Word: sebastians
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...speak of the storm--the title character in The Perfect Storm, the adaptation of Sebastian Junger's 1997 nonfiction best seller that opens this week. We do not speak, however, of the $140 million film. For more on that, you, along with the Warner Bros. executives, can read the critics or check out the box-office grosses after opening weekend. (You'll know them; they'll be the ones with the gnawed-down fingernails and little voodoo dolls bearing a striking resemblance to the July 4 competition: Rocky, Bullwinkle and Mel Gibson...
...Sebastian Junger's book could only speculate on the actions of Tyne and his men since, for reasons we can't explain, none of the crew would talk to him. The book was as much a history of commercial fishing as a story of one ship in a storm. So screenwriter Bill Wittliff has given a little storyline to Tyne (George Clooney) and the other Andrea Gailers--except for the black in the crew; he is allowed to provide only background nobility. Murph (John C. Reilly) gets all sniffly and teary bonding with his son. Sully (William Fichtner...
...year-end critics polls, it's the group's resolve to do things in its own flighty, boho way that has transformed it from a mere band into a cosmology. Growing out of an experiment in a music-business class at Glasgow's Stowe College in 1996, Belle and Sebastian was named after an obscure French children's cartoon. The band turned down major labels and big-money offers to sign with tiny London-based Jeepster (it's distributed in the U.S. by Matador), and all seven members have kept their day jobs, including Murdoch, who rather famously lives above...
Devoted fans aren't unusual in the music world, but Belle and Sebastian--not a duo, but a mixed-gender septet from Glasgow, Scotland--inspires cultish adoration from folks too old and too smart to be hanging posters on the wall. The group's votaries meet in coffee houses to pore over lyrics. A couple proudly reported naming their children Belle and Sebastian. There's even a website devoted to--no joke--original fiction inspired by B&S songs. What artistic force could cause perfectly normal adults to regress into thoroughly obsessed teens...
...most part, it's old-fashioned pop music. Belle and Sebastian blends guitars, pianos, violins, cellos, horns and whatever else is lying around into the kind of sweet pop pioneered by the Beatles, Love and Phil Spector. Lyrically, chief writer and singer Stuart Murdoch, 30, favors mournful, Smiths-influenced rhymes about the adolescent frustration that comes from desperately wanting to do something but not knowing exactly what. He's clever, but it's Murdoch's quavering falsetto that is the band's trademark. Earnest and prematurely wise, his vocals mix angst and nostalgia with a hint of optimism...