Word: clarksons
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Lars and the Real Girl, which begins as a standard indie study of the sympathetic oddball, soon reveals itself as a gentle comedy of community. Prodded by the town doctor (Patricia Clarkson), Gus and his pregnant wife Karin (Emily Mortimer) figure out that for Lars, Bianca is not a sex object but a love object--an outlet for the tenderness he has never been able to express and that his indulgent friends are thrilled to see bloom. Most movies celebrate the journey to another place. Lars pursues the counterargument--that most of us are defined by our past...
...become characters," says Gosling. "They're all me." His latest screen self is a Midwestern recluse named Lars who orders a sex doll on the Internet and suffers from a delusion that the doll is his real girlfriend. On the advice of a therapist (Patricia Clarkson), Lars' friends and family play along and treat Bianca like any other pretty new girl in town. To become Lars, "I had to get rid of all the posturing and ideas of what I think makes me cool or charming and turn up the more vulnerable parts of myself," Gosling says. In another actor...
This ain't Mika or Kelly Clarkson. Cool teen Londoners are into "credible music," according to Sam Killcoyne, the15-year-old organizer of the Underage events. And the roster of young talent assembled at London's Victoria Park for the festival was dripping with cred. The Young Knives, Jack Peñate and Cajun Dance Party may have already made an impression on the charts, but even the likes of Nottingham's electro-popsters, Late Of The Pier and Brighton's Maths Class have mustered a substantial London following by word of MySpace alone...
...problem with My December is that it isn't particularly great rock. Even those dismayed by what American Idol hath wrought (consider my hand raised) have to admit Clarkson has a strapping, swooping voice. But it lacks a defined personality, reflected in the bloated industrial-Pat Benatar knockoffs ("Haunted," "Don't Waste My Time," the single "Never Again") that dominate the album. When they aren't in that mode, Clarkson and her new, hardly avant-garde producer David Kahne (Bangles, Sugar Ray) dabble with proven formulae: They know a solemn ballad must start with a lone strummed guitar ("Sober...
...lyrics, an aggrieved and angry lot, are no more forgettable than what we hear regularly on the radio. But most of the songs, co-written by Clarkson, rely on wide-screen, processed production gimmicks, rather than genuine hooks. And as any pop Svengali knows, making a pop record is as much a matter of craft and precision as it is eccentricities. It's about the thin line between hackwork and magic. As much as one can applaud Clarkson for wanting to be taken seriously, neither pop nor rock should sound as labored as most of My December. A Svengali might...