Tidbits- Now More Bite-Sized Then Ever Before!

My Morning Jacket’s Bermuda is like…like dust-covered peaches or a porch swing lit by nothin’ but candles and moonlight. Exquisitely forlorn.

If I didn’t know better, I’d say it’s downright crass to be secretly rejoicing in the latest economic news- just 32,000 new jobs were added last month. We’re feeling so damn politically pragmatic these days that we wouldn’t mind wallowing in this so-called economic "soft patch" until November- anything to dampen the cannon fodder provided it doesn’t present too much undue hardship.

David Doucet’s Cajun Waltz from his album 1957 is like…the great pumpkin rising in Arcadia or beautiful girls and beautiful boys dancing on red clay and straw.

Sweetness and Light

I Can’t Go For That is like…the blue-eyed soul brother to Billy Jean…like somebody put slippers on the funk. We can now take Hall and Oates in very small doses.

Japanese Story, the commendably striving second film by Australian director Sue Brooks, never quite congeals and teeters perilously close to the downright silly. But, still, there was something there, just beneath the surface, wanting to rise above all the melodrama that bogs down the second half of the film and offer something special. Maybe it was Toni Colette’s performance, which seemed all together superior to the film surrounding her- it’s a performance that sets a standard Brooks never quite matches. The force of Colette’s performance, especially the feisty sensuality she exudes in the film’s first half, creates a disparity between her and everything else.

The film’s second half is one long dirge that aims for grace through a minimum of speaking, the ritual motions of grieving and a heavy lacquer of mournful musical accompaniment. It’s almost something special but it’s always crumbling along the edges, interrupted with blunt melodramatic pieties that destroy the elegiac mood. The pleasures of this film, however, ultimately resides in Toni Colette’s performance.