The NZ Herald  has listed the top 30 albums of 2011. Here’s the music which mattered most in 2011 to TimeOut reviewers …

1. BLACK KEYS

El Camino

After narrowly missing out on TimeOut’s top spot last year with timeless breakthrough album Brothers, the Black Keys hit straight back with El Camino – their finest and most accessible work to date. The thing that made the Akron, Ohio duo’s seventh album so good is that it was a fun, straight-up and rockin’ record from start to finish. In contrast to Brothers, guitarist and singer Dan Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney upped the pace and took off on a joyous, and sometimes hell-raising journey. What was also remarkable was that after seven albums they continued to improve and reinvent themselves, while still keeping that solid base of blues, soul, rock ‘n’ roll and swaggering hip-hop firmly intact. Opener Lonely Boy was a thumping blues boogie, songs like Run Right Back and Stop Stop had you doing the mash potato as you sang along, and the cooler, cockier groove of Sister was a standout. There was little let up, apart from the acoustic start to Little Black Submarine, which soon spiralled off beautifully into Led Zep land, and the catchy Dead and Gone had more than a little of Outkast’s Hey Ya to it. This was rock ‘n’ roll you can dance to – so shake it, baby, shake it.

Read the rest here.

Michael C Hall has been in the country and in today’s Sunday Star Times there is a feature on him called  Dexter dreaming darkly by Adam Dudding.

The world’s most loveable serial killer has an elbow on a bar leaner and is looking out across Auckland’s Westhaven Harbour. He’s yakking into a cellphone and hatching sinister plans – suggesting, from what I can overhear, that “maybe we could start shooting early”.

 

Just like everyone on TV, Michael C Hall seems a little smaller off-screen than he should. The muscled chest that fills out his sweatshirt when he’s being the emotionally stunted murderer Dexter Morgan and wrapping up a bad person in clingfilm before driving a knife through their sternum, doesn’t look as gym-buff as I’d expected. And without the benefit of the warm filters the cameramen use to make the Dexter locations in Los Angeles stand in for steamy, sleazy Miami, he looks kind of pale. The big American jaw and deep eyes and jutting brow are real though, as are the huge Fred Flintstone upper lip and big, fleshy mouth.

 

When he finally gets off the phone, he sits down at a cafe table with a glass of water and begins a long exercise in absent-minded origami with his paper napkin.

 

Hall’s press agent, Craig Bankey, had demanded pictures not be taken mid-interview, to avoid unflattering open-mouthed shots of his client, so I take a peek in Hall’s mouth as best I can. For the record, it seems he has a couple of slightly overlapping, almost un-American, bottom front teeth, but nothing too freaky.

 

He apologises about the call.

 

Contract negotiations for shooting a seventh, and probably eighth, season as the star of the darkly hilarious TV series Dexter are “a matter of days” away from completion, but a few details need clearing up, including how to juggle schedules so he can also star in a new musical based on the Tim Burton film Big Fish.

Read the rest here.

The Kardashians, I hate that I know who they are and that I follow the latest ‘news’ about them. Kim is divorcing – why do we even care? Emma McDonald ponders why this is.

Kim Kardashian and her clan (or should that be klan?) only came on my radar during the most recent school holidays when I discovered my teenagers glued to the television.

Frustrated by their inertia, I enquired as to what was keeping them indoors. Keeping Up With The Kardashians, I was told (as if I was a complete moron).

Up until that moment in my life, I thought Kardashians were fictional aliens on Star Trek. Now I know they are in fact a family of non-fictional nobodies from Los Angeles called Kim, Khloe, Kourtney, Kendall, Kylie and Kris who have their own reality television show.

Since my recent epiphany, I have come to realise that this family is strangely ubiquitous. In addition to the television show, I now regularly notice Kardashians on multiple magazine covers near the supermarket checkout and this week, pack-leader, Kim and one of her K-named sisters are in Australia to spruik their “fashion” label and attend, among other things, the spring racing carnival in Melbourne. One has to ask oneself, why do these women command so much of the world’s media attention and why on earth are they famous?

Read the rest here.

A little more reading on Gattaca – a review this time. Here’s a taste:

IT’S HARD TO BELIEVE THAT Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman aren’t as perfect a combination of chromosomes as you can get. But in “Gattaca” they represent flawed specimens, each genetically pre-disposed toward heart trouble which is ironic, since they are the ones with the most heart in the near future of “Gattaca,” where biology is destiny.

This chilly sci-fi thriller intelligently explores the social and ethical ramifications of genetic engineering. Andrew Niccol, who’s making his directorial debut, wrote the script about a grim, codified society where parents choose their newborn’s genes the way they might a china pattern.

Read the rest here.

I saw Andrew Niccol’s In Time today and as I really liked the premise of the film I was hoping to enjoy it. However, for me the Justin Timberlake factor meant that I didn’t really get into it. There is some great acting (Cillian Murphy and Vincent Kartheiser) but the leads, Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried can’t carry the film.

In Time is set in the future (Los Angeles – but not named as such) where people stop aging at twenty-five but the downside is that they have only one more year to live unless they can buy more time. So everyone is counting down and they all have these very cool sub-dermal, digital countdown clocks on their arms so that we can see just how long they have got. If you are wealthy there is a chance that you could live forever.

It is a stratified society and the poor are literally living day-to-day, doing anything to buy even a minute more. Our hero (Timberlake) plays Will Salas, a factory worker trying to do the best he can for his friends and family. He ends up with a huge time top-up from a rich man who has grown tired of living. And of course that leads to the poor and rich colliding.

This is what The NY Times had to say:

The tick tick tock of the mortal clock gives the science-fiction thriller “In Time” its slick, sweet premise. Set in a near or far future in a segregated city that resembles the separated, weirdly depopulated neighborhoods in and around Los Angeles (where it was shot), the movie imagines a world in which everyone stops aging at 25. (Just like in Hollywood!) On that birthday a glowing green digital clock on everyone’s left forearm starts running, giving them just 365 days to go and then 364, 363, 362. When the days run out, the clock stops for good.

In this futureworld in which time is literally money — everything, including food, shelter and wages, is valued in minutes, hours, years, decades — it’s possible to slow the escaping hourglass sand by buying more time, as the rich do. The poor, of course, are slaves to time: many die young and stay pretty, and are preyed on by time bandits called Minute Men, who clean clocks at gunpoint.

In the ghetto the industrial-looking time zone called Dayton where Will (Justin Timberlake) lives, most people only scrape together a few extra hours. At 28 he has managed to put three additional years on his life, but the cost of breathing keeps going up. What set him back an hour yesterday may take two hours off his life tomorrow.

Read the rest here.

In the NZ Herald  Francesca Rudkin gave the film four stars out of five and this is what she had to say:

Justin Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried are a futuristic Bonnie and Clyde in this stylish sci-fi action thriller from New Zealand director Andrew Niccol. As you’d expect from Niccol, the writer/producer of The Truman Show and the writer/director of Gattaca, In Time is a thoughtful, slick and stylish film, which this time draws on issues like over-population, our obsession with staying and looking young, and the lack of time in our busy modern lives.

Niccol builds on the idea that time is money, and literally makes time the currency of the day. In Time sees people engineered to stop ageing at 25, at which point they have one year left to live – unless they can earn, steal or borrow more time. Everyone’s destiny is worn on their arm, where a built-in digital clock counts down how much time they have before their body self-destructs. If you’re rich you can live forever and look good doing so; if you’re poor like Will Salas (Timberlake) then you live somewhere like the Dayton ghetto where life is very much day to day.

It’s a clever idea and an obvious metaphor; the wealthy few control the supply of time, callously raising the cost of living in poorer areas while also making the ability to earn time more difficult. After Salas experiences first hand just how the rich get richer through the poor being expendable he decides to confront the system.

Read the rest here.