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Matt Bochenski rounds up the best films, music and books heading your way this month

The Bounty Hunter

Director Andy Tennant
Starring Jennifer Aniston, Gerard Butler

With his romantic solitude, self-possession and uncompromising, all-American moral code, the bounty hunter is a ready-made movie hero. As such, it’s difficult to account for why the profession has been largely unexplored by Hollywood, with only Tony Scott’s lacklustre Domino broaching the subject in recent years. But fear not! Jennifer Aniston is here to make amends. Aniston plays reporter Nicole Hurly, who, after jumping bail, has bounty hunter Milo Boyd (Gerard Butler) assigned to track her down. It should be an easy gig, except for the fact that Boyd is Hurley’s ex-husband and, as their marriage has already proved, nothing between this pair ever runs smoothly. Hurly soon gives Boyd the slip, before landing both of them in trouble when she gets too close to a murder. After much in the way of eye-rolling, wise-cracking and romantic longing, the pair end up on the run together.

No boundaries are broken here, but Aniston and Butler have a convincing chemistry and the film exudes an air of unpretentious likeability that’s sure to appeal to fans of the genre. And they look pretty hot, too.

The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

Director Werner Herzog
Starring Nicolas Cage, Eva Mendes, Val Kilmer

When it was announced that inimitable German filmmaker Werner Herzog was remaking Abel Ferrara’s seedy 1990s shocker about a corrupt, drug-addicted cop, there were cries of disbelief. Why would a visionary get caught up in a pointless remake? Well, we should have known better –The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans can hold its head high alongside the director’s best films.

Nicolas Cage plays Terence McDonagh, a New Orleans cop struggling with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, addiction to just about every chemical substance known to man, and a prostitute girlfriend who’s got him mixed up with the Mob. On one hand, this works as a cracking thriller, as McDonagh balances an ever-growing number of plates while the audience waits breathlessly for the whole lot to come crashing down. But thanks to Herzog, the film is a whole lot more than that. Katrina-battered New Orleans adds a backdrop of disorder, on to which is layered bizarre hallucinations, distorted camera angles and fractured imagery, until the whole film becomes a fever dream. In its centre is Cage, fabulously deranged and laughing like a rabid hyena. Before you know it, you’ll have joined him.

Paul Weller

Wake Up The Nation

Fresh from winning an award for ‘Godlike Genius’ (courtesy of NME readers), The Modfather is back with a new album that shows he’s lost none of his bark or bite. The ex-Jam frontman has even reteamed with his old bassist Bruce Foxton, which only adds to the sense that Wake Up The Nation is a return to the glory days of the punk-inflected social commentary that characterises his best work.

Here, in a maelstrom of pounding guitars and snarling vocals, Weller and guests (including Kevin Shields from My Bloody Valentine) take aim at a new generation of social ills, from the dehumanising ubiquity of Facebook (on ‘Wake Up The Nation’) to the breakneck pace of modern life (‘Fast Car/Slow Traffic’). But it’s not all old man’s ranting: there’s disco (‘Up The Dosage’), an anthem (‘Find The Torch, Burn The Plans’) and a flirtation with psychedelia (‘Andromeda’). The unifying theme, however, is the consistent energy of Weller’s vocals – as raw as ever, with a burning, contagious passion for life.

Rufus Wainwright

All Days Are Nights: Songs For Lulu

Singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright has captivated audiences since his debut in the late 90s. His appeal can in part be explained by a fascinating biography – he is steeped in a musical tradition that includes his mother, father, sister and aunt, and has battled various personal demons, including a drug addiction that nearly destroyed him. Throughout it all, his ethereal, intelligent music remained constant, but there’s an added dimension to the release of All Days Are Nights: Songs For Lulu. It’s Wainwright’s first album since the death of his mother in January, and is inspired in part by a dark alter ego he believes exists in all of us. The title is a reference to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 43: ‘All days are nights to see till I see thee.’

Wainwright himself has described the record as “an eerie album, essentially my mourning while my mother was still alive”, but that description undervalues its subtle shifts in tone and textures – plaintive and poignant, but also uplifting and even extravagant.

Book club

This month’s must-reads

A Question of Belief
Donna Leon

Crime novels are often set in the great US metropolises – New York, San Francisco, Washington DC – or the squalid side of UK urban wastelands: places that are cold and hostile. But Donna Leon had a much better idea.

Her recurring character, Commissario Brunetti, plies his trade around the grand medieval piazzas of Venice. It’s the perfect backdrop for her complex, sprawling plots, which locate the hidden menace behind the romantic exterior.

A Question of Belief is her best yet. The narrative begins with Venice wilting under a heat wave, and Brunetti being drawn into a bizarre mystery involving a stranger receiving large amounts of money from a friend’s aunt. Meanwhile, corruption at the courthouse ultimately leads to murder. Faced with his most tangled web to date, Brunetti sets about unknotting the mystery with his usual blend of determination and sleuthing.

A brilliantly evocative page turner.

Caught
Harlan Coben

The prolific Harlan Coben is back, taking a break from PI Myron Bolitar to pursue a fresh crime angle with this standalone story of a girl whose disappearance throws a community into chaos.

Set amid the eerily perfect trappings of middle-class America, Caught peers beyond the picket fence and into the deep well of emotional destruction that each of us is capable of enacting in our lives. Haley McWaid is a poster girl of suburban America – smart, pretty and athletic, she’s surely destined for a happy life. But when Haley goes missing for three months, it sparks a chain of events that leads to TV reporter and social crusader Wendy Tynes. Wendy’s job is to smoke out sexual predators, and she thinks she knows who’s responsible for the missing girl. But Wendy will soon be forced to question her instincts…

Coben’s no-nonsense style and devious plotting lends itself perfectly to this fast-paced thriller, which has more of a moral subtext than fans might expect.

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