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    indie firsts

    Arcade Fire roars to No. 1 album in America — by the grace of The Woodlands &Amazon

    Steven Devadanam
    Aug 16, 2010 | 11:25 am

    Turns out The Woodlands makes for a record-setting muse. Arcade Fire — the indie wonder band front-lined by The Woodlands-reared Win Butler — has reached No. 1 on the Billboard chart with its new album, The Suburbs, which finds its inspiration in Butler's youth on Houston's far-out fringe.

    The album begins with Butler advocating stealing a car in an attempt to escape the 'burbs, and in the penultimate song, wife and bandmate Regine Chassange pleads, "Can we ever get away from the sprawl?" Reflects Butler, "In this town where I was born/I now see through a dead man's eyes."

    Despite its detractors, The Woodlands has inspired "an album for the ages."

    According to Nielsen ScoundScan, the album sold 156,000 copies in its first week, usurping Eminem's Recovery, which had rested for five weeks as No. 1. While the Montreal-based band's mounting commercial success has been attributed to enthusiastic reviews and two sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden (one of which was filmed for a live webcast), online retailer Amazon.com can claim much of the glory for the steep incline in sales — 62 percent of which were digital downloads.

    By offering customers the 16-track album for a mere $3.99, Amazon also provided the band's independent record label Merge with its first No. 1 album. Label mates and Texas indie stars Spoon showered praise on Twitter, "Let the record reflect that Merge Records is the NUMBER ONE LABEL IN THE USA!"

    Surprisingly, Amazon's decision to boost Arcade Fire comes at a loss for the company. Executives at other labels, speaking on condition of anonymity because deals between the record label and Amazon were private, said the online retailer typically selects an album to promote and sell at a discounted price, while continuing to pay its label wholesale price — usually around seven dollars.

    Amazon triumphed Vampire Weekend with a similar technique in January, offering the album, Contra, for $3.99 — also propelling it to No. 1.

    In an email to the New York Times, Laura Ballance, a founder of Merge, gave a shout-out to the corner record store — SoundScan data shows that independent stores held their own against big-box stores.

    "Is it wrong for me to want to point out that independent retail also did really well with this record?" Ballance wrote. "They made a significant contribution to making this record No. 1. Without them, Eminem would have had it."

    Independent retailer Cactus Music is offering "The Suburbs" for $12.98.

    unspecified
    news/entertainment

    Movie Review

    Final Destination: Bloodlines reboots cult favorite horror franchise

    Alex Bentley
    May 15, 2025 | 4:30 pm
    Kaitlyn Santa Juana in Final Destination: Bloodlines
    Photo by Eric Milner
    Kaitlyn Santa Juana in Final Destination: Bloodlines.

    On the surface, the Final Destination films really shouldn’t work. There is no villain other than the concept of death itself, and nearly every death that occurs is foreshadowed so heavily that it removes the normal suspense that comes in horror films. And yet the franchise was successful enough to spawn five films over 11 years in the early 2000s, and now a reboot, Final Destination: Bloodlines.

    A fantastic opening sequence set in the 1960s sets both the tone and the plot of the film, in which Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) has a recurring nightmare about a disaster that her grandmother, Iris (Gabrielle Rose), helped to avert. A visit to the reclusive Iris convinces Stefani that she and her family should not exist, and that each one of them is destined to meet a grisly end in the near future.

    Met with resistance from her family members, Kaitlyn is unsurprisingly proven right as the film goes along, with different people dying in a variety of bizarre ways. A visit to William Bludworth (the late Tony Todd), a mortician who’s been the one constant in the series, provides a glimmer of hope that they can cheat death. But will they figure it out before it’s too late?

    Directed by Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein, and written by Guy Busick and Lori Evans Taylor, the film does not try to reinvent the wheel for the concept. The entire point is to get as creative as possible with the death scenes, and the filmmakers take that mandate seriously, with each successive death becoming increasingly gruesome. The Rube Goldberg-like manner in which each death occurs makes the scenes come off as entertaining instead of off-putting.

    The idea of Death hunting down an entire family line due to the actions of the family elder is a solid twist on the series’ central premise, and that change keeps the film from feeling repetitive. The story also introduces the possibility that the entire series is connected due to Iris’ actions, with the character possessing a scrapbook that references well-known incidents from previous films, a fun Easter egg for longtime fans.

    The creativity of the kill sequences does not carry over to the overall story, though. Almost every character in the film only exists in order to meet a horrific end, so anything that they have going on outside of being stalked by Death is purely window dressing. Consequently, it’s hard to really care about anybody, even if they are all related to one another.

    Because characters are so easily dispatched in the film, the cast is devoid of well-known actors. This is by far Santa Juana’s biggest role to date, and she does well enough to want to see more of her in the future. Adults like Alex Zahara and Rya Kihlstedt are character actors who bring some history with them, while the younger group is composed of people still trying to make names for themselves.

    Final Destination: Bloodlines is a solid return for the franchise, even if it feels more like a one-off film rather than a justification for more stories in the future. But given how easily the concept can be adapted into new circumstances, don’t be surprised if another movie pops up in a couple of years.

    ---

    Final Destination: Bloodlines opens in theaters on May 16.

    moviesfilm
    news/entertainment

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