The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
Directed by Tommy Lee Jones
By Travis Mackenzie Hoover

Picking out the message of this Cannes-winning screenplay isn’t easy; it wants to punish racism while taking pains to avoid doing so. But there’s something to Guillermo Arriaga’s characters and situations (as well as his gently fractured chronology) that’s more subtle and nuanced than more on-issue movies.

Director Tommy Lee Jones assays the role of Texas ranch foreman Pete Perkins, who goes on a mission of vengeance when the eponymous illegal alien ranch hand turns up dead. Seeking out Mike Norton (Barry Pepper), the border patrolman who accidentally killed him, Perkins engineers the man’s kidnapping so that he might teach him a lesson while returning the dead man to Mexico.

You’re not entirely sure if Perkins is righteous or crazy, whether his charge is a victim of his captor or of karma, and whether the dead man was even honest about his identity in the first place. But while confusion about the film’s ideological orientation reigns, there are some choice observations about small-town ennui and the fluid nature of morality.

That the film has no major Mexican characters is a big drawback to its political thrust, but Arriaga and Jones still manage to doodle interesting things in the margins, such as the empty-headed prison endured by Norton’s wife Lou Ann (January Jones), who’s dragged to the middle of nowhere by her husband and left with nothing to do but stare vacantly out of their ugly tract house window.

Little details accumulate weight in this movie and the various infidelities and acceptances of bad situations give the film more gravity than that of the usual liberal hand wringer. And though Jones is no great shakes as a director, Arriaga manages to get out from the ostentatious thumb of Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu to show what he can do. (Mongrel Media)

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Metal is a genre of music that is often stereotyped, dismissed and condemned but it’s also misunderstood by many, even those who consider themselves experts, fans or even “metal” musicians. Metal-head lifer Sam Dunn’s documentary is an anthropological study of the music and its characteristics that could have easily gone wrong. ...Read More
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One of this city’s superstar DJs, Misstress Barbara specializes in big beats for the masses, and with her three-piece band Girls on a Ducati, she’s extending her house pop chops to a more traditional live setting. With a guitar and mic, as well as keys and effects, she’s a capable front-woman but he... Full Review
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The deliberately lo-fi, yet earnest, split between Transit and Man Overboard sounds like the product of a bunch of friends growing up on punk and hardcore throughout the '90s. The hardcore leanings of Boston fivesome Transit lay the groundwork for the pop punk tendencies of the Jersey kids in Man Ov... Full Review
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The term "videogame music" is often intended as an insult, deriding electronic beatscapes as rudimentary by comparing them to the 8-bit by necessity, bleep-based soundtracks of early Atari and Nintendo games. (See: Castles, Crystal) That Super Mario's theme music remains embedded in the frontal lobes of anyone under the age of 40 proves the critical weakness of the diss ― but it's also hopelessly archaic considering how much videogame music has evolved over the years.... Read More
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