| CD reviews: Alicia Keys; Jay-Z; Nellie McKay; Plant/Krauss
Surrounded by nervous contemporaries doing back flips to find a relevant niche in the music industry's shifting framework, Alicia Keys is a model of stability. That constancy might not be so commendable were she not delivering old-school grooves so sincerely and skillfully. On her third and most cohesive studio album, Keys flirts with hip-hop rhythms and seductive lyrics while pulling short of extremes that might alienate the more tender ears of her broad demographic. She may be playing it safe with this radio-friendly batch of midtempo R&B, but Keys also plays it straight, never striking a false emotional note as she serves up gorgeous ballads and steamy soul. Collaborations with rapper/producer Kerry "Krucial" Brothers, hitmaker Linda Perry and blues/pop star John Mayer yield mixed results, and their involvement seems almost beside the point when Keys' impassioned and impeccable vocals triumph over the occasional trite lyric and pedestrian arrangement.
Broadway strike is ill-conceived, inexplicable
The stealth strike by stagehands that shut down 27 of 35 Broadway shows this weekend had one indisputable beneficiary. On Sunday afternoon, center orchestra tickets for today's performance of "Young Frankenstein" were selling online, legally, for a cool $1,890 the pair at StubHub, a ticket exchange service sanctioned by the Broadway establishment. The availability of tickets to the new Mel Brooks musical, one of eight shows not affected by the strike, may be a bright spot for expense-account customers. But Broadway is heading into a holiday season as crucial to producers as it is to retailers for its impact on the annual bottom line. One show's fortunes will do little to relieve the pall that the strike has cast on the business that's like no business I know. This strike is the most ill-conceived labor action imaginable.
Top Scoops
I saw two movies last week, one exceptional (Julie Taymor's "Across the Universe") and the other disappointingly so-so (Robert Redford's "Lions for Lambs"). Both films speak to the prevalent confusions, moral lapses, corruptions of spirit in the CheneyBush era. And, despite the heavy, at-times depressing material they're dealing with, both are ultimately uplifting in their own unique ways. .
Tattle | W. tops online mag's list of the 'Frigid 50'
FILM THREAT online magazine has chosen its annual "Frigid 50," a ranking of the "least-powerful, least-inspiring and least-intriguing people in Hollywood," and the guy at the top of the list isn't even in Hollywood. President George W. Bush. Film Threat's editors point out that Bush has been parodied in movies like "Transformers" and "American Dreamz" and scrutinized in documentaries such as "Sicko" and "No End in Sight." "With all due respect to Hollywood," they wrote, "the mighty W is as much a cinema celebrity as the next despotic tyrant." The good news for Bush? He's on top of Angelina Jolie. "Traveling the Third World with a small army of stylists and publicists, the one-time Lara Croft feels like an unholy mix of Mother Teresa and Paris Hilton: Look at the poor, but make sure you get me in my best light," Film Threat says of the second-place finisher.
A Movie for Every Color of the Rainbow
Forget vinyl, tubes, and magnetic tape. Technicolor, as in "Glorious Technicolor!," a 14-film survey beginning Saturday at the Museum of the Moving Image, may be the most absurdly analogue technology ever invented. On first examination, the most glorious thing about "Technicolor Process 4," as the specific application that yielded the classic colors of Hollywood from the 1930s to the '50s was called, is that it worked at all. It was a union of unwieldy optics, multiple-camera negatives, and a dye-printing process more akin to lithography than assembly-line film production. Exhibit A is the rare, original "three-strip" (one for each primary color, all exposed simultaneously and combined in printing) Technicolor camera that the museum recently added to its collection. When placed within the necessary soundproofing box (appropriately called a "blimp"), a Technicolor camera was roughly the size of a riding mower.
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