Also: Van Morrison’s Moondance in 5.1 on Blu-ray, Santana’s third album on audiophile vinyl, and ’80s tunes revamped by The Big Bright. Plus, let’s see…oh, yeah, Katy Perry.
Whatever you think of Miley Cyrus these days, she does have you thinking. In other words, she got your attention. Which, in the current era of Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, and elder shockwoman Britney Spears, is the first order of business, and I do mean “business.”
The thing is, what if she’d gotten our attention another way?
Also reviewed: Kings of Leon, Sting, and Icona Pop. Plus: a thematic list of all the other prominent new releases and reissues, including The Complete Waitresses and a big box of Nirvana’s In Utero.
Iron Man 3, The Big Combo, Foyle’s War: Set 7, 3 Films By Roberto Rossellini Starring Ingrid Bergman, Fear Eats the Soul 2 — The Nightmare Continues: Prince of Darkness, Halloween, Psycho II, Psycho III, V/H/S/2, Hannibal: Season 1.
World War Z, Fear Eats the Soul— The Horror Continues: Dracula, Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, Friday the 13th: The Complete Collection, Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th, Bates Motel: Season 1, Autumn Sonata, Behind the Candelabra, and more.
New release (Columbia; tour dates) Photo of Trent Reznor by Baldur Bragson
Trent Reznor already came back haunted in March with the release of Welcome oblivion by How to destroy angels. That side project with Atticus Ross and (Reznor’s wife) Mariqueen Maandig took post-industrial/ambient music and made it sound fresh. By contrast, Hesitation Marks, Reznor’s first album in five years under the Nine Inch Nails moniker, seems beset by run-of-the-mill electronica. Ross and another veteran collaborator, Alan Moulder, return as co-producers with Reznor, but together they’re often just busy little techno-bees buzzing around Reznor’s generally average material.
As with Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge!, with this adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic novel set during the Roaring Twenties, the writer-producer-director creates a series of set pieces of bravura filmmaking with careering camerawork of huge zoom-ins and acrobatic fly-arounds all tied together with rapid montages.