By Elliot Boswell
TAKE A PASS ON ... Jay-Z's new album. "The Blueprint 3," which dropped last week, is at best a complacent album from the biggest name in the rap game, and at worst, a boring rip-off of his older, far superior work.
As his two lead singles suggest, Jigga doesn't really have a clear image as to what he's gunning for. "D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune)" proclaims exactly that - lyrics here accuse everyone of "T-Pain'n' too much," which is fair - but it's followed up with current number four single, "Run This Town," which showcases a Rihanna whose vocals are pickled in electronic sauerkraut. Huh?
Unless she naturally sings like the Energizer Bunny, we have a conflict of interest on our hands, and Jay-Z seems in no mood to set his record straight.
Elsewhere, he's simply lazy, reverting to tropes he's expressed a hundred times before: He went from pauper to prince, slung a lot of blow in his day, and no, he's never killed anyone but he has his flow for that.
Oh, and lest we've never picked up a tabloid, he also bagged Beyoncé. Whoopee.
The production and music is similarly uninspired, consisting mostly of process blocks of chords, and surprisingly, a poverty of memorable hooks. (The aforementioned "D.O.A." is a notable exception, a seamless hand-off between acidic guitar in the lower registers and slinky sax in higher ones.)
The guest appearances are hit-and-miss: Kanye has a couple decent turns, Kid Cudi is shamefully underused on "Already Home," and Alicia Keys' slot on "Empire State of Mind" is kind of weird but definitely compelling. Arguably the high point of the album, however, is newcomer J. Cole's stunning verse on "Everyday a Star Is Born," where he tosses off lines like "The flow's cold as the shoulders of gold-digging hoes when a broke n*gga approaches." Yowzah.
The biggest, most consistent problem throughout "The Blueprint 3" is its debt to Jay-Z's previous work, especially 2004's "The Black Album." (Note the similarities between "Thank You" and "Encore," among others.) It's not that old themes are revisited and re-cast as much as they're recycled, but to stale effect this time around.
So we come back to Jay's perpetually nagging question: What do you do when you have everything? Rest on your laurels, apparently, and bore us in the meantime.
GO SEE ... "The Informant!" Directed by Steven Soderbergh, "The Informant!" tells the strange-but-true story of Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon), a rising star in the Archer Daniels Midland Company, a food-processing conglomerate.
It's the early 90s, and Whitacre, clued into a now-infamous international price-fixing scandal involving the food additive lysine, decides to blow the whistle and becomes an informant for the FBI.
The story turns bizarre, however, when he tries have his corporate cake and eat it too, embezzling close to $9 million from the same company he's attempting to expose, forcing the feds into a strange, unforeseeable conundrum.
This is all public knowledge, of course, as Soderbergh based his script on Kurt Eichenwald's book of the same name, so our viewing compulsion lies instead in the film's presentation.
After the brooding, overlong "Che" and the low budget dabble "The Girlfriend Experience," Soderbergh is back to box office form, lucidly showing us the absurdities of this entire series of events, with a deft touch for ironic juxtaposition reminiscent of the Coen brothers in their lighter moments.
But it is deservedly Damon who is the film's centerpiece. By and large, when beautiful movie stars uglify themselves for a role (Charlize Theron in "Monster," George Clooney in "Syriana"), it bodes well for their performance. Damon is no exception: He is a well-meaning but delusional corpocrat ("Call me 0014, 'cause I'm twice as smart as 007") who blunders his way through an incredible series of good decisions marred by poor decisions further marred by backtracking.
His paunchy, pompadoured frame couldn't be farther from the ripped assassin Jason Bourne, and Damon demonstrates that he can stretch his acting range along with his waistline. "The Informant!" opens in theaters tomorrow.
