The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
Tuesday, April 9, 2019 — 5

After fleeing to the Broadway 
scene for six years, Sara Bareilles 
is finally back with her new album, 
Amidst the Chaos. Filled with 
themes of love, feminism and 
politics, Bareilles has certainly 
made up for the lost time and has 
given fans an in-depth look to what 
she’s been thinking about during her 
time in the theatre scene.
In stark contrast to her previous 
albums that include pop anthems 
such as “Love Song” and “Brave,” 
Amidst the Chaos is richer in 
both sound and lyrics, a concrete 
representation of the ways Bareilles 
has grown to be more confident 
and vulnerable in her work. It’s no 
question that this was Bareilles’s 
intent; she teamed up with producer 
T Bone Burnett, who is famous 
for his organic approach to music 
production and focus on American 
roots in order to produce a very real, 
raw-sounding album.
From soft piano and guitar riffs 
to untouched vocal inaccuracies, 
Bareilles embraces messiness and 
clings to confidence. Although 
Amidst 
the 
Chaos 
doesn’t 
incorporate much of the musical 
theatre style fans were anticipating, 
Bareilles still strayed from her 

traditional pop sounds and opted 
for 
a 
gentler, 
jazz 
approach. 
Moreover, 
she 
unapologetically 
allows her lyrics to be politically and 
emotionally driven. From break-
up songs addressed to the Obamas 
to ballads about her own personal 
encounters with love, Bareilles 
doesn’t hesitate to testify to a broad 
array of themes for the sake of her 

own self-discovery.
The most blatant difference 
between Bareilles’s new album 
and any of her previous work is 
her prominent devotion to political 
campaigns. 
Released 
earlier 
this year before, “Armor” is an 
undoubtedly 
feminist 
anthem. 
Its lyrics confidently expose the 
patriarchy with lines such as “Blind 
men only set the world on fire.” 
Although lyrically it lies in the 
same realm as her empowerment 

anthem 
“Brave,” 
Bareilles 
has 
given fans the same feminist fire 
with a more down-to-earth sound. 
Bareilles even offers some words 
of consolation to immigrants in 
“A Safe Place to Land,” where she 
encourages travelers to “Be the light 
in the dark of this danger.”
Despite 
the 
ways 
she 
has 
incorporated ideas that fans haven’t 
seen in any of her previous works, 
Bareilles has also made sure to stay 
true to her roots by including some 
of her traditional love songs. Her 
heart-felt ode to a deadbeat lover, 
“Poetry By Dead Men,” provides a 
taste of the traditional “Bareilles 
style” fans have grown to appreciate.
What’s most notable about the 
album is the way it both empowers 
and heals. Bareilles makes it known 
this album was intended to mend 
broken feelings and experiences she 
hasn’t had the opportunity to share 
in her previous work and hopes 
others can share in that healing. 
Now that Bareilles has distinguished 
herself in both the theatre and pop 
spheres, she has definitely taken 
the liberty of toying with new 
sounds and opening up more in her 
music. Bareilles’s ambition suggests 
this is just the beginning of a new 
era. There’s no doubt that she will 
continue to amaze us with her drive 
to keep growing in her music and 
career.

Sara Bareilles comes back 
with ‘Amidst the Chaos’

KAITLYN FOX
Daily Arts Writer

A classic episode of “The 
Twilight Zone” follows a bookish, 
bespectacled 
bank 
teller 
so 
desperate for an escape from his 
demanding wife and wicked boss 
that he’s delighted when a nuclear 
explosion obliterates everyone 
on Earth but him. Finally he has 
“time enough at last” to read, 
uninterrupted. Amid the post-
apocalyptic rubble, he happens 
upon the ruins of the public 
library and giddily sorts tomes of 
Shakespeare, Shelley and Shaw 
into neat little piles to pore through 
this month and the next month 
and the one after that. 
Just as he settles in with 
a hardcover, though, he 
slips, his glasses break 
and he is rendered 
virtually blind. “It’s not 
fair! It’s not fair!” the 
man is left whimpering, 
surrounded by books 
he’ll never get to read.
If 
you 
were 
to 
reboot the story in 
2019, it might go a little 
something 
like 
this: 
Everyone is very excited 
to see how a buzzy 
auteur 
reimagines 
a 
beloved sci-fi anthology 
franchise, but in a cruel 
twist of fate, nobody can watch the 
show because it is only available 
on the risibly obscure streaming 
service CBS All Access.
For what it’s worth, CBS has 
tried admirably to make the 
subscription service worth it, 
stocking the network’s complete 
back catalogs and some streaming 
originals — a deliciously gonzo 
spinoff of “The Good Wife” and a 
new “Star Trek” show — behind 
the paywall. But unless you 
are the rare TV watcher with 
a predilection for old episodes 
of “JAG,” the consumer surplus 

calculation doesn’t really justify 
the purchase. That means some 
genuinely good shows on the site 
will have very small audiences. 
And very large potential audiences 
probably won’t get to watch them 
(It’s not fair! It’s not fair!)
One of these shows is now 
Jordan Peele’s (“Us”) uneven, 
stylish reboot of “The Twilight 
Zone,” which first aired on CBS 
from 1959 to 1964, and has actually 
been revived twice before (both 
times to middling reviews).
Peele’s 
version 
differs 
conspicuously from the original 
created by Rod Serling: The 
episode runtimes are longer, the 
signature black-and-white motif 

eschewed for luscious production 
design that just betrays menacing 
undertones. The episodes are also 
rooted in a very different present. 
In the second episode, “Nightmare 
at 30,000 Feet,” it is not a Muppet-
like gremlin that warns a flight 
passenger of an imminent crash 
as in the original, but instead a 
prophetic podcast.
But not everything of the 
original “The Twilight Zone” 
is lost. Still intact are the 
ominous Faustian bargains, the 
contrapassos that would raise 
an eyebrow from Dante, the 

staunch commitment to poetic 
justice that is equal parts amusing 
and agonizing. Peele steps into 
Serling’s narrator role and does 
it effortlessly. It’s only when he 
opens his mouth that you’ll wish 
he had been a bit more involved — 
Peele neither writes nor directs the 
show (though he is an executive 
producer), and its insipid script is 
practically screaming for a more 
inventive hand.
Serling’s original was pithy — 
sometimes funny, usually chilling, 
often didactic. And though Peele 
clearly understands “The Twilight 
Zone” and its manifest politics, 
the new version has forsaken 
what made the show work the 
first time around: A tight 
half-hour time-slot meant 
the twists came so quickly, 
the repercussive punchlines 
so unexpectedly, that you 
couldn’t 
quite 
decipher 
a given episode until it 
had ended, and you were 
basking 
in 
its 
lasting 
impression. The pacing here 
is assuredly off — the first 
episode, “The Comedian” is 
nearly a full hour long, but 
the thrill of the story wears 
off well before it ends.
Maybe this is inevitable 
when an old classic is 
recalibrated for the prestige 
TV 
age. 
(Fortunately, 
the show’s portraits of modern 
anxieties dare to go beyond the 
reflexive technophobia of “Black 
Mirror.”) But a show’s new home 
on a streaming service should 
ostensibly free it, not limit it. “The 
Twilight Zone” is, as the show’s 
opening credits famously declare, 
a middle ground between light 
and shadow, between science and 
superstition. This reboot treads 
a far less exciting middle ground: 
not untethered from convention, 
but intractably lost, chasing after 
a purpose that shouldn’t be so 
difficult to articulate.

MAITREYI ANANTHARAMAN
Daily Arts Writer

ALBUM REVIEW

EPIC RECORDS

NEON PRODUCTIONS
Korine loses the vision in 
ambitious ‘Beach Bum’

There’s 
only 
one 
thing 
worse than a bad comedy: a 
pretentious one. “The Beach 
Bum” is a bland, frustrating film 
that tries to be both hilarious 
and deep, yet fails to accomplish 
either. Written and directed 
by Harmony Korine (“Spring 
Breakers”) 
and 
starring 
Matthew 
McConaughey 
(“Serenity”) in a role tailor-
made for him, the movie is a 
hollow joyride of drugs and 
excess in the Florida Keys.
The most accurate microcosm 
for 
the 
movie’s 
grandiose 
emptiness 
is 
the 
image 
of 

McConaughey’s 
Moondog, 
a 
perfectly 
grisled, 
dashingly 
hysterical, fanny-pack-strapped, 
flip-up-sunglass-donning, sex-
crazed stoner, leaning back in 
his rickety boat while clacking 
away on a typewriter. “The 
Beach 
Bum” 
animates 
the 
notion of late-night dorm-room 
philosophy — barely-coherent, 
juvenile 
ideas 
inflated 
into 
gobsmacking revelations — to 
tell a meandering, dry story of a 
man at odds with “civilization,” 
a vague, ubiquitous term that 
stands in for the film’s villain.
After a family tragedy forces 
the retired writer to finish his 
latest project in order to retain 
all his stunning wealth, he 
roams Florida in a hazy search 

for the meaning of life. The plot 
sounds corny when phrased 
this way, but the worst part of 
the movie is that it thinks it’s so 
much more than it is. Occasional 
solid editing and admittedly 
impressive visuals can’t cover 
up one simple fact: It’s a dumb 
idea for movie.
Another unaware summation 
of the film’s pompousness is a 
scene in which Moondog reads 
aloud one of his new poems at 
an academic ceremony. The 
poem is frankly terrible — a 
lewd anecdote about bestiality 
written during an acid trip 
— and the audience erupts 
in raucous applause. This is 
what Korine so desperately 
wants from the audience of 

his own film, an enthusiastic 
appraisal of crude writing. But 
the most pretentious moment 
in the whole film is a slow 
motion, semi-biblical montage 
of homeless junkies throwing 
furniture in a lavish pool set to a 
crisp orchestra. The scene is so 
ridiculous and overblown that I 
physically cringed 
in 
response. 
To 
be 
fair, 
when 
the film stopped 
worrying 
about 
its 
overbearing 
ideas, 
it 
almost 
worked. 
“The 
Beach Bum” has 
its funny moments, 
including a shark 
attack scene that 
had 
me 
doubled 
over with laughter, 
but for the majority 
of the time I was 
not grinning. I was 
just waiting for the 
mess to be over.
By 
the 
time 
the 
film 
ended 
in 
a 
thunderous 
explosion, 
I 
felt 
like I had missed a 
birthday. 
Despite 
a brisk runtime of 95 minutes, 
“The Beach Bum” felt like an 
eternity, hopping from drug-
fueled episode to drug-fueled 
episode 
without 
a 
concrete 

narrative. 
Despite Moondog’s largely 
lethargic 
character 
arc, 
McConaughey was thoroughly 
entertaining and perfect for 
the role. His unique drawl and 
graceful charisma are ideal for 
the seedy ease of Moondog. It 
never feels like he’s performing, 

just 
exuding 
the 
maturely 
ironic aspect of his charm that 
comes through in every role of 
his. And yet, none of the film’s 
other characters are even a 

little 
bit 
interesting. 
Both 
Isla Fisher (“Tag”) and Snoop 
Dogg (“Law & Order: SVU”) 
have secondary roles, but are 
ultimately purposeless vehicles 
for 
Moondog’s 
development. 
Another music icon in the cast 
was Jimmy Buffett, playing 
himself. Somehow, the idea of 
Jimmy Buffett 
partying 
with 
washed-up 
stoners on the 
west coast of 
Florida 
was 
one of the most 
realistic aspects 
of the movie.
“The 
Beach 
Bum” 
is 
the 
most agonizing 
kind of movie to 
watch. I didn’t 
totally hate it, 
but 
I 
would 
have 
enjoyed 
my experience 
more 
if 
it 
had 
been 
unambiguously 
atrocious. 
Instead, 
the 
film 
is 
the 
product of one 
pretentious writer writing about 
another 
pretentious 
writer 
and is about as impactful as a 
3 a.m. dorm room philosophy 
discussion.

ANISH TAMHANEY
Daily Arts Writer

FILM REVIEW

Amidst the 
Chaos

Sara Bareilles

Epic Records

Peele’s ‘Twilight Zone’ 
forgets source material

TV REVIEW

CBS

The Twilight Zone

Episodes 1 & 2

CBS All Access

Thursdays

The Beach Bum

State Theatre

Neon Productions

