Tabloid claims about Newman's health denied & other: August 2008

Sunday 24 August 2008

We Can�t Wait for �FBI Art Squad,� the Movie

Photo: FBI

Today's Wall Street Journal offers an option-ready profile of Robert Wittman, a Pennsylvania-based FBI agent who goes undercover to find art thieves and ferret them out. Thanks to his efforts, over $225 million in missing art has been recovered, including an original copy of the Bill of Rights and the Rembrandt self-portrait on the left. Apparently art thieves are no longer engaging in fun Thomas Crown Affair bullshit but instead just steal paintings at gunpoint now. So there's everything you need for a movie: guns, danger, sexy naked paintings, and institutional dismissal � the FBI apparently ignored Wittman's requests for more agents for years. But which Hollywood star will play Wittman? Based on his identity-protecting photo in the Journal, all we need is an actor with a back.

From the Art World to the Underworld [WSJ]

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Thursday 14 August 2008

Shena, One Man Woman

Soul is a musical evergreen, a genre that doesn't swear on partiality technological updates or gimmicks to remain touching or relevant. This, though, poses its possess problems: videlicet, when you step up to the microphone to articulate those most heavy of human truths � love, green-eyed monster, heartbreak � like it or not, you're competing with the greats. Formerly backing vocalist for name calling like Mariah Carey, James Brown, and Charlotte Church, UK singer, Shena, sure enough has a set of pipes to her; a rich, slenderly husky somebody voice that dances octaves with ease. Sadly, on her debut solo album, she finds little of particular interest group to do with it.

The majority of One Man Woman is smoky, polished MOR soul remindful of pre-makeover Whitney Houston or Lauryn Hill at her least idiosyncratic, mawkish keys and slow-dance basso cradling simplistic, sentimental songs like Where Did It All Go Right? and I'll Never Love This Way Again. A couple of tracks - Everything You Need and Why You Wanna Man Like That - go somewhere a little more interesting; coming from more of a 90s dance position: upbeat piano dances over electronic beats. And Shena adopts a more powerful, diva vocal. ''He's the sort of man who'll leave you standing with his kids'' she blasts, righteously, on the latter. Even here, though, you get the impression that One Man Woman is more keen to go through the motions of the genre than put it with any new ideas. An average soul album that neither puts a perfumed foot improper, nor does anything peculiarly special.

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