I haven't seen it, but evidently Hal Hartley's latest film, "The Book of Life" is about Satan, Jesus, Magdelene, and other deities and religious figures trying to work through the same millennial anxiety that the rest of us are supposedly dealing with. I suspect it's a pretty serious affair, and though Hartley's films are generally as unpretentious as they are serious, something tells me that he's not going to pull this off. Of course, the idea of Satan hoarding bottled water, ramen and canned baked beans is pretty irresistible, but I doubt that figures very prominently into the film.

Now, as I understand it, the soundtrack for "The Book of Life" is as high- concept as the film-- purporting to be a sort of overview of music at the end of the millennium. This is asking for trouble. I mean, no matter how much weird random stuff you put on a record like this, you're going to leave something out. Sure, Hartley gets big juxtaposition points for getting the Osnabrucker Boys Choir to stand next to PJ Harvey, but then he goes and leaves out hip-hop, jazz, country, Canto-pop and creole marching bands.

Oversight is not the only problem with a survey approach like this, either. Like so many soundtracks, this one contains a lot of previously released fodder. Hub, Phylr, Tanako Minekawa, Drazy Hoops and Super 5 Thor all contribute songs which appear on proper albums, and Hartley gets all postmodern on us by including a song which originally appeared on another soundtrack, David Byrne's "Machu Picchu." This leads to a pretty frustrating paradox: if you're a fan of one of these bands, you get nothing new, and if you hear them for the first time here and decide to seek out their other recordings, the soundtrack becomes obsolete. It's nice that the bands are at least obscure, but whether or not Phlyr's same old ambient/industrial schtick, Hub's sensitive-guy folk-rock or Drazy Hoops' laidback, breathy acoustigroove deserve wider exposure is another question entirely.

Devoted PJ Harvey fans will wanna hear the old school crunch of "The Faster I Breathe the Further I Go," and really devoted Yo La Tengo fans will enjoy their "Turtle Soup," a two-part instrumental which is pretty throwaway compared to the excellence of most of their album work. And there are even a few really good songs on the soundtrack. Some might even find it a useful document in terms of pointing the way towards some interesting music, but as a whole, it doesn't hang together very well. Here's hoping the film is better, and that maybe Jesus does some serious looting or maybe flips over a couple of cars in it.

-Zach Hooker