Given MAGNET’s detailed coverage of the end of the Mendoza Line—a beloved, ragtag countrypolitan bar band that went up in flames in 2007—it only seems fitting that we have plenty of access to the formation of the Jescos, the new group featuring the Mendoza Line’s Timothy Bracy and Wooden Wand’s James Jackson Toth, as well as Bracy’s wife, singer Elizabeth Nelson. Bracy has found his rambling pub-rock foil in Toth on the forthcoming Remembrance Of Things Trashed, a debut album that guts it out for rock ‘n’ roll glory. Read our Q&A with Toth and Bracy.
Timothy Bracy (And Elizabeth Nelson): We love Stella, so we’ll basically give everything that David Wain does at least a once over with a favorable eye. Role Models is Wain’s first real foray into commercial filmmaking, and it succeeds magnificently. It’s the story of two guys who are forced to make nice with some kids in an ersatz Big Brothers program as part of a probationary sentence and how such an experience changes everyone involved, for good and for ill. The entire concept could have been stripped from an ’80s sitcom plotline, and the film veers dangerously into this territory on more than one occasion, but it never “goes there” full bore. The performances by Paul Rudd and Sean William Scott are hilarious without being over the top, and the marvelous Jane Lynch steals every scene that she is in. But Bobb’e J. Thompson really made the movie, with perfect line readings at every turn that take Role Models from “excruciatingly long episode of Diff’rent Strokes” to “poignant and infinitely palatable movie about mostly implausible circumstances.”
