On the cover of Rilo Kiley’s Under the Blacklight, singer Jenny Lewis and guitarist Blake Sennett stare coldly at each other as their band mates look forward. Their romantic breakup after the release of 2004’s successful More Adventurous nearly killed the band’s momentum, especially after Lewis found acclaim with her solo Rabbit Fur Coat. The band is back with the release of Under the Blacklight, and while many critics are noting Lewis and Sennett’s Fleetwood Mac-like ability to churn out music under emotional turmoil, what’s more noteworthy is that Rilo Kiley has taken their music in a whole new direction and put out what may be their most enjoyable album to date.

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After an unacceptably long downtime, Movie Hawk is officially back up and running. I’ll have a real post each of the next two days, but Movie Hawk Tech Support isn’t confident the downtime won’t be repeated in another two months or so. Enjoy it while you can.

Miss me?

I’m going to hold off on writing anything for a few days while my tech support works on renewing my lease and getting away from our current domain host. Back next week.

The heroes in producer Judd Apatow’s universe have always held an interesting mix of stunted social interaction, artificial worldliness, and the right amount of heart. Consider Andy, the gentlemanly protagonist of Apatow’s breakthrough hit The 40-Year-Old Virgin or Seth Rogen’s Ben Stone, the clumsy but chivalric everyman at the center of this summer’s Knocked Up. Eternally childish but with the principled intentions, Apatow’s leading men are easy to love and painful to observe as they flounder before females. The latest results of this formula are the heroes of Superbad, a recollection by first-time screenwriters Rogen and Evan Goldberg of the Homeric chase after sex and alcohol in the waning days of high school.

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At some point, you’d think that Jason Bourne would have to rest. Through two movies, he’s been beat up, shot at, and chased by a government that doesn’t want its secrets uncovered. Over the course of The Bourne Ultimatum, the amnesiac superspy jumps continents so often – from Russia to Italy, England to Spain, Morocco to the United States – that it can make an audience member’s head spin. But logging frequent flier miles is nothing for someone in search of a past. The result is two hours of nonstop chase scenes and the very best movie of the series and the summer thus far.

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A combination of infrequent circumstances – including my reading of the Philadelphia City Paper – inspired me to travel downtown this weekend to visit the Ritz at the Bourse for the first time since the chain had been bought out by Landmark Theatres. The reason? To catch a limited-engagement showing of the 1986 classic Labyrinth.

I hadn’t seen the movie in full in at least a decade, and like too much visual media from the 1980s, it doesn’t age perfectly. Labyrinth is a movie that makes it hard to believe that Jennifer Connelly ever won an Academy Award, impossible to believe that David Bowie went on to be a serious actor, and easy to believe that Jim Henson did some fabulous drugs. Even so, Henson’s homage to The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, and a slew of other children’s stories is a wonderful bit of entertainment, and a must-see for Muppet fans and 80s nostalgists alike.

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Upon the cancellation of Arrested Development and Veronica Mars, two of television’s most intelligent shows, fans clamored for them to be transferred to HBO, where ratings are less important and advertisers are virtually nonexistent. Anyone looking for those shows to resurface is out of luck, but they can take solace in the network’s Sunday lineup, which now boasts one of TV’s smartest shows in Flight of the Conchords.

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Matt Nathanson is something of a paradox. He’s a serial jokester who writes intensely touching songs. He’s a radio-ready pop star who seems content having spent ten years under the radar. And while some might suggest that he “sold out” when releasing the robustly produced 2003 album Beneath These Fireworks (which didn’t really sell, per se); true to this dual nature, his sound benefited from the move.

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I’m still recovering from Kevin Smith’s marathon Q&A on Thursday night (he spoke for 7 hours, meaning that the event ended at 2 a.m. and we got home from Red Bank at 4), and so I don’t have much to write about, but for your information, I’ve rejoined the Last.fm community and you can now see what songs I’ve most recently listened to and click through to my profile to see my top artists.

Note: Any grammatical errors in the song labeling is Last.fm’s fault, not mine.

After nearly twenty years on the air, nearly 400 episodes, and thousands of quotable quotes, there was almost no need to advertise the release of The Simpsons Movie. But, as omnipresent as the show has become in our culture, so too was the aggressive marketing for the first movie featuring America’s favorite yellow family. The challenge, then, was not only to justify a Simpsons adventure thrice as long as the normal dosage but also to live up to the hype it built for itself. Fortunately, these stumbling blocks are, more often than not in the movie, no obstacle for the cultural juggernaut.

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