Survival Stories

Into the Wild, Nikki Sixx, and more media picks

September 18, 2007

MOVIES: These days, Sean Penn's self-righteous off-screen persona threatens to overshadow his on-screen talent, but, thankfully, such issues are moot in Penn's masterful adaptation of Into the Wild. Slightly less compelling: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (though Casey Affleck's titular coward does upstage Brad Pitt's titular outlaw). In limited release, horror flick The Last Winter concerns an evil force unleashed by—that again—Arctic drilling.

TV: The question has mystified historians for decades: What was America doing between 1941 and 1945? The War, Ken Burns' seven-part PBS doc (top center) premiering Sunday, finally provides some answers. Speaking of future historians (hey dudes), they'll likely be stumped by Kid Nation, debuting tomorrow on CBS. Also of note: The Simpsons are back on Fox Sunday, followed Monday night by the underrated How I Met Your Mother (CBS).

MUSIC: Buddies Eddie Vedder and Thurston Moore both go solo this week—the former with his excellent Into the Wild soundtrack, the latter with the mellow Trees Outside the Academy. Celtic punks the Dropkick Murphys drop The Meanest of Times, while two four-disc boxes are worth your bread: sixties Haight-Ashbury comp Love Is the Song We Sing, and Emmylou Harris rarities collection Songbird.

BOOKS: Smack talk abounds in Ben Ratliff's Coltrane: The Story of a Sound and Nikki Sixx's harrowing Heroin Diaries, while some guy named Greenspan looks back at The Age of Turbulence. Exuberance of a different kind is on display in artist and wildlife aficionado Hunt Slonem's new monograph, Pleasure Palaces.

DVD: Good call: Hacking the bloated Grindhouse into two DVDs. Better call: Leading with the superior half, QT's sadistic Death Proof. Find more cheap thrills in the eight-film Roger Corman Collection, which includes a prefame Robert De Niro as Shelley Winters' glue-sniffing son in Bloody Mama. Lastly, Upright Citizens Brigade season two finally sees release.

WEB: LCD Soundsystem releases the digital-only EP A Bunch of Stuff today—highlights include Franz Ferdinand's cover of "All My Friends." And get ready to spend Saturday home alone in front of your computer: It's One Web Day, created to celebrate how the Internets have helped unite the human race.