Album opener, “Focus”, seems to be lacking in much focus, providing quite a good idea of whats to come throughout the album, but tries to be many things at once it seems. Whilst this is no bad thing, it does seem a bit of a mish mash of styles in one track. “Asleep at trial”, the second track of the album starts off with a voice akin to Thom Yorke’s, before descending into a mish-mash of sounds similar to an Arcade Fire live show.

From the child-like keys at the start, to the percussion throughout, and bird-like guitars and weird sounds at the end, its songs like “I sing the song wrong” that show what Klum could be in a few albums time.

“Breathe Machine” is the perfect soundtrack to a good night’s dreaming: disembodied voices in the background, gentle, organ-like keys and the soothing vocals of Brock Flores. Slowly “I can’t dance” fades in, and the dream continues, floating over epic sounds that are akin to early Radiohead.

“From the door” sounds like a chilled out attempt at cock-rock, “That’s not really my car, but I look good in it and that could take me far” says Brock, and you can’t help but feel that he actually means it, before everyone starts to overlap each other with drums and electric guitars chaotically mixed: but just before it becomes unlistenable they pull it back round, suddenly becoming very tight and together.

Closer “Seaslow” starts off quite similar to Sigur Ros, but soon we realise that its not quite as good, and the album could probably have managed without it: a long string of moaning before the obligatory loud ending.

So all in all a bit of a mixed bag from this LA band. They could be ones to watch or check out in an album or two’s time, when they’ve perfected their sound a little bit more. At the moment they seem to be trying to be too much at once, and whilst they do most of it perfectly ably, I think they need to just focus on one style.

The book is a very medium paced gradual progression of events across time moving to and fro, unlike a regular novel that would follow a certain sequence and time line. V. V. Ganeshananthan has used a very unmatched style to demonstrate the role of marriage in Sri Lankan society and provides a brilliant contrast to the immigrant Sri Lankan's idea of marriage.

She begins the book with "In this globe-scattered Sri Lankan family, we speak of only two kinds of marriage. The first is the Arranged Marriage. The Second is the Love Marriage. In reality, there is a whole spectrum in between, but most of us spend years running away from the first toward the second." This summary of the Sri Lankan line of thought is compared with her American born Sri Lankan's views in the closing of her book. "But although we are the children of our parents, we have entered other countries in which the rules of Marriage - Love Marriage, Arranged Marriage, and all that lies in between- do not always apply."

The book represents a journey portraying the difference between a traditional Sri Lankan and one who is only Sri Lankan to speak of. It is a struggle of wanting to be someone closely tied to ethnic values, yet at the same time a rebellion and 'other worldly'  outlook on life. 

It is also a struggle to be a part of something and to actually belong. Yalini, the main character, was born and raised in the States. But until her cousin Janini came from Sri Lanka, she had never thought about what she believes in, what faith is and in true essence, who she really is.

Despite having integrated in the American society, her parents' constant love for home unknowingly seeps into her system. She may not have a perspective on the Tamil Tigers or on the Sinhalese government, but she has reason to believe that her uncle and cousin fought a just war. 

Ganeshananthan has used the concept of marriage as the central theme of the book, but she has several other themes revolving around the central theme. Every character in the book is defined by the marital choice they made. Those who got married, those who didn't, those who couldn't and those who lost their spouses for a variety of reasons. She has brilliantly enveloped war, migration and patriotism all within the concept of marriage. 

Ganeshananthan has an extraordinarily peaceful style of writing. She makes war and hatred seem less dramatic than they truly are. In not wanting her naive character to be exposed to the horrors of war, Ganeshananthan has kept the gruesome details out. Not only out of her character's knowledge, but out of the book entirely. This is probably what makes war sound like a usual occurrence. Personally, it gave the feel of the current world crisis, depicting how people in one part of the world and torn into pieces, whereas in another life continues without disruption or so much as emotions for those unfortunate ones. 

Aside from the fact that the book was slower than regular novels, Love Marriage provides a perspective that is unheard of. A perspective that is influenced by factors people would normally not consider while making such decisions.

Nolan and his co-writer, brother Jonathan, have crafted a Batman film which corrects quite literally every mistake of their predecessors, even Nolan himself. With The Dark Knight, they offer us proof that a superhero film does not have to be wholly dependent on the source material in order to be great or even what fans call "faithful;" nor does it have to be bright and flashy to appeal to children, nor light and self-conscious to make the adults more comfortable while watching a superhero film.

No, the Nolans know that a superhero film represents an opportunity to draw from an abundant source while adding something as well. The Dark Knight is neither a regurgitation of famous Batman storylines nor a Warner Brothers marketing scheme. It is the Nolans' film as much as a Frank Miller Batman comic is a Frank Miller book. This is perhaps what is most commendable about the latest chapter in Bat-mythology: that it has the feel of solid fiction, like an authored book or, dare I say it, an auteur film.

The film opens without credits, throwing us directly into a brilliant bank robbery orchestrated by a man known only as The Joker (Heath Ledger). The Joker enjoys heists and organized manipulation, but he has little care for money and many of his "plans" are just brilliant improvisations, a total embrace of existential chaos, as we soon learn. He is the definition of a sociopath, the raging id of an entire society. He is, in other words, the perfect Joker.

With all due respect to Jack Nicholson, Heath Ledger blows the legendary actor out of the water - and out of the viewer's consciousness - with his funnier, scarier version of the Clown Prince of Crime. He's aided by a wonderful script and Nolan's sound direction, but Ledger, using just mannerisms and speech patterns and with very little makeup, becomes unrecognizable as the same actor who played hunks in Brokeback Mountain and 10 Things I Hate About You.

While the Joker is gaining power in Gotham's underworld, Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) is looking toward an end to his tenure as the masked vigilante Batman. He sees his salvation both in District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), a symbol of justice for whom (unlike Batman) the people of Gotham have a name and face, and Dent's girlfriend, ADA Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal), for whom Bruce still holds a torch. The rise of the Joker and his siege of Gotham make things more complicated for Bats, however, as the lines between justice, vengeance, law, safety, and freedom start to blur.

Praising the cast of the film seems redundant, as most of the names here have established themselves as actors of high regard, if not mega box office stars, numerous times. But Christopher Nolan's talent is not in recognizing names, but recognizing what roles, however atypical, suit them. The Joker, especially as he is here, is not a role in which I would have imagined Heath Ledger two years ago, but apparently Nolan never considered anyone else. Gary Oldman as the tough-as-nails Police Lieutenant (and later Commissioner) James Gordon seemed strange in 2005 with Batman Begins, but here, with an expanded role, is able to flesh out his character. Aaron Eckhart, with his talent for playing duplicitous characters, is in more familiar territory as the not-all-rosy Harvey Dent, but Nolan still deserves credit for recognizing the actor that Harvey/Two Face needed.

This cast is met with a story that deserves them. The themes of the film, which deal mostly with the nature of fascism but evoke everything from terrorism to urban decay, are nothing new but are so rich and so damned well done as to actually become a reason for enjoying the film - an odd thing to say about a film with eight major action scenes all worthy of the climax of any other film. The Dark Knight is a blissful relief from what has been a mindless summer and makes me feel guilty for enjoying so many films that now seem so lazy. True, it is thoughtful and complex in the broadest sense of the words and still accessible to wide audiences, but it is refreshing and engaging nonetheless, the perfect pop masterpiece.

The Dark Knight is easily Christopher Nolan's best film since Memento, the film which put him on the map and whose follow-ups, with the exception of Batman Begins, have not impressed me. Neither his celebrated remake of Insomnia nor his much-praised The Prestige approaches the quality of this newest film. It is not just an improvement upon the young director's last superhero outing, but upon almost his entire oeuvre. And now, one of the cliches I have been holding back for the last 900 words: I was blown away!

Front man Trent Reznor labels this album a big thanks to all fans for the success of Ghosts I-IV and its predecessors; and the gratitude is evident in this typical Nine Inch Nails album, contrary to the experimental music in Ghosts I-IV. Having said that, the album does not lack versatility, as it covers genres ranging from country to rock, via the mushy slow-dance type.

The album starts off with an Industrial Rock type 999,999 that follows the experimental touch from Ghosts I-IV. This track soon leads to the typical NIN rock sound of 1,000,000. The adrenaline is kept pumping with Letting You. After this, the listener is subjected to an early-eighties type dance number, Discipline, which leaves one with a nostalgia for the post-Beatles era. After Discipline another typical NIN number, Echoplex, reflects the same kind of music that we have already heard in the early NIN albums. 

The typical NIN sound is continued with Head Down, with its hardcore distorted riffs, long solos, shrieks from the vocalist and swift drumming. True head-banging material! This is followed by the slow-dance number, Lights in the Sky. Even though this track sounds more like an amateur job, it manages to intrigue the listener with its simplicity. Corona Radiata is undoubtedly one of the best songs of the entire album. It is a fusion of the hard rock and country genres, and expertly fused at that! Saying anything else about this number would give too much of it away.

Next up is another amazing track, this time with an Industrial touch. This one is called The Four of Us are Dying and its beats and powerful riffs fill the track with a pleasing insanity. The last track on the album, Demon Seed leaves the listener pleased, with its orthodox Rock-n-Roll sound and a brilliantly done crescendo.

Overall, The Slip is a great album, something that all of us have come to expect from NIN. After the experimental Groups I-IV, this album is refreshingly typical NIN material. 

The Slip is available, free of cost, on the NIN website and requires email registration. It is available in almost all popular audio formats with high quality. All downloads include a PDF cover booklet.

Track numero uno is the album’s namesake; to middle-agers it may be considered mere “noise,” but to the rest of,us it’s like a pack of purple Soothers, trickling into our bodies and calming the senses, with the infamous reverb adding to the smoky feel of the riffs. The track, despite its name, takes you into a state of unconsciousness with lead singer Jim James leading your thoughts away from drudgery with his silky sounds. Underneath the high octaves lies a smidgen of MGMT, surreal is definitely the name of the game for MMJ.

‘Highly Suspicious’ is a track that demands attention. It features Prince-style singing and a bass-line that will get your blood pumping, not to mention dalek-esque backing vocals. If that isn’t enough to capture your attention, just wait for the Joker laughs that quite eerily fill the middle-eight. I wouldn’t be surprised if it quickly appears on your ‘most-played’ list.

In direct contrast ‘Look At You’ and ‘Librarian’ are sweet little love songs that make you go weak at the knees and think “awwww.” The latter features the lyrics, ‘simple little beauty- heaven in your breath. The simplest of pleasures- the world at it's best.’ Who said romance was dead eh? James’ vocals are nothing short of beautiful on these tracks. The simplicity of the melodies transports you into a dream-like state full of romance and love. WARNING: They make you want to hug everyone you meet.

‘Two Halves’ is another stand-out featuring an upbeat rock rhythm with a catchy tune that will get you laa-ing along in no time. Although the lyrics echo something a little less cheery, the song occupies a good-time feel. Repetition is the only thing that lets this, and other tracks down. Although the melody is a hooky one, there’s only so many times you can sing the same tune.

It seems that the five lads are running out of steam a tad; compared to their previous albums ‘Evil Urges’ is a disappointment. Tracks like ‘Touch Me I’m Going To Scream Pt. 1,’ ‘Aluminium Park,’ ‘I’m Amazed,’ and ‘Sec Walkin’ are more B-sides than the A graders they should be after all the musical experience the Kentucky quintet have picked up along their decade. Saying that though, the album features more good tracks than bad, it would be fair to say My Morning Jacket are ‘finger lickin’ good!’

I can't tell if I disliked this album so much because of all of the rancor that opposed it, because I've spent the past two days listening to Jean Grae and 9th Wonder's masterpiece "Jeanius" or if I'm just tired of Nas' act that he's some sort of conscious rapper who masquerades in the mainstream as the savior of rap.

Don't get me wrong. Esco is once, forever and always one of the best of all-time. But after a while, you have to start to wonder what the guy is trying to do. Or maybe you just stop thinking people like him ought to take themselves so darn seriously.

The album uses beats that wouldn't be good enough for a mixtape. It's just retread stuff that's not fit for the kind of stuff we'd expected from Nas at this point in his career. I don't know if anyone really expects him to produce a great album, on par with his debut Illmatic or with Stillmatic, arguably his other "great" album. But it's starting to get a little -- dare I say, boring -- listening to what amounts to minimal amounts of artistic depth in his rhymes, spewing out bombast and divisive silliness that doesn't really uplift those he's trying to reach and alienates those who otherwise appreciate the art form.

On track 10, "Untitled", it amounts to a ode to Louis Farrakhan. Now there's a way to make your album spirited. On "Make The World Go Round," he pairs Chris Brown and The Game, in what amounts to the most bizarre dual cameo in history. At least, in recent hip-hop memory anyway...

The real thing about this album is that it's full of bluster and none of the tracks are particularly memorable. You can't even listen and point to some resounding standout track that makes you go "Ok, that's signature Nasir there..." Nope. Nothing. The guy has a track called "Fried Chicken" for goodness sakes. (It's as bad as the name implies.) "Sly Fox" is a track about Fox News.

In terms of currency, the album is very much focused in the "now and here" versus anything else. I suppose that's laudable to some degree. It's a tome of reflective relevance, that tries to define itself in the cloak of the identity of an entire people. I think that in some ways, Nas bites off way more than he can chew here. When I first heard about the project, I thought it might be interesting. Nas is one of the most prolific writers in mainstream hip-hop and has a patience and plodding sense about his craft, that I thought few could pull this off.

In the end, Nas falls short of what are probably his own lofty expectations about using an album to create a much larger dialogue about a troubling history, a past that we can't shake and a future that we are all trying to envision. One where words might still hurt, but don’t carry the vestiges of a legacy not just of a few mean people in a far off place; but those who were entrusted and empowered at the highest halls of power.

Even if I'm not surprised, it doesn't mean that it's not unfortunate.

But if the film is only ostensibly an update of the old show, does that mean it's not funny? Certainly not. The main flaw of the film, as I hinted, is that it awkwardly attempts to be both a tongue-in-cheek action film and an all out, pratfall-heavy parody, two styles of comedy which do not mesh particularly well. It throws in some half-hearted satire as well ("Did you staple a paper to a guy's face? You know better than that! That's CIA shit!") Nonetheless, it is entertaining and occasionally even very funny.

For the film, Maxwell Smart (Steve Carell here) has been turned into a reformed overweight intelligence analyst who badly wants to be come a field agent. As his allusive name would indicate, he has the smarts and even the skills, but he is too good an analyst - not to mention a little accident-prone - for the Chief (Alan Arkin) to promote. But after CONTROL headquarters are compromised and attacked, they need all the agents they can get. Max is promoted and assigned with Agent 99 (Anne Hathaway) to get to the bottom of the attack.

Agent 99, originally a character for Max to bounce lines off of, has been updated to a post-feminism super agent who has to deal with the green Max. There's some business about the terrorist organization KAOS and lots of references to the old show, along with Terence Stamp as a mysterious villain, pretty much the same role he plays in this summer's Wanted.

The plot is soon lost in the film's numerous gags, or maybe that was just my lack of interest. Like the token love story between Max and 99, the terrorist stuff is as easily ignored as it probably was to write. What the film is really about is the jokes, a few of which fall flat but more than compensate for the utterly uninteresting story. There is little chemistry between Hathaway and Carell, but somehow this doesn't really matter until the denouement, which tends to drag where the love story is concerned.

The humor of the film is good ol' low-brow American humor, not much like the rehearsed-comedy-routine style of the TV Show (much of which would have been just as good on the radio) but good in its own way. Despite months of bad buzz and generally poor reviews, I was surprised midway through the film to find that I was enjoying myself and had been since it had started. So while Get Smart may be somewhat lacking in brains, providing for more than a few punny review titles, it gets by without them, just as Max always did on the old show.

In conclusion, would you believe me if I told you Get Smart is going to win 10 Oscars?

How about 2?

How about 1 thumb up and a handshake from Leonard Maltin?

Hancock was a wise career move for Will Smith and can only do good things for his co-star Jason Bateman, whose journey from D-List reject to low-A-List favorite is one of Hollywood's nicest stories from the past few years. But despite the combination of two of my favorite people in Hollywood and the film's sure-hit status, Hancock is underwhelming in nearly every area it tries to succeed. As an action film, a comedy, and a family drama it fails, attempting each with all the conviction of Amy Winehouse at rehab.

As the film opens, Hancock (Smith) is drunk and asleep on a public bench in Los Angeles. A high-speed car chase between the police and some goons is going down on the freeway, but Hancock has to be woken up out of his drunken stupor by a concerned child, who gestures to the televisions in a store window and says sarcastically "Hancock? Bad guys?!" before calling him a bad name.

Hancock begrudgingly sits up on the bench, and pulls out another Seagram's whiskey from under the bench. Whiskey in hand and still drunk from the night before, he flies toward the freeway, eventually causing $9 million of damage in the foiling of the unspecified nefarious plot of the villains.

Hancock is a public relations nightmare, a hero whom the city hates for his unabashed drunken ways and tendency to destroy more things than he fixes. After he saves the life of PR man Ray Embrey (Bateman), Ray decides that he is going to help Hancock with the public's perception of him, which includes serving prison time for the charges filed against him by the city, at least until the city realizes how much they need their hero.

At some point I think the half dozen companies that produced this film realized that they had a superhero film without a villain or a concrete action plot, a story which was a half-hearted regurgitation of the moral lessons of half the superhero movies ever made without sufficient wit to make it a comedy or the conflict to make it an action film. Twists were added to make something resembling a more typical CGI-laden blow-em-up action film, but what results is a film whose lazy writing fails to maintain interest.

Hancock seems uninterested in its own plot's developments, throwing them out there in quick succession without sufficient explanation. Within ten or fifteen minutes of Hancock revealing he doesn't know his own origins, we find out what they are - sort of. The script, by Akiva "Batman and Robin" Goldsman, doesn't bother to explain Hancock's origins more than in one throwaway line, even though there's a character in the film who knows the entire story. Even then, the one line we get, "Some societies call us angels, some gods," is so vague and contrived that it's not so much a reveal as it is a Superhero Writing 101 no-no.

You may think there is more to the story - and certainly there is, as there is a big character reveal which is supposed to come as a twist but is made so painfully obvious by director Peter Berg in the opening minutes of the film as to make Lucky Number Slevin look like The Usual Suspects in comparison. There is also a side to the story which involves Ray, his wife Mary (Charlize Theron) and their son Aaron, but this is just so much token struggling-idealist-and-his-family-troubles nonsense; forgivable in the right film but only more tedious here.

The real crime of Hancock is what it could have been. Amidst superhero blockbusters which only seem to be growing in popularity at the same time that their pretensions to deeper meaning expand, Hancock could have been a deconstruction of the superhero myth, giving us a satirical, if not openly parodic, view of the very concept of a caped crusader. Instead it gets caught up in its own desire to engage in superhero-ness, resulting in an uneven film whose construction of a superhero myth is infinitely less interesting than the opposite. It is a film about the development of Hancock from a drunken bum to a stand-up hero, but by the end of the film you just find yourself remembering the opening moments of the film fondly and preferring the flying drunken bum with super strength to the bland superhero version of Hancock.