Anthems

Cover albums always have a whiff of the unnecessary about them, but that doesn’t mean that they are always subpar. Rush’s Feedback set the gold standard for rendering 60s rock classics, and Puddle of Mudd’s Re: (disc)overed provided bold yet surprisingly reverent takes on 70s hard rock.  Anthrax’s 2013 EP Anthems covers similar ground, and while the results are uneven, they aren’t as dismal as they could have been.

The EP’s weakest point is arguably the title track, a cover of Rush’s 1975 Randian rocker. Joey Belladonna struggles to ape Geddy Lee’s signature wail, and the whole production sounds awkward. Renditions of AC/DC’s “TNT” and Thin Lizzy’s “Jailbreak” are more up the band’s alley. They are done faithfully and competently, but they don’t come close to surpassing the originals.

On the other hand, the band hits a home run with its cover of Boston’s “Smokin’.” Belladonna’s voice is much better suited for the material, Charlie Benante’s drumming and the Scott Ian-Rob Caggiano guitar duo are energetic, and guest keyboardist Fred Mandel is spot-on.

The band also makes decent work of Journey’s “Keep on Runnin’,”but the remainder of the tracks are questionable. Cheap Trick’s “Big Eyes” is an odd choice when one considers other possibilities that didn’t make the cut. And why did Anthrax decide to include not one, but two versions of its own song “Crawl” on here? It’s not a bad track, but it stands out like a sore thumb.

With a suspect track listing and uneven execution, Anthems is unlikely to win over anyone who is not already an Anthrax fan. However, it does offer a fun walk down memory lane, and it’s encouraging to hear musicians nearing or over 50 play with gusto.

7.25/10

Telegraph Avenue

Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe, the owners of a popular neighborhood record store in North Oakland, find themselves beset by both personal and professional crises. A new corporate store financed by former NFL player Gibson Goode is threatening to move into the neighborhood and drive Brokeland Records out of business. The venture has the backing of powerful city councilman Chan Flowers, who will only change his stance if Archy can locate his estranged father, a former blaxpoitation star who knows Flowers’ dirty secrets. Meanwhile, Titus, Archy’s illegitimate son, walks into his life for the first time, becoming an object of attraction for Nat’s overachieving son Julius and further complicating Archy’s already shaky marriage with Gwen, a midwife who faces the potential loss of her hospital privileges following a botched birth.

Over the course of his 25-year career, Michael Chabon has shown a knack for keeping things interesting. There have been a few constants in his work (Jewish culture, LGBT themes, fractured father-son relationships), but otherwise, each novel has been a world unto its own. This is true of his latest offering as well, and unsurprisingly Chabon excels at capturing the diverse community dynamics and cultural nostalgia of his Telegraph Avenue setting. What is surprising, however, is just how incomplete and uneven the rest of the book feels.

To start, while the characters are certainly quirky, none of them are especially likeable or do much to drive the story. Chabon’s past protagonists were flawed as well, but they were driven by a sense of purpose (be it Grady Tripp’s quixotic quest to complete his manuscript or Meyer Landsman’s determination to solve the case). Archy, on the other hand, is a serial philanderer, absent husband, and ungrateful (though, perhaps, justifiably) son who doesn’t even seem like he wants to be in the music business half the time. Nat, on the other hand, really does want to save the business, but his role in the proceedings is almost comic relief: he’s prickly and neurotic to the nth degree.

More grievous, however, is the pacing. Chabon has long been a critic of “plotlessness” in literary fiction, and to his credit, a lot does happen here. But instead of alternating the plot threads in a way that builds tension, Chabon ziz-zags, digresses, riffs, and abruptly changes tone. There is a stream-of-consciousness section that stretches a single sentence over several pages, new background characters popping up seemingly every chapter (including a little old lady who claimed to have trained Bruce Lee), and a general lack of any cohesive identity. By the end, the fate of the record store seems less like a pivotal development and more like a “Oh, so that’s what happened” amid all the madness.

This is not to say that Telegraph Avenue is a total disappointment. Chabon’s prose remains lively if a bit too unconstrained, and when the novel stays put long enough to focus on something, the results are either very funny, very moving, or sometimes both. It’s just a shame that for a writer of Chabon’s caliber, these moments are so few and far between.

7.25/10 

M'Coul's Public House

NOTE: Provided you get there early enough (they open at 11 on Sundays), M'Couls has proven to be a great weekend brunch option.


Located at 110 W. McGee Street in downtown Greensboro, M’Coul’s specializes in Irish fare and pub food. It offers a full-service bar with an extensive selection of drinks, patio seating, late-night dining, and a Sunday brunch.

Restaurants with Irish-sounding names are a dime a dozen, but ones that offer authentic Irish dishes without any semblance of kitsch are fairly rare. That alone makes M’Coul’s a curiosity. The food, however, elevates it to something more.

M’Coul’s menu is an intriguing combination of traditional and experimental. You’ll find the requisite corned beef and lamb stew, but you’ll also find Irish “nachos” (potato wedges topped with chili) and dishes that incorporate tabouli. A gouda-topped shepherd’s pie was hot, savory, and delicious while the emerald isle chicken (with tomatoes, mozzarella, goat cheese, spinach, and more) was moist, well-seasoned, and nicely presented. While the dinner menu includes all of the above (plus breakfast foods, if you’re so inclined), lunch selections are a little more limited.

If you come seeking mere bar fare, M’Coul’s will seem pricey, but for the quality of the food, the prices are about where they should be. Factor out steak and seafood, and dinner entrees run between $9 and $14 while the lunch sandwiches (side included) go for about $9. Servers are reasonably quick, friendly, and willing to offer recommendations.

The atmosphere at M’Coul’s is both a blessing and a curse. It sits in sturdy, multilevel brick building, which you enter by passing the iron gates and traversing the patio. Depending on the weather and the number of patrons present, you’ll either be eating inside or outside, downstairs or up. On a good day, you can take in some sunshine on the patios or admire the classic wood-and-brick interior. On a bad day, you may find yourself faced with a wait (due to limited indoor seating), a headache (due to the noise), and a growling stomach.

The popularity of the downtown location makes it a bit of a gamble, but if you are able to hit it at the right time, M’Coul’s makes for a memorable meal.

8/10

Bernie

In the small East Texas town of Carthage, affable assistant funeral director Bernie Tiede (Jack Black) is the only person to successfully befriend wealthy, cantankerous widow Marjorie Nugent (Shirley MacLaine). But as time wears on, Marjorie becomes more and more demanding of Bernie until he finally kills her. Hiding her body in a freezer, he spends the next nine months using her money to do good works. Bernie’s sterling reputation – and the fact that nobody liked Marjorie – provides a challenge to local prosecutor Danny Buck (Matthew McConaughey), who is determined to convict him.

Few directors would have the audacity to turn a fairly recent (mid-1990s) real-life murder case into a dark comedy, but Richard Linklater did just that here. Based on a Texas Monthly article by Skip Hollandsworth (who also wrote the script), Bernie is filmed in a faux-documentary style with various townsfolk sharing recollections of people and events as the film’s story unfolds. Some of these segments are comedic gold – for instance, one man refers to a neighboring town as being full of rednecks he wouldn’t trust to work on his car. But for as funny as the film is, it also feels incredibly manipulative and insensitive. The film tries to make a hero out of someone who shot an 81-year-old woman in the back four times and lived off of her fortune, and that’s something that won’t sit right with viewers who are just the least bit rational.

Despite the flawed premise, Black is picture perfect in the lead role. Those accustomed to seeing him playing bombastic oafs will be shocked by how easily he transforms into a cultured, sensitive, and compassionate pansy. MacLaine is equally good as she portrays Nugent as a loathsome hag who is still quite believable. McConaughy, sporting a bad haircut, tries to appear as the voice of reason, but his prosecutor character is transparently (and appropriately, given the political nature of the job) self-serving. Just as in Dazed and Confused, the actor seems ten times slimier than normal while under Linklater’s direction.

Bernie closes with video of the real Bernie Tiede, now gray haired and sans moustache, serving his days in prison. That he has still kept his same affable expression lends credence to the saying “only in Texas….” In Linklater’s case, perhaps it should be amended to “only by Texans.”

7.5/10

Robot & Frank

Frank (Frank Langella) is a retired jewel thief living in upstate New York who is gradually starting to lose his memory. His guilt-ridden son Hunter (James Marsden) provides a helper robot (voiced by Peter Sarsgaard) to look after him. Though Frank objects to the robot’s presence at first, he soon finds that he can teach it the tools of the criminal trade. Together, the two conspire to steal a rare book to win the affection of a local librarian (Susan Sarandon).

Directed by Jake Schreier, Robot & Frank is part old-age tragedy, part buddy comedy, and part sci-fi parable. These various components don’t always mesh well, but the resulting concoction is interesting more times than not.

It helps that Langella and Sarsgaard are excellent in the title roles. Frank is depicted as a wily old thief, tamed by age and failing memory, still rough around the edges, and still capable of raising hell when the situation dictates. Sarsgaard’s performance calls to mind that of another sympathetic robot: Kevin Spacey in Moon. It gets some funny lines (especially when forced to socialize with another robot), but despite, as he often reminds Frank, not being a person, it seems, in a way, more human than the film’s supporting characters. The town’s sheriff (Jeremy Sisto) is incompetent, the library’s new owner is a sniveling jerk, and Frank’s son and daughter (Liv Tyler) seem to see him as a problem rather than a person.

Robot & Frank premise is also almost unbearably simple – it’s exactly what it says on the box – but the film is able to wring the most out of it. If you are looking for a philosophically deeper exploration of technological ethics, look elsewhere. As a small film, however, this manages to be both moving and amusing.

7.75/10

The Feast of the Goat

In 1961 during the last days of the Dominican Republic’s Trujillo regime, Urania Cabral, the teenaged daughter of a disgraced loyalist politician, fled for the United States. Now a middle-aged woman, she has returned to the island to confront her invalid father, her family, and the island’s dark and tumultuous past.

Anyone who has read Junot Diaz’s work will be familiar with the long shadow that Rafael Trujillo cast over the Dominican Republic for three decades. Mario Vargas Llosa’s historical novel goes one step further, examining Trujillo and all that he stood for through the eyes of a naïve girl turned hardened woman, the various conspirators to his assassination (each with a personal reason for wanting to see him dead), and the Goat himself. These shifts in perspective, coupled with graphic depictions of depravity and torture, make The Feast of the Goat a difficult book albeit a rewarding one.

A large part of the novel’s allure is Llosa’s deft combination of fact and fiction. Urania, her father, and several other supporting characters are fictional, but Trujillo, his playboy son Ramfis, his sadistic intelligence chief Johnny Abbes, and the Machiavellian civilian president Joaquin Balaguer were all real historical figures. By taking us inside their heads, Llosa simultaneously humanizes them and makes them more monstrous. Trujillo, for instance, is depicted as a malcontent who has carried the country on his back for thirty years by force of will. He sees himself as surrounded by hordes of incompetent yes-men even though he himself is responsible for their rise to prominence. Contrastingly, the men who carried out his assassination (several of whom were military officers) had more or less come to accept Trujillo’s autocratic rule as a way of life until a personal tragedy – the death of a brother, being forced to forsake one’s love, etc. – pushed them over the edge. It’s a morally ambiguous account that goes the distance to show that blood is on everyone’s hands.

In contrast to the historical intrigue, the frame story seems ponderous at times. It isn’t that Urania is a weak character – learning why she loathes her father so much is one of the book’s central mysteries – it’s that her role as expositor means she does nothing more than reproach and reminisce. This lack of agency makes it hard to accept her as a protagonist even though the novel positions here as such.

Stylistically, Llosa demonstrates incredible precision. Everything from the cut of Trujillo’s suits to the methods used to torture the conspirators is described in impeccable detail. Though vivid, there is a certain stuffiness to the prose; however, this may be the result of the translation.

By the conventions of the novel, The Feast of the Goat does not carry much forward momentum. But if you look beyond its time-fractured narrative, it’s an engrossing look at desperation, power, and corruption.

8.25/10