Kanye West “Yeezus” Review

Nobody can say West didn’t warn us. His new album, “Yeezus”—which leaked four days ahead of Tuesday’s scheduled release—is as dark and abrasive as the first two songs he put out, “New Slaves” and “Black Skinhead,” promised. It’s also as daring and infectious as anything he’s done, and demands to be heard with speakers on blast.

Stark electronic beats, driving dancehall riddims and menacing bass lines underpin his rants on race, sex, commercialism and celebrity. He almost dares you to let your attention wander, throwing in random, tempo-shifting samples and guttural screams just when you might think you know where he’s heading.

On the Daft Punk-produced “On Sight,” an aggressive West raves that “Yeezy season is coming” and that “a monster is about to come alive again” over ominous synthesisers. The French duo also did “Black Skinhead,” which finds West boasting about breaking the rules.

On “I Am a God,” he sure didn’t check his ego at the studio door. He’s explained in interviews that the title refers to his “God name,” and on this track it’s clear that a man of his celebrity operates on a much higher plane than most people. “I just talked to Jesus/ He said, ‘What up, Yeezus?’/ I said, ‘(Expletive) I’m chillin’/Tryin’ to stack these millions.’”

“Chillin’” isn’t the best way to describe the intensity with which he delivers his societal critiques on “New Slaves” and “Blood On the Leaves,” which samples Nina Simone’s cover of Billie Holiday’s searing “Strange Fruit.”

By the end of the album, West finally takes some of the edge off with the smoothed-out “Bound 2,” which features Charlie Wilson and an old-school sample of the Ponderosa Twins Plus One hit of the same name.

Like everything else West does, “Yeezus” is immediately stunning, but requires repeated listenings to be fully appreciated. Luckily, it’s only 10 tracks long. Give him credit for not taking the easy route and compiling a bunch of radio tracks.

Instead, he created a polarising, multi-layered body of work that probably will be debated all summer. Who does that besides Kanye West? Maybe he’s a Yenius.

Boogie Nights

Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson’s second feature (1997) is a two-and-a-half-hour epic about one corner of the LA porn industry during the 70s and 80s—a seemingly limited subject that becomes the basis for a suggestive and highly energetic fresco. The sweeping first hour positively swaggers, as a busboy (Mark Wahlberg) is plucked from obscurity by a patriarchal pornmeister (Burt Reynolds at his near best) to become a sex star. Alas, this being the American cinema, tons of gratuitous retribution eventually come crashing down on practically everybody in mechanical crosscutting patterns, and because Anderson has bitten off more than he can possibly chew, a lot of his minor characters are never developed properly. Moreover, just as his first feature, “Hard Eight,” at times slavishly depended on Jean-Pierre Melville’s “Bob le flambeur,” Anderson here attempts to “outdo” Tarantino (in a fabulous late sequence with Alfred Molina) and to plagiarise a sequence from “Raging Bull” that itself quotes from “On the Waterfront,” rather than come up with something original. But notwithstanding its occasional grotesque nods to postmodernist convention, this is highly entertaining Hollywood filmmaking, full of spark and vigour.

The Descent and United 93

A half-dozen women friends meet in the Appalachians to explore a remote cave, hoping their outdoor adventure will rejuvenate one of them after a tragic accident a year earlier, but they’re attacked by blind subterranean beasties. Written and directed by Neil Marshall, this intermittently effective UK horror thriller carefully establishes the psychological relationships among the women, then squanders this calibrated and generally plausible setup with a series of crude, implausible, and scattershot horror effects. The two strains are supposed to merge but mix like oil and water as the narrative grows increasingly incoherent (the fact that so much of it transpires in darkness doesn’t help). Marshall changed the film’s ending after its successful British run, reportedly to dumb it down for the American audience.

To the credit of British writer-director Paul Greengrass (“Bloody Sunday”), this taut, partly speculative account of the 9/11 flight that crashed in a Pennsylvania field has practically none of the exploitative melodrama one would expect from a major studio release. The film cuts between the delayed Newark-to-San Francisco flight, a military air-defence facility, and air-traffic-control centres in Boston and New York (with some of the real-life participants playing themselves), then switches to real time once the plane takes off. Greengrass takes pains to keep events believable and relatively unrhetorical, rejecting entertainment for the sake of sober reflection, though one has to ask how edifying this is apart from its reduction of the standard myths. (One myth it perpetuates is that the passengers succeeded in storming the cockpit before the plane crashed.)