New video series! Joining the likes of Best Live Tracks and Best New Music, this series will present what I think are some of the Best Covers Ever.
Credit where credit is due, my friend Brent linked to these guys and it’s only through him that I found them. Nonetheless, this husband and wife YouTube sensation do incredible covers of songs you wouldn’t expect to sound so good. And they just seem so gosh darn happy!
Karmin — Price Tag
Karmin — Lighters
Win Win is a movie about a small-town lawyer who coaches a high school wrestling team. It’s about an old man in a retirement home, his grandson, and his wayward mother. It’s about relationships, how they begin and how they end, how they break down and evolve, and the consequences of our actions. It’s a creative and inventive story, full of the same kind of deep humour that packed a movie like Lars and the Real Girl or The Family Stone. It packs a similar moral punch, too.
It struck me, after unintentionally watching two very similar films, to do a themed review. I’m calling this Summer Films in Small Spaces; these are two excellent movies to watch this summer—popcorn thrillers—dealing with very small, cramped, and confined spaces.
Back in 1988 a man named Jack Rebney and a crew of amateur filmmakers were under contract with Winnebago Industries to make an industrial promo film for Winnebago salesman to use across the country. The infomercial was filmed over the course of a dozen days, in the heat of the summer, in the middle of Iowa. Rebney, being a seasoned broadcaster whose career included two stints with CBS, quickly lost patience battling the scorching heat, the vexatious fly population, and his bumbling production crew. The result of Jack’s lost patience? The famous Winnebago Man outtakes reel. Outtakes peppered with so much swearing and so many breakdowns and brilliant catch phrases that it earned Rebney the title “The World’s Angriest Man” and became, arguably, the first viral video (originally passes around on VHS tapes).
Winnebago Man, the 2009 documentary, is the quest of one filmmaker, Ben Steinbauer, to track Rebney down and find out exactly what made him so angry. The resulting film is brilliant.
Steinbauer, while annoying and vexatious himself at times, hires a private detective to find Rebney and from there we begin an emotional, mysterious, and humorous adventure into the foothills of Northern California. Without spoiling too much I can tell you that this film packs a wonderful story, has a very good pace, and if you like human interest dramas about truly interesting people than you’ll enjoy this film. In fact, after watching it I thought how interesting it would be to see more of these “Where Are They Now” videos about former YouTube stars—those, of course, who didn’t intend to achieve stardom.
All in all, if you like documentaries, or even if you can mildly tolerate them, this is a great summer film to spend an afternoon or evening with. Oh, and it has a lot of swears.
So I’m a huge fan of The Tragically Hip but somehow missed the release of frontman Gord Downie’s latest solo record, his third, this past summer. The first time I heard the album’s single on the radio was about a month ago, I immediately went home to do some further investigation.
The Grand Bounce sees Downie recording with some other pretty impressive Canadian musicians under the guise of Gord Downie & The County of Miracles. Joining Downie is, among other names, Canadian singer/songwriter Julie Doiron and Josh Finlayson of Toronto’s Skydiggers. Together, this Canadian ensemble manages to scrape together a rather impressive record and at least some songs that definitely deserves some time on your playlist, in my opinion.
I’m a pretty big fan of The Decemberists ever since I stumbled upon a band that sounded, to my description, like “the American Belle & Sebastian.” That was around the time of the release of their first full-length, Castaways and Cutouts.
Since then, The Decemberists have produced a series of solid records roughly maintaining the party line as a band that sings about rifles, tall ships, and cobblestone. The 2009 release The Hazards of Love, a dark and foreboding concept disc, saw a pretty serious departure from this format though. The Hazards of Love was a complete story, told in dark, enchanted forests, and broken up into a series of acts with characters, plot, action, and the whole nine yards. Musically, it was vastly different from what we’d heard from The Decemberists up to that point. The Hazards of Love was dark, electric, and chaotic. When I initially reviewed it I found it very difficult to enjoy—very tough to get into—and even when I was recommended to give it a second try I had a very hard time getting comfortable with the band’s sound. Listened to in one sitting, as I think it was intended to be, proved to be an onerous task for me and so I gave up.
But early buzz surrounding 2011′s The King is Dead made it clear that The Decemberists were taking a very different tact from their previous release. Indeed, the rumours were true.
If Sufjan Steven’s performance of Too Much on Jimmy Fallon Live doesn’t cut it as one of the most memorable live performances you’ve seen in a long time, then I don’t know what funky stuff you’ve been watching lately. After taking a few years off to regroup after the critical success of Illinois, it’s clear that Sufjan is back, in a big way, and he’s about to kick your butt/take over the world.
Too Much
