Page B2 Wyoming Tribune Eagle Saturday, November 2, 2019

NEW RELEASES

New DVDsTribune News Service

Following is a partial schedule of coming movies on DVD. Release dates are subject to change:

Nov. 5“Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw”“Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark”“The Art of Racing in the Rain”“The Kitchen”“Ophelia”“Boy Genius”“Castlevania Season 2”“Christmas Break-In”“Corporate Animals”“Good Omens”“Prey”“Riot Girls”“Undercover Brother 2”“Yellowstone: Season 2”

Nov. 12“Good Boys”“The Angry Birds Movie 2”“47 Meters Down: Uncaged”“The Peanut Butter Falcon”“The Farewell”“Brian Banks”“After the Wedding”“Show White Christmas”“Cobra Kai Season 1 & Season 2 Limited Collector’s Edition Set with Double-Sided Headband”“Polaroid”“Poldark: The Complete Fifth Season”“Star Trek: Discovery – Season Two”“The Big Bang Theory: The Twelfth and Final Season”“The Weekend”

New gamesThe following is a list of video games scheduled for release next week, according to www.ign.com. Release dates are subject to change.

“Garfield Kart: Furious Racing” (PC, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One. Genre: Racing. Rating: Not available)

“Mario & Sonic at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics” (Nintendo Switch. Genre: Sports. Rating: Not available)

“Red Dead Redemption 2” (PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, Stadia. Genre: Action. Rating: Mature)

“A Year Of Rain” (PC. Genre: Strategy. Rating: Not available)

“Valfaris” (PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, Nintendo Switch. Genre: Platformer. Rating: Not available)

“Planet Zoo” (PC. Genre: Simulation. Rating: Not available)

“Conception Plus: Maidens of the Twelve Stars” (PlayStation 4, PC. Genre: RPG. Rating: Not available)

New musicThe following is a partial list of titles released Friday.

Compiled by Keith Coombes of Ernie November

Angel Witch, “Angel Of Light”

Black Stone Cherry, “Black To Blues Vol. 2”

Cold War Kids, “New Age Norms”

The Doors, “Soft Parade” 50th Anniversary Deluxe Reissue

Bob Dylan, “Bootleg Series #15: Travelin’ Through 1967-1969” 3-cd

Fire From The Gods, “American Sun”

Jeff Goldblum And The Mildred Snitzer Orchestra, “I Shouldn’t Be Telling You This”

Hootie & The Blowfish, “Imperfect Circle”

Jay & Silent Bob Reboot, “Original Motion Picture Soundtrack”

Miranda Lambert, “Wildcard”

Stoney LaRue, “Onward”

Jeff Lynn’s ELO, “From Out Of Nowhere”

Montgomery Gentry, “Outskirts”

Nile, “Vile Nilotic Rites”

November’s Doom, “Nephilim Grove”

R.E.M., “Monster” 25th Anniversary Deluxe Reissue

Skinlab, “Venomous”

ALBUM REVIEWSThe Philadelphia Inquirer

“COLORADO”NEIL YOUNG WITH CRAZY HORSE (RECORD LABEL) HHH

Neil Young’s 39th album is the first in seven years that the ragged rocker has released with Crazy Horse, his rowdy beast of a band. But the version of the Horse that Young assembled in the snowy Rocky Mountain town of Telluride to record “Colorado” this past spring is freshly updated with an old friend. Instead of now-retired guitarist Frank “Poncho” Sampedro, Young is joined by Nils Lofgren, who played on Young’s “After The Gold Rush” album in 1970 but has busied himself with a solo career and as a member of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band in recent decades. Lofgren fits right back in with the Canadian rocker, joining in the spirit of spontaneous creativity and occasionally cutting loose with Young, as on the 13-minute “She Showed Me Love,” a song about how “old white guys” not so different in age and complexion from Young seem intent on killing Mother Nature. Rage against the desecration of the environment fuels “Colorado,” a 10-song set that arrives along with Mountaintop, an in-the-studio verite documentary movie that Young directed under his Bernard Shakey alias.

Self-righteousness and didacticism have often gotten the better of Young’s art, but they’re mostly used effectively on “Colorado” as he vents his frustration on “Shut It Down” and gets so fed up with day-to-day existence that he’s moved to make the perfectly reasonable request for someone to please “Help Me Lose My Mind.” He strikes a sweet, romantic chord on “I Do,” a love song to his new wife, Daryl Hannah, and he’s written a powerful plea for embracing a multihued American future on “Rainbow of Colors,” in which a rough chorus of Crazy Horse members insist that “no one’s going to whitewash those colors away.”

– Dan DeLuca

“ALL MIRRORS”ANGEL OLSEN (JAGJAGUWAR) HHH

Going back to her 2010 debut EP “Strange Cacti,” Angel Olsen has always been able to stun with emotive songs and her piercing alto. Ever since, her music has gotten rougher, bigger, and stronger, from 2014’s garage-rock “Burn Your Fire For No Witness” to 2016’s fully fleshed-out “My Woman.” “All Mirrors” takes a big leap forward, drenching her voice in reverb and surrounding it with soaring orchestral strings. The passionate, all-in sonic strategy is fabulously effective on the opening “Lark,” with a heartbeat pulse that soars to a crescendo as it regards a transformative love affair from shifting perspectives. The album’s gleaming surfaces reflect back on one another, shining light and casting shadow as the singer confronts her various selves, unsure of where she stands. How to locate the true you in a funhouse world that’s “All Mirrors?” The strings and synths and booming drums often dazzle, but Olsen’s arresting voice is sometimes overwhelmed by grandiose walls of sound. The songs could use a little room to breathe. Intriguingly, Olsen also recorded a second version of “All Mirrors,” recorded in stripped-down folkie form, due out at a yet-to-be-determined date. Comparing and contrasting the relative effectiveness of the two approaches will have to wait till then.

– Dan DeLuca

“CYPRESS GROVE”JIMMY “DUCK” HOLMES (EASY EYE SOUND) HHH

Besides being one-half of a major rock band, the Black Keys, Dan Auerbach owns a Nashville record label for which he is a prolific producer. These two releases show his stylistic breadth, as well as his ability to put disparate artists in their best light.

Kendell Marvel has the deep voice, concise writing style, and thematic concerns of a country traditionalist. On “Solid Gold Sounds,” Auerbach backs him with up to a baker’s dozen of instrumentalists and singers, but the arrangements never seem cluttered or obtrusive. Instead, they enhance Marvel’s topflight originals (all co-written by Auerbach) and his delivery as he ranges from smooth balladeer to edgy country-rocker. He also offers a terrific country-soul take on the Bee Gees’ “I’ve Gotta Get a Message to You.”

Jimmy “Duck” Holmes is a 72-year-old bluesman, and “Cypress Grove,” named after one of the Skip James songs he deconstructs here, is as elemental as it gets. It’s pretty much what you might hear if you saw the singer-guitarist playing at his Bentonia, Missouri, juke joint. Auerbach backs him with just bass and drums, sometimes adding his own guitar and that of rising star Marcus King (there is also a sax on one cut). Whether putting his own spin on numbers by Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, and Bentonia’s James, or offering some of his own songs, Holmes casts a transfixing spell.

– Nick Cristiano

By Todd MartensLos Angeles Times

Early in “Ring Fit Adventure,” a talking, virtual Pilates-like ring tells you that your “glistening sweat” is beautiful. Your opinion of such a phrase – sorta cute, kinda funny or infuriating – might reflect how you will feel about Nintendo’s latest bid to enter the fitness and tech market.

I rolled my eyes yet ultimately kept playing. Partly because I fell out of a pretty strict fitness regiment the last two hectic months and part-ly because there was a dragon ahead. But not just any dragon. This is a body-building-obsessed, hyper-masculine hunk of dragon idiocy. At long last, here was an antagonist that I recognized and was eager to battle. I could see a teenaged ver-sion of this “Ring Fit Adventure” dragon – imagine a distant cousin of Chernabog from “Fantasia’s” “Night on Bald Mountain” scene – coming up to my junior high locker to ask me how much I could “bench” before laughing in my face.

So run in place I will, holding my surprisingly comfortable and won-derfully adept tech-enhanced plas-tic ring in front of me. Said ring, which Nintendo calls a “Ring-Con,” is the main peripheral of “Ring Fit Adventure,” and it can not only mea-sure your strength – exercises are essentially completed by pulling the ring in or out – but help you complete modified versions of the sorts of ac-tivities that you bought your unused sack resistance bands for. It can also measure your heart rate.

Combine the Ring-Con with a leg strap affixed to your thigh, each one holding one of the controllers of the Nintendo Switch, and “Ring Fit Ad-venture” turns out to be hiding a pretty potent little exercise ma-chine under its fight-the-dragon ad-venture premise. The Ring-Con can be used with shoulders and thighs for myriad exercises to target vari-ous muscles outside of the main game. In one week with the $80 de-vice, I’ve largely been using it, and it has forced me to work through some

of the core-strengthening exercises my physical therapist thinks I’m doing every day.

While there are echoes of Ninten-do’s Wii Fit, an instant hit when it was unveiled in Japan in 2007 and the victim of stock shortages for months in the U.S. upon its 2008 re-lease, that item is likely collecting dust in most closets these days. Still, there’s no denying the Wii Fit fore-told a future where game-like ele-ments would creep into all aspects of our life. Exercise has long been seen as a market for gamification, dating back to pricey, early exercise bikes that showed stationary users peddling along digital forest pre-serves to today’s Apple Watches, Fitbits and bounty of apps such as Noom, the latter of which essentially turns calorie counting into a game.

All of these devices hold aspira-tional qualities. At long last, they promise, technology will not only make exercise and staying in shape fun, it will be easy! Not really – if you’re not already in the large seg-ment of the population that craves physical movement it’s unlikely an Apple Watch, a Fitbit, an app or “Ring Fit Adventure” will provide some magical answer to loving ex-ercise. That’s fine, though. These devices needn’t be life-changers so much as different options to either help us get out of a routine or create

a new one.And “Ring Fit Adventure’s” main

game works hard to become part of our daily life. It’s robust, for one. Nintendo says that if one spends be-tween 30 minutes and one hour with the game every day it could take up to three months to complete. Proba-bly longer, if, like me, you choose to mix and match your own exercises with custom routines or minigames, such as one that has you stretching out or pressing in on the Ring-Con to smash robots.

More fun and goofy is a pottery game, which combines squats and arm presses on the Ring-Con to shape and sculpt virtual clay. It can burn a few calories but also works as a party game.

The main quest of player vs. bully-ing dragon alternates running in place with a host of exercises. We un-cover more as we move more deep-ly into the game, and while this is meant to encourage us to keep play-ing and learn different fitness rou-tines, as someone who suffers from occasionally paralyzing sciatica I wanted significantly more exercises available at the start of the game.

Squats are great and all, but the level to which my lower back allows me to move is not necessarily always the level that will best a foe. To be fair, difficulty settings can be ad-justed to allow for modified versions

of exercises, and the Ring-Con and leg strap do a strong job of recogniz-ing body movement and posture. But I’m a masochist and refuse to work out on anything but the higher levels and would thus prefer to choose from different movements rather than adjust the difficulty.

While many games tie abilities or trinkets to advancement, this game design trick only works when the game is essentially teaching the player new abilities. In an instance in which we are the controller, more or less, chances are we know our own abilities better than any piece of tech.

But I know the game has the exer-cises I want – they are all accessible outside of the adventure – so I’m willing to stick it out, as it’s just silly and fun enough to move through hills, bridges and ponds to stop this dragon from spreading his cult-like fitness beliefs throughout a fantasy universe where street fixtures are barbells.

This world, while colorful and welcoming, is sort of akin to if your local gym had vomited all of its equipment throughout your neigh-borhood, and instead of half-broken scooters littering your sidewalks you saw weights – and purple mon-sters that sort of look like they have boxing gloves for hands. These are the dragon’s minions, and you defeat them by doing exercises. Simple ones, such as the aforemen-tioned squats, or overhead presses to start, the latter accomplished by trying to squeeze the Ring-Con to-gether.

“Ring Fit Adventure” won’t be the phenom that was “Wii Fit,” but that’s because the latter started this revolution, one in which today in-cludes a wearables market that has exploded beyond fitness to include lifestyle accessories that promise to aid in sleep or relieve pain.

Using tech to gamify our lives has become so commonplace that “Ring Fit Adventure’s” biggest challenge is simply standing out, and out of the box it gets one thing right: We never feel like we’re losing.

”RING FIT ADVENTURE” IS NINTENDO’S AIM TO SLAY THE FITNESS DRAGON

A body-building, fitness-obsessed dragon is the antagonist in Nintendo’s “Ring Fit Adventure.” Tribune News Service