that promises paradise and delivers something closer to purgatory, “Nim’s Island” is a picturesque adventure-comedy that quickly capsizes under the weight of its obnoxious slapstick, pedestrian dialogue and general unwillingness to rise above stock ideas and situations. Recasting Robinson Crusoe as a young 21st-century heroine, and confirming Walden Media’s rep as a maker of slick, professional family entertainments of highly variable quality, this strictly-for-kids Fox release should ride the significant appeal of stars Abigail Breslin and Jodie Foster to make midsize B.O. waves.

There’s a difference between skewing toward young audiences and targeting dimwits of all ages, and too often this adaptation of Wendy Orr’s 1999 novel veers toward the latter. As directed by the husband-and-wife team of Mark Levin and Jennifer Flackett (”Little Manhattan”), who share scripting chores with Joseph Kwong and producer Paula Mazur, “Nim’s Island” is much easier on the eyes than it is on the ears. It’s the sort of movie that compels its characters to recap plot points that weren’t exactly mind-bending the first time, read messages aloud even when the words are perfectly legible onscreen, and never miss an opportunity to overstate the obvious.

Breslin plays plucky, prepubescent tyke Nim Rusoe (get it?), who, for as long as she can recall, has lived happily with her scientist-writer dad Jack (Gerard Butler) in a large treehouse — handily outfitted with electricity and high-speed Internet — on an uncharted Pacific island. But when a violent storm hits and Jack is lost at sea, Nim seeks help through a chance correspondence with a person she thinks is the great explorer Alex Rover.

Trouble is, she’s actually exchanging emails with Alexandra Rover (Foster), a severely agoraphobic San Francisco author who couldn’t be more different from the Indiana Jones-style hero she writes about in her bestselling adventure novels. But Alexandra, touched by the girl’s pleas and spurred on by visions of Alex (also played by Butler) only she can see, decides to break out of her shut-in existence, find her way to the island and, inevitably, become the mother Nim never knew. (Latter was apparently swallowed by a whale shortly after Nim’s birth, as recounted in a five-minute prologue and cloyingly referenced throughout.)

Even the journey to this halfway mark seems to tax the film’s resources to the point of exhaustion, as the story bogs down in an excess of dialogue (some of it expository, most of it just embarrassing), half-hearted action-adventure mayhem, the usual supporting cast of friendly wildlife, and hyperactive cross-cutting among the principal characters.

While Nim attempts to contact her father and ward off some opportunistic island crashers, Alexandra trips, bumbles and vomits her way across the Pacific, affording Foster a rare opportunity to flex her physical-comedy muscles. But bearing the brunt of the pic’s increasingly tiresome pratfalls, she flexes rather too hard and too often.

Breslin is appealing and sparky as always but not much more in this lackluster addition to her resume, and her character’s tilt toward bratty self-entitlement in the second act underscores the reality that Nim’s wilderness existence is too cushy by half, a spoiled Girl Scout’s castaway fantasy. Butler, for his part, is both figuratively and literally at sea, as his Jack is forced to spend a ridiculous length of screen time hanging on for dear life.

Lenser Stuart Dryburgh takes full advantage of the widescreen to frame the gorgeous sunsets and beaches of Australia’s Gold Coast and Hinchinbrook Island. Production designer Barry Robison created the paper puppets and miniatures used in the lovely opening and end-credits sequences, although the latter would’ve benefited from a more imaginative song choice than U2’s “Beautiful Day.”

Pic’s souped-up, high-tech “Swiss Family Robinson” aesthetic is borne out by an alarming number of product placements: When Nim and Alexandra exchange emails, the Apple logos on their computers seem to glow in unison, as clear a sign as any that they’re destined to live happily ever after.

Camera (color, Panavision widescreen), Stuart Dryburgh; editor, Stuart Levy; music, Patrick Doyle; music supervisor, Lindsay Fellows; production designer, Barry Robison; art directors, Colin Gibson, Deb Riley, Jacinta Leong; set designer, Tamia Nicol; set decorator, Rebecca Cohen; costume designer, Jeffrey Kurland; sound (Dolby/SDDS/DTS), David Lee; sound designer, Craig Berkey; supervising sound editors, Skip Lievsay, Curt Schulkey; re-recording mixers, Lievsay, Schulkey, Tim LeBlanc; senior visual effects producer, Camille Cellucci; visual effects art director, Geoff Kemmis; visual effects, CafeFX; additional visual effects, Cine-Fin, Eden FX, Digital Dimension, Handmade Digital, Digital Dream, Amalgamated Pixels, Halon Entertainment; special effects supervisor, Dan Oliver; stunt coordinator, Glenn Reuhland; assistant director, John Martin; second unit director, Alun Bollinger; casting, Nancy Nayor Battino; Australian casting, Ann Robinson. Reviewed at 20th Century Fox studios, Los Angeles, April 1, 2008. MPAA Rating: PG. Running time: 95 MIN.

By FRANCINE PROSE

THE SONG OF EVERLASTING SORROW
A Novel of Shanghai.
By Wang Anyi.

Midway through Wang Anyi’s extraordinary novel “The Song of Everlasting Sorrow,” its heroine, Wang Qiyao, is on her way to a pawn shop when she runs into Mr. Cheng, a friend she hasn’t seen in 12 years. A portrait photographer, Mr. Cheng had taken Wang Qiyao’s photo in the late 1940s; the picture appeared in a magazine, and she went on to win third place in the Miss Shanghai beauty contest, the pinnacle of her career. By the time they meet again, it is 1960. Tragedy and ill-starred romance have ruined Wang Qiyao’s reputation; she is pregnant with the child of a lover whose identity she refuses to reveal. Food shortages have pushed China to the brink of famine, so Mr. Cheng, taking pity on her, invites Wang Qiyao to share his modest lunch of rice and salt pork. At his apartment, “after her eyes had adjusted to the darkness, she saw that the little world inside had barely changed; it was as if the little room had been encased in a time capsule. … Wang Qiyao failed to understand that it is precisely this myriad of unchanging little worlds that serves as a counterfoil to the tumultuous changes taking place in the outside world.”

These observations could stand as an epigraph for this beautiful novel, which considers, among its many themes, the question of what endures and what remains the same — what resists the passage of time and what succumbs to the forces of cataclysmic social change. The scope and sweep of the book, which begins in 1945 and ends 40 years later, as well as its focus on the lives of women, may seem reminiscent of “Wild Swans,” Jung Chang’s memoir of her family’s travails under the draconian policies of Chairman Mao. But in fact the two works are remarkably different.

Though politics play a role in the deaths of two of the men Wang Qiyao loves, history more often seems to happen offstage. It enters the characters’ consciousness like the gossip — “made up of fragments discarded from serious conversations, like the shriveled outer leaves of vegetables, or grains of sand in a bag of rice” — that dominates the culture of Shanghai. Its residents, we are told, “hewed to the little things of life, which left them stranded on the margins when it came to politics.”

Throughout the novel, Shanghai, with its distinct and mysterious longtang — neighborhoods circumscribed by narrow alleys — is as powerful a presence as its citizens and provides the occasion for the most poetic writing, as in this description of young girls’ bedrooms, “where anything can happen, where even melancholy is noisy and clamorous. When it drizzles, raindrops write the word ‘melancholy’ on the window. The mist in the back longtang is melancholic in an ambiguous way — it unaccountably hastens people along. It nibbles away at the patience she needs to be a daughter, eats away at the fortitude she must have to conduct herself as a woman. … Every day is more difficult to endure than the last, but, on looking back, one rues the shortness of the time.”+

For the young girls who yearn to escape these rooms, history is filtered through the lens of fashion. The advent of Communism replaces their delicately embroidered cheongsams with blue “liberation suits”; the Cultural Revolution tears the curtains from the windows and fuels bonfires with high-heeled shoes. Rebelliousness asserts itself “in the slight curls at the tips of otherwise straight hair, in shirt collars peeping out from underneath blue uniforms, and in the way scarves were tied with fancy shoestring bows. It was remarkably subtle, and the care people put into these details was moving.” We know a more liberal era has begun when clothing stores open along the boulevards, a mania for shopping infects the population, and Wang Qiyao’s daughter and her friends rush to adopt “the hottest fashion on the street.” Meanwhile, the city itself changes almost beyond recognition. By the final chapters, old Shanghai has become a polluted modern metropolis, the maze of its longtang shadowed by high-rises and hideous new construction.

In contrast, the novel’s characters each possess, for better or worse, a unique and unalterable core that remains unaffected not only by the lessons of history but by those of personal experience. No amount of enforced “liberation” can make Wang Qiyao’s neighbors transcend their conservative mores and forgive her for having lived in sin with the rich and powerful Director Li. When Wang Qiyao’s girlhood friend, Jiang Lili, becomes an ardent Maoist, she wears a military uniform and struggles to substitute self-discipline for her former self-indulgence. Only her soul is resistant to political re-education. Her youthful “odes to the wind and moon had been replaced by devoted words about steely determination and selfless sacrifice. Now, as then, however, the style smacked of theatrical exaggeration and was not entirely persuasive.” And Jiang Lili still adores gentle Mr. Cheng, whose heart has belonged to Wang Qiyao ever since he photographed her in his studio.

Ultimately, it is Wang Qiyao who suffers the most and changes the least. And it is Wang Anyi’s complex and penetrating portrayal of her heroine that best displays her gifts as a novelist. Michael Berry and Susan Chang Egan’s graceful translation, only rarely marred by jarring Americanisms (“grunt work,” “deal breaker”), helps us understand why Wang Anyi is one of the most critically acclaimed writers in the Chinese-speaking world.

Though we are told what Wang Anyi’s heroine is thinking and feeling at almost every moment, her essential qualities become apparent to us — if not to her — only as we observe the patterns that reappear throughout her life. She compulsively or inadvertently places herself at the apex of triangulated relationships and fails to see the pain she causes in the process. Resourceful and essentially decent, she is nonetheless unable to fully comprehend the intensity of other people’s emotions.

The novel is particularly illuminating and incisive on the subject of female friendship, on what draws girls and women together and then drives them apart. Wang Qiyao has less affection for her somewhat plodding daughter than for her daughter’s best friend, whose effortless and original fashion sense recalls the glamour of Wang Qiyao’s youth.

By the time Wang Qiyao understands and, in some cases, returns the passion her beauty inspires in men, she has hurt them so much they have no choice but to leave her. Yet despite her flaws she is never unsympathetic. An unusually pretty but otherwise ordinary woman, she is too easily dazzled by style, wealth and pleasure, and too slow to recognize the value of loyalty and kindness. As “The Song of Everlasting Sorrow” moves toward its violent, melodramatic and distressingly appropriate ending, readers may feel a Proustian nostalgia for the novel’s lost time, a sadness that mirrors the melancholy that haunts Wang Qiyao and pervades the fascinating, mostly vanished longtang of Shanghai.

 by :Kerri Mason

Madonna makes producers, producers don’t make Madonna. The diva plucked William Orbit, Mirwais and Stuart Price from electronic music obscurity, meshing her own pop sensibility with their sonic specialty. But for “Hard Candy,” Madge hooked up with name-brand guys like the Neptunes and Timbaland, and even brought on Justin Timberlake as a writing partner. What results is, expectedly, of-the-moment and radio-ready. “4 Minutes,” with Timberlake, is already a top three Billboard Hot 100 hit, and harmonious ballad “Miles Away” might be some of her best work yet. But it feels familiar. “Miles” is a close cousin to Timbaland’s “Apologize,” “Spanish Lesson” is a dead ringer for N*E*R*D’s “She Likes to Move,” and “Devil Wouldn’t Recognize You” instantly recalls Timberlake’s “Cry Me a River.” That’s par for pop acts when they collaborate with producers who are bigger stars than they are. But for a vanguard artist like Madonna, it feels like a bit of a concession.

by:GLENN KENNY

The immortal writer/director Preston Sturges, responsible for such trenchantly hilarious comedic romances as The Lady Eve, The Palm Beach Story, and Unfaithfully Yours, held that sex was “Topic A.” The movie output most closely associated with producer Judd Apatow — The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Superbad — suggests that Apatow concurs. Times being what they are, and Apatow’s sensibility being what it is, exploring “Topic A” in screen comedy today means, to be blunt, that the next dick joke is rarely more than a couple of minutes off.

Written by and starring longtime Apatow acolyte Segel, who’s currently part of the ensemble of the sitcom How I Met Your Mother, Forgetting Sarah Marshall’s biggest early laugh is just such a, um, gag. Segel’s Peter is established as a typical Appatowian slob in the opening (that’s a BIG bowl of Fruit Loops he’s enjoying as part of a complete breakfast), albeit a fairly functional one. Peter’s the composer for a silly cop series whose star, the titular Ms. Marshall (Bell, in probably the film’s most thankless role), is his real life girlfriend. She calls, compelling him to do some cleaning of his pad and his self, and when she arrives, he’s fresh out the shower and ready for love. Only she’s ready to… dump him. She does, and he drops the towel, and we are treated to the sight of a stark-naked Segel sobbing, his package bobbing up and down in tandem with his slight, um, man-boobs.

Yeah, it’s pretty funny. And it’s a pretty accurate depiction of a certain feature of male romantic humiliation. But it’s also a little — and this is one of my two misgivings about the movie — expected. The Apatow formula hasn’t curdled just yet, but there’s a certain can-you-top-this? tone cropping up in its raunch, and as The Farrelly Brothers recently proved with their grievously misbegotten remake of The Heartbreak Kid, that path can lead to disaster.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. After the dumping, Peter, in hopes of getting over Sarah, retreats to a Hawaiian resort that his now-ex has spoken of (we later learn she has an endorsement deal with the place). Only she’s there, with her new beau, a British rocker of bountiful attitude and hair, the side-splittingly funny Russell Brand. Much pratfallish humor ensues as Peter toggles between trying to avoid the couple and devising petty ways to avenge himself. He takes some time to recognize the new romantic possibility right before him, the comely, frank desk clerk Rachel (Kunis). And he has numerous amusing interactions with his goofy step-brother (Hader), a stoner surf instructor (Rudd) and a wannabe rockstar waiter (Hill).

As directed by Stoller (another Apatow acolyte; he was a writer on the series Undeclared), these interactions have a relaxed feel — Apatow, like Sturges, has built up a pretty formidable comic repertory company, and the movie is smart to give such seasoned and proven laugh-getters such substantial shots to do their stuff. That said, the picture still takes twenty minutes too long to reach its inevitable conclusion. What’s to blame here is not, as with Knocked Up, a surfeit of jokes but rather a little too much emphasis on a self-help theme — which, as you can imagine, is not nearly as enjoyable to sit through as a surfeit of jokes might have been. Maybe the filmmakers just want to prove their hearts are in the right place, but its characters are all plausible and sweet-natured enough (even the narcissistic rocker has a near-noble side) that they needn’t have sweated it.

by : Alex Lai

Landing inside the top ten with her pop-rock single ‘Misfit’, Amy Studt was perceived as a possible British answer to Avril Lavigne back in 2003. Unlike the Canadian, she failed to continually deliver hits and was dropped by her label, despite selling 200,000 copies of her debut album ‘False Smiles’. She now returns, having toured with Razorlight under the alias of ‘Jane Wails’.

Any fans of Studt who have been waiting for this comeback may be in for something of a shock; put simply this is not the same artist who was a teen star. Introduced with a hypnotic piano melody, ‘Sad Sad World’ opens the record in brooding fashion, before Studt unleashes a vitriolic outburst. ‘She Ran’ is a very grand number full of attitude and a thunderous orchestra and well-utilised strings, perhaps raising expectations too much as it is the highlight of the album. With the ‘mature’ direction seemingly working well, proceedings dive on the fragile ‘Furniture’, which tries too hard to be all grown up, while ‘She Walks Beautiful’ is an Evanescence song without the crunching chords, which either way doesn’t really impress.

The closest Studt comes to her previous incarnation is on ‘Chasing The Light’, which features an angsty chorus that is misplaced with the rest of the track. ‘Nice Boys’ is a complete change in tone, bordering on jovial and on which the artist sounds similar to Kate Nash, but it isn’t enjoyable as far as pop music goes. By the time the final ballad of ‘Here Lies Love’ spins round, it’s difficult to still maintain an interest, which is a shame considering the promising start and the fact that Studt does have a decent voice.

By Michael Phillips
Tribune critic

Greasy, hazy good fun, “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle” (2004) got by on a 4 a.m. mixture of explosive-emission toilet jokes, gratuitous nudity and Neil Patrick Harris as himself. Everything took place in one night, hinging on a single quest rife with detours. Crass? Yes. But there was a merry spirit to it all.

A far more strident sort of crassness pervades “Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay.” The sequel picks up and tokes up where the original left off. New Jersey roommates Harold and Kumar set off for Amsterdam, so that Harold can chase the woman of his dreams (Paula Garces) while the lads can smoke all the mezz they desire. On the plane Kumar hauls out a homemade bong, which is mistaken for a bomb. Off to Gitmo! Off to the land of tiresome fellatio gags!

The escape of the title takes about 45 seconds. The rest of the movie, written and directed as a lurching, occasionally funny skits by Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, keeps H&K one step ahead of a venal Homeland Security chief (Rob Corddry), and Kumar on the trail of his ex-girlfriend Vanessa (Danneel Harris). The ex is due to marry a Texas family friend of the George W. Bush clan. Bush himself, portrayed by the world’s worst Bush impersonator, shows up late to this fairly draggy party, in order to get high with the boys and explain to them, in relative sincerity, that “you don’t have to like your government to be a good American. You just have to love your country.”

At least one scene rivals anything in the first outing. It’s a flashback to H&K’s college days, complete with perfect haircuts and pleasingly nostalgic vibe, a memory of when Kumar met the lovely Vanessa. I suppose the whole film couldn’t be like this. The rest of the time you find yourself smiling at some of the bits, wincing through many, many others, and ultimately wondering if the pacing would’ve improved had either H or K developed a terrible cocaine habit.