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Bohemian Films Pick of the Month... "Kids In The Hall: The Complete First Season" (DVD)
Change is good. It can be important, even historic. It is not always necessary. One of the best things about Room on Fire, the Strokes' second album, is that, in most of the ways that matter, it is exactly like their first. Nick Valensi's and Albert Hammond Jr.'s dirty-treble guitars cut 'n' thrust over the hard-rubber bounce of bassist Nikolai Fraiture and drummer Fabrizio Moretti. Singer-songwriter Julian Casablancas delivers his put-up-or-fuck-off telegrams in a brusque, corrosive drawl, and producer Gordon Raphael wraps up the whole package with airtight austerity. On first impact, Room on Fire is to 2001's Is This It as the Ramones' second album, Leave Home, was to their knuckle-sandwich debut -- a perfect twin. If you want comfort and clarity, you're definitely in the wrong room. This record was built for thrills and speed.
"OK GO" by OK GO (CD)
Coldplay required a lifetime to make its wonderfully assured debut, Parachutes. But it took less than two years for the moody British quartet to deliver a masterful follow-up. As a band they have advanced to a stage where they outshine nearly every one of their rivals in terms of imagination and emotional pull. A Rush of Blood to the Head is a soulful, exhilarating journey, moving from the cathartic rock of "Politik" to the hushed tones of "Green Eyes" without once breaking its mesmerizing spell. Singer Chris Martin takes his voice on soaring flights, reaching places only Jeff Buckley previously dared to go. And the music is nearly flawless, a persuasive cross between Pink Floyd and The Verve. Even if they haven't come up with another "Yellow," you would be hard-pressed to care. This is exquisite stuff. --Aidin Vaziri
"The Royal Tenenbaums" (DVD)
After taking five leisurely years to follow up on 1996's Pinkerton, Weezer are apparently on a roll. Arriving just over 12 months after The Green Album, Maladroit finds the Los Angeles power-pop band in the midst of a particularly fertile creative period. "Dope Nose," which is easily stronger than anything on the last album, flexes a sinister shout-along chorus and vintage Van Halen riffs, while the potent garage-punk blast of "Fall Together" wipes out any lingering discomfort over the thoroughly Sugar Ray-sounding "Island in the Sun." In a sense The Green Album was just a taster for this, the blissfully thunderous main dish. Sure, there are some deadpan emo moments ("Death and Destruction") littering the course, but mostly Maladroit is Weezer doing what they do best--inverting and embracing dumb rock stereotypes and somehow making them sound smart.
"Lonelyland" by Bob Scheinder (CD)
THE GUEST is a collision of youth and melody set to a soundtrack of contemporary guitars and atmospheric samplers. Influenced by bands like Elvis Costello and the Attractions, U2, Air, and the Flaming Lips, Phantom Planet manages to create a record that puts them in their own very special category. "It's a big step since our last record " says vocalist Alex Greenwald. "We were kids who had just gotten our drivers licenses. Now we are four years older, I got my license revoked, and we're ready to make some real rock and roll."
The album is strong enough to withstand a thousand fault splitting earthquakes. The pairing of veteran producers with the energy and youth of PHANTOM PLANET surpassed the expectations of everyone involved. This is immediately evident on the album's undeniably contagious opening track "California" with its road weary verse and fist pounding chorus. By the album's third track, "Lonely Day," with its lilting, carefree verse and exploding chorus and the fourth track, the refreshingly acoustic "One Ray of Sunlight", the band seizes you. And with "Anthem", the album's centerpiece, the message is clear: These boys won't become pretentious, ego-driven, megastar deadbeats.
-www.phantomplanet.com
"Rockin' the Suburbs" by Ben Folds (CD)
As heard in the Bohemian Films production, "A Fish Called Ringo"!
Ouch! This disk is so swingin', I hurt myself. Nothing that a few Cosmopolitans can't cure. With the faux fuzzy leopard skin case, and Spanish olive design on the disc, not to mention the eclectic collection of tunes from the first twelve volumes of the series, the Fuzzy Sampler is a terrific introduction to the Ultra Lounge Series.
You can't help but sway to these tunes, the best of that glorious post-war era, when we learned HOW to consume, conspicuously. Martin Denny, The Jackie Gleason Orchestra, these are some of the artists that encouraged a generation of swingers to ignore "the bomb" and focus instead on "last call!" Well, maybe ignoring the bomb was too heavy a task, but this music definitely helped take the edge off. So I say, Cheers, here's to the Ultra Lounge. Swank!
"Citizen Kane" (DVD) 
Film Directing Shot by Shot offers a good introduction to the rudiments of film production. Steven D. Katz walks his readers through the various stages of moviemaking, advising them at every turn to visualize the films they wish to produce. Katz believes that one of the chief tasks of filmmaking is to negotiate between our three-dimensional reality and the two-dimensionality of the screen. He covers the number of technical options filmmakers can use to create a satisfying flow of shots, a continuity that will make sense to viewers and aptly tell the film's story. Katz provides in-depth coverage of production design, storyboarding, spatial connections, editing, scene staging, depth of frame, camera angles, point of view, and the various types of stable compositions and moving camera shots.
A complete catalogue of motion picture techniques for filmmakers. It concentrates on the 'storytelling' school of filmmaking, utilizing the work of the great stylists who established the versatile vocabulary of technique that has dominated the movies since 1915. This graphic approach includes comparisons of style by interpreting a 'model script', created for the book, in storyboard form.
What They Don't Teach You At Film School(Book)
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From romantically challenged cabbage heads to serial head crushing, five men from Canada, who were occasionally five women, turned sketch comedy into a bizarre, irreverent and always hilarious weekly showcase of side-splitting unpredictability.
With a brilliant knack for turning the mundane into the surreal, and a dangerous willingness to explore the darker sides of comedy, all 20 episodes from the debut season of THE KIDS IN THE HALL are collected here - by popular demand - on DVD for the first time ever. The 4-disc set also includes new never-before-seen interviews with the Kids and Lorne Michaels, 30 minutes of performances from the Rivoli Theater, 50 minutes of audio commentary, sketches from the pilot episode, biographies, and more!
"Room on Fire" by The Strokes (CD)
Years ago, Rolling Stone rated Nirvana's album Nevermind 3 stars. Ever since then, the magazine has gone downhill in the reviewing department. Giving 5 star reviews to only established "classic" artists like Bob Dylan, they often overlook newer, exciting bands. Their latest travesty--rating Ok Go's new album 2 stars--is pathetic at best. The album is a breath of fresh air in the pop genre--this is the "smart-pop" we've all been yearning for, drowning in the boy and girl band mud pool. In a world of "nu-metal", female singer-songwriters, bad (no really bad) radio pop, and derivative hip-hop, the need for music like this is urgent. Listen to "Get Over It" first (the first single and MTV2 video) and then get to the better stuff--"Bye Bye Baby", "Don't Ask Me", "What to Do", "You're So Damn Hot", and the exhilarating time-loop song about a guy with a problem that won't go away, "There's a Fire". The other tracks are equally strong, save for the strange "C-C-C-Cinnamon Lips" that seems out of place. Ok Go is in its finest form in exciting live shows, but this CD is proof that they are here to stay on stage and off. Thank you to Capitol Records for recognizing their amazing talent.
"A Rush of Blood to the Head" by Coldplay (CD)
In a fitting follow-up to Rushmore, writer-director Wes Anderson and cowriter-actor Owen Wilson have crafted another comedic masterwork that ripples with inventive, richly emotional substance. Because of the all-star cast, hilarious dialogue, and oddball characters existing in their own, wholly original universe, it's easy to miss the depth and complexity of Anderson's brand of comedy. Here, it revolves around Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman), the errant patriarch of a dysfunctional family of geniuses, including precocious playwright Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow), boyish financier and grieving widower Chas (Ben Stiller), and has-been tennis pro Richie (Luke Wilson). All were raised with supportive detachment by mother Etheline (Anjelica Huston), and all ache profoundly for a togetherness they never really had. The Tenenbaums reconcile somehow, but only after Anderson and Wilson (who costars as a loopy literary celebrity) put them through a compassionate series of quirky confrontations and rekindled affections. Not for every taste, but this is brilliant work from any perspective.
"Maladroit" by Weezer (CD)
Ugly Americans may be on the wane, but various survivors of the Austin alt-pop outfit do turn out to support frontman Bob Schneider on this solo effort. Lonelyland showcases Schneider's competing interests as a singer-songwriter (nice Elvis Costello-like melodic turns of "Big Blue Sea") and Southern white-boy rapper (most notably on the swampy "Bullets"). But things get really strange on "The World Exploded into Love," on which a sub-Barenaked-Ladies spiel is paired with full-blown female operatic accompaniment. Schneider, it turns out, is the son of an opera singer, so the song makes sense biographically, if not musically. While fans of Schneider's prior outfits (Joe Rockhead, Ugly Americans, and the Scabs) will likely find things to love on this album, Lonelyland sounds like the work of a solo artist who's still finding his own voice.
"The Guest" by Phantom Planet (CD)
On the evidence of Rockin' the Suburbs, Ben Folds's decision to jettison the two-piece Five that had backed him on four largely excellent albums has not resulted in any significant shift in trajectory. The Ben Folds Five were only getting better, gradually discovering the confidence not to hide their musical uniqueness (there have been too few piano-led power trios) and lyrical intelligence behind undergrad Barenaked Ladies-style gags. Songs like "Mess" and "Brick" signaled an extraordinary new songwriting talent worthy of comparison to Folds's obvious idols, Elvis Costello and Paul Simon. Only this album's title track harkens back to Folds's fondness for comedy, and it is by far the weakest track here. The rest is mournful, reflective, and, at best, quite magnificent. Folds's hymns to his family, "Still Fighting It" and "The Luckiest" are shot through with an honesty that's rare in alternative rock. The acerbic essence of character sketches such as "Carrying Cathy," "Losing Lisa," and "Zak & Sara" are leavened with a generous compassion. Folds's second solo effort is his best album yet. The remainder of his career must be anticipated with equal parts expectation and impatience. --Andrew Mueller
"Ultra Lounge Sampler" by Various Artists (CD) As heard in the Bohemian Films production, "A Beautiful Mind: Part Deux"!
Arguably the greatest of American films, Orson Welles's 1941 masterpiece, made when he was only 26, still unfurls like a dream and carries the viewer along the mysterious currents of time and memory to reach a mature (if ambiguous) conclusion: people are the sum of their contradictions, and can't be known easily.
No minuscule "featurette" for the greatest movie ever made. The backbone for this grand two-disc set is the 1995 Oscar®-nominated documentary The Battle over Citizen Kane, a very rich two-hour film on how this masterpiece was almost destroyed by Welles's adversary, William Randolph Hearst. A great remastered print is complemented by two running commentaries, the better one by critic Roger Ebert. Don't think you want a two-hour lecture by Mr. Ebert? Just listen to his 10-minute talk over the gallery of photographs from the movie (which you can flip through manually with your remote or see as a slide show), and you'll want more. Ad campaigns, storyboards, and even call sheets are included in this must-have DVD. --Doug Thomas
"Film Directing Shot by Shot" by Steven D. Katz (Book) 
Do you have to go to film school to get your movies made? No, say two young entrepreneurs who survived the grind. Here they offer 140 strategies for making movies no matter what. Amateurs as well as seasoned veterans can pick up this entertaining and incredibly useful guide in any place--at any point of crisis--and find tactics that work. Whether it's raising money or cutting your budget; dealing with angry landlords or angry cops; or jump-starting the production or stalling it while you finish the script, these strategies are delivered with funny, illustrative anecdotes from the authors' experiences and from veteran filmmakers eager to share their stories. Irreverent, invaluable, and a lot cheaper than a year's tuition, this friendly guide is the smartest investment any future filmmaker could make.
Strategies from the book include: Love your friends for criticizing your work--especially at the script stage Shyness won't get you the donuts Duct tape miracles Don't fall in love with cast or crew (but if you do...)
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