Paranoid Park, a recent indie movie that spooked us.

Music

Counting Crows – Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings
I’d hate to party with Counting Crows. The dirty-haired alt-rockers and A&O Ball performers’ latest album, Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings, finds the band trying to create an album split between “Saturday songs” (with guitars) and “Sunday songs” (with piano and maybe harmonica). The group’s fifth LP sounds more like Tuesday afternoon: Sonically bland and loaded with Hallmark sentiment. According to Counting Crows, living it up means playing generic guitar while singing about girls and Christopher Columbus (“1492”), a fatal mistake when half your album is about Saturday nights. Opt for a frat rager instead.
—Patrick St. Michel

Tokyo Police Club – Elephant Shell
When people say all indie rock sounds the same, the new Tokyo Police Club album, Elephant Shell, is what they’re talking about. Steady drum beats back repetitive but nod-worthy guitar riffs, usually played on the same three chords. David Monks’ whiny voice sings about emotional pitfalls and forced metaphors: “You’re my cave and I’ve been hiding out.” The catchiness of the band’s 2006 EP A Lesson in Crime is gone, and the handclaps and chanting sound tired. So here’s to regression: The keyboard and synthesizer lines blatantly stolen from the ‘80s may well be the highlight.
—Jenny An

Gnarls Barkley – The Odd Couple
Outkast hinted at funk-and-soul revivalism, but Gnarls Barkley opened the floodgates. It was a lot easier to like Cee-Lo and DJ Danger Mouse when their celebrity status didn’t rest on one single and a lot of film parodies. The Odd Couple is a sophomore album that sucks its concept dry, from the annoying antics of “Run” (only outdone by Justin Timberlake’s humorless appearance in the music video) to the slickly over-produced “Whatever” and “No Time Soon.” The best Gnarls Barkley song–on here it’s “Charity Case”–is one that understates Cee-Lo’s soulful voice and Danger’s Gorillaz-style chill beats, but most of the time it’s a whole lot of soul crammed into a song that’s so un-soulful it’s deadening.
—Paul Schrodt

Movies

Funny Games (Directed by Michael Haneke)
No one wants to play a game that isn’t fun, but Michael Haneke expects you to come back for more in the American transplant of his original German film, Funny Games, which set arthouse hearts aflutter in 1997. That was then, this is now — Haneke still nudges at his incredulous audience (Michael Pitt’s killer addresses them directly), except that his generic dissection of the horror film no longer looks fresh in 2008’s torture-porn glut. We watch as Naomi Watts’s hostage mother vomits into her mouth, but we don’t get to see anyone die. Haneke admonishes his audience for wanting release, but after Steven Spielberg’s deft examination of real-life violence in Munich, his tricks no longer pass for clever.
—Paul Schrodt

Surfwise (Directed by Doug Pray)
Surfwise is a documentary that follows the Paskowitz children — eight boys and one girl — raised as nomadic surfers on a spiritual quest led by their father Dorian, or “Doc.” The film delves into the family’s bizarre lifestyle, like Doc’s unconventional approach to schooling (none), diet (strict) and discipline, as well as their various encounters with fame. Pray illuminates familial divisions as the children grow up and apart, and though the in-depth feuding sometimes feels self-serving, the result is an honest look at the unusual family’s life outside of society — and the childrens’ individual assimilations back in.
—Lizzie Schiffman

Paranoid Park (Directed by Gus Van Sant)
Like Gregg Araki’s Mysterious Skin, Paranoid Park is flooded with the tortured memories of childhood — in Mysterious Skin it was Fruit Loops, now it’s Super-8 footage of skaters whirling through a cement-pipe chamber. “I don’t think I’m ready for Paranoid Park,” Alex (Gabe Nevins) says before he is accidentally entangled in a murder by the park’s train tracks. Echoes and shadows are everywhere in Gus Van Sant’s story about a quiet skater kid coming to terms with life. Non-professional actors speak awkardly as if they’re afraid to talk. Van Sant toyed with adolescent angst in Elephant, but that film’s obfuscation of the Columbine High School massacre felt vacuous. The pain in Paranoid Park is real and beautiful — the teens don’t say very much, but you can always tell they’re thinking.
—Paul Schrodt