Director : Joe Brewster
With : Giancarlo Esposito, Regina Taylor

“The Keeper” is a solid little known low-budget New York psychological thriller. The film is shot similarly to a “Hill Street Blues” TV style police drama, with all sorts of quick cuts and sharp fades. It’s plot revolves around a Brooklyn prison guard played convincingly by Giancarlo Esposito, who is studying at night school to become a lawyer so that one day he can make “a difference.” His moralistic attitude towards his fellow guards and the prisoners they abuse, cause Esposito to become afflicted with a sort of double vision. While at the prison he befriends a Haitian prisoner who he believes to be wrongly accused of a rape charge and invites him to stay with he and his wife until he gets back on his feet.

Although the plot seems straight forward at first, the film oozes philosophically into the mind of Esposito’s character as he struggles with the delicate racial issues that arise at the prison and the precarious romantic triangle that begins to take shape while at home. Filmed in a few banal locations in Queens, “The Keeper” is an dark but tightly constructed and imagined film. In a way it watches like one of those TV shows would have been much better if it had been rated R for really Mature Content instead of the watered down versions the networks provide us with. It is the ideas that are the most disturbing and intriguing and when combined with the bleak low-budget Queens landscape “The Keeper” becomes a gripping urban drama.

Label: Warner Brothers

With all the worthy, but often bandwagonesque attention being paid to Brian Wilson (circa “Pet Sounds”- of course) people often forget that he made a few other decent records with the Beach Boys right around that same time. The best post-”Pet Sounds” album is “Smile,” and was produced by rock composer Van Dyke Parks just over 30 years ago. “Smile” is a weird pop record, but also a very good one.

After having listened to so much Brian Wilson influenced music over the past year, a few months ago I decided to unearth a barely listened to copy of “Orange Crate Art.” For whatever reason I had picked up the album, listened to it once and then quickly lost track of it. Sometimes a surprise rediscovery can actually make an artist seem even better. “Orange Crate Art” is basically a album of songs written by Parks and sung by Wilson. On the surface the album sounds like a fusion of neo-Jimmy Buffet tropical cheese, and densely layored lyricism produced by a true studio genius.

Either way, it is nice to hear Wilson’s distinctive voice singing smart lyrics accompanied by a vaguely familiar structural style. For anyone smitten by the High Llamas, Eric Matthews, Richard Davies, Spooky Ruben or any of the other Pet Soundsian prodigy, “Orange Crate Art” is a curious and entertaining diversion.

Coming in at 800 pages this very well may be one longest novels I have ever read (Ayn Rand novels excluded). This is a problem only because it is so very good, but so very long. It is a Dickensian tale about a young boy cheated out of an enormous inheritance in 18th century England. What unfolds is a novel filled with a cast of villains conspiring to cheat a small boy and his mother out of one of the largest estates in England. It begins with the mother an child living in comfortable secrecy in the country. Circumstances drive them to London where they are reduced to mere subsistence as their complicated story begins to unravel. Told through the eyes of sharp but innocent child, the momentum of this story carries you effortlessly through a wonderfully heavy book.