Fan Fare

CORRECTED-Bob Dylan’s new Christmas album has the goods, critic says

It turns out that Bob Dylan Christmas album due out on Oct. 13 might be a good reason to hit the eggnog after all.

When news of the album was revealed over the summer, many Dylan fans could hardly believe it. Dylan just isn’t the kind of artist who does Christmas albums, or so everyone thought.

But writing at the Los Angeles Times music blog Pop & Hiss, critic Randy Lewis said on Thursday that after a sneak preview listen to some songs from Dylan’s “Christmas in the Heart,” he judges that the album is “a ton of fun.”

“Rather than simply a tossed-off session for his kids and grandkids, Dylan seems to be offering up an astute exploration of the roots of holiday music — Christmas records in particular — in the same way he has returned in various albums over the years to mine pop music’s foundation in blues, folk, country and gospel,” Lewis wrote.

In tracing the roots of some of the songs on the album, Lewis wrote that Dylan’s version of “Must Be Santa” harkens back to the Texas rock-polka group Brave Combo, and that his treatment of “Here Comes Santa Claus” reaches back to the stylings of Texas-born singing cowboy Gene Autry, whose 1947 version of the song is remarkably similar.

It’s not the first time that Dylan has borrowed from a Texas-born singer named Gene. His “Sugar Baby” song on the 2001 album “Love and Theft” lifts a melody from Gene Austin’s “The Lonesome Road” (follow the links to hear for yourself).

Lewis writes that Dylan’s for-charity Christmas album comes complete with “reindeer-quick accordion” from Los Lobos star David Hidalgo, and Dylan singing the first verse of “O Come All Ye Faithful” in Latin. So it looks like Dylan has shaken up the Christmas standards like a kid shaking a present under the tree.

UPDATE-Former prosecutor, filmmaker at odds over statement on Polanski in documentary

A retired L.A. prosecutor has admitted that he lied when he said in a documentary film that he advised the judge in Roman Polanski’s 1977 case to send the director to prison.

The documentary in question, “Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired,” is cited by Polanski’s defenders as evidence that he was the victim of judicial misconduct.

In the 2008 HBO documentary from filmmaker Marina Zenovich, former prosecutor David Wells said that he told the late Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Laurence Rittenband that Polanski deserved prison time, instead of being released on the 42 days already spent in custody under a deal with prosecutors.

But Wells recanted his account of those events from more than 30 years ago, in a brief interview with the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday. 

“That was not true,” Wells told the paper. “I like to speak of it as an inept statement, but the reality is that it was a lie.”

Wells’ also spoke to a writer with news website The Daily Beast, which was first to report his comments on Wednesday.

Critics give thumbs “Up”

In Pixar’s 2007 movie “Ratatouille,” a food critic played by Peter O’Toole offers a glowing review of a restaurant run by a rat, in a poignant scene at the climax of the film. O’Toole’s dramatic speech begins with the words, “In many ways, the work of a critic is easy,” before going on to say that his true job is the “defense of the new.” When it comes to Disney/Pixar’s latest animated release “Up,” Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times is on a similar wavelength. “Some films are an obligation to write about, ‘Up’ is the purest pleasure,” he reports.

Nearly all of Turan’s fellow critics agree about “Up,” which opens on Friday floating on a wave of box office success for other family-oriented films. The movie is about an old man and a boy who set off in a house carried skyward by 20,622 helium balloons. The aggregating Web site rottentomatoes.com reports that as of Thursday afternoon, 97 percent of critics have given the movie a favorable rating. Rotten Tomatoes has stamped all 10 Pixar films with its “Certified Fresh” seal of approval, going back to the 1995 “Toy Story.”

Turan in his review said that “Up” is noteworthy for starring an old man, voiced by Ed Asner, who appears genuinely old, instead of having the physicality of a young man.  ”This is a film that is heartfelt enough to restore your faith in whatever needs restoration,” Turan wrote.

David Edelstein of New York Magazine remarked on the computer-generated imagery (CGI) of the film. “The look of ‘Up’ is a world away from Pixar’s usual CGI intricacies – simple in a way that only artists with a genius for complexity can achieve.”  

Joe Morgenstern of the Wall Street Journal was one of the few critics to take ”Up” down a notch.  ”The characterizations are fairly coarse cartoons, in contrast to the emotionally rich cartoons that have become Pixar’s hallmark. They’re more schematic than organic, and that applies to the plotting as well,” he wrote.

“Up” will open in about 3,800 theaters on Friday with more than 1,500 of those locations showing the movie in 3-D, the Walt Disney Company said.

Aside from the critical praise for “Up,” the film also generated positive buzz this month at Cannes in France, where it became the first ever animated feature to open the international film festival.

Get me rewrite! L.A. Times blasts movie about L.A. Times

A movie about the Los Angeles Times just got a big thumbs-down from the Los Angeles Times.       “The Soloist,” the fact-based saga of an unlikely friendship between one of the paper’s columnists and a troubled street musician, is “trite and contrived,” according to critic Kenneth Turan.      “I can’t help being mightily frustrated by ‘The Soloist,’” Turan added in his review published on Thursday, the day before the feel-good drama was scheduled to open across the United States and Canada.   “I can’t help resenting that it suffered the death of a thousand cuts and, more frustrating still, that all this happened in the name of doing good in the world, of making the story’s powerful lessons more palatable to a wider audience.”      Robert Downey, Jr. plays Turan’s colleague, Steve Lopez, a columnist who dedicates himself to improving the life of a paranoid schizophrenic cellist played by Jamie Foxx.       Turan was troubled that the film’s British director Joe Wright (“Atonement”) and Oscar-winning writer Susannah Grant (“Erin Brockovich”) overplayed the story, “settling for standard easy emotions when singular and heartfelt was called for.”      Other reviews were generally mixed. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times said the film “has all the elements of an uplifting drama, except for the uplift.” But Peter Travers at Rolling Stone said Downey and Foxx delivered “two of the year’s best performances.”      The $40 million-plus film was originally supposed to come out late last year with grand award-season hopes. But Paramount hastily pulled the DreamWorks production from the release schedule. Its new slot is something of a dead zone, coming a week before “Wolverine” kicks off the lucrative summer moviegoing season.      Box office prospects for “The Soloist” are unclear. The Hollywood Reporter said a three-day haul in the teen millions was “certainly doable but not quite guaranteed.” Prognosticators believe the weekend’s top slot will go to another new release, “Obsessed,” a thriller starring R&B singer Beyonce Knowles.