Man Man will trip the life fantastic at the Music Hall of Williamsburg on May 31 and June 1
Music Hall of Williamsburg
66 North Sixth St.
Tuesday, May 31, and Wednesday, June 1, $16, 8:00
www.myspace.com/wearemanman
www.musichallofwilliamsburg.com
Man Man’s idea of a fantastic life is probably a lot different from yours. “And the scene, it turns so grisly / and the children, they are crying / You hand them black umbrellas / tell ’em that the world is dying,” they sing on the title track to their fourth album, Life Fantastic (Anti-, May 2011), continuing, “It’s how you hide your cards / It’s how you dress your scars / and let them breathe (breathe) / Life, fantastic… / Life, so tragic… / Life, fantastic…” Man Man has been displaying its unique worldview and unusual experimental sound since it formed in 2003, releasing such discs as 2008’s Rabbit Habits (with such fine tunage as “Mister Jung Stuffed” and “Mysteries of the Universe Unraveled”), 2006’s Six Demon Bag (“Black Mission Goggles,” “Van Helsing Boombox”), and 2004’s The Man in a Blue Turban with a Face (“Against the Peruvian Monster,” “10lb Moustache”), but they’ve gone a whole lot darker on their latest. Led by keyboardist and lyricist Honus Honus (Ryan Kattner), who seems to have emerged from his time in Los Angeles not exactly the happiest of campers, the Philly band also includes Pow Wow (Christopher Powell), Critter Cat (Russell Higbee), and Chang Wang (Billy Dufala). Life Fantastic is like a wild Brecht/Weill Gypsy carnival, with sweet musical flourishes from an endless array of horns, strings, xylophones, and various other forms of percussive and computerized madness, evoking a bit of David Bowie here, a shot of Frank Zappa there, and even Tom Waits and Captain Beefheart in places. “I’m racing through the dark / a headless Saint Bernard / to cauterize the scars / that line your dirty heart,” Honus proclaims on the album opener, “Knuckle Down.” On “Piranhas Club” he asks, “Is it all about the ebb and the flow / of losing your mind sometimes and letting go? / You feel like you can’t breathe / You’re outta control / The world is a shitshow / you barely can handle.” Man Man is well known for not putting on shit shows, instead driving crowds crazy with their exuberance, their face paint, and their constantly changing tempos and rhythms, giving audiences all they can handle and more. “Can you feel it? / It’s like a warm atomic cloud that’s raining down, washing over us,” Honus Honus sings on “Dark Arts.” You’ll be able to feel it when Man Man plays the Music Hall of Williamsburg on May 31 and June 1 with Shilpa Ray & Her Happy Hookers; the first night is sold out, but tickets are still available for Wednesday night.
Based on embedded journalist Mark Boal’s experiences in Iraq, The Hurt Locker follows a three-member Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit as they are called in to defuse a series of dangerous situations involving various kinds of bombs, including IEDs and other life-threatening explosive devices. Team leader Will James (Jeremy Renner) is an expert bomb defuser and maverick who doesn’t follow protocol and likes to live on the edge. Spc. Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) is a greenhorn who just wants to survive the last forty days of their rotation. And Sgt. J. T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) likes to go by the book and take no unnecessary chances, which puts him in constant conflict with the unpredictable James. Recalling the second half of Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam drama Full Metal Jacket (1987), The Hurt Locker unfolds in a series of harrowing set pieces in which the EOD unit is called in to either safely detonate or defuse explosive devices while under the eyes of local Iraqis, any of whom could potentially be the bomber or a sniper. Director Kathryn Bigelow (Blue Steel, Point Break) masterfully builds suspense scene after scene, beginning with the edge-of-your-seat opener through to the gripping conclusion. The experiences of the EOD unit serve as a microcosm for modern warfare in general and the U.S. involvement in the Middle East specifically, placing viewers in the midst of a tense, bitter, psychologically and emotionally draining battle that can never be won. The outstanding cast also features Guy Pearce, Ralph Fiennes, David Morse, and Evangeline Lilly in small roles; many of the Iraqis were played by actual war refugees. Shot in Jordan not far from the Iraq border, The Hurt Locker is a remarkable story, one of the best war films of the decade.
France’s official selection for the 2007 Academy Awards, Persepolis brings to animated life Marjane Satrapi’s stunning graphic novels. Codirected by Satrapi and comic-book artist Vincent Paronnaud, Persepolis tells Satrapi’s harrowing life story as she comes of age during the Islamic Revolution in Iran in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Raised in a well-off activist family, she fights against many of the country’s crippling mores and laws, particularly those that treat women as second-class citizens, trapping them in their veils, denying them any kind of individual freedom. But the progressive Satrapi (voiced first by Gabrielle Lopes, then Chiara Mastroianni) continually gets into trouble as she speaks her mind, experiments with sex, and refuses to play by her country’s repressive rules. Satrapi and Paronnaud do an outstanding job of adapting the books’ black-and-white panels for the big screen, maintaining her unique style and emotional breadth. The first part of the film is excellent as the precocious teenager who talks to God learns about life in some very harsh ways. Unfortunately, the second half gets bogged down in Satrapi’s failures as an adult, focusing too much on her myriad personal problems and taking away the bigger picture that made the first part so entertaining as well as educational. Still, it’s a story worth telling, and well worth seeing. (Interestingly, since the film, which is in French, is subtitled in English, the audience ends up reading it similarly to the way they read the graphic novel.) The closing-night selection of the 2007 New York Film Festival, Persepolis also features the voices of Catherine Deneuve as Marjane’s mother, Danielle Darrieux as her grandmother, Simon Akbarian as her father, and François Jerosme as her radical uncle Anouche. Persepolis is screening May 28-29 at 1:00 as part of the Museum of the Moving Image’s “Great Adaptations” series, which continues June 4-5 with Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox and June 11-12 with Alfonso Cuarón’s A Little Princess.