Music & More

All the four star reviews are well deserved by Walk the Line , skillfully directed by James Mangold. For those who want something more than the stereotypical celebrity biopic, there's the great love story of Johnny Cash and June Carter, but what really puts this movie over the top is the masterful job T-Bone Burnett did with the music. Although Johnny Cash had a lengthy and accomplished career and can easily fill a boxed set with his best songs, song selection for a movie like this is hardly easy. Burnett deftly avoids every possible pitfall in his handling of the music in Walk the Line . He left out anything that might seem cliched, including "A Boy Named Sue" which introduced a whole new generation of pop audiences to Cash in the sixties, and "Man in Black" where Johnny explains why he always wore black, just to name two somewhat surprising omissions; even still the song selection is just perfect. . Reese Witherspoon & Joachin Phoenix The production of the...

Though normally classified with the childrens' books, Chris Van Allsburg's work ( Jumanji and The Polar Express are best known for having previously been made into movies) combines a beautifully artistic style of drawing with a level of imagination that is unique among books for any age group. Zathura revisits the premise of Jumanji , a board game that unexpectedly brings to life fantastic and life-threatening perils, to create a second story along the same lines only this time the game transports the players to outer space, complete with meteor showers, killer robots, killer aliens, and a stranded astronaut, with the only way back being to play the game to its conclusion. Zathura is beautifully rendered on the big screen, offering an exciting flight of imagination that's not just for kids, in fact some of the scenes might be too scary or intense for the really small ones. The screenplay is well written, the cinematography and special effects are just right to tell this sto...

While pretty much unknown on this side of the Atlantic, K.T. Tunstall in 2005 has shifted somewhere north of a half million copies of her debut album Eye to the Telescope with her record company expecting sales to hit the million mark soon, and that's just within the U.K. Having only just encountered her story a few weeks ago with the news of her being booked to play Hogmanay with Texas on New Year's Eve in Edinburgh Scotland, it seemed like an excellent and soon to be rare opportunity to see a singer with this kind of drawing power play in one of the most intimate venues in New York. The Living Room is an unlikely place for an industry showcase, between its small size and hour long set blocks, but Virgin Records who will release the album in America early next year, booked the majority of the seats for this show. The crowd scene in the bar before the room opened was highly unusual for this venue but the prevalence of British accents made it all the more interesting. From the ...