Category: Pop

The Calamity Club, by Kathryn Stockett

(Spiegel & Grau, 638 pages)

When your debut novel sells more than 15 million copies, spends nearly two years on the New York Times bestseller list and becomes an Oscar-winning movie with a star-studded cast, what do you do for an encore?

Take your time, and go stay for a while in Peterborough.

That’s how Kathryn Stockett finally finished The Calamity Club, her second novel, which was stalled out when she went to the renowned MacDowell artist retreat in 2016 after five years of working on the book. Ten years after that stay, the novel is vexing reviewers across the country with its sheer heft. At a daunting 638 pages, this is not a book picked up lightly — some readers have gone so far as to weigh it. (It’s 2.2 pounds, according to The New York Times.)

But Stockett, and her publisher, are betting that the people who loved her first book, The Help, will be willing to invest a not-insignificant portion of their time on this new story, which revolves around an orphanage in Oxford, Mississippi, during the Great Depression. For those willing to do so, there is, indeed, a payoff. It’s a satisfyingly complex and well-plotted novel that grows more enjoyable after the first couple of hundred pages, if you can stick with it that long.

There are two central characters in this story, both immensely likeable. Meg is a spunky 11-year-old who was brought to the orphanage two years earlier after her mother disappeared and is being mistreated by a malevolent director. Birdie is a 24-year-old spinster, “churchy and chinless,” who lives with her mother and grandmother in circumstances that are fast dissolving into insolvency.

At first Meg and Birdie have nothing in common except their status as first-person narrators, but their lives will intersect when Birdie travels to Oxford for the uncomfortable task of asking her younger, prettier sister (who’d married a wealthy banker) to give her money so the family won’t lose their house for having not paid the taxes on it for nearly two years.

Birdie’s sister, Frances, is neither villain nor ally. She’s a woman who’s been told she’s beautiful so much that she has come to occupy another, ethereal plain of existence, and she is oblivious to the problems that Birdie can see in her marriage, problems that soon threaten her luxurious existence and that of her distinguished widowed mother-in-law, with whom Frances and her husband live. (In shades of The Help, the Tartt family employs two Black women who run the household, Picador and Polly.)

Getting money out of Frances and her husband is no small task, and Birdie has to move into the house for a while. It’s during this stay that she encounters and befriends Meg, while helping the orphanage balance its books. Although the time they spend together is brief, this connection spins the narrative in unexpected ways, as the young girl and the young woman seek to escape the difficult circumstances of their lives.

For Meg, it’s not just the mistreatment that she is suffering at the orphanage, where she is banished each day to a dank room where mold is blooming. She’s also haunted by the sudden disappearance of her mother, who, as we learn from her memories, had been a devoted and joyful parent right up to the day when she never came home. She dreams of reuniting with her mother, even as she dreams of being adopted. But Meg’s circumstances are more complicated than the child knows, and there are people conspiring to keep her from the happy ending of which she dreams.

Meanwhile, a devastating sequence of events causes Birdie to stay with her sister months longer than she anticipated, and in a major plot twist, she winds up conspiring with the unlikeliest of characters in order to keep Frances and Mrs. Tartt in their house as financial ruin threatens to overtake them.
Like The Help, Stockett’s second novel is threaded with history, much of it disturbing, such as the practice at the time for states to sterilize people, mostly women, that they have declared “feeble minded,” a criterion that included not only disabled people but those addicted to alcohol and those deemed promiscuous. “Feeble-mindedness” was considered hereditary, and sterilization was the solution, according to Mississippi and more than two dozen other states with such laws on the books.

Stockett also writes realistically of what it was like to live during the Depression years in the deep South, and in Mississippi specifically, where in one year, more than a quarter of homes were seized for nonpayment of taxes. Few were exempt from hardship, and Birdie’s struggle to retain hope and dignity in light of odds stacked overwhelmingly against her reflect the situation of many other families, both then and now.

Did this novel need to be 600 pages? Definitely not, and The Calamity Club reminds me of a favorite saying of my mother: Work expands to fill the time. And Stockett had a lot of time to write this novel.

More debatable is whether Stockett needed to give Birdie a love interest, which felt formulaic from the moment this person was introduced. It may be what Hollywood wanted, but it’s not what this character needed. But that’s a quibble, and the fact is that Stockett kept me interested in what happens to these characters throughout all 2.2 pounds of this book, which was no small task. But I finished it thinking of Apollo Creed’s immortal words to Rocky Balboa, “Ain’t gonna be no rematch.”

Ain’t gonna be no sequel. Six hundred-plus pages is plenty, thank you very much. A

Featured Photo: The Calamity Club, by Kathryn Stockett

Album Reviews 26/07/16

Shonen Knife, Let’s Knife Re-Cut (Summit Records)

Full-scale re-rub of the Japanese trio’s 1992 Let’s Knife LP, which Rolling Stone Japan placed at No. 37 on its list of the “100 Greatest Japanese Rock Albums of All Time” in 2007. No idea why they did this; they could have left this album alone and simply rattled off a new collection of Ramones/Black Flag-flavored punk tunes, but instead it just serves to show that they’ve, you know, gotten a lot older. We can start at the start with “Riding On The Rocket,” which has its original raw energy surgically removed and replaced with a version that’s so lifeless it’ll make you think of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Of course, that might have been the point of doing it; the updated version of “Get The Wow” sounds like a tune that should have made it onto the first Go-Go’s album. It’s still Shonen Knife, but jeez. They’ll be in Durham, N.H., with Men At Work and Toad The Wet Sprocket at the Whittemore Center on July 28. A

Electric Six, I Shall Exterminate Everything Around Me That Restricts Me from Being the Master (red vinyl remaster) (Metropolis Records)

Born in the 1990s Detroit scene that also saw the emergence of bands like the White Stripes, these guys are often considered a “gay disco” band owing to their upbeat, high-energy tuneage and theatrics. If it matters to you, and it shouldn’t, the members all identify as straight but supportive of the LGBTQ community; they’re a go-to band for bros and others who hold such-themed events. This was their fourth album, released in 2007, and it was and is a blast, distilling their fun-filled essence and cementing the band’s reputation as a borderline joke band that can really play (“Down at McDonnelzzz” is a classic among their food-obsessed songs; as one YouTuber commented, “I got this song banned before due to ‘over-requesting’. 6:30 AM, trippin’ nuts, getting Egg McMuffins, and this song on the radio, I can die happy”). The bullet version of their legacy would read “Come for the hard garage rock, stay for the Danceteria madness.” Absolutely relentless record, now with bonus tracks and downloadable stuff and ruby red vinyl. A+

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• July 17’s list of new album releases is in my hands, everybody start drinking and I’ll try to make it as painless as possible! Now, something that’d technically be proper to talk about this month owing to this column’s focus on — you know, famous people playing/singing music and whatnot — was the planned concert series for America’s 250th anniversary, which took place in several U.S. cities, including Los Angeles, California, and Philadelphia, a city in Hell. As everyone knows, the main event was originally planned to be held at the National Mall in Washington, D.C., but since all anyone does these days is argue about politics on Facebook, it got canceled and replaced with a giant thunderstorm, so I tried to find something about that whole 250th kerfuffle that wasn’t horrible, or at least not politically radioactive, and I finally did find something, specifically the appearance of opera-singing tenor dude Christopher Macchio, whose specialty is blending non-operatic genres with, you know, opera, at the Freedom 250 rally performance in D.C. on June 24. He has only made two albums and probably couldn’t care less if SpongeBob SquarePants was our president, but either way he is a great singing human. He hasn’t made an album since 2020, a Christmas album, on which he sang a rendition of my least favorite Christmas jingle, “O Holy Night,” which most singers only sing in order to show that they have lungs made of Kevlar and could probably impress Simon Cowell on his stupid talent shows, in other words it’s the “My Heart Will Go On” of holiday jingles. Will he make another album? I don’t know, but there’s definitely one coming out Friday from trip-hop pioneer Tricky, titled Different When It’s Silent! He was a member of Massive Attack when they were The Wild Bunch, and even though his last appearance on a proper Massive Attack album was 32 years ago, no one can ever utter his name without mentioning Massive Attack somewhere within the same breath. What does this mean? It means he is too cool for school, so let’s see what he’s up to, on this new album! Yep, “I’m Yours” is a great little tune, starting with its 1960s guitar line, over which Tricky lays his usual helium vocals, and then it becomes a loud-ass no-wave thing, he’s still got it, or whatever the kids say nowadays.

• But does rapping man Ne-Yo still have it, he of “I Wish” fame, from 70 years ago? The answer is a definite no if you only like him for his flows about being short or whatever, as he has been going in a more cowboy-hat direction since last year’s “Simple Things,” how do you feel about rappers going country? Highway 79 is the new album, and “Miss Tundra” the single, a chill R&B-tinted cowboy song about a girl with large glutes, don’t you love how nothing ever changes?

• British indie rock band Kasabian has still got it, even though they’ve gone in a more wimpy direction since their early days, remember when “Club Foot” was on the mixtapes of everyone who felt the need to hide their taste for old-school heavy metal, that was a good one. Their latest LP, Act III, finds them trying to become New Order harder than ever, at least as far as the single “Great Pretender” is concerned; it has the same vibe as the old Modern English song “Melt With You,” which will please people who remember that dreadful period of cultural history.

• We’ll call it a week with boomy-voiced rapper Rick Ross and his new LP, Set In Stone! It is the usual fare: Sell stuff on black markets, avoid the po-po, and then buy some Benzes. Reddit’s r/hiphopheads group, which never met any pointless thing that didn’t start fights among the regulars, is mostly angry that the album cover is AI-generated; as far as that business goes, I do not care.

Featured Photo: Shonen Knife, Let’s Knife Re-Cut and Electric Six, I Shall Exterminate Everything Around Me That Restricts Me from Being the Master

Minions & monsters & sheep

Movies for family viewing

If you have kids, you will probably have contact with the newest entry in the Minionsverse, Minions & Monsters (PG, in theaters), and that is fine. I kind of view all Minions-related content as not-quite-as-clever Looney Tunes, which is I think a completely acceptable form of entertainment. No, nobody is learning or growing or imparting any life lessons, but also you don’t have to sit through any learning or growing or poorly conveyed life lessons. The Minion-speak means you don’t even really have to listen to all that much dialogue — all the better to avoid quippiness or writers’ attempts at sounding “of the youth.” It’s kinda great.

Here, the movie piles up a bunch of riffs, mostly visual, on the early years of Hollywood — you get some Roaring 20s, silent film, introduction of sound, suffragettes and Prohibition thrown at you along with some nods to 1920s, 1930s and 1940s films and also Jaws and The Day the Earth Stood Still and the existence of George Lucas. Historical inaccuracies, you ask? “Poop” the Minions would say, and I probably agree because these little touches are nice treats for the adults in the audience — probably watching this movie because it is a family outing in the air conditioning.

The Minions (all voiced by Pierre Coffin) wind up in Hollywood after their attempts at finding an evil “Big Boss” to serve fail, usually because the Minions accidentally do in the Big Boss. In 1920s-or-something Hollywood, they stumble through an elaborate action sequence in a movie being shot by director Max (voice of Christoph Waltz). You ruined everything, get out of here!, he tells them. But then the heads of his studio, the Bright Brothers (both voiced by Jeff Bridges), tell him that the Minions sequence is brilliant. You’re my best friends, come make more films with me!, Max says to the Minions after he rushes to find them. The movie focuses primarily on Minions Henry and James and their buddy Edward. Henry and James have long been amusing themselves with outlandish stories and now find in Hollywood the perfect outlet for their imaginings. When the advent of sound ends the Minions’ serious career in Citizen Kane-ish and Maltese Falcon-y films, the trio attempt to make a monster movie by conjuring a real monster, Goomi (voice of Trey Parker). Perhaps they should have paid attention when he said his full monster name, which included “the Deceiver.” (Also adding their vocals to the movie are Allison Janney, Jesse Eisenberg and Zoey Deutch.)

The monsters are fun, the Minions are fun, the callback to Harold Lloyd hanging from a clock and a building falling around Buster Keaton are fun nerdy tidbits. Minions & Monsters is a jolly entry in kid-focused entertainment that offers just enough to the adults who are also in the room.

Of course, learning doesn’t have to be a drag to a kid movie — for example, see the recent The Sheep Detectives (PG, 2026), which was released in May and is now on Amazon Prime Video. This movie, which really feels more straight down the middle all-ages fare rather than just kid-specific, contains a complex examination of grief and what it means to belong and also talking sheep solve a murder.

The sheep here — some kind of computer-generated creatures based on real sheep or something, according to some light Googling — are of the “live-action animation” variety living in an otherwise human live-action world. There is a bit of an uncanny sheep valley you have to walk through and acclimate yourself to but then you can — or at least I could — basically live with what you’re watching, because the sheep are so sweet and so cute and have such a lovely life on their English countryside farm with their shepherd George (Hugh Jackman), who only raises sheep for wool. What would another reason to raise sheep be, wonders Lily (voice of Julia Louis-Dreyfus), displaying that though she is a very clever sheep, she has been protected from some of life’s harsh realities. Well, except for the harsh reality of Murder!, due to George’s nightly reading of mystery and detective novels to the sheep. When George is found dead, Lily and her buddy Mopple (voice of Chris Dowd) and flock loner Sebastian (voice of Bryan Cranston) begin to investigate his murder, trying to nudge village police officer Tim (Nicholas Braun) in his investigation of suspects, principally the people named in George’s will. The chief suspect appears to be American Rebecca (Molly Gordon), George’s long lost daughter. But there’s also the neighboring shepherd (Tosin Cole) who is interested in George’s flock, the local butcher (Conleth Hill) and an out-of-town lawyer (a glammed up Emma Thompson, having such fun).

In addition to sheep being sheep — a Brett Goldstein-voiced pair of rams always looking for something to smash with their horns — we get a very touching and straightforward consideration of grief and how the pain of loss might be worth it to keep the memories of our loved ones. Louis-Dreyfus in particular does a beautiful job at conveying her character’s feelings with her vocal delivery, really helping to bring life to these digital creatures. The movie does a good job of bringing this serious, weighty stuff to the story without weighing it down and still giving us a very solid and fun “English village murder” murder mystery.

If your family movie nights largely involve older middle schoolers and up, Netflix’s recently released Enola Holmes 3(PG-13) is an enjoyable option, if not quite as crackling as its previous entries. Millie Bobby Brown returns as Enola, younger sister of Sherlock Holmes (Henry Cavill), who has been making quite a name for herself as a detective in her own right. And as the movie opens, she’s worried about that name because the wedding dress-wearing Enola is about to become Lady Tewkesbury as the wife of her longtime friend and sort of boyfriend Lord Tewkesbury (Louis Partridge). After some debating whether she actually wants to go through with the marriage, she heads to the church only to be waylaid by Dr. Watson (Himesh Patel), who has come to tell her that Sherlock, who had also come to Malta for her destination wedding, has disappeared, possibly been kidnapped.

Of course this case quickly spreads, with another kidnapping and other nefarious events and Enola desperate to solve the mystery and also figure out how exactly to get the life she wants with Tewkesbury.

There is less Sherlock/Enola teamwork than in previous outings, perhaps one of the reasons the movie doesn’t quite have the same bouncy feel as the others. But the movie still presents its Sherlock riff with adventure and good humor.

Featured photo: Minions & Monsters.

Sparta, by Andrew Bayliss

(W.W. Norton & Co., 326 pages)

Other than Rome, is there any ancient civilization that commands more attention than Sparta?

Sparta remains front and center in the popular imagination in part because of the Spartan Race franchise, headquartered in Vermont, as well as the many books and films about the culture, to include Steven Pressfield’s Gates of Fire. And most everyone who is well-read knows the adjective “Spartan” and has an opinion about whether it should be capitalized.

But the popular view of Sparta is largely informed by myth, which is why historians talk about “the Spartan mirage.” British historian Andrew Bayliss proposes to correct the record in Sparta, The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Superpower.

Although Sparta’s glory days began two centuries earlier, the first surviving history was written in the fifth century BCE. Little was written by actual citizens of Sparta, and even then, that’s “a few hundred lines of verse,” Bayliss writes. How then, did Sparta become so important that it was seen as aspirational by a diverse collection of thinkers, including Plato, Machiavelli, Rousseau, Robespierre and even Samuel Adams, who wanted the United States to become “the Christian Sparta”?

Part of the answer appears to be selective memory because, as Bayliss explains, we have cherry-picked the good of Spartan culture and conveniently excised the abhorrent, such as the practice of throwing prisoners and babies deemed inferior off a cliff and the violent enslavement of “helots” in order to enable the lifestyle of the citizens of Sparta — who were called Spartiates, by the way, not Spartans. (Bayliss uses the terms interchangeably, however.)

Slavery was common at the time, even in Athens, where historians believe there were about 80,000 enslaved people in the fifth century BCE.

“What singled the Spartans out was the ruthlessness with which they conquered and enslaved their fellow Greeks, in order to ensure that each of their own citizens possessed a captive, self-producing human workforce,” Bayliss writes.

The official citizenry of Sparta, determined by their land holdings, did not work at all, at least not in order to sustain themselves and their families. They worked on their bodies, readying themselves for battle and for their famed athletic games. The women, too, participated in athletic games and were required to maintain a high level of fitness, although they were not required to serve in the military. (Women were also allowed to inherit and own land in Sparta, unusual for their time; Bayliss points out that this wasn’t allowed in Britain until 1870.)

Theirs was a communal lifestyle, with everyone required to gather together for meals in the evening, in which the main feature was “unbaked barley burgers” and something called “black broth,” which scholars believe was a liquid derived by boiling pork in salt and blood. “The broth was so unpleasant that a visitor … remarked that he no longer considered the Spartans to be brave after trying their food, because ‘anyone in their right mind would prefer to die ten thousand times than share such a poor living.’”

For the Spartiates, death on the battlefield was considered a privilege, an idea that was inculcated from childhood, and one that enabled the battles that have become legendary, including the “Battle of the Champions” in which 300 elite warriors of Sparta fought an equal number of warriors from the region of Argos. All but three died — two from Argos and one Spartiate; the Spartan warrior later committed suicide because he was ashamed for having survived.

Interestingly, Spartan men who died in battle were the only citizens permitted gravestones, and the ones that have been found are reminiscent of the uniform graves at Arlington National Cemetery: small, identical markers engraved with the name of the warrior and the words en polemoi, “in war.”

In their ideals and practices, Spartan culture lingers in modernity; “Come and take them,” the popular retort of gun enthusiasts, is said to have originated with Leonidas, the Spartan king who died with his men at Battle of Thermopylae, depicted in the 2006 film 300.

Despite their fierceness, the Spartiates were a superstitious people who thought that the devastating earthquake in the fourth century BCE was punishment sent by the god Poseidon. “A tremor at the wrong time would halt a Spartan army in its tracks, in the belief that the god was expressing his displeasure at the mission.”

And yet their government was oddly predictive of modern democracies. Sparta had two kings, from separate families, and a ruling council of elders composed of 28 citizens over the age of 60. The system, Bayliss writes, provided stability and worked to cancel out “the excesses” of the leaders, much like the American system of government is supposed to do. Citizens of Sparta could vote on bills the council had put worth, although the value of this seems dubious since the Sparta constitution said, “If the people choose crookedly, the kings and elders shall set it aside.”

The Spartan Race philosophy is that people become “unbreakable” by doing hard things. Unfortunately, the Spartans proved not to be unbreakable themselves; like Rome, they had a rise and fall, and the fall of Sparta came relatively fast, in less than three months. Their power, too, proved to be “illustory,” Bayliss writes. “Their alliance system gave the impression — both to insiders and onlookers — that Sparta could dominate the Greek-speaking world for generations, and even allowed them to think that they might be capable of taking on and conquering the Persians. In fact, none of this was really possible, because there were simply too few Spartans.”

In short, they overextended themselves, and not for a noble cause.

“The only freedom the Spartans were interested in was their own — and particularly the freedom to treat anyone they thought beneath them as they pleased,” Bayliss says.

Although Sparta is superbly researched, it often feels like required reading for a history class. One must be very interested in Sparta, its enemies and the Peloponnesian War to remain engrossed throughout. Fortunately for Bayliss, a good many people are. For everyone else, there is a lasting takeaway: Choose your heroes wisely. B-

Featured Photo: Sparta, by Andrew Bayliss

Album Reviews 26/07/09

Chuck Bergeron, Bass & Face: Duets With Ten Premier Vocalists (Summit Records)

The ever-polite All About Jazz describes bassist Bergeron as “one of the most active and innovative musicians working in the field of jazz,” not that I’ve ever seen a review from them that went something like, “Boy, this lazy putz should just quit polluting the airwaves,” you know? I mean, I kid, he’s assembled, as described, an elite group of jazz singers that includes Manhattan Transfer’s Janis Siegel; Deborah Silver, who was Grammy-nominated for her 2025 collaboration with the Count Basie Orchestra, and the appropriately named Kevin Mahogany, whose rich, knurled baritone positively floats over Bergeron’s deftly bowed acoustic bass interpretation of Duke Ellington’s “Sound of Love.” Overall this record feels like a comfortable, casual pair of socks, not a novelty release aimed at bass wonks; the funnest moment is Nicole Yarling’s unapologetically urban rendition of “Audubon Zoo/Iko-Iko,” which anyone with ears will recognize as the Mardi Gras singalong from the 1988 film Rain Man. Plenty to like here. A+

Alden Hellmuth, Tether (Leiter Verlag GmbH Records)

Just to reassure regular readers, no, I’m not turning this into an all-jazz column; fact is, over the past few months I’ve been absolutely buried in new jazz releases — physical copies too, not just empty-brained emails with links to confounding whiz-bang download pages that require a master’s degree in IT just to get to the part where one actually listens to stuff — and at this point I’m feeling guilty that I haven’t been able to get to many of them (there are so few music publications covering jazz nowadays). I wasn’t going to let that happen with this imported 12” vinyl LP, which was Fedexed to me from Germany (do you have any idea how much that costs?); its subject is an avant garde saxophonist with a casual fetish for noise. Ipso facto, this one’s obviously from the more experimental space, but New Yorker Hellmuth is as interested in brain-dazzling melody as she is in Mingus bonking; she goes into a deep, center-of-midtown reverie in “Witness,” the best on board here. Fascinating album. A+

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• July 10 would be a great day for some new albums to appear, and lo, thus it shall be, unto us, and yadda yadda. Yikes, look at all the albums that are coming out this week, I wonder if any of those albums will do something more than get on my nerves, let me look. Well, at least the 80-year-olds are still “rockin’ out,” like they say in Kansas, given that The Rolling Stones have a new one, called Foreign Tongues, which isn’t a strictly bad thing I suppose. I mean, they did turn the studio into a giant party, with people like Robert Smith, Steve Winwood, Paul McCartney and the drummer from Red Hot Chili Peppers dropping in to help out, not that the Stones need any help. For example, on “Rough and Twisted,” a loud, loutish blues-rawk tune that name-checks Muddy Waters in the band’s most Muddy Waters-ish tune ever, the Stones’ singer, whatever his name is, plays harmonica, and it doesn’t suck. I don’t know, I’ve never really cared about the Stones but never actively disliked them either, like, my high school friends who liked them were all confirmed druggies, so I just associate the band with drugs, which is what rock ’n’ roll is supposed to be about, or at least it was until it became a distinctly un-fun genre in which Berklee-dropout guitarists showed off the scant few jazz chords they’d learned in school and sang songs about Trump and being awkward around their exes or whatever everyone’s deal is now. I mean, yes, there’s literally no need for a new Rolling Stones record, but at least they’re singing about cocaine and one-night stands at that age, where most people would just be singing about adult diapers. That’s a good thing, isn’t it? I don’t know, you tell me, America.

• I always get a nice short burst of Facebook un-friendings when I mention that I always hated Queen, like when I state that their News Of The World album was a low point in arena rock that will never be matched. I only mention that because Adam Lambert, Queen’s kind-of-replacement for singer Freddie Mercury, has a new album streeting this week, cleverly titled ADAM, in capital letters, because wouldn’t you if you were him? OK, I wouldn’t either, but whatever, we shall talk about this new album, from the one-time American Idol runner-up, because if we didn’t, the 10 people who’ll be buying the stupid thing might feel abandoned, and I wouldn’t want that. O, what horrors will be on this record, OK, at least it isn’t a bunch of covers like the last one, the first single is titled “UNDER THE RHYTHM,” in capital letters, see what he did there, but it isn’t bad if you like Michael Jackson/Bruno Mars-type singing; it’s very busy and well-done, and this is without a doubt the last time you’ll see this album mentioned in any media outlet, ever.

• Release the kraken of hamburger jokes, because it’s a new album from famous burger-eating human Jack White, called Frozen Charlotte! Now, my guess is that the music on this album will be Led Zeppelin-esque, because isn’t it always, but this human Ronald McDonald is at the “One Never Knows What I’ll Try Next” stage of his career, so this may just be heavy metal versions of 1930s polkas, so let’s just do the dutiful and find out. Yup, nope, “Dollar Bill” pilfers the drunken guitar noodling of Zep’s “In My Time Of Dying,” you get the idea, right, let’s move on.

• And finally it’s fashion model/actress/singer/future ex of Robert Pattinson Suki Waterhouse, with Loveland, her third album. Single “Back In Love” regurgitates the breathy, amateurish sound of Aughts bands like Au Revoir Simone, I don’t care for it.

Featured Photo:

Robins Hood

A look at some of the tales of Sherwood Forest

The newest Robin Hood is a vibe.

In The Death of Robin Hood (rated R, in theaters now), Hugh Jackman takes the broken-down old Wolverine of Logan and goes like a hundred times more grizzled and dark with the outlaw Robin. Now an old old man with hair and beard that are completely out of control (his kingdom for a headband and some conditioner), Robin is, as he explains in the movie’s opening moments, not the heroic rob-from-the-rich economic equalizer of legend. There was no great love Maid Marian, there was no giving to the poor, and if he fought a sheriff or a bad guy here and there it was incidental because he fought, and killed, a lot of people — to include the person he soliloquies all this to, one of the many relatives of someone he once murdered who has come for vengeance.

But he does have one buddy, the equally bad Little John (Bill Skarsgård), who seeks him out to help with his own vengeance situation. Seems that years earlier, John killed a man and b asically stole his identity and his farm. Since then, Little John has been Edward, married to a good woman named Margaret and father to little Margaret (Faith Delaney). Except now the real Edward’s family has kidnapped his family and wants to take back his/their land. He asks Robin to help him get it back, which he does, with exactly the bloody results predicted.

Because he is super old, Robin is severely injured during the battle and John takes him to recover at an island priory, run by Sister Brigid (Jodie Comer). In his weakened state, Robin is quiet and still enough to find himself comforted by Brigid’s care and the safe haven she has created on the island.

But like, kind of a bleak safe haven because everything about this movie is pretty bleak. (Also bleak but pretty. Props to the cinematographer, Pat Scola, according to IMDb.) And bleak is the vibe this Robin Hood is all about — bleak like the unforgiving winter wilderness, bleak like the idea that people will always prefer a legend to the truth, bleak like a church farm run by a prioress with a superbleak past, bleak like a very grizzled old man vacillating between feeling the awful weight of his crimes and having no problem committing more of them. That that guy is Robin Hood is fine, whatever, but I don’t know that it necessarily adds anything to the story it’s telling. And it’s telling that story kinda slowly — the runtime is listed as two hours and three minutes but it feels longer than that.

The performances here are great — Hugh Jackman as a man who can’t really deal with the things he’s done in his life, Jodie Comer as someone determined to create a peaceful life from a horror-filled past. And the movie looks amazing. Just don’t go in expecting a lot of merry swashbuckling.

The lack of classic Robin Hood-ing in this latest Robin Hood movie had me seeking out other Robin Hood content.

MGM+’s Robin Hood series premiered its first season of 10 episodes in November 2025 and it’s been renewed for a second season, according to Wikipedia. I’ve seen the first four episodes and I do like that this one orients itself not around the Crusades but around the tensions between the Norman invaders who have taken positions and land from the Saxon colonized. I don’t know how historically accurate all this is, timewise, but whatever, I appreciate the new take.

We meet Rob Locksley (Jack Patten as an adult) when he is a boy and his dad, Hugh (Tom Mison), is still angry at having his family’s lands and mansion taken away by Normans. Hugh is strongarmed by the Sheriff of Nottingham (Sean Bean) into taking the job as the, like, hall monitor for the forests, keeping poachers from taking the “King’s deer.” As the years go by, Hugh puts effort into being kinda bad at his job so he doesn’t have to go around arresting his Saxon neighbors. But, by the time Robin is all grown up, Hugh’s permissive approach to poachers and the grudge he still holds toward the Norman Lord Huntington (Steven Waddington) who took Hugh’s house leads the Sheriff to go along with plans to arrest Hugh for treason. Robin’s grief quickly leads to some outlaw behavior that has him hiding in the woods with Little John (Marcus Fraser), Friar Tuck (Angus Castle-Doughty) and other only mildly merry men.

Meanwhile, in London, Huntington’s daughter Marian (Lauren McQueen) is in the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine (Connie Nielsen) and is pining for Rob, who she spent some time with before troubles flared up. The core cast also includes Priscilla (Lydia Peckham), the daughter of Nottingham, who is the frequent star of the episodes’ comically unsexy sex scenes. They feel very “check out our sex scene, we’re prestige!” without feeling particularly necessary or fun.

This whole show feels expensive-cheap. Like, this isn’t made on a dime — the actors’ costumes fit and the sets are good enough. But there is an inch-thick feel to the world and to the characters. It reminds me a bit of the 1990s and early aughts syndicated shows of the Xena Warrior Princess ilk, but grayer lighting and none of those shows’ lack of self-seriousness.

The June 15 episode of the This Had Oscar Buzz podcast reminded me of the existence of the 2010 Ridley Scott-directed Robin Hood(on HBO Max, and available for rent or purchase). Rereading my review from the time, I liked it fine then and — like hosts Joe Reid and Chris Feil on the podcast — I might like it even more now. Russell Crowe plays Robin Longstride, the character who eventually becomes Robin Hood, and Cate Blanchett is Marian. They have nice chemistry and have some genuinely funny scenes together. There are some very Ridley Scott battle scenes, some nice business with Robin and all the guys who become his Merry Men and excellent villains in Mark Strong and Oscar Isaac, who at moments almost seemed to be mixing in a little Sir Hiss from the 1973 animated Robin Hood (Disney+, as well as rent or purchase). Fun is being had while a story is being told and I can totally forgive whatever bits of Gladiator it seems to be mixing in.

Over on Prime Video, you can find 2018’s Robin Hood starring Taron Egerton in the title role, Jamie Fox as a sort of Little John-esque character and Eve Hewson (who showed up in the recent Disclosure Day) as Marian. While 2010’s movie, like 1991’s Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, goes for some sense of historical realism, 2018’s movie is set in a kind of alternate medieval era where armor looks more like bulletproof vest and there are touches of steampunk and, I don’t know, Megalopolis? This movie more than others really goes for the “Robin Hood equals Batman” comparison with some very Bruce Wayne and Batman universe story beats. Ben Mendelsohn plays the villain Sheriff of Nottingham/personification of the U.S. War on Terror — this also feels like an Iraq war movie, weirdly. It is sometimes surprisingly dark and sometimes a “good entertainment while you fold your laundry” level of fun.

While you’re over at Prime Video, check out 2022’s British production The Adventures of Maid Marian, which has real scrappy student film energy, with some Party City-looking costumes and “the glue is not quite dry on that” sets and a few “we cast this guy because he owned one of the cameras” casting choices. That said, I kind of had fun watching it? Marian (Sophie Craig) has spent the last three years hiding out at a nunnery, pretending to be a novitiate, while waiting for Robin (Dominic Anderson) to return from the crusades. When he does come back, they quickly learn that the former Sheriff of Nottingham (Bob Cryer) has returned, with a plan to kill Robin Hood and take back his office. Craig doesn’t have much to work with but she does a watchable job with what she’s got. This is a light B movie for when you are in a light B movie mood.

Speaking of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (rent or purchase), that movie kind of rides the line between B movie touches and big blockbuster production. Kevin Costner’s performance is exactly as remembered — he remains a weird choice for the style of playfulness and charm the role seems to need. The appearance of Christian Slater certainly takes you back to the early 1990s but Alan Rickman’s performance remains a mustache-twirling bit of goofy fun.

Featured photo: The Death of Robin Hood.

Stay in the loop!

Get FREE weekly briefs on local food, music,

arts, and more across southern New Hampshire!