The Listening Ear

Random Musical Friday

2012-01-27T07:35:00.003-05:00

Another random list, I'm afraid - I'm running late again. May iTunes reward....

1. Melvins - Dies Iraea
2. Elvis Costello - Big Boys
3. System of a Down - Soldier Side (intro)
4. Bootsy Collins - Psychoticbumpschool (live)
5. Neil Young - Harvest
6. TV on the Radio - Wolf Like Me
7. Pere Ubu - Monday Morning
8. The Clash - Inoculated City
9. John Zorn - Chinatown
10. The Seeds - Satisfy You

That was a nice set, if you ask me... so video? Bootsy is indicated, for sure:

And - this song didn't come up, but - the Seeds on network TV? plopped down in someone's living room? I have to post this! Gassy!

Very Random Friday Music Post Here

2012-01-20T09:36:00.000-05:00

Now I'm starting to worry about this Not Listening to Music thing. Yesterday, I was on a long train ride - and still didn't put on the iPod. That's what those things were invented for! As has been the patter for the last year or so - I read a book instead. I suppose you take what you get....

Anyway - once again, I end up going completely random - nothing wrong with that, I suppose.... Here goes:

1. Dave Van Ronk - DId You Hear John Hurt
2. Love - Everlasting First - this is Love with Hendrix
3. The Stooges - Passing Cloud
4. Black Mountain - Don't Run Our Hearts Around
5. Johnny Cash - Thirteen
6. Dream Syndicate - Cinnamon Girl
7. Pink Floyd - The Happiest Days of Our Lives
8. Johnny Thunder and the Heartbreakers - One Track Mind
9. Television - Venus
10. Melt Banana - One Drop, One Life

Video? bit a retro, hippy vibe up there - Black Mountain sounds good....

Stopping SOPA & PIPA

2012-01-18T07:31:00.003-05:00

I doubt by 5 or 6 readers would be much inconvenienced by me taking my site black for the day - but I don't want to let the day pass without note. SOPA, PIPA, indeed any similar law that would undermine the roots of the free internet, in the name of any of the supposed evils of the day, must be stopped. You must protect the means of speech and communication before you can worry about what the speech and communication might be.... and in this case - you have to be sure that the means of speech and communication remain free of the control of either the government or of corporations. So - do what you think best, oh gentle readers. But oppose this evil.

Here is a petition, from Google, a big corporation that at least is on the side of the angels on this one: End Piracy, Not Liberty

And Wikipedia's information page, explaining the blackout etc.: Learn More.

Good luck, internet! You have been very good to me!

Short Reviews of Recent FIlms

2012-01-17T20:46:00.001-05:00

I've fallen way behind in my film reviewing - even just doing these kinds of capsules. Some of the problem comes from the fact that a couple films tend to get away from me - the capsules start to edge into full reviews, and then what? Actually - it would be a bit more accurate to say there are a couple films I've seen in the last month or two that I can't stop arguing with myself about. That sort of mixed reaction can really slow down the process... Anyway - there is no point waiting for those films to work themselves out to post about others - so - here are a few quicker reviews of recent films. This will have to do for now - I suppose these are, almost by definition, not the most interesting recent films - but there you go. That isn't really true - there are a couple gems on here - but they're gems that I don;t find it hard to figure out. So... anyhow:

Carnage - 10/15 - 2 sets of parents meet to work out something after a fight between their kids. Then they can't leave the apartment. Roman Polanski's latest, an adaptation of a play, a tour de force for the actors and Polanski, to make a visual feast out of one room and 4 people and an hour and a half of time.... There has been something of a run lately of films that struck me as being much better in the execution than the conception. I don't know if there is much to this story - it's rather bland and unrevealing, really, though there are some sharp lines - but the acting more than puts it over. The cast is absolute trumps, I will say. The men are hilarious - Waltz can get a laugh from almost anything - reactions, timing; John C. Reilly is his usual abrud self. The women play differently - Winslet and Foster are both more tightly wound, both play the characters a little straighter - but they give the men plenty to play against, and sneak in their own comedy along the way. Winslet especially gets some neat physical comedy moments - Foster seems willing to take the straight role, trying to take the Whole Thing Seriously while the rest of them riff - it works. And Polanski keeps it moving, uses the space, blocking, timing superbly. The film remains fun to watch, even if the story is, you know - drab. I liked it, even if it didn't amount to as much as it seemed to think it did.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo - 8/15 - hey! Another film better in the execution! This time, I suppose, the gap is nearly insurmountable - and Fincher and his cast, for all their virtues, can only do so much with it. Everyone else in the world seems to have read these books - at least carried them around for a year or so - so I suppose there's not much point is talking about the plot. What do we have? Daniel Craig as a reporter who's just lost a libel suit to a guy who looks like a cross between Julian Assange and the guy who plays Nicolai Carpathia in the Left Behind films. He's then hired by Christopher Plummer to find out what happened to his granddaughter (or niece or grandneiece or something like that) Harriet, back in 1966. This is intercut with the misadventures of Rooney Mara in the person of Lisbeth Salandar, a girl with a dragon tattoo and some kind of supersleuth. Eventually reporter and hacker/spy/whatever she is join forces and solve the mystery and wreck Julian Assange Carpathia in a 30 second subplot at the end. Yay! It is very silly, very silly indeed - though Fincher and his cast make it seem like it ought to be interesting. It is saddled, I suppose, with a particularly obvious mystery to solve - and can't really build up any suspense when characters are put in peril since, I mean - there are two more books, right? So - that leaves Fincher working very hard to make the process of looking at old pictures and running google searches seem inherently interesting. He manages it too, mostly - he should stick to procedurals, though he'd be well advised to pick material that has something interesting about it. I am going to give way to my inherent cynicism and guess that the reason these books are so popular is because they are full of fake atrocities and icky sex and violence and really obvious plotlines that make anyone feel clever. The movies I imagine are popular because girls in leather are cool, and this one is particularly cool. Though probably not Aeon Flux cool, try as she might.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - 10/15 - classic spy novel made into a film by Tomas Alfredson who made Let the Right One In, with Gary Oldman heading a cast of the Finest British Actors... Story about uncovering a mole in British intelligence, told elliptically, very coolly - it looks great, widescreen compositions, barren forbidding spaces - but maybe is a bit too cold. I also suspect the act of compressing the novel into a feature film has pushed the story past clear comprehension - it seemed a bit of a mess... But it is a solid film, the performances are quite good, and it looks like the 70s on ice.

The Descendants - 11/15 - Alexander Payne's new film, with George Clooney as a lawyer whose wife is in a coma; he is also the trustee on a large estate that has to be sold. He has 2 daughters, 17 and 10 - he has not been the best father, and they are both a bit crazy - but they have to bond and all... They make the rounds of their families, telling the bad news about the wife (who is going to die), and bringing out various secrets and lies. And so on. It's interesting - a quiet, patient character study, with several people emerging - the daughters as well as Clooney. Understated and decent. It is hard to summarize - not that there isn't a story to summarize, though Payne does tend to approach the plot obliquely, through the characters - but because the plot does seem less important than the relationships that develop. Somewhere, back when it first came out, I saw a remark that it felt like a TV sitcom pilot. There's something to that. I know that sounds dismissive, but I think that describes the structure of the film very well - the story you see feels like setting up the central relationships, the new family unit. A lot of the story ends up deliberately deferring decisions - and the ending (Clooney and girls sitting on the couch, watching TV) feels like it is setting up more, rather than finishing what has come. You can imagine what comes next - the motherless family, the land issues and family issues left unfinished in the film. It would work. In any case - I liked it - a very satisfying film.

Le Havre - 12/15 - New Kaurismaki, and a wonderful little film - lovely and moving and funny, classic Kaurismaki. About a shoe shine man and his wife, living on the edge of poverty - she becomes ill, with something usually fatal. She lies about it to her husband though - meanwhile, he has run across a boy from Gabon, who managed to narrowly escape being caught by the police. So the man hides him, and tries to get him to London to be with his mother. The cops look for the kid - the man and his friends organize a concert to raise money to send the boy to London - in the end, another character is also redeemed. And - sometimes the doctors either get the prognosis wrong or do their jobs better than they know... great little film.

Outrage - 11/15 - one more big time auteurist film, a yakuza flick from Beat Takeshi, an unusually cold and dour one. Starts at a big meeting, where the top boss tells a major underling to look out for another gangster - so the underling tells his underling, Kitano, to get the rival. This sets off a series of ploys to shake down the other gangsters, push them out, force them to fight. It's very cool, the way Kitano's gang keeps escalating things, while the gangster on the other side can't figure out what is going on. This continues until the rival is broken - but then, the big boss starts going for the rest of them, especially when the rival turns up again. And so on - the top boss plays the rest of them against each other (Kitano's Otomo, his boss Ikemoto, another one, Ozawa, in between) - until they all burn one another up. It is single-mindedly nihilistic - the top bosses manipulating the people under them - the smaller fry attacking one another and consuming one another as they go, all burning up like paper in a fire. It offers none of the catharsis of his older gangster films - no one (important) goes down in a blaze of glory - people die sloppy, cruel little deaths, knifed in a prison yard, shot down naked in a sauna, gunned down by a dull confederate during a beach party, dragged from a car by the neck.... no one but the money men are left standing. You have to figure that is the point - the purposelessness of it all, without redemption or even glory.

Sunday Shopping Report

2012-01-15T16:01:00.003-05:00

This was a surprise - I found a copy of Godard's Histoire(s) du Cinema on the shelves at Newbury Comics! I knew it was being released, but can't say I expected to find a copy in a local store....

It'll keep me busy a while - 7 hours long and all - but that's not a problem.

I also found this one -

- the new Criterion edition of Tokyo Drifter. But that's what I went in looking for...

A Noisy Musical Friday

2012-01-13T06:57:00.002-05:00

Though I should still be trying to catch up on last year's music, today, it's back to the randomizer!

1. Beastie Boys - Egg Man
2. Pere Ubu - Postcard
3. Mozart - The Marriage of Figaro [well - two pieces in a row from this record came up - strange enough...]
4. Yoshimi & Yuka - KoRoKoKoRo'n Insects
5. Butthole Surfers - Moving to Florida [I'm gonna bowl me a perfect game]
6. Rites of Spring - Spring
7. Aihiyo - Your Eyes Have the Sparkle of 10,000 Volts [Keiji Haino goes pop!]
8. Velvet Underground - Some Kinda Love [put jelly on your shoulder]
9. Danielson - Time that Bald Sexton
10. Liars - Here Comes all the People

Okay - the randomizer must be very happy to have access to the whole catalogue again (after all those 2011 posts) - it's definitely trying to please - that's the kind of playlist I like to see! Video? The Surfers seem indicated, combining the absurd with the vulgar, to a fault....

...which leads us to the Velvets, on their revival tour, doing what they do, and even Lou sounds halfway decent (until he starts trying to scat.) This is, of course, one of the great songs of all time.

Desert Island DVDs

2012-01-08T19:35:00.000-05:00

Via Jim Emerson, Matt Zoller Seitz has initiated a new kind of meme - Movies for a Desert Island. The rules are simple enough - "You can list 10 feature films, one short and a single, self-contained season of a TV series" - and "Every slot on the list must be claimed by a self-contained unit of media." So - no combining Godfather movies, that sort of thing.

It's a fun exercize - and comes in time for my Sunday Screen Grab, which is an invitation, I suppose. So up first - a short? there are good choices, but I am going to stick with something necessary - Buster Keaton's One Week. Holes, you know...

As for TV - in the end, this is not very hard: Season 2 of Monty Python's Flying Circus. That's the Piranha Brothers and Silly Walks, the Spanish Inquisition, Blackmail, Scott of the Antarctic, Archeology Today, the Dirty Hungarian Phrasebook, the Lifeboat sketch (how long is it?) It's great stuff, and beats out the nearest competition (the first and third year of Mpnty Python, I imagine), by a hair.

And now to movies. This gets a bit complicated - there are certainly more than 10 films I don't want to live without. But I guess the fun of a thing like this is the pain of separation, and the joy of choosing what you choose. So - here goes, with comments and pictures, most of the time.

1. I'm going to start out cheating, sort of. It's a film I have never, in fact seen - and I don't think it's actually available anywhere, at least not legally: it's Out One: Noli me Tangere - 13 hours of Jacques Rivette? Oh yeah, I'd take that sight unseen without worrying that I'm wasting a slot.

2. Next up, something obvious - It's a Wonderful Life. I waffled on this, to tell the truth - I've seen it many many times, to the point of memorizing it just about... I could take something else, I thought, and memorize it. But then - I will be trapped on a desert island; whatever I take, it won't be long before it is as familiar as this is. And will it (whatever that film is, that I leave off in favor of this - say - Seven Samurai) be as endlessly revelatory as the Capra? Well - probably - but which will I miss more? No - how better to remember what you had (and what you're finally free of) than It's a Wonderful Life?

3. The Maltese Falcon - another one I've seen many many times and considered skipping - in favor of, oh - a Hawks? (His Girl Friday?) Yeah but - proof is in the pudding, I still have to watch this every few months. (Same with His Girl Friday, of course, but what can you do? there are only 10 films.)

4. M - this is another one I have seen many times, but I would never for a second consider leaving it off.

5. McCabe & Mrs. Miller - another film that never seems close to exhausted.

6. Early Summer - I'm not going anywhere without Ozu.

7. Duck Soup - here, I think I'm moving more into the comfort food section. Some of the films above can be kind of rough sledding - but this is plain joy. I don't think I have to defend this, though.

8. Bride of Frankenstein - similarly - I put this on and am happy with the world. Just to listen to the voices, even...

9. Finally, a couple recent films - Rushmore.

10. O Brother Where Art Thou - I also considered Big Lebowski, but in the end, this is better, and more fun, and more - moving. And a musical.

My Favorite Music of 2011

2012-01-06T07:16:00.001-05:00

This is very strange - I don't think I can even pretend to make list of favorite records this year. I bought a modest number of new records - 30 or so - many of them by bands I like and respect, some for a long time (REM! a new Feelies record!), some more recent (Battles? just found them...) - more than a few serious favorites - Feelies, Gang of Four, PJ Harvey, Tom Waits, Boris, Damon and Naomi, REM, Earth, Bill Frisell, 6 Organs of Admittance, TV on the Radio.... But I have just not listened to them. Maybe a song here or there, coming up on the iPod, but only a handful got beyond that. I mean - being honest, I think I might have listened to a grand total of - what - 6? all the way through? somewhere along the line?

PJ Harvey
Josh Pearson
Wire
The Feelies
Gang of Four
Iron & Wine

I think that might be it. It's a question of habits, really - of not putting on the iPod every time I get on a train, say. (Which has other implications - I've read a lot more in the last couple years than I had been - I pull out a book when I step on the subway, these days.) It will change back, I know - somewhere in the next few years, I will get obsessive about music again. When it does, I will have to come back to 2011 and try a more serious ranking. For now? I can make a list, but the first two are the only ones I feel confident will be on any future top 10:

1. PJ Harvey - Let England Shake
2. Josh T. Pearson - Last of the Country Gentlemen
3. Gang of four - Content
4. Tom Waits - Bad As Me
5. Feelies - Here Before
6. Times New Viking - Dancer Equired
7. Iron & Wine - Kiss Each Other Clean
8. Wire - Red Barked Tree
9. Boris - Attention Please (the Wata record)
10. TV on the Radio - Nine Types of Light

Okay - the one good thing about listening to music on an iPod is that you do, in fact, get to hear songs. So I can, I think, offer a fairly convinced version of my 10 favorite songs of the year:

1. PJ Harvey - Words That Maketh Murder
2. Wire - Please Take
3. Iron & Wine - Big Burned Hand
4. Battles - My Machines
5. Boris - Spoon [sounding remarkably My Bloody Valentinish]
6. Gang of Four - She Said 'You Make a Thing of Me'
7. PJ Harvey - On Battleship Hill [I could have limited myself to one song per artist - I've left out a few I like, REM's Discoverer, the Feelies' When You Know, maybe Radiohead's Lotus Flower, etc... - but this is just too good - one of the most distinctive tunes of the year...]
8. Mogwai - Mexican Grand Prix [I remain a sucker for a nice bit of motorik]
9. Tom Waits - New Year's Day
10. Times New Viking - It's a Culture

Good enough. One thing I will commit to - PJ Harvey's Let England Shake is a damned Great Record. I liked it enough when I got it - it's grown since. I like it as much as any of her records, and that is saying something. I will add - it was the occasion for some outstanding videos as well - here is "Let England Shake":

And on that subject - here is another great one, that might be my favorite video of the year, after, or along with, Polly Jean's. Gary Numan singing with Battles, on "My Machines". (And another note - while I bought a fair amount of music, but didn't listen to it - what I bought was almost all stuff I am very familiar with already. I think this record - Battles' Gloss Drop - is just about the only record I got this year from a group I don't already own the rest of their catalogue. Battles and Josh Pearson. And nothing at all that's genuinely new, since they've both been around a while - and of course, I bought up their back catalogue too.):

Best Films of 2011

2012-01-02T17:07:00.001-05:00

Here we are again, a new year - a couple days old now, and time, I suppose, to sum of last year. 2011 - making this list, I was surprised to see how many films I rather liked last year. At the halfway point, I thought it was a very thin year - even later, in the fall, it didn't seem that a lot of really interesting films were coming out - but I guess they did. Certainly, the last couple months have been very satisfying. And it helps that a good number of truly outstanding foreign films were released this year, especially early. So - here you go - best 25 films I saw this year. As always, my criteria are: films that received a commercial release in metro Boston in the year 2011. (That I managed to see - there are a couple out in release now I haven't seen, but should - but they will have to wait, because I don't want to.)

1. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall his Past Lives - Apichatpong Weerasethakul
2. Mysteries of Lisbon - Raoul Ruiz
3. Certified Copy - Abbas Kiarostami
4. Melancholia - Lars von Trier
5. Quattro Volte - Michaelangelo Frammartino
6. Poetry - Lee Chang Dong
7. Le Havre - Aki Kaurismaki
8. Meek's Cutoff - Kelly Reichardt
9. Strange Case of Angelica - Manoel de Oliveira
10. Take Shelter - Jeff Nichols
11. 13 Assassins - Takashi Miike
12. Dogtooth - Yorgos Lanthimos
13. Martha Marcy May Marlene - Sean Durkin
14. The Skin I Live In - Pedro Almodovar
15. Tales from the Golden Age - Hofer, Marculescu, Mungiu, Popescu & Uricaru
16. Jane Eyre - Cory Fukunaga
17. Nostalgia for the Light - Patricio Guzman
18. Rapt - Lucas Belvaux
19. The Descendents - Alexander Payne
20. Outrage - Takeshi Kitano
21. Rango - Gore Verbinski
22. Page One:Inside the New York Times - Andrew Rossi
23. A Dangerous Method - David Cronenberg
24. The Guard - John McDonogh
25. Sleeping Beauty - Catherine Breillat

And also - the best new films from 2011 - whether released or not. This is necessarily a very tentative list:

1. Melancholia - Lars von Trier
2. Le Havre
3. Meek's Cutoff
4. Take Shelter
5. Martha Marcy May Marlene
6. The Skin I Live in
7. Jane Eyre
8. The Descendants
9. Rango
10. Page One

And finally, using this chance to revisit Last year's list of new (in 2010) films:

1. Carlos
2. Exit Through the Gift Shop
3. The Social Network
4. True Grit
5. A Film Unfinished
6. Greenberg
7. The Tillman Story
8. The Ghost Writer
9. The Kids Are All Right
10. Kick-Ass

Given a year to think about it, see a few of them again, and see a broader sampling of 2010's films - here is a retroactive list. The films from last year's top 10 are italicized:

1. Carlos
2. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall his Past Lives
3. Mysteries of Lisbon
4. Certified Copy
5. Quattro Volte
6. Poetry
7. True Grit
8. Exit Through the Gift Shop
9. 13 Assassins
10. Oki's Movie
11. The Social Network
12. The Strange Case of Angelica
13. Another Year
14. A Film Unfinished
15. Nostalgia for the Light
16. Outrage
17. Greenberg
18. Road To Nowhere
19. Somewhere
20. The Tillman Story
21. Sleeping Beauty
22. The Housemaid
23. Gainsbourg
24. The Ghost Writer
25. The Kids Are All Right

Film Posts 2012

2012-01-01T09:31:00.004-05:00

This post is meant for the sidebar, as an index of my film posts in a given year. A little more flexibly than the tags.

Long Form:

(None yet.)

Occasional Pieces:

1/2 - Best Films of 2011 list.

Screen Grabs:

1/1: Happy New Year! - Husducker Proxy
1/8: Desert Island DVDs

Reviews:

Ring out the Old, Ring in the New

2012-01-01T00:12:00.000-05:00

Happy new year, everyone! brought to you by one of the great new year's eve films... The Hudsucker Proxy doesn't always get the love some of the other Coen brothers films do, but it gets better every time I see it. It's a movie movie, all those parodies, all those quotes - everything from the Crowd to Gene Kelly films, though heaviest on the Capra and Sturges quotes (like Capra done Sturges style) - all the jokey interludes - newsreels, newspaper front page montages, fake home movies - it's fun fun fun. Mostly, it's the sheer pleasure of the actors and their lines - Newman and Robbins and especially Leigh bite off their lines and chew, and it is a joy. It's almost a disappointment that actors like Leigh and Robbins (or William H. Macy, say) have only done one Coen brothers films - they seem perfectly at home in them. But any actor looks good working with the Coens.

It's Still Friday, Isn't It

2011-12-30T17:57:00.004-05:00

Another random list of songs from this year:

1. Wilco - Rising Red Lung
2. Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks - No ONe Is (As I are Be)
3. Surfer Blood - Miranda
4. The Feelies - Bluer Skies
5. Beastie Boys - The Bill Harper Collection
6. Jane's Addiction - Words Right out of My Mouth
7. Gang of Four - I Can See From Far Away
8. Tom Waits - Pay Me
9. Josh T Pearson - Thou Art Loosed
10. PJ Harvey - The Glorious Land

Videos? Josh T. Pearson?

And Polly Jean:

A Melancholy Christmas

2011-12-25T09:33:00.001-05:00

A good Christmas movie really needs a bit of angst. Think about the Grinch, or Rudolph in exile, or Charlie Brown and his tree. There may be nothing to beat It's a Wonderful Life in terms of sheer desperation, but is there a more melancholy Christmas movie than Meet Me In St. Louis? I could add, of course, is there a more beautiful Christmas film - but it's Minelli, so that is a given. But if you don't go down, you can't come up (it's not a solstice holiday for nothing) - so have yourself a Merry Little Christmas!

More Random new Music

2011-12-23T09:09:00.004-05:00

And, once more, 2011 randomized -

1. Six Organs of Admittance - Above a desert I'Ve never seen
2. Wire - red barked trees
3. Fleet Foxes - Bedoin Dress
4. The Kills - the Last Goodbye
5. Boris - see you next week
6. Deerhoof - C'Mon
7. TV on the Radio -You
8. Iron & Wine - glad man singing
9. Burfer Blood - Voyager Reprise
10. Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks - Spazz

Video? from a likely contender for record of the year - TV on the Radio:

...and now, off to the mall...

Where they Really Know About Winter

2011-12-18T22:32:00.000-05:00

Well, winter arrived here in New England, with a vengeance - the cold anyway. No snow yet, not much - but the cold! thanks for that... Anyway - who knows cold better than our friends in Minnesota and Winnipeg?

December is for This Year's Music

2011-12-16T07:23:00.003-05:00

Another random sampling of records I bought this year:

1. Boris - Spoon [from Attention Please, the Wata record they released this year - sounding, here, more than a little My Bloody Valentinesque...]
2. REM - All the Best [Collapse into Now is an almost listenable REM record - they went out on a pretty decent note, I think.]
3. Decembrists - January Hymn
4. Tinawiren - Takkest Tamidaret
5. Gang of Four - Do as I Say
6. Feelies - Later On
7. Battles (featuring Matias Aguayo) - Ice Cream
8. Boris - Leak - Truth, yesnoyesnoyes [from Heavy Rocks, sounding more like Dinosaur Jr. than ever]
9. Damon & Naomi - Walking Backwards [hey! more Kurihara!]
10. Times New Viking - No Room to Live

Video? Boris is always good:

And maybe an actual Times New Viking video:

The History of Cinema is Still a Short One

2011-12-12T07:07:00.003-05:00

Another birthday post - this one for the greatest of them all. Here is a thought - Yasujiro Ozu was born 5 years before Manoel de Oliveira, who is, as noted, still active.

One Hundred Three and Counting

2011-12-11T15:07:00.005-05:00

It is, again, the birthday of Manoel de Oliveira, 103, still working (another film in post-production, one after that in pre-production - I like the description on IMDB - "Three connected stories set in Brazil following a visit of devil to earth, a case of adultery and the delusions of an ornithologist." - sounds good!) And still working at a very high level. Look at these shots from Eccentricities of a Blonde Haired Girl - without trying to find anything special - you can't miss. Every moment of every film, I believe, is lovely to look at...

Another 2011 Music Sampler

2011-12-09T07:05:00.003-05:00

Continuing with December's theme, here's a random sample of 2011 music:

1. Danielson - Grow Up
2. Beastie Boys - Multilateral Nuclear Disarmament
3. Jane's Addiction - Twisted Tales
4. Boris - Jackson Head
5. Six Organs of Admittance - Brilliant Blue Sea Between Us
6. Tom Waits - Talking at the Same Time
7. Tinawaren - Aden Osamnat
8. Damon & Naomi - SHadow Boxing
9. Wilco - Art of Almost
10. Loutaliica - Junior Dad

And video? Loutallica?

And how about the Danielson, sounding more Pixie-like than ever, with all those electric guitars and everything.

Exhilarating Misery at the Movies

2011-12-06T09:46:00.002-05:00

I've gone a bit off the grid here lately - holidays, things like that - I tried my hand at NaNoWriMo, sort of - and not written about films in a while. I picked a bad time to stop writing about films - I've done some complaining this year about the quality of the new releases, but the last month or so has seen a very strong run of films. Maybe better than that - I've liked every film I've seen since the middle of October or so, and most of them I've liked very much.

I do have to say - it has been a harrowing stretch of films. The apocalypse seems much on the minds of our best filmmakers. It's been that way all year - Meeks Cutoff might have been the best film before this stretch; Contagion, Page One, even Rango might be considered end of the world films as well. But this fall - a run of films have come out that are quite relentless in their sense of dread. Or, in the case of the Almodovar - that accumulate dread in the corners, shielded by the bright colors and glamourous actors and high melodrama. But it is every inch a horror film as well... Now - there have been some cheerier films this fall - but I am going to put them off for now, stick with the misery...

Melancholia - 13/15 - Antichrist, I thought, made it halfway back for old Lars - this one, though, seems to me to be among his best. You have a simple enough story - 2 parts - first, "Justine" - Kirsten Dunst getting married, a huge party, she and her husband turn up late, and after that the tensions simmer and stew and everything goes to shit. Her boss harangues her about work; her father clowns and snipes at her mother, who interrupts and snipes right back; sister warns her, husband tries to ne nice, brother in law reminds her how much money he's spending, and it all gets worse and worse and poor Justine reacts predictably. In the end, all is lost, as everyone fails her, most abandon her, and she gives as good as she gets.... Part 2, "Claire", is about her sister and the end of the world. Poor Justine is back, catatonic with depression now, and there is a new planet that is going to either circle the earth harmlessly or crash into it and kill everyone - Claire, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, tries to keep it all together, but her sister's madness seems a bit contagious, or maybe she is just the only sane one in the lot, and thus reacts to the end of the world with perfectly rational hysteria.

All this is done in a mix of LVT's trademark nausea inducing camera work and the kind of hyperslow aestheticism of Antichrist. It begins with nearly frozen tableaux of the end of the world as a bad dream - Dunst in her wedding dress in a pond, or walking with huge vines of yarn hanging from her limbs; Gainsbourg carrying her son across a golf course, sinking halfway to her knees with every step. This gives way to the shaky cam of the wedding reception, interrupting this mode from time to time with more of the dreamy tableaux. The shaky cam is particularly shaky - I have to admit, the first time I saw it, I was not in peak form going in, and probably sat too close, and "nausea-inducing" was not a figure of speech... That stuff doesn't usually bother me (It didn't the second time I saw it...), but a larger point might be that it didn't seem particularly well done - I can't imagine Breaking the Waves looking any different - I mentioned the way Antichrist makes you feel the presence of the cameraman - this time, it felt a bit more affected, almost like it was expected in a Lars Von Trier film. But that can't detract from the film's other virtues. The cast is excellent - the second half is a chamber piece, 4 characters in a huge house; the first half a teeming mess, full of first rate performers chewing on their corner of the scenery. John Hurt, Charlotte Rampling, Stellan and Alexander Skarsgard, Udo Kier, Brady Corbett, etc., all stealing the bits they are in.... In the second part, Dunst, Gainsbourg and Kiefer Sutherland play off one another as the world ends, all remarkable. And, shaky cam or not, the imagery is superb - the jumbled chaos of the first half with faces and bodies suddenly picked out of the mess; the dazzling shots of the house and grounds, and the strange new planet in the sky... A lovely and disturbing film.

All of this is, rather obviously, a huge allegory about depression. You could almost say, the first half shows the onset of depression realistically, in a woman's collapse - the second half, allegorically, as the end of the world. Like Antichrist, it makes its metaphors extremely literal - and here seems to be explicitly autobiographical as well. Thinking about it tends to recast von Trier's earlier films - retrospectively, they all seem to be like this one. About a woman who is beset by troubles - the cruelty of the world, an abstraction that is usually manifested in an arbitrary but real external force - a pipe, a dead child, an accident, America... Oddly, maybe because this one is less generically melodramatic, it strikes me as being a bit more self-pitying - the way everyone blames Justine for her breakdown, while they all contribute to it... But that doesn't really diminish it. It is a thrilling piece of filmmaking, which is an odd thing to say about a film about this kind of crushing despair - but there it is.

Take Shelter - 13/15 - Jeff Nichols' second film, starring Michael Shannon as Curtis, who has bad dreams - when they start leading him to dangerous behavior (hallucinating about his dog and his friends attacking him; building an elaborate storm shelter to survive a gas attack), he also checks on his mental health. His mother was afflicted by paranoid szchophrenia from her 30s, just like him.... Nichols plays out the tension to the end, between Curtis's hallucinations as premonitions and as madness - is the end of the world at hand, or is he going mad? It's a fantastic film - Shannon is great - a decent man, tortured, fighting himself, fighting the voices in his head, fighting everyone around him (and trying not to fight them, at the same time). The supporting cast has less to do, but they (Jessica Chastain, Shea Wigham, Kathy Baker, etc.) are excellent as well. All this does play as a kind of allegory of the world as it is, the anxieties of contemporary America - the collapsing economy, leaving all of us on the edge (much of the angst is about money, work, not to mention health care and the environment - it works in all the things we have to be terrified about these days) - but that level of allegory is grounded in a careful and detailed consideration of Curtis's mental breakdown, played with conviction and realism. Complicated, of course, by the fact that his private demons, the terrible storm he foresees, is just about dead right in terms of the catastrophe that is coming for all these people. He may be mad in the literal sense but dead on about the metaphors. All this, I could add, is not very far from what von Trier gave us in Melancholia - a character whose breakdown takes on a kind of universal sign - storm - planet - which consumes the people around them. Both films end in a very similar way - the threat seems to come - it is averted - then, it comes back - and this time, the "sane" characters see it to. It's as if their madness was contagious.... In any case - this is a remarkable and heartbreaking film, every bit as devastating as the von Trier.

Martha Marcy May Marlene - 12/15 - this, while avoiding the end of the world imagery of those other two films, is, like them, a careful examination of the inner world of someone whose inner world is coming apart. Starts with a girl in a farmhouse somewhere in upstate NY, who runs away and lands with her sister and brother in law in a cottage by a lake in Connecticut. Fomr that point on, the film flashes back and forth between the cottage and the girl's life on the farm - we learn, soon enough, that she was part of some kind of cult. At first, a relatively benign looking cult, though with intimations of extreme patriarchy (men eating first), plus mystical/self-sustaining platitudes - as the film goes on, the horrors of the cult escalate - to rape, intimidation, robbery and murder. Cult behaviors are explored - changing names, breaking down identities, creating new ones in the family. Hints of Manson begin benignly (through music, say) but become literal in the end. This is contrasted with the girl's experiences after fleeing, her relationship with her sister and her husband (a soulless and horrible yuppy), and hints of their past, a difficult past. For a long time, the film actually holds these world's in a kind of balance - you can see what drew her to the cult, its sense of real family, its anti-materialism. We see what she is running away from - her brother-in-law's snottinesss, or the way they push her back into drinking, which seems pretty clearly to have been a big part of her problem. When she starts drinking again, she gulps it down like an old friend. The film maintains for a while the notion of these two worlds as equally cruel and bad - though, interestingly, as things get worse with her sister, we see the flashbacks to the things that were truly evil at the cult. All this builds to a masterful final shot that is positively devastating.

The more I think about it, too, the better I think it is. Watching it, it seemed to drag a few times - but in retrospect, I think that is part of the design. It works through her experiences, from the escape, to something else - it is notable that she gets more and more crazy as time goes by - and that the flashbacks get more and more intense. It is as though she starts disassociated (after escaping), and over time, she comes out of her trance - the more she escapes the horrors of the cult, the more she remembers the horrors of the cult, and the more horrifying they become. This film has much the same tone as Take Shelter - a kind of deadly dread, knowing there is nothing you can do, no way for this to end well... Finally - once again, this is a superbly acted movie - Elizabeth Olsen is first rate - John Hawkes is on hand, bringing his sense of homespun decency to a role that has no decency in it - but that strange, emaciated charisma makes the role that much more powerful. Sarah Paulson too is very good.

The Skin I Live In - 12-15 - Almodovar film, starring Antonio Banderas and Elena Anaya as a mad scientist and the woman whose skin he has made... the tale is told all out of order - starts with a woman in a kind of suit, working with fabrics, locked in a room - we meet the doctor who keeps her there - get pieces of the outside of the story - false skin, stronger than real skin, hints of his madness, hints of the woman's resistance to the treatment. Then the maid's son turns up - a crook in a tiger suit - he attacks the woman, rapes her, and the doctor shoots him... That touches off 3 sets of flashbacks - the maid's story about the brothers and the doctor's wife; the doctor's flashback to his daughter's misfortunes; then - another set of flashbacks, to the boy who picked up the daughter at a party, and led to all her troubles - and then to his own. BY this time, the woman with the skin has slept with the doctor - and now we get the whole plot - who the woman is, why she looks like the doctor's wife, why she has been trying to kill herself - the whole shebang. It is, shall we say, a particularly extravagantly absurd plot - but one that bites deep..... It is certainly a first rate bit of filmmaking - Almodovar is a master of the form. It is, in the end, a pure horror film - quintessential horror film - by my pet definition - "the instability of the self - how the self is threatened by forces outside it, that turn out to be somehow inside it - the themes of the Other who is a Double; themes of invasion, especially - loss of bodily integrity, loss of self" - it's about as pure an example as you could ask for. Mad scientists, loss of identity, ghosts in the machine - sexual dysphoria indeed. A very fine film, and one that probably matches all those above in its sense of complete devastation....

Happy Birthday, JLG!

2011-12-04T09:28:00.003-05:00

A day late, as it happens, but it suits our purposes. And next week - Week End starts a full week's run at the Brattle! Hurrah!

I shall celebrate with a nice cup of coffee, maybe a beer...

Random 2011 Tunes

2011-12-02T06:52:00.002-05:00

WIth December here, let's start running through some of the music I bought in 2011- starting by letting iTunes give me a random 10 for the day:

1. Gang of Four - Fruitfly in the Beehive
2. Fleet Foxes - Montezuma
3. Danielson - But I don't Wanna sing about Guitars
4. Gang of Four - She said 'You Make a Thing of Me'
5. Wilco - Standing O
6. Decembrists - Dear Avery
7. Beastie Boys - Make Some Noise
8. Bill Frisell 858 Quartet - Old Times
9. Wilco - Born Alone
10. Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks - Jumblegloss

And video? some restrained Gang of Four?

and mayby some live Wilco:

Happy Thanksgiving!

2011-11-24T09:12:00.005-05:00

While the turkey is cooking, here's some old rock and roll - let's be thankful for the electric guitar!

And Sly:

Or, if you are a cat - what better to be thankful for than a paper bag and a friend to wash your head?

Platinum Blonde

2011-11-20T07:38:00.003-05:00

I don't have a lot of time to devote to his today, so keeping it simple, the basic Frank Capra story - man gets what he thinks he wants, finds it a trap, escapes and gets what he thinks he really wants. The film ends, but the next one is likely to pick up where that one left off with the same story. Every shot will be perfect.

Great Googlymoogly!

2011-11-18T07:12:00.003-05:00

I am back again without a good theme for this Friday. Maybe a couple scattered thoughts that might have musical illustrations... politics?

That seems appropriate. The fact that it was pulled off their first record after 9/11 - well, I could draw apocalyptic conclusions. We do seem awfully deferent these days to the Forces of the Law. Just remember - when you see a bunch of guys in riot gear beating up a bunch of guys in tee shirts, you can probably guess that the guys in riot gear are the bad guys.

(All that competes with the thought that, somewhat contrary to my endorsement of the general anti-Strokes sentiments on the blogosphere, they kick, once in a while. Maybe they are that much better live - I can't say their records ever really engaged me, but watching them on YouTube, they almost convince. And then there is the fact that having made sure to get the import version of This is It - I was convinced even then that this was one of the better songs on the record. I like the way it morphs from a straight Stooges ripoff to a straight up Feelies cover - the guitar solo from Moscow Nights, ain't it? Etc.)

I have to do this, too - one of my co-workers has had Frank Zappa in his head all week, and won't stop humming the opening riff to this -

What can you do? "Save your money, don't go to the show."

Okay - then - 10 sngs at random:

1. Melvins - the Savage Hippy - hey! iTunes has caught my mood! This might be Mayor Bloomberg's theme song!
2. Dungen - Gor Det Nu
3. Louis Armstrong & The Hot Five - Come Back, Sweet Papa
4. Carter Family - River of Jordan
5. Built to Spill - Made Up Dreams
6. X - Because I do
7. Spiral Stairs - Blood Money
8. Dire Straights - Lions
9. Yoko Ono - Death of Samantha
10. Beck - Gamma Ray

Well? Might as well - the visuals aren't anything special, but here's the Melvins....

Sergeant York

2011-11-13T08:07:00.004-05:00

This Sunday, let me add to Friday's remembrance with another WWI film. This one is the rarest of breeds - a film about WWI that is not anti-war. Though it is a strange kind of not-anti-war film: a film about a pacifist who comes to fight - though the film is as much about a violent man who becomes non-violent as about a non-violent man who takes up arms. Which gives it some kick - in a way, then, it becomes really about the limits of absolutes in morality - there is always a case where your values are less useful than some others... Whatever you might say about WWI, in WWII the values are different. There is that. Of course, being a Howard Hawks film, it is largely about the mastery of someone who is very very good at what he does.

Competence:

God:

War:

Home:

Friday Random Ten Plus One!

2011-11-11T11:11:00.003-05:00

A gimmick! A random eleven (maybe not entirely random) published at 11:11 11/11/11!!!11!11! etc. (I wonder how many other bloggers will think this same thing is just too cute to resist? will we bring the internet to its knees? we'll see!)

1. Grateful Dead - The Eleven Jam
2. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds - The Ship Song
3. Warren Zevon - Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner
4. Thelonius Monk - Suburban Eyes
5. Elvis Costello - Oliver's Army
6. Rush - Witch Hunt
7. Elvis Presley - Lawdy Miss Clawdy
8. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club - Rifles
9. Boris with Merzbow - A Bao A Qu
10. Smashing Pumpkins - Rhinoceros
11. Benny Goodman - Seven Come Eleven

Charlie Christian and Benny Goodman:

And - Tal Farlow, Barney Kessel and Charlie Byrd, the same:

Armistice Day 2011

2011-11-11T07:37:00.002-05:00

Veteran's Day, 2011 - it's notable that 2 years ago, there were still three surviving veterans - possibly combat veterans, at that point. Now, there is only one, Florence Green, 110 years old...

I've said before, especially in regard to this holiday - I think it's important to keep the original point of days like this in mind. And probably - WWI being one of the most decisive moments of history - this one in particular. And so?

Some songs: Here's A Long Way to Tipperary, from a 1914 recording:

And Pack all your Troubles in an Old Kit Bag:

And - Over There... patriotism in full bloom:

But I can't stop without another version of Eric Bogle's transcendent anti-war song - the Band Played Waltzing Matilda...

Musicals

2011-11-10T22:14:00.000-05:00

Now that Wonders in the Dark has finished counting down their list of musicals, I am moved to comment. First - that's it's been a treat to follow along, as it came out. A bit intimidating, as well... Not so intimidating that I'm not inspired to offer my own list of favorite musicals.

Or best musicals - or whatever they are. The countdown does tend to stir up questions about genre - they seem to have been deliberately vague about the definition of a musical - though they seem to have reached a consensus on some things. Documentaries and concert films seem to be right out - none on the list (that I can see) - I'm assuming that if they were considered eligible, you'd see Don't Look Back or Stop Making Sense or Gimme Shelter in there somewhere. That's a rule that makes sense, though it's odd that everyone seems to have gone by it on their own.

On the other hand - what about Nashville? O Brother Where Art Thou? or for that matter - how did This is Spinal Tap not make it? I won't credit the possibility that they aren't among the 140 best films with music in them - so they must be passed over for other reasons. And - I suppose it's reasonable enough that they are, they don't exactly present themselves as musicals, not in any traditional sense. (Though what else would Spinal Tap be, anyway?) But what is striking about those films, even more than some others that might fall on the edge of being musicals (from - oh - Pierrot le Fou to To Have and Have Not to some on the list - Blue Angel, say) is how conventionally they fit the genre. How is Nashville not, from start to finish, a backstage musical? O Brother Where Art Thou is an even more complete match - it is a backstage musical, featuring multiple performances in the film; plus more than one musical number that is NOT a performance - the Sirens - the KKK rally - the baptism scene. It also has the tone of old movies - light and breezy (with a hint of seriousness) - though I'd say it draws its tone more from old newspaper comic strips than old movies, there's a lot of overlap. It's not just a musical, it's an old fashioned musical - and on top of that, features some outstanding music, played straight. It's interesting that it's not there - not quite surprising - if I hadn't started thinking about definitions, I might not of considered it myself.... But once you think about it - I don't know how you ignore it.

Anyway - that aside - I can't see much to quarrel with on the list. Though - there are a couple films I don't understand missing it. Namely - Fantasia - that might have been definitional, though other Disney cartoons are on there - it is something of a strange beast, though... The other one - and I'm less inclined to forgive this oversight - is Shall We Dance. Fred and Ginger got lots of love - 3 films (that I remember off the top of my head) - #6 and #11 at that - but surely there should be at least one more. I like the early ones the best - you can see that below... but I can see why someone might prefer Swing Time or Shall We Dance - they are sleeker, the formula has been shined to a sparkle - and formula is not a bad thing at all in films... I would take Shall We Dance over Swing Time, but it's not so much the order as the fact that they are both aces... Though I do think this - that over all, Shall We Dance has the best music of any of the Fred and Ginger films. Overall - nothing, ever, beat Night and Day, as a song - but the Gershwin score, the Gershwin songs (You Can't Take That Away From Me; Let's Call the Whole Thing Off) are just marvelous, and add up to more than the music of any of the others....

Okay - enough. What would I vote for? This could bog down into definitions - and so I am going to offer two versions of this list. First - the expansionary one - this is the best films that I can find a reason to call musicals, ranked as movies:

1. Duck Soup
2. Pierrot Le Fou
3. Nashville
4. Blue Angel
5. Love Me Tonight
6. Top Hat
7. Hard Days Night
8. Night at the Opera
9. Gay Divorcee
10. Golddiggers of 1933
11. Wizard of Oz
12. Horsefeathers
13. O Brother Where Art Thou
14. Thirty Two Short Films About Glen Gould
15. Beijing Bastards
16. This is Spinal Tap
17. Merry Widow
18. West Side Story
19. Under the Roofs of Paris
20. Blond Venus
21. Don't Look Back
22. Forty Second Street
23. An American in Paris
24. Singing in the Rain
25. Red Shoes

And then - ranked as Musicals. For - meeting the genre requirements of a musical; and for the music itself - the dancing - the performances, the way the music is used in the film, as an end to itself. I think this is what I would end up with there:

1. Top Hat
2. Love Me Tonight
3. Gay Divorcee
4. Golddiggers of 1933
5. Hard Days Night
6. Duck Soup
7. Wizard of Oz
8. West Side Story
9. Forty Second Street
10. O Brother Where Art Thou
11. Singin' in the Rain
12. Meet Me in St.Louis
13. An American in Paris
14. Shall We Dance
15. Blond Venus
16. This is Spinal Tap
17. Don't Look Back
18. Merry Widow
19. Under the Roofs of Paris
20. The Red Shoes
21. Fantasia
22. Nashville
23. Gimme Shelter
24. Golddiggers of 1935
25. Cabin in the Sky

Today anyway...

Scribblers of the World, Unite!

2011-11-06T09:17:00.006-05:00

Since November is National Novel Writing Month:

Good luck!

Friday Random Ten

2011-11-04T07:23:00.002-04:00

Today?

1. Radiohead - Scatterbrain (As Dead as Leaves)
2. Soft Machine - We Know What You Mean [the Kevin Ayers years...]
3. Muddy Waters - I Just Want to Make Love to You [electric mudd version - Pete Cosey!]
4. Bing Crosby - I'll be Home for Christmas [starting this already are we?]
5. The Tragically Hip - Eldorado
6. Byrds - Have you Seen Her Face
7. Devo - That's good
8. Van Morrison - Caravan
9. Bob Dylan - It Takes a Lot to Laugh, it Takes a Train to Cry
10. Big Star - Jesus Christ

I'm going to vote that one hell of a random playlist.

For video? Let's start with Soft Machine, on TV back in 1967 or so:

And - here's a tribute to Alex Chilton, featuring the latter day Big Star and some guy named Mike Mills in Chilton's role. I can't say that I am planning to post a Christmas song every week, but if it works out that way...

Frankenstein

2011-10-30T19:35:00.001-04:00

I have never posted anything here about the James Whale Frankenstein films - that’s odd. They are great films - they are also films I have spent a lot of time pondering. As it happens, I did not see them when I was a kid - unlike all my friends, who would talk about them every Halloween, arguing about whether the mob really killed the monster, or how he could keep turning up in more films... Not me, though, so I didn't really have any kind of primary shock of seeing them. I've mentioned this before - last year in fact, writing about Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - 30s horror films seem to have been made for 2 audiences - for people who would see them once (for kids?) - and for people who would see them over and over. The first emphasizes the shocks, the spectacle - the second, the artistry, the characters and plots and themes - and many times, the half-submerged themes. Frankenstein is a prime example of that - the horror film (terrifying monster, battle against evil, etc.) is very effective - but under it - and not very far under it - is something else. A monster who comes off as much as a child, or maybe a shell shocked veteran, as monster... someone thrust into the world and abandoned, surrounded by people who are far more evil than he is. Though - even that breaks up in this film: the worst people are also by far the most interesting.

IN any case - the first one is the horror film - a tight, clean story, maybe the best story of the early Universal horror films - an economically told nightmare. The horror comes fairly straight, the shocks and spectacle played as shocks and spectacle, with far less of the operatic parody of the second one. Everything is to the point - though even here, a good part of the point is an ironic one. The monster - his first act is to reach of the light - he’s thwarted at every turn, hurt and abused, and blamed when he fights back or protects himself. Abandoned by his makers, set loose in the world, which he tragically misunderstands - that’s all there. Those elements get replayed in the second one, with a few more twists, and a lot more comedy - though the archness, the sense of the absurd, that animates the second one is present in the first as well. Technically, of course, is a triumph. The cast is superb - Karloff is miraculous, glorious looking and giving a stunning performance without saying a word.

The second one is even better. This film is different than the first of course - funnier - essentially a dark comedy all the way through. There is conventional comic relief in the first one - in the second one, the conventional comic relief (the very grating Una O’Conner) plays like comic relief from the much darker, and funnier, comedy of Pretorius. (Or is it the other way? Is Pretorius meant as a sophisticated, ironic, relief from the overplayed antics of the conventional clowns? Might be - O’Conner, particularly, is playing to the back of the hall - she’s very close to being a self-parody.) Though it is also a deeper, more serious work than the first one - the scene with the Hermit is meant to be taken straight (though it is seeded with jokes and ironies and what look like elaborate parodies of something); the ending - is almost heartbreaking. “We belong dead!” - the Bride’s hiss - the last shot of the monster’s tear - indeed....

Both films are masterfully made. They look great - deep spaces, fluid camera movement, imaginative editing. Whale wasn’t as extravagant as Rouben Mamoulian, but he was no slouch - both films contain numerous bits of bravura filmmaking. Showy angles; Whale’s favorite move of tracking through walls; neat compositional tricks, echoes and rhymes across the films:

- and a handful of magnificent editing sequences. The monster’s introduction is the most famous of these - jump cutting straight in - but there are several remarkable instances. The introduction of the secondary characters, Elizabeth and Victor, for example - a series of fast cuts from closeups of a picture of Henry to a maid announcing Victor's arrival to Victor (coming into the room) to Elizabeth standing from her couch. He seems to like that kind of trick, especially when he can play it against longer, often moving shots. And it's all in service of the film, sometimes to the point of symbolism - the monster's crucifixion, for example:

But there are equally significant bits of editing - this one at the end, Frankenstein and his monster looking through a mill wheel at one another, cut so they blend into one another:

It's one of the more obvious moments of doubling in the film - Henry becoming the monster - but hardly the only one. It's a theme picked up from the book - the ways the monster becomes Henry's (Victor's, in the book) double, the ways he supplements or replaces him. Replaces him in his bedroom on his wedding day - in film and book - in one of the more obvious cases:

These two films are very interesting as adaptations - there's no doubt that they abandon pretty much everything in the book except the title, some of the names (though even those are changed), and the Creature that Frankenstein made out of dead bodies. But at the same time, it gets back around to many of the book's themes - the doubling of monster and Frankenstein; the fraught relationships of fathers and sons; and a certain attention to the development of the monster - it is a book about education, and that is a major theme of the films, as well. In fact, the dominant theme of the second one - education and sexuality. The monster is a pretty clear figure of the Id - and frequently seems to spark sexual moments - taking Henry's place in his wedding bed in the first one - the whole plot, basically, of the second one. Though there, the emphasis has shifted from the idea of the monster as a kind of unleashed Id to the idea of the monster as a character in his own right - and specifically, as a young man coming of age. Karloff, I believe, later criticized the decision to make the monster speak in the second film - but I think that is central to the point of the film. It is about his education and development - and the failures of the people around him.

They are, these two films, both masterpieces - together especially. It is a sequel that picks up from the first and develops its most interesting elements - that takes the pathos hinted at in the first and works it out at length. And - as I said in those Jekyll and Hide posts - because they are horror films, because Frankenstein's monster is a monster - the filmmakers are free to take a much more challenging approach. Their heroes don't have to be heroic; it is possible for there to be unhappy endings. It's liberating. And the results, here, are among the best films ever made.

Halloween Quiz Time

2011-10-28T20:24:00.001-04:00

I have been waiting for this, it's been a long time - Dennis Cozzalio is back, with a new quiz for Halloween!

DR. ANTON PHIBES’ ABOMINABLY ERUDITE, MUSICALLY MALIGNANT, CURSEDLY CLEVER HALLOWEEN HORROR MOVIE QUIZ

Let us away!
***********************************************

1) Favorite Vincent Price/American International Pictures release.

A. I am not sure how many I have seen - bits an pieces, yes, but start to finish? Saw a 16mm print of The Raven when I was in college, a double feature with House of Wax - rather neat, a way of seeing films that seems to have disappeared...

2) What horror classic (or non-classic) that has not yet been remade would you like to see upgraded for modern audiences?

A. While Vampire Lovers (and Vampiros Lesbos, for that matter) have their - let's call it charms - I think the world could use a more straightforward adaptation of Carmilla.

3) Jonathan Frid or Thayer David?

A. I watched a bit of the show, but I can't say it made much of an impression on me.... probably have to vote for Frid, though.

4) Name the one horror movie you need to see that has so far eluded you.

A. The answer is probably The Exorcist - that's about the most prominent horror film I have avoided...

5) Favorite film director most closely associated with the horror genre.

A. This is James Whale, easily.

6) Ingrid Pitt or Barbara Steele?

A. Barbara Steele

7) Favorite 50’s sci-fi/horror creature.

A. Gojira - probably not really close, unless I can count Tor Johnson.

8) Favorite/best sequel to an established horror classic.

A. There are a couple possible answers, I suppose. Bride of Frankenstein is obvious, almost too simple - and I am inclined sometimes to look at it as more a continuation than a sequel (though I know better.) Dracula's Daughter is a very interesting variation on the theme...

9) Name a sequel in a horror series which clearly signaled that the once-vital franchise had run out of gas.

A. For whatever reasons, I find that series' I like I never got to the bad ones - and ridiculous sequels I've seen have tended to be of series' I don't care much about - Hellraiser III? why would I have seen that? Another kind of answer might be Bride of Reanimator - pointless and not very interesting sequel to a great film...

10) John Carradine or Lon Chaney Jr.?

A. John Carradine, though I suppose this goes well beyond horror movies.

11) What was the last horror movie you saw in a theater? On DVD or Blu-ray?

A. Restless is a ghost story and it was pretty horrible - does that count? Take Shelter might be a slightly better answer... DVD - Thirst, watched it for this post - though the Frankensteins will end up in this position.

12) Best foreign-language fiend/monster.

A. I suppose the obvious answer is Count Orlock - I don't know if silent films count, but if not, Kinski works as well as Shrek. Though I'm thinking a good contender might be either the two kids or the television in Funny Games.

13) Favorite Mario Bava movie.

A. Tough, but I'd say Black Sabbath (Three Faces of Fear) - the Verdulak section especially is one of the greatest horror films of all time.

14) Favorite horror actor and actress.

A. Karloff, easily.... And - Brigitte Lin? a case can be made, a good one...

15) Name a great horror director’s least effective movie.

A. I'm not really an obsessive horror fan, so haven't gone looking for a lot of lame films by great directors here - though - Dario Argento's Mother of Tears might count - silly, boring story, though even here, boy, it looks good...

16) Grayson Hall or Joan Bennett?

A. Joan Bennett - I mean, she was Fritz Lang's go to actress for a while! I think more or less any of his films are, in fact, scarier and more disturbing than just about anything labelled horror...

17) When did you realize that you were a fan of the horror genre? And if you’re not, when did you realize you weren’t?

A. I'm not, in any special sense. I enjoy horror films, find the genre interesting enough - but no more so than any other genre, and I don't tend to enjoy horror films because they're horror films as much as, oh - I will watch even a bad western or martial arts film just because it is a western or martial arts film. On the other hand, I suppose I do find the horror genre more interesting to talk about, as a genre, than westerns, noir, martial arts films... it does seem to have a metaphorical interest that I find fascinating...

18) Favorite Bert I. Gordon (B.I.G.) movie.

A. I wish I could answer this, but I don't think I can. If I've seen any of his films, I don't remember them, and I think if I had seen them, I would remember them.

19) Name an obscure horror favorite that you wish more people knew about.

A. Let's go with Dream Lovers - Brigitte Lin and Chow Yun-fat as contemporary characters who start dreaming about one another, and about ancient terracotta figures - they meet, they fall in love of course, there are other people involved who suffer, 8 years or 2000 years, it's still love... shares a lot with the Mummy - plot elements, and a tone of infinite romantic sorrow. Great little film that's not much talked about.

20) The Human Centipede-- yes or no?

A. I suppose I have no inherent objection to it, but I have no interest in seeing it.

21) And while we’re in the neighborhood, is there a horror film you can think of that you felt “went too far”?

A. I am not inclined to think of any film in those terms - art shows what it shows... that is somewhat different from saying that a film fails - or becomes less effective or interesting because it tries to gross people out or shock them - going for cheap effects or whatever the problem is. Something like Organ comes to mind - because it's kind of a dull, underwhelming film (or so I remember it), that tries to make up for its flaws by being grosser than its competition. I suppose by that criteria, Passion of the Christ would qualify... quite well, actually.

22) Name a film that is technically outside the horror genre that you might still feel comfortable describing as a horror film.

A. Being probably more fond of the theory of horror films than actual horror films - I suppose I do this rather a lot. I've done it a couple times already in this quiz - Passion of the Christ - the great mass of Fritz Lang films. My pet theory is that the major theme of horror is the instability of the self - how the self is threatened by forces outside it, that turn out to be somehow inside it - the themes of the Other who is a Double; themes of invasion, especially - loss of bodily integrity, loss of self.... Given that - lots of films, not horror, become very close to horror - from stuff that is, really horror, like Lost Highway - to things like, oh - L'Humanite... Bigger than Life.... Showboat....

23) Lara Parker or Kathryn Leigh Scott?

A. No, I'm well out of my depths now.

24) If you’re a horror fan, at some point in your past your dad, grandmother, teacher or some other disgusted figure of authority probably wagged her/his finger at you and said, “Why do you insist on reading/watching all this morbid monster/horror junk?” How did you reply? And if that reply fell short somehow, how would you have liked to have replied?

A. Well - no, it's never happened. For this sort of thing, you would have to ask me about either the music I listen to, or about people wondering why I watch so many cheap Hong Kong police thrillers - I have had that question...

25) Name the critic or Web site you most enjoy reading on the subject of the horror genre.

A. Siegfried Kracauer? getting there first is a big thing sometimes...

26) Most frightening image you’ve ever taken away from a horror movie.

A. This is a great question - this is the one that justifies the quiz. I don't know the answer though - unless it's that reel-long shot in Funny Games after the first set of abuse... I think, rather seriously, that Funny Games was the most disturbing horror film I have ever seen, and that the most excruciating moment in it.

27) Your favorite memory associated with watching a horror movie.

A. Another interesting one - seeing the whole 9 hours of The Kingdom over 2 nights was certainly up there

28) What would you say is the most important/significant horror movie of the past 20 years (1992-2012)? Why?

A. Significant or best? The best, when push comes to shove, probably comes down to either The Kingdom or Thirst - The Kingdom wins if you count the whole series, I think, parts 1 & 2. Thirst probably wins otherwise... Significant? MIght be something like the Ring films, popularizing Asian horror, touching off a host of American imitators... or Buffy the Vampire Slayer - which seem to be one of the places vampires made a jump into a new realm of pop culture. Though a big part of that jump is out of the horror genre...

29) Favorite Dr. Phibes curse (from either film).

A. Alas, etc.

30) You are programming an all-night Halloween horror-thon for your favorite old movie palace. What five movies make up your schedule?

A. Another great question - all right - going on the themes, Invasions - dissolution of self/other - tragic monsters - doubles - how about this:

Student of Prague
Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde (Mamoulian)
Vertigo
Lost Highway
Doppelganger

Scary Music Friday

2011-10-28T07:08:00.005-04:00

On this Halloween Weekend, here are some songs about monsters!

1. Half Japanese - Frankenstein Must Die
2. Slint - Nosferatu Man
3. Sunn0))) - Bathory Erzsebet
4. Outkast - Dracula's Wedding
5. Beck - Devil's Haircut
6. Black Sabbath - Black Sabbath
7. Blue Oyster Cult - Joan Crawford
8. Donovan - Season of the Witch
9. Mogwai - Mogwai Fear Satan
10. Fleetwood Mac - Green Manilishi

For Video - let's be like the stores! it might not be Halloween yet, but let's get started on the Christmas carols! here's Spinal Tap:

And - though it's just audio, it's still irresistable - James Chance:

Thirst

2011-10-23T16:27:00.007-04:00

I guess I will continue this month's vampire theme with what is, I think, the best horror film of the century so far - Park Chan-wook's Thirst.

Combining, as it does, two 19th century texts - Stoker and Zola - from two great traditions, that don't necessarily seem to go together - but it works, mixing the mundane....

... and mordantly comic....

... with the gorgeous style of classic vampire films - in the same shot, sometimes (has anyone ever looked better going out a tiny bathroom window than Song Kang-ho?) - but always, hitting it's high points in style - the cool blue lighting alternating with murky darkness, the perfectly posed and shot scenes and decor...

- and - at least one character who knows how to act like a vampire...

No Rapture? Well - Music then!

2011-10-21T07:26:00.004-04:00

Another slothful week, and another randomly generated list. I suppose I could have rooted around looking for topical connections - we have another dead dictator; the world has apparently not come to an end; the Rangers have tied the world series - well? Let's see what iTunes says.

1. Charlie Parker - Cheers
2. Charlie Parker - this is Always - with vocals by Earl Coleman [and again I ask - 13,000+ songs and 2 from the same record come up in a row? strange, though welcome.]
3. Glenn Gould - Piano Contrapunctus IV [iTunes is going high brow so far...]
4. Pere Ubu - Misery Goats [live, acoustic version, from Apocalypse Now - not that is timely!]
5. Waterboys - Upon the Wind and the Waves
6. Jim Reid - I'm Stranded
7. Young Marble Giants - Sporting Life [go Rangers!]
8. Pink Floyd - One of My Turns [if I did manage a theme, it would probably be to do with Pink Floyd, as I recently snagged a pile of their remastered music...]
9. Love - Orange Skies
10. Danielson Famille - Fathom the Nine Fruits Pie [from Fetch the Compass Kids, one of the many records better than This is It in 2001.]

Video? a Sax chorus playing Cheers.

And Glenn Gould himself:

Let the Right One In

2011-10-16T09:32:00.006-04:00

This week's screen shots come from Let the Right One In - one of the handful of outstanding vampire films in the 21st century (a decade of which has brought up more vampire films than you can shake a sharpened stake at.) It is a fine film, though one of it's unusual characteristics, among vampire books and films, is that the book is, in fact, even better than the movie. Stoker's Dracula is top shelf, and there are so many derived films, that a good number of them don't measure up - but Nosferatu is better (that actually true for either Murnau's or Herzog's version) - with lesser vampire books (which are legion), this is almost universal. I mean - even the Twilight movie - the first one anyway, the only one I have had to watch (and read) - is almost a decent film, at least to a point.... This goes pretty far - last year, in the vampire class I mentioned a couple times, the subject was broached from time to time - why (after Dracula, and with a few exceptions here and there along the way), are these books so bad? why are there no (or very few) vampire books that are really good? Unspoken in this question, though it certain occurred to me, is the corollary - why are there so few serious and ambitious vampire books - and so many serious ambitious vampire films? Murnau, Dreyer, Herzog, Denis, Park, Maddin, etc.? And why are the schlocky vampire books so bad, and even run of the mill vampire films seem to have a spark? I don't know if I have an answer - except that vampires look so good on screen - or that vampires are, like films, shadows on the wall - or maybe that filmmakers have to create striking imagery to be frightening, and books - I don't know...

But that aside - this time, the book Let the Right One In is better than the film - the book is simply outstanding. But the film is no slouch -handsome and understated, with a subtle touch for glorious horror imagery, tucking things into the backs and corners of the frame, like Eli climbing the wall in the back of this shot....

But one of it's best features is the use of spaces - the empty, stark, cold spaces of Blackeberg, a vision of Swedish hell, swallowing its inhabitants whole. The book (more than the movie, though some of this survives) seems to be explicitly about the return of a violent, pagan, past to the sterile, domesticated present - nature red in tooth and claw coming back to get its own. Though if Eli is a kind of hell visited on the modern world, the modern world is a kind of hell for her - and Tomas Alfredson shoots the suburb to make it look as horrifying as anything Eli might do.

Musical Friday

2011-10-14T07:05:00.003-04:00

Well, I was thinking about possible themes for this Friday, but as usual, haven't done any prep work, so it's gonna be another randomizer day....

1. DNA - Surrender
2. Minor Threat - No Reason
3. Jimi Hendrix - Purple Haze (live at Winterland)
4. Naked CIty - Igneous Ejaculation
5. Mission of Burma - Academy Fight Song
6. Warlocks - Come Save Us
7. Times New Viking - No Time, No Hope
8. Rolling Stones - I am Waiting
9. Queen - Under Pressure
10. Otomo Yoshihide, Bill Laswell, Yoshida Tatsuya

There has been some chatter in the blogosphere about someone (Taylor Clark by name) at Slate declaring the Strokes' This is It the best record of the 00's - most of the chatter negative.... Amanda Marcotte noted something that may or may not have anything to do with the Slate writer, but is interesting anyway - that the Strokes are a bunch of straight white guys, and so they look like a rock band, in a way that - oh - the White Stripes or TV on the Radio don't. I've taken a stab at listing the best music of the 2000s (by which I mean, my favorite music of the decade, but that has to be obvious) - and she's right - the list (my list) is pretty thin on all straight white guy bands - Mercury Rev (though with their first album made without a regular female member), Liars, Grinderman, Radiohead, Gomez get in the top 25 - plus a couple solo artists - the rest are mixed... even with the near misses listed - only two or three more all straight white guys bands appear (Modest Mouse, Mission of Burma, Fire Theft...) Now - obviously I have somewhat idiosyncratic tastes, that tends not to encompass a lot of mainstream rock bands - but I think you can see something changing there. I'm still mostly listening to rock (with something of a jazz/avant garde flavor to it) - I'm not looking for groups with women or Black men in them (I am a big fan of Japanese rock, though - but most of those groups are mixed - my favorites - Boris, Acid Mothers Temple, Ghost, Boredoms, all feature women.) And yet... And Marcotte's list, quite different from mine - shows the same thing....

I couldn't do that in the 70s - a 10 best, 20 best of the 70s would be very heavy on straight white guys. 60s too, if I stuck to rock. (Though you'd get Mo Tucker up there at the top...) 80s - it starts to change - though mainly because of Husker Du and REM. In the 90s -a quick top 10 albums? would feature PJ Harvey, Pere Ubu, Yo La Tengo, REM, Sleater Kinney, Mercury Rev - all mixed - plus Pavement, Janes Addiction, Built to Spill, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds - say... I think it is different. For whatever reasons, even within rock, "the image many people have in their heads about what a great band should look like" (as Marcotte puts it) isn't what it used to be. Neat.

Video? what a great band looks like - Times New Viking?

What great rock bands sometimes looked like in 1980 or so:

And sometimes in the 60s:

Horror of Dracula

2011-10-09T09:35:00.001-04:00

Though I do get a bit annoyed at the way October turns into horror month on so many blogs I read - I can't resist playing along, at least on Sundays.... After all, so many horror films look so good - they are an endless source of great looking screen captures. So here's Christopher Lee and company, looking very good.

What iTunes has Wrought

2011-10-07T07:32:00.003-04:00

Can I find a musical tribute to Steve Jobs? Maybe - but when you get down to it, isn't every random ten a tribute to Steve Jobs? Sure sure, randomization existed before iTunes and in a lot of places besides iTunes, but it spread, and spread over everything, thanks to those little white boxes....

1. Keiji Haino - See that My Grave is Kept Clean [I see that iTunes knows what is expected of it...]
2. Spirit - Elijah
3. Dr. Nerve - Three Curiously Insubstantial Duets: II
4. Pylon - Italian Movie Theme
5. Charlie Parker - The Gypsy [one of the tunes from the breakdown session always a bit harrowing...]
6. Ella Fitzgerald - The Lady is a Tramp
7. Mono - Pure as Snow (Trails of the Winter Storm)
8. Shonen Knife - Cycling is Fun
9. Liars - Leather Prowler
10. Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks - Fall Away [evidence that I do still buy some records these days...]

Video? I think Kraftwerk is in order, don't you?

Of course - and even more appropriately - Heimcomputer!

But I do want to post that Keiji Haino song - two parts:

and

Steve Jobs (And Me)

2011-10-06T23:00:00.000-04:00

I know everyone else has written about Steve Jobs, but I have to too. I try not to be too in your face about it (with strangers anyway), but I am a complete Mac head, a fanatic, a 72 virgin iPods in heaven type, if such a thing made sense - they are the only computers I have ever used on my own dime, and I expect that won't change as long as there are Macs to be used. I am in the cult, and have been from the first time I used one - they have shaped my life, for better or worse.

20 odd years ago I was working part time in a law library (and full time at a book store), expecting to stay there until I'd paid enough of my debts to live on a bookseller's wage - when someone said they might have some work for me in the systems group if I wanted it, and gave me as SE/30. Here, they said, learn this. I sat down at the machine and started typing and was addicted. That is the best way I can describe it - like being given crack, and being addicted on the spot. I had used computers before - a vax in high school, my mother had a commodore, my brother (a few years younger) had an apple, I think (maybe a Franklin, something like that) - I'd poked around on DOS machines, or whatever they were at the time. I could see the use of these things - my brother wrote all his school papers on his computer, and you could see how much better it was than my method of going from longhand to hunt and peck to correction tape and white out - better, but the amount of work it would take to get there - and the amount of irritation and ugliness I would have to put up with, looking at those other screens.... But I sat in front of that little SE/30 - looked at the screen, the desktop, the little pictures you clicked on and they'd open up, the "folders" inside "folders", the way you never had to type a path, type the name of anything, you could se the names there - that made sense. And then I opened Word Perfect [yes - this was a very strange set up - that extreme rarity, a big corporation that used Macs - and a Mac shop that used WordPerfect; I don't know why, but they did...], started typing, and that was that. It was obvious that this is how computers should work. This is how writing should work - this was better than a typewriter could dream of being - this was better than pen and paper! It was easier to compose than on pen and paper - and you could fix your mistakes, change your mind, you could move stuff around, you could make words bigger, smaller, make the letters look any way you wanted - without hacking around with codes, without blocking text first - you just pointed the mouse, you clicked, you dragged, you did something on a menu, you clicked a button - it was right.

That was the end. I was doomed. I started working for systems instead of the library - eventually I did it full time - I am there to this day. It was thrilling for a year or two - the company put computers on everyone’s desk in the course of the next 2-3 years - and I found that that, setting up computers, getting to them to work, to connect to things, to print, showing people what they could do with WordPerfect (and eventually Word) - that was good, a challenge, kind of fun. That first couple years, I went to computer shows, I read MacWorld and MacUser and MacWeek faithfully, kept track of new developments (scanning and OCR! that was a big one, for a while), I got my own computer at home and obsessed over fonts and various word processors and page layout programs and graphics programs - I loved it. I didn't even mind the job.

All of that I can blame on Steve Jobs. If my company had been using PCs, this would not have happened. Some of it would - they probably would have invited me to work for systems, given me a PC to learn, and I probably would have taken it - better than doing pocket parts, after all - but move to full time? It was nice money (compared to selling books), but I liked my bookstore job - liked working in bookstores, liked the people, liked the location (Harvard Square), liked the customers, liked everything - nice as the money was working on computers for a big corporation, if I hadn't loved the computers, I don't think the money would have held me. For that matter, I don't think I would have bothered learning enough about a PC to have the option - I took to the Mac quickly, figured it out, its programs, started building stuff in Hypercard immediately - I made myself useful, because the machines were worth learning. I wouldn't have done that otherwise - I didn't care, really, about computers, in the abstract - I never bothered to learn any programming languages (other than hypercard, some macro languages, some VBA later, some html) - I certainly wouldn't have cared as much as I did on DOS machines.

And that, finally, is why I've written all this, and why it's relevant to Steve Jobs. I was never that interested in the technology - never saw the need to learn to program or put together computers out of old wires and shoeboxes. I was a user, when all was said and done, and almost defiantly so. I am probably pretty close to the consumer Steve Jobs imagined in his heart of hearts all these years - someone who wants to be able to get a machine that will let him do all the things he wants to do, and do them with style, without worrying too much about what's going on under the hood. I loved that SE/30 because I could use it to write, and it looked good on the screen while I was writing, and it created handsome pieces of paper... I could draw things with it - I could do math with it (I didn't have Excel at first, so I built spreadsheets in hypercard - I might have had a book for help, I don't remember) - I could make databases, do all kinds of things, without worrying about the code. That's what I wanted, and what I want - to write, to draw, the make databases and keep databases, to make pictures, look at pictures, look at cat videos, make cat videos - connect all this stuff to other people, argue with people, look at their pictures, find people who share my obsessions and hobby horses and curiosities. I don't care, really, about the machines, I care about what the machines get me to - but I want the machines to get me there without pissing me off. And - 20 years of Macs have managed that, even the Microsoft programs running on them. The Windows devices I'm stuck with at work - a different matter - even now. I like the first comment on Making Light's Jobs post - I too wanted to be a power user, not a programmer. And Macs made that possible - directly, and immediately, in ways (at least in 1990 or so) that were not conceivable on any other machines. It was possible to master the machines, most of the software, just by knowing what you wanted it to achieve and plugging away at it, and paying attention. I could teach myself what I needed - I was quite happy to be able to make a living guiding other people through their problems getting their computers to do what they want to do - so here I am....

The Macs are long gone at work - that experiment was killed off by the Apple's mid-90s woes - but by that time, Windows 95=Mac 89 - so most of the old principals apply. A lot of my experiences are very closely tied to their time and place - the fact that I hadn't been brought up on computers (as kids 5 or 6 years younger than me were) - the fact that the gap between Macs and PCs was still as dramatic as it was in 1990. 10 years later, it is hard to imagine getting a couple years out of college without significant time on a computer - and if it were possible, I'd probably have been as comfortable on a Win 95 or 98 machine as a Mac. But we're here to talk about Steve Jobs, his effects on the world - and those post Windows 95 machines are his babies (though rather ugly and misshapen brats) as much as the Macs are. Job's vision of how computers work spread out, from Apple to Microsoft, through the world - and not just in general terms - WIndows 95=Mac 89 is really not far from the truth.

One of the many things I read this morning about Jobs noted that he had been instrumental in 6 world changing things - Apple II, Macs, iPods, iPhones, iPads and Pixar - that's true, but I don't know if it does justice to his impact. You could put Mac on their twice - the original Macs, and the iMacs - that were almost as revolutionary. They saved the company, created the platform for the iPods and iPhones to follow - but they also changed the way the world looked; they changed the language. And it's hard to overestimate, really, just how important the Macintosh and it's OS really were. GUI's - and the nature of GUIs - icons, in space, clicks and folders and apps and documents, the whole arrangement of data - is the standard now. And then there is The Mouse. Reader - you can click on that blue underlined bit, and your computer will display a page explaining the history and nature of this device - and that - the fact that you go to that page by clicking on it, instead of typing it into a box - underlies another of the world's utterly transformative technological innovations - the World Wide Web, html. This is our world, and it looks the way it does, because Steve Jobs pushed for a particular kind of interface - one he did not invent, including many things like the mouse that other people made and used first - but he made them integral to his computers....

For me - and more or less by definition, anyone reading this - Steve Jobs has shaped the world we look at as much as anyone alive in the last century.

And I haven't even mentioned his effect on film...

Flann O'Brien Centennial

2011-10-05T20:22:00.002-04:00

When money's tight and hard to get
And your horse has also ran,
When all you have is a heap of debt -
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN

Flann O'Brien - Brian O'Nolan (or perhaps more properly, Brian Ó Nualláin), to his mum - born 100 years ago today. I read At Swim-Two-Birds 20 odd years ago, probably at the prompting of Anthony Burgess, and have read it at regular intervals since; read, 20 years ago, everything else I could find by O'Brien (and Myles na Gopaleen), loving it all, though not returning so often. Not sure why, as The Third Policeman and The Dalkey Archive are nearly as entertaining as the first novel. I dip into the Best of Myles more often, though usually not at length - an essay here, a catechism there....

What, as to the quality of solidity, imperviousness, and firmness, are facts?
Hard.
And as to temperature?
Cold.
What with what do they share this quality of frigidity?
Print.
To what do hard facts belong?
The situation.
And to what does a cold fact belong?
The matter.
What must we do to the hard facts of the situation?
Face up to the hard facts of the situation.
WHat does a cold fact frequently still do?
Remain.
And what is notoriously useless as a means of altering the hard facts of the situation?
All the talk in the world.
Is this killing you?
It certainly is.

He was, his books are, truly delightful. All of them as funny as anything ever written, and just as clever - many a joke on novel making to be found. And could he turn a phrase - I could quote all his books whole, almost - though this bit, on drink, got me laughing hopelessly the first time I read it, and, well -

Innumerable persons with whom I had conversed had represented to me that spiritous liquors and intoxicants generally had an adverse effect on the senses and the body and that those who became addicted to stimulants in youth were unhappy throughout life and met with death at the end by a drunkard's fall, expiring ingloriously at the stair-bottom in a welter of blood and puke.

Ah, the musical flow of the language, the hint of parody (the language of temperance pamphlets and sermons), and that glorious swerve at the end. Beautiful, man. It'll live, Mr. Lamont, it'll live.

Rio Lobo

2011-10-02T09:58:00.004-04:00

Another lazy Sunday - and since I was watching this one... if I were called on to make some simple remarks, I might say how much it feels like a silent movie, with some interpolated sound scenes. The dialogue is very on the nose - all exposition and attempts at banter (whether the banter is lacking or the actors bantering aren't up to it, I'm not sure - some of both I guess) - but the imagery remains - delightful. Slyly delightful, I guess - efficient, effective action scenes - lots of nicely framed shots of people hanging around... a pleasure all around.

Loading the MacGuffin:

I will seldom miss the chance to post a picture of a train:

Here comes trouble, in the form of a woman:

Though it being Hawks, she will be soon be one of the boys:

Hanging around:

There is a plot, though, advancing in casually - but look how carefully! - composed and staged shots like this....

Amen.

Crash and Burn, Crimson Hose Department

2011-09-30T21:28:00.004-04:00

Well, Terry Francona is gone. I suppose I should offer a post-mortem on the season. I don't know how Francona got to be the scapegoat for their collapse - I believe someone mentioned during their last game that the starters had averaged 4.2 innings a game in September - you aren't going to win doing that. ESPN collects some stats - 7.08 ERA, the worst month ever for their starters - Andrew Miller leading the way with a 11.70 ERA... right. There's a lot of sniping and backbiting going on - Francona complaining about the bums in his clubhouse, which I suppose the team will blame on him - lots of sniffing about conditioning and attitude - but the thing about those awful pitching numbers is that there was nothing surprising about them. The team ran Lackey, Wakefield and Miller out there all summer, and none of them were all that good to start with. Or - especially in Wake's case - they were clearly operating on borrowed time. You could see this coming - once Buchholz got hurt, you could see doom waiting on the horizon. I suspect a big part of the team's downfall was that the team kept winning through June and July - Lackey looked like he'd stabilized a bit; Wake was effective; Miller even had a couple decent starts. I suspect Epstein and company looked at them and thought they'd be okay - the team could slug its way out of any slumps it fell into, they were holding their own, they could tweak here or there, bring in Harden or Bedard and prop up the back of the rotation, and they'd be fine. Oh god.... Watching them - they did seem likely to hit their way to the post-season, and I could imagine Bedard getting hot (though I would hardly have bet anything on it) - but - I can't say I had many illusions about the post-season, by the middle of August. Wake, as is his habit, ran out of gas somewhere around 100-120 innings... Miller lost what little trace of effectiveness he had... Lackey appearances were a nightmare all year - Bedard was Bedard and kept the trainer busy... And so? when Beckett and Lester began to run down, it was over - the bullpen was run into the ground (and always overworked - the back of the rotation wasn't exactly soaking up innings before the collapse.) In the end - they crashed and burned, and frankly - other than the (worn out) bullpen, and the mediocrity from Lester and Beckett - nothing about it seems remotely out of order. The back end of the rotation performed exactly as I expected them to.

The thing is, they had nothing else to go to. They didn't have options in place of letting Wakefield try yet again for that 200th win - other than maybe putting Aceves in the rotation, though I don't know what that would have helped as it is, he threw the second most innings on the team (per that ESPN article.) And that ought to be a hint as to what I think about Francona leaving. The team didn't fail because he lost the clubhouse - the team failed because they had 2 major league starters. Now - Lackey has been good, and probably will be again - if Freddy Garcia and Bartolo Colon can rise from the dead, why not John Lackey? And Wake was, as usual, pretty good through about 120 innings. But past is past, and in the present, neither was worth a damn. Bedard was sort of okay for a while, but he's pitching with the same arm he's been occasionally pitching with all his career, so the results are predictable. Andrew Miller - may be a worthy project, but not one you put in a game when there's anything on the line. And again I say - none of this should have been surprising. And - something should have been done. And if it wasn't done - I kind of wish the team, or Epstein, would say, we ran out of pitching, we didn't have the arms to contend. Because that's the truth - even if they made the playoffs, they would be easy pickings, as things stand now.

So - I suppose it is obvious what I think they have to do in the post-season: they need to get a reliable starting pitcher. They probably should resign Papelbon and Ortiz - they should find a decent right fielder (better if they can, but that may be easier said than done) - but most of all, they need a proper starting pitcher. I do not think they can afford to assume, or hope, that Buchholz will be healthy (though I expect he will be) and Lackey will remember how to pitch (though I imagine he will, sooner or later). Even if they do - they need more assurance than that. Now - the real problem is that they need to start developing their own arms again - they seem to leave themselves short a few years in a row. They could use Justin Masterson right about now... But that aside - they need to have a lot more in reserve than they had this year.

And finally - losing Tito strikes me as being a very ominous sign. The sox went decades - I mean, decades - without keeping a manager more than 3-4 years at a time - including some very good ones. The job eats them alive, here in Boston, with its rabid sports press and fans and its sometimes - unrealistic management. In the old old days, they tried to do it on the cheap - in this brave new world, they try to spend like the Yankees - but the Yanks have managed to keep a remarkably stable organization over the last 15 years, with obvious results. I don't know. Tito gave them stability in the dugout, on the field - now that he's gone, I suspect they will soon have the managerial revolving doors spinning. They spend a lot of money - they won't have the loyalty and commitment to any new guy they had to him. This is going to become a habit, I fear. I've become a soccer fan in the last couple years and I dread that they will decide to adopt the Chelsea method - pour in the money, run out a new manager every couple years, watch Man U/New York run up 3 championships to every one of yours. Which, to be fair, has plenty of baseball precedent - the Mets, the Dodgers - I suppose it is not surprising that Bobby Valentine and JOe Torre - Mets and Dodger alums - are being touted for this job.

All right - that's enough of that. What about the playoffs, huh? the teams that are in are pretty interesting in themselves....

AL: I say - Tigers are going to beat the Yankees. Yanks are obviously a pretty good team but - Freddy Garcia? Bartolo Colon? Ivan Nova? Course I said the same thing at the beginning of the year and look where that got me... I do think the Tigers are going to win. In Texas? TB has pitching, yes, and a decent team, but Texas is really good - all over the place really good. They are, I think, the real team to beat in the AL - I don't think TB will do it.

NL: Should be the Phils in something like a walk - all that pitching, and some real hitters... the Cards aren't bad, have Pujols plus Berkman and Holliday - I don't know. I don't think they have shut down pitching, and the Phils do, so... The Brewers should beat Arizona, though it wouldn't be impossible for the Snakes to win. Just very unlikely. Then - The Brewers aren't too far off the Phils - offensive punch, very strong rotation, strong bullpen - just that - if the Phillies' pitchers are hot - and they usually are - they won 102 games for a reason.

A lot of neat World Series matchups can be generated by this - Phils over Texas is the most likely I think; Tigers over Brewers would be the most entertaining, I suspect. With the sox out, I find myself without too strong feelings - I rather like quite a few of these teams (Phils, Rangers, Tigers; the Brewers and Rays to some extent) - the Diamondbacks are a fun story. As always, though, I know who to root against - the Damned Yankees and Tony LaRussa. I haven't forgiven him for using 7 pitchers in a meaningless midsummer game I attended in Baltimore in 1994 - the damned idiot had to know the season was only going to run another week! it was 99 degrees of Baltimore heat - and he's running 7 pitchers out there? I will never forgive him.

Friday Random Ten

2011-09-30T07:40:00.000-04:00

Pure Randomness!

1. The Pogues - The Gentleman Soldier
2. Little Feat - Crack in the Door
3. Omar Rodriguez-Lopez - If Gravity Lulls, I can Hear the World Pant
4. Pearl Jam - Release
5. Devo - Gates of Steel
6. Velvet Underground - The Murder Mystery
7. Heavens to Betsy - Paralyzed
8. Vernon Reid & Masque - Brilliant Corners
9. Beck, Bogert & Appice - Lady
10. Nick Cave & Bad Seeds - Darker with the Day

It must be said - the randomizer is doing it's job today - nice variety, some semi-obscurity, deep album tracks from the acts iTunes is full of (Velvets, Nick Cave, various incarnations of Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, who I think managed to release a record a week for a few years in the middle of the 00s, and anyone who can play guitar like that, I'm gonna buy all of it), and all of it interesting - it might prove a challenge to come up with video, though.

If I go with substitutes though - here's Vernon Reid playing with Jamaaladeen Tacuma and Calvin Weston, which should satisfy your free jazz/funk/fusion needs:

And why not - here's Omar Rodriguez-Lopez working the not-Mars Volta side of the house...

And I suppose, following through with the conceit - here's the other big guitar hero on the list, playing something not on the list - Jeff Beck doing his thing in 1999 for Conan, making a piece of completely generic boogie almost bearable:

Rules of Threes

2011-09-29T07:14:00.003-04:00

I have to take this as a sign - three stories in a row in my RSS feeder about the dangers of not paying enough (or the right kind) of attention to history.

Paul Krugman - History Roolz!

Tom the Dancing Bug - Fighting the Wrong Wars.

And the Onion Historians Politely Remind Nation To Check What's Happened In Past Before Making Any Big Decisions - via Lawyers, Guns and Money.

Belated Maddin Post

2011-09-26T18:36:00.000-04:00

A very busy week and weekend has made me miss not only my usual Sunday screen shot post, but a Guy Maddin blogathon, hosted by Fandor. Alas! I can do no more than offer a partial atonement...

REM Retires

2011-09-23T09:49:00.004-04:00

I suppose this should be a big deal for me. It may be true that they are a bit past their sell-by date, but in the 80s, they were the real deal. I spent the middle part of the decade obsessed by them, before my deeper exploration of all the underground, semi-marginal strands of rock scattered my attentions - I can concur with what Nancy Nall said about them - "They were my favorite band in the last time in my life when I thought I needed to make such a designation." I suppose that's roughly true for me (though probably a record or two later than for her. Fables of the Reconstruction was the one I wore out...) After U2, they were the band that marked the transition from the 70s to the 80s - from classic rock to contemporary - and more than U2, they steered me in the direction I would follow - forward - they got me into the Feelies and the Replacements and Husker Du, and into the Velvet Underground and Joy DIvision and the Byrds, the bands that inspired the bands I liked that were around at the time... They were significant - the first CD I bought was the Reckoning - Lifes Rich Pageant the first record I bought on vinyl, then bought on CD 2 weeks later - I was an enthusiast, for a while anyway.

But.... They faded after a while - how much was due to their changes and how much to mine, I'm not sure, but records like Green and Out of Time didn't do much - I shrugged them off - bought one fo them on vinyl and may never have listened to it - if I ever got them on CD, I didn't put them into the computer, the 21st century mark of whether I care or not... I loved Automatic for the People, though I thought it came out of nowhere - but it didn't reestablish them in the center of my passions - I never did buy Monster, and though I have a few of the later ones, I barely listen to them, and tend to hit the skip button when their songs come up... what can I say. None of that changes how good they were, and how much I worshipped them in the 80s, and I don't hit skip when those songs come up...

So for this Friday - here are my 10 favorite REM songs:

1. Driver 8
2. Little America
3. Try Not to Breath
4. Life and How to Live It
5. Pretty Persuasion
6. Catapult
7. 7 Chinese Brothers
8. Radio Free Europe
9. South Central Rain
10. Undertow [might as well at least acknowledge the later years, huh?]

Trains!

And - appropriately - leaving the stage, with Radio Free Europe and Little America.

Good bye, and thank you.

In The Theater Old and New

2011-09-21T21:30:00.001-04:00

A couple weeks of viewing... some interesting films here, though nothing to measure up to the old timer of the bunch. (I should add - there's an undue number of action/suspense films here - I have made no effort to avoid giving away plot points... so perhaps, if you are planning to see some of these and don't want them spoiled - have a care. I don't think there are many mysteries revealed, but...)

Contagion - 10/15 - Steven Soderbergh's latest, an disaster movie about and epidemic, treated with a mixture of excitement and matter of fact. Starts with Gwyneth Paltrow coughing in an airport where she is waiting for a plane after a quickie with a man - she has just come from Hong Kong, and Soderbergh takes us there, to another sick man, then a man dying on a bus in Tokyo, then - a string of sickness and death and then - characters: a sleazy blogger, a doctors at the Center for Disease Control, GP's family (Matt Damon), etc. - they figure out what is happening and the story is on its way. The opening sequence might be the best - the quick cutting from runny noses to hands to doorknobs and credit cards and bus and subway poles to terrible painful death.... Once everyone figures out what is going on, they try to control it - Kate Winslet in MInnesota, Elliot Gould in San Francisco - and as it gets worse, the control becomes more desperate - panic in the streets of Chicago, Minneapolis, Hong Kong - society threatens to collapse, violence, disorder, kidnappings, careless use of social media, etc. - cures are promised, conspiracies mooted, money is made, experiments are performed, press conferences and TV shows go awry - and in the end? a doctor finds a vaccine, tries it on herself, it works, and the world begins to emerge again from this disaster.

Soderbergh takes an interesting approach - he uses horror and science fiction tropes, building tension, then sliding away from them - suggesting - is it a zombie picture? is it science fiction? is it terrorism? is it a government conspiracy? The evil blogger (Jude Law) plays an interesting part in this - the paranoid outsider - and Soderbergh plays with the character - is he right? does forsythia cure this? he seems to cure himself - but did he? did he just have a mild case? did he have something else? did he fake it all for the publicity? - Soderbergh holds off letting us know until the end. He knows this is a major archtype in disaster films - he knows government conspiracies are a major theme of these films - he knows science vs. money vs. power are fundamental conflicts in these films, and he keeps them all active as long as he can. Choosing among all the options only when he has to... This happens over and over - suggestions of terrorism raised and dropped; Gould's experiments, in an unsafe environment - that could make things worse, or better, and which it is we have to wait for... It's a fascinating exercise in film construction, really - a very nice film, overall.

The Guard - 10/15 - highly amusing if inconsequential cop buddy picture. Brendan Gleeson plays Boyle, a bad cop in Galway, who finds a man murdered in a holiday house - then at a meeting about a shipment of drugs coming in, sees the man as one of the gang. So he and Don Cheadle, playing an FBI agent, head back to the coast to work on the case - sort of. Cheadle gets hung out to dry for most of the film, since it's Gleeson's day off - alas, he spends the day getting his rocks off with a pair of whores - who turn out to be working for the drug smugglers and are bound on blackmail... etc. The crooks, inevitably, come to kill our man, but in the meanwhile he's found a stash of IRA guns, which prove useful when the time comes. It's all very neatly plotted, down to the convenience of the three guns he steals (a derringer, a glock and an AK-47) - sometimes, maybe, it's a bit too neat. The real pleasure is in the performances, and the material given tot he actors - Gleeson is glorious, Cheadle plays more of a straight man, but gets his moments - and the bad guys (Liam Cunningham, Mark Strong, David Wilmot) get to chew through some highly amusing, if improbable, dialogue. Like so many films, it plays halfway between an homage to Pulp Fiction and a parody - though here, it pushes the metafiction to 11, and makes no bones about its plain joy in the words and the way the men say them - the crooks arguing aboiut their favorite philosopher and quoting Nietzsche, that kind of thing. It's a load of fun.

World on a Wire - 13/15 - A wonderful science fiction film - actually a 2-part TV show - from Rainer Werner Fassbinder, in 1973. Virtual reality, with a strong PK Dick vibe... There is, apparently, a huge VR computer - the Simulacron - overseen by the government.... the film starts with its programmer going a bit crazy ont he government people, then, after making some obscure comments to the head of security - dying.... His replacement is Stiller - the security chief (Lause) tells him about Vollmer - but then - disappears, in the middle of a party. And then? Stiller sets out to run the project while worrying about these two mysteries (Vollmer's death and Lause's disappearance) - made worse by the fact that no one else can remember Lause at all. Uh oh. He is not the last person to disappear - or reappear, inside the simulacron. It is not too much a spoiler, I think, to say that by the end of part one, a character from the Simulacron tells Stiller that he is also part of a simulation program - another, bigger one. In Part 2, Stiller sets out to find out if this is true, and what you might do with the information if it was.

It's all handled quite well - the is-it-real-or-is-it-Simulacron business stays interesting - we may have a pretty clear idea what is going on, and by the middle of the film, so do the characters - but they still have to prove it, to themselves or anyone else, and how this goes remains interesting. But the plot is less thrilling than the filmmaking - Fassbinder is working his most Sirkean mode - gorgeous compositions, mirrors and balls and flowers and doors and screens, complex and gorgeous. The sound design, also typical for Fassbinder, is magnificent. And the lead - Klaus Lowitsch - is just great - giving a wild, athletic performance, like a mix of Mike Hammer and Jackie Chan. The film too draws on cinematic history - Sirk plus Alphaville plus Kiss Me Deadly plus god knows what - a brilliant piece of work.

Rapt - 11/15 - Strong french thriller, that reminds me, oddly, of Contagion - in the way it deals with genre conventions, it's way of slipping around obvious points, obvious emotions, and so on - its matter of fact depiction of a disaster. In this case - Yvan Attal plays a very rich businessman who we see working, meeting high government officials, fucking a mistress, playing poker, interacting with his wife and children, then getting kidnapped. He's hauled off to god knows where - abused - has a finger cut off and mailed to his family with a ransom note for 50 million Euros Is he worth it? will they pay? Well - they only have 20 million Euros to spare - his company surely isn't going to pay (though they could offer a loan) - then all his sins and misdemeanors start to be revealed and - well, the wife still wants to pay.... So - the crooks try different tactics, try to work with different parts of his family and entourage - his lawyer tries to pay, for example, thought he cops get wind of it and follow, queering that deal. And so it goes - and after another failure to get the money - the crooks turn him loose.... and now things get really difficult. Everyone distrusts everyone else - all his sins are in the open; he's a bit chuffed that no one bothers to ask him how he is doing, how he is holding up. He loses it all in the end, everything except the money - but the crooks send him a letter.... Throughout, the film maintains a great sense of multiple perspectives, and pays it off especially well at the end. The way he and his wife both seem to be right - and wrong; the way we don't really learn whether he is indispensable to his firm or just a figurehead; the way we see hints of deeper plots - who organized all this? is it just a bunch of smart crooks, or is there a conspiracy? These things aren't resolved - like Soderbergh, Lucas Belvaux plays with genre expectations, plays with possible plots and interpretations, but doesn't settle them. Another very fine film.

Drive - 10/15 - existential crime film, that taciturn 70s style, with an 80s look and feel - about a driver, who obviously never gets a name, who does stunts, works in a garage, and drives getaway cars.... Inevitably, after one job, he moves into a new building and meets a pretty girl with a cute kid - the kind of woman and kid who play games and cutesy jokes at the supermarket... her car breaks down and he helps and etc. He doesn't seem to fuck her though! Steve McQueen would have fucked her. Anyway - he has an old coot as a mentor, the mentor is trying to get him into the race car circuit, he's dealing with crooks to do it, the crooks are played by Albert Brooks and Ron Perlman, which seems important. (The diriver is Ryan Gosling, girl is Carey Mulligan, coot is Bryan Cranston).) The girl's husband gets out of jail, but he owes people money, so the driver offers to help, but alas - crosses are doubled and doubled again and before long the driver is on the warpath. This is, I'm afraid, one of those films where there are only about 12 people in the city of LA - so obviously the driver's own gangster friends are involved... Anyway. It's hard to describe the plot without getting a bit glib - to say it's been done before... it has moments - it builds to a certain amount of tension - the crooks, especially, are given scenery to chew, lines to linger over and such - there are a couple very nicely shot action sequences. But you know - it's nothing new, it's not all that interesting an old thing - at least - it something I have seen before, and don't feel any particular need to see it again. It's kind of the opposite of Contagion and Rapt - where they raise genre conventions then complicate or confound them, this one just ticks them off and delivers them, on cue. Without any sense of just how silly and sentimental it all is... It's still a fairly effective film - I mean - 10 is a good rating - there are parts of it I would watch any chance I got - I wish Albert Brooks could get a spinoff as this character - but.... it's the least interesting of this run of theatrical viewings, by a fair margin.

Fassbinder - Capitalism, Violence, Media

2011-09-18T10:04:00.000-04:00

I have watched a handful of Fassbinder films lately - World on a Wire most notably - but a couple other films on DVD as well.

It was hard not to think about this, from The Third Generation, during the 9/11 commemorations last week. One of the first things I thought after the towers were hit was, we are just like everyone else now - we will have to live with terrorism, the way they have in the rest of the world for decades. It's an odd thing to think, though - in the 90s, we had the first WTC attack, we had Oklahoma CIty, we had the Atlanta bombings, we had bombings and assassinations against abortion providers - we had plenty of terrorists and terrorism in the good old USA. Still - I thought it, and a lot of other people said something similar. But oddly - we didn't seem to think that maybe the rest of the world, so experienced in terrorism, might have already had a few things to say about it. We have never been so unique - we are not the first, nor the last, to deal with these things.

The three Fassbinders I watched last week - Third Generation, Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven, and World on a Wire - all deal with violence - with the intersection of power and resistance. And the intersection of the individual and society - society in all its forms, from families to political groups to, well - metaphysical ontology... How one man's possibly inexplicable act (Herman Kuster's murder suicide) is pulled into the web of human relations - how do you make sense of it? What do you do about it? Mother Kusters does this directly - it is her husband, after all, who did the deed. But she does this while the rest of society pulls at it themselves. The media, the politicians, pulling at the deed, and at her, from all directions, to put it (and her) to use...

The media is the other great theme of the three films - or I could say, mediation, through technology and the media. The ever-present television of the Third Generation; the press and its abuses in Mother Kusters; and - the very premise of World on a Wire. The question, I suppose, is one of representation, representation and power - explicitly in World on a Wire (how do you represent the real world in a computer, that you can control?), but just as clearly in the others. How do you represent the world? what happens? the people in it? how are those images controlled?

Third Generation stages this question - it is in the plot, in the ways the industrialists and police manipulate the terrorists, but also in the TV sets and cameras that pervade its world. The TV set always on, haunting every scene (visibly or audibly) - and then leading to the terrorists' attempt (rather absurd, really) to control the image themselves.

And in the films themselves - they are also representations, not reality. Fassbinder keeps that close at hand - the ending of Mother Kusters, with its frozen image and cold, fatalistic text, to pull us away from the direct reality, to acknowledge the representation:

...or endings - I am not entirely sure what the history of the 2 endings of Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven is - but they create a lovely effect: the harshness of the first, followed by a different kind of harshness in the second, as everyone just walks away:

And then - what I imagine is something of a take off on the end of The Last Laugh.... though why not give her a happy ending?

Guilty Pleasures

2011-09-16T08:00:00.001-04:00

Another Friday, another music post, and this time (thanks to the iPod tossing up one of the songs below), about Guilty Pleasures. This is a hardy perennial on the internet, so I won't claim any originality... And I suppose there's not much originality in my opinion of the idea of guilty pleasures in the first place - I don't tend to feel guilty about my pleasures. But I won't deny, there are things I like that need a bit of explaining. Some of them things that shouldn't require too much justification - bands that get a bad reputation for some reason, that fall out of fashion, that are associated with values that are denigrated, etc. - but are in fact quite good. Light pop, cheesy metal, bloated bombast, singer-songwriters - that kind of thing - styles that manage to produce an inordinate amount of garbage - but when done well, are done very well indeed.

So - there are perhaps those who would think you should feel guilty for liking, oh - the Carpenters - the Steve Miller Band - Gordon Lightfoot - but not me. There are certainly bands that sneak up to the line - 70s Jefferson Starship, say - they were ready to topple over into the utter dreck they made in the 80s - but songs like Miracles or Caroline are better than good. (This may come down to the degree of involvement from Marty Balin - he seems to be the key to the good stuff...) But basically - these are very fine acts, working in styles that have passed out of (and into, and out again, every half a decade maybe) fashion - or who worked at a time, in a milieu that produced a kid of structural crappiness (the 1970s!), that the material still transcends. I will add - this sort of thing occasionally catches up bands that are indisputably great, but get missed, or dismissed for extraneous reasons. (I have treated this subject before.) There are people who would question ones devotion to Queen, or George Michael, or Elton John even, or maybe even the Go Gos or - is this possible? - Blue Oyster Cult... these are not guilty pleasures at all - and one must question the judgment of those who question yours...

Not guilty - pleasure:

But that's not what I'm here to write about. No. I mean, real guilt! Though this requires another distinction - because again, there are songs, acts, etc. that, well - they aren't so respectable, and maybe it's fair this time, maybe they aren't so respectable because they do tend to suck.... But not these songs. That is - these songs are as good as they are - but I still feel like I need to explain them, in ways I don't feel any need to explain liking "Freedom 90".

1. REO Speedwagon - Time for Me to Fly - REO became something evil in the 1980s (though still catchy enough) - and in the 70s - they were a bland, middle of the pack semi-arena band - along about the level of Journey or something... Though unlike Journey, they did not suck in the 70s. Unlike Journey, they do not make me want to break something when I hear them. And some of their songs - especially this one - are - heard later, all these years later - fucking great. I mean really - this is one of the best breakup songs ever, and I am not kidding.

Really:

2. Styx - Lady - cheesy 70s psudo-prog bullshit, but when you listen - well, all right, get past Dennis DeYoung's caterwaul, yes, and the tinkly piano, sure, and - the fucking bells... and then? The guitar riffs kick in - is it a bolero? I think it might be - but the way it plays against DeYoung's mewlings - I don't know - it's great, for all that. It feels - modern.

3. Fannypack - Cameltoe - songs like this - cutesy comic bubblegum - might be worth an eyeroll or two, but in the end - catchiness and comedy will carry the day. There's no point pretending to feel any guilt for liking this, done well.Which is good, because I don't feel guilty.

4. Blind Melon - No Rain - I know I probably should hate myself for liking this, but I can't; especially when the guitar solo kicks in.

5. Eddie Money - Two Tickets to Paradise - this has to be mentioned. Eddie Money sucks eggs, but something went wrong here - the song - you know, I'm tempted to dismiss it, but it's not half bad - catchy, nothing wrong with the lyrics, neat sound - and then.... It features a guitar solo that I am not alone is considering not just one of the best solos on a bad song, but one of the best guitar solos period - one of the most wonderful musical breaks in pop music. Seriously. On an Eddie Money song.

And so, after all that, we get to the Real Deal. You want guilty pleasures? here they are - songs that no decent person should be listening to, and no sane person should defend, but... Even here, I suppose this is a bit dishonest - I don't really feel guilty for liking all these songs - but I probably should. I shall Count Them Down, least to most guilt - because, by the end of it - yes - there are a ocuple songs here that, well - I hate the fact that I have ever heard these songs, let alone listened to them, let alone listened to them intentionally - and yet I have - and have perhaps paid the 99¢ for the privilege. Even added them to frequently played playlists. I may not be able to face myself if I admit this in public... but here goes. In reverse order, from least guilt to most:

5. Starland Vocal Band - Afternoon Delight - this is a close thing, really - for all that's wrong with it, it has to get some points for: A. being one hell of a catchy number; B. being unambiguously about fucking; C. Very close to being self-parody all by itself, even before Will Farrell got hold of it. So - the truth is, I don't feel very guilty about liking this at all - but I had to include it somewhere in this post, if it wasn't here I'd have to think of something to say about something by Yes or System of a Down, and I can't face that.

4. Bay City Rollers - Rock and Roll Love Letter - a lot of things I liked when I was a wee bairn, then decided were crap, I went back to as an old fart and realized, Dang! this is pretty good! The Bay City Rollers, alas, were not one of them. Most of their stuff turns out, in retrospect, to be utter crap... But not this song. It's almost cool enough to leave off, here, maybe in favor of Yesterday's Hero - but - Yesterday's Hero, despite having some merits, really isn't good enought o bear comparison to the likes of Afternoon Delight - so, Rock and Roll Love Letter stays...

Fake can be fun too!

3. Terry Jacks - Seasons in the Sun - here, we start moving into the self-loathing territory. Now, granted, this is a Jacques Brel song, and brings with it the merits of M. Brel - but given a wimpy, lachrymose reading and arrangement... I grew up listening to this song every frigging morning on AM radio and - couldn't help loving it almost as much as I hated it. Certainly couldn't get it out of my head.

2. Petra - The Coloring Song - Christian Rock is a reliable source of complete crap, and this is a fine example - awful, cheesy, MOR Christian Rock from the late 70s, complete with flutes or recorders or some shit like that - and gory lyrics ("red is the color of the blood that flowed" - why didn't Mel Gibson use this during the flogging scenes in his Jesus in bondage film?) - but damn, it's pretty...

These things exist!

1. Morningwood - Nth Degree - I hate myself for enjoying this song. It's from a fucking car ad! the song itself - is cheesy and fake (it sounds like it was written for a car ad, possibly by the car) - it has no lyrics - I do not believe there are any actual humans participating in the song. And yet, christ, isn't it catchy? It's horrible - it's embarrassing - it makes me want to kick a puppy - but I still can't help listening to it.

Unspeakably horrible, and irresistible. Thank Christ the video contains an ad.

September 11, 2011

2011-09-11T10:40:00.000-04:00

I don't know what to write for the 10th anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. I have written quite a bit about it in the past - most of the posts under the Memorial tag are about September 11. I've seen a lot of pieces this week about the legacy of 9/11 - I won't add another, since most of what I've written in the past was about the political fallout. The political legacy has not been a good one - we are a weaker nation now than we were before - though I admit in the last couple years, it seems the sins of Reagan (systematic destruction of the American economy) have overtaken the sins of Bush (systematic destruction of civil liberties, the rule of law, democracy itself.) So it's true, if I were to rant, I would be more likely to rant about the continued need for a trillion or so dollars of infrastructure spending to put people to work....

So no, I'll skip the politics. Though I don't know quite what else to say - I wish to mark the day - and mourn the dead and maybe look back at what was lost. I was in New York in the summer of 2000, and like every tourist, shot the length of Manhattan from the top of the Empire State Building. An iconic view, as filmmakers certainly knew - how better to show the promise of America? It may be coincidence that the image I found first was from Stroscek - but it's hard to think of a better encapsulation of the promise and threat of America. So I'll start with Herzog and end with me, looking out across the great city, at those two towers anchoring the composition, and hope we can find more of the promise of America as we go forward...

Friday Music & Otis Redding

2011-09-09T06:56:00.005-04:00

Today - Otis Redding's birthday! probably worth a mention, and a video at least...

It's an odd fact that I have exactly one Redding song in iTunes - Mr. Pitiful, obviously. I have records, but no CDs - so nothing has made it to the computer. I have more of those kinds of records than I care to admit, including a few things that rank pretty high up my list of bands - I've never replaced most of my Husker Du LPs for instance. I should do something about that, I suppose, but....

Anyhow - let's go with a straight random list today [ Plus annotation, I see!]:

1. Saint Etienne - Action [a CD I have no idea why I bought in the first place and have barely heard through the years.]
2. Wilco - Everlasting Everything [a band I probably should be more of a fan of - I loved Uncle Tupelo, but am almost always underwhelmed by Wilco - until they get to Nils Cline's parts anyway]
3. Bloc Party - Idea for a Story [from the second (I think) record - I didn't like it as much as the first, which was one of the neo-post-punk/new wave records of the early 21st century that actually seemed to live up to its models... So I haven't listened to this all that much - but this is a pretty neat song, with its skittering drums and odd synth sounds... Actually better than that - this is a bit of a revelation. This is what comes from actually listening to the songs that come up on these shuffle tests...]
4. Loren Connors - Airs No. 17 [very pretty guitar work... though this is music that does not fare well on iPods]
5. Pere Ubu - 30 Seconds Over Tokyo [The live, Shape of Things Version. This is of course one of the great songs of the 70s, one of the crucial songs of the decade, of music history. The secret history, perhaps, where Pere Ubu is accepted by more people than me as American's greatest rock band. This one's got Tom Herman and Peter Laughner fighting over the guitar parts. No Ravenstine, though - but the guitarists are taking up the slack in the Strange Sounds Department... I'm never going to leave the house this morning, cause I am going to have to listen to the whole thing again...]
6. The Mars Volta - L' Via L' Vazquez [no one quite brought guitar wanking back so well as The Mars Volta...]
7. Galaxie 500 - Don't Let Our Youth Go to Waste [... not that Dean Wareham ever slacked in the guitar wanking dept...]
8. Melt Banana - Stick Out [will they finish before I finish this line? nope.]
9. Pere Ubu - Indiangiver [short piece from Pennsylvania - still - America's greatest band?]
10. Michio Kurihara - Canon in "C" (C is for Cicada) - [somewhat disappointing solo record from probably the best guitarist of the last 20 years. My favorite anyway...]

Video? Recent Pere Ubu, with Robert Wheeler providing the Strange Sounds on theremin:

New Films Recently Viewed

2011-09-07T20:40:00.000-04:00

Another month has passed since my last review post - annoying, but this time, it's mostly because I simply haven't seen that many new films. Partly because of all those older films I've seen in theaters - Went the Day Well, 3:10 to Yuma, The Man Who Fell to Earth, etc. - a run much more interesting than most of what was coming out new. I've also been watching a lot of DVDs - getting as much use as I can from Netflix before I change the plan.... I should write up some of those, though I admit I'm more likely to root around those films for my screen shot posts... Lately, I've been digging into Fassbinder - what with World on a Wire coming to Harvard this weekend. We'll see.

In the meanwhile - new films I've seen this past month - which is again heavy on the documentaries, but with a bit of variation, and one plain masterpiece.

The Sleeping Beauty - 11/15 - Catherine Breillat's latest, returning to fairy tales, this time to tell the story of a little girl who goes to sleep, for 100 years (to save her life) - and dreams. She passes through a series of places - a quiet house with a mother and boy, forming a little family for a while, but then, the boy discovers the Winter Queen (puberty! - Breillat is not pretending otherwise - she lays out her symbolism and has a laugh about it...) - he disappears, and the girl goes looking for him. She finds instead a strange kingdom, a train station guarded by mannequins and a dwarf station master, rules by an albino prince and princess. They befriend the girl and send her on her way with riches and sweets - she is promptly set upon by brigands, who are led by another willful little girl. They in turn send her along, this time mounted on a doe travelling to lapland, where she meets an old owman in a teepee who sends her to meet her love - and she awakens, now 16 years old, in an empty castle, where she meets a boy, who may be the descendent of her love Peter. The brigand girl turns up, also grown - as one expects from Breillat, there is sex (the girls, then the princess an the boy), and it ends with the princess pregnant in the boy's world, the modern world.... All of this is quite ravishingly beautiful, unabashedly playful (the sense of make believe is strong), witty and sweet, with an undercurrent of romance, sensuality - it's Breillat after all - but it's Breillat that feels grown up, somehow. Here, the sex is incorporated into living, part of a broader sense of what life is - a trend I think has been coming in her last 3, 4, 5 films - these days, her films don't feel so much like plain provocation. The spikiness of her stories serves a more complete view of life - she never leaves sex out of these films, or life itself - but she also takes more care not to leave out the rest of people's lives. From Une Vieille Maîtresse on, I think she has moved up, to the first rank of directors.

Mysteries of Lisbon - 13/15 - from a novel by Carmilo Castelo Branco, a vast elaborate adaptation of a convoluted tale - stories inside of stories - starting with a teenaged orphan raised by a priest. The boy learns his story - his mother a countess held prisoner by her husband (in the present) - she escapes to tell her story - the forbidden love affair, the incipient bastard, the attempted murder, the child slated for death, the gypsy who pays off the killer... And then - the film shifts tot he count's story, how he met the boy's mother, how it all went wrong... and then, to the mysterious Brazilian who defends the countess's honor... then - the monk who cared for the dying count tells the priest (/gypsy/aristocrat/Napoleonic soldier/etc.) the story of his (the monk's) youthful love affair, that led to his (the priest's) birth.... etc. There's still quite a bit more of it - we get the Brazilian's story, the backstory of one of his lover's, a French Duchess, who happens to be the daughter of a woman loved (hopelessly) by our friend the priest (/gypsy/aristocrat/Napoleonic soldier/etc.)... the ultimate fate of the young orphan - and so on.

It was a mistake pretending to try to sketch the plot of this thing. Though don't be fooled - it's complicated, but coherent enough in fact. All those stories, growing out of one another, and winding around one another, are, in the end, a perfect delight - and Ruiz took obvious delight in unfolding them. Lovely film, full of strange details - a servant who runs in place, a woman hiding under tables, 80,000 francs that circulate quite a bit, and so on. Attempted murders and duels and suicides ending in failure, though sometimes not., and all those stories, breeding themselves like - well, like all the bastards being dropped across the generations. It is a bit of a dreamlike film - it is very like Oliveira's Doomed Love (another Carmilo Castelo Branco story), though perhaps more cinematically surreal than theatrically surreal. In place of Oliveira's static tableaux and stylized stagings, you have Ruiz's articulated spaces and levels of artifice. It's a double feature I would love to see, even if it would be 9 or 10 hours long. This is just a thrilling film.

Magic Trip - 9/15 - You might think that a film about the Merry Pranksters' 1964 cross country drive in a psychedelic painted school bus called "Further" might be a bit more surreal and strange than an adaptation of a mid-19th century Portuguese novel, but you would be wrong. This is, as it happens, an okay documentary, compiled mostly from footage shot by the pranksters themselves in 1964 - with a few additions (animations, found footage, etc.) - you get 1964 America, the world's fair, the cross country trip, Neal Cassady speeding and driving, acid and sex and psychedelia before anyone else was doing it. It's interesting enough, from a documentary perspective - the footage itself is amateur and nothing special, though Gibney and Ellwood put it together in interesting ways. The material is even less interesting. Kesey's lot are not that interesting - they act like a bunch of frat boys pretending to be 9 year olds on a long road trip - it's hard to see what the appeal is. Which isn't to say they aren't interesting at all - there is something vert odd about them, with their short hair and red and while polo shirts and their desperate antics, as if willing themselves out of the doldrums of their world. They are, as they say themselves, caught somewhere between the Beats and the hippies, with a strong dose of All American Boys thrown in - they come off, in fact, a lot like the Beach Boys - caught, themselves, somewhere in the middle between Elvis and the Beatles, very uneasy with their image and place in the culture. (And they seem to have fucked themselves up about as badly as the Beach Boys, too.) Still. There is something unconvincing about this gang - other than Kesey himself, they don't seem to have accomplished much - even he accomplished most of it before this stuff happened. It's unintentional, but there is something rather sharp in the way they are bracketed, in the film, by Ginsburg in New York (the great poet, who like him or not did the work), and the Grateful Dead in San Francisco - who, like them or not - also did the work. I mean - Ginsburg and the Dead left behind art, not just antics (as did Kesey - but not here). I can't quite get around that.

Myth of the American Sleepover - 9/15 - Another film about the Last Day of Summer - this one with sleepovers, 2 houses full of girls (older, younger), one of boys (younger), plus a college kid, who goes to Ann Arbor to find a pair of twins, one of whom may have had a crush on him. The film follows four people - college kid Scott; Rob, a younger boy who sees a girl in the supermarket and looks for her everywhere; Maggie, who flirts with boys along with her friend Beth, who looks like a refugee from Todd Solondz (or the two of them from Ghost World); and Claudia, a new girl, who goes to a sleepover and finds out her boyfriend banged the hostess - so she steals her boyfriend... All this is set somewhere near Detroit in the mid-90s, though the times are carefully elided. It is all very calm and understated, occasionally insightful, but rather bland in the end. There is nothing much to look at - it's well made, yes, but.... it strikes me that it illustrates why comedy, melodrama, action are so useful to filmmaking - jokes (or violence or whatever) focuses the story - gives it a kind of hook, something that organizes the rest of the material. The best films of this sort (like what? Dazed and Confused? Cold Water?) hang similar kinds of observational filmmaking on something else - jokes - plots - or just sheer cinematic brilliance.

And finally - Senna - 9/15 - a documentary about Ayrton Senna, Brazilian superstar Formula 1 race car driver who - Spoilers! to anyone who doesn't have access to Google - drove his car into a wall in 1994, the last Formula 1 driver to be killed on the track. (The result, it seems of either a broken steering column, or punctured tires, that caused the car to lose its grip on the track and not turn...) The film is made of archival footage - of which there is plenty, Senna being a huge star - and put together very well. I can't say there is anything special about the filmmaking, but it tells a fascinating story of a fascinating person. The film does this in a constantly engaging and interesting way - and is very edifying for that.

Quick Links - Nick Ray Plus

2011-09-06T19:02:00.004-04:00

I don't want to forget this - though I have been forgetting it... Don't miss the Nicholas Ray Blogathon hosted by Tony Dayoub at Cinema Viewfinder. There is a host of material there, and around the internet....

Also - I'm reminded that yesterday was Freddie Mercury's birthday - that's gotta be worth noting....

Kick Me Deadly

2011-09-04T12:03:00.006-04:00

Labor Day Weekend Friday Music

2011-09-02T07:25:00.003-04:00

Thank god for Fridays, cause this is one day a week I can make myself post something here! This being labor day weekend, I should post something - labor related - heck, I could work in some politics, something about JOBS [the president's speech; the fact that the whole government has already basically taken the one thing sure to create jobs - spending money to hiure people - off the table, etc.] - but... I've gotten myself in a bind, getting up late, starting this late, leaving myself a small window of time to compile interesting songs - fortunately, help is only a search field away - here we go!

1. Devo - Working in a Coalmine
2. Feelies - Forces at Work
3. Frank Sinatra - Nice Work if you can Get It
4. John Lennon - Working Class Hero [something of a perennial in these lists, no?]
5. Lone Justice - Working Late
6. Merle Haggard - Workin' Man's Blues
7. MInutemen - Working men are Pissed
8. PJ Harvey - Working for the Man
9. Prince - Let's Work
10. Sufjan Stevens - To the Workers of the Rock River Valley Region, I have an Idea Concerning Your Predicament

Video? Minutemen of course:

Why not? We are Devo!

Hurricane Day

2011-08-28T08:27:00.008-04:00

Shall I try a hurricane post? Though we (Boston) don't seem to be in line to get a hurricane this time around. I have been through 2 of them, Gloria and Bob - both time I was living next to a beach, but a beach on a shallow bay, well away from any potential danger. It was the perfect kind of beach to stand out in the hurricane force winds and rains without worrying about waves or trees or flying patio furniture or loose wires - just me and nature. That was fun - though both hurricanes turned out to be a bit less than advertised. Bob didn't even knock out the power!

This time that won't quite work. I'm not living by a beach, I'm inland, in a nice tree lined neighborhood - no walking around in the hurricane this time, thanks! I am up on the third floor, in a big apartment building, on top of a hill - about as safe as I can imagine, from wind, rain, floods, you name it, even in the midst of a full blast hurricane. The power might go, the cable might go, but that's about the worst of it. (That and a very nervous cat.) The one thing I do have to worry about is a tree - a huge thing, just outside my window.

It's a big brute - this is on the third floor - and the closest branch keeps going, up well past the roof, straight up over the roof. (The rest of the tree is higher than the roof too, but it's growing away from the building, so I'm less nervous about it.)

I don't really worry about the thing coming down, especially if the winds aren't really going to get over 50-60 MPH - the storm hasn't gotten all that bad yet, and it seems like the winds are coming from the building side, so I don't think the tree is in real danger. I do worry about branches coming off and coming through my window. Though the most likely effect is that the cable gets knocked out - the wires go right up the side of the building. Plenty of room for mischief there.

So - this thing isn't likely to be much trouble here in Boston. Not for me, probably not much more than an inconvenience anywhere. (I mean, I probably won't even get a day off work out of it - it ruins my weekend, and I don't even get a free day off?) Obviously can get a lot worse elsewhere - hopefully not, of course. And if you are in a low lying area, well - the rain alone might make this thing a hell on earth. So good luck, everyone!

Friday Hurricane Music

2011-08-26T07:12:00.003-04:00

Today's music post can really only have one theme, right? We New Englanders don't get to experience the thrill of anticipation of a big hurricane very often - better make the best of it, at least until that big tree comes down...

Neil Young - Like a Hurricane - obvious, I know, and the obvious video (Live Rust), but really, this is the measure of all hurricane songs...

Warlocks - Hurricane Heart Attack - an army of guitars and drums thrashing away like 100 mile an hour winds...

Red Crayola - Hurricane Fighter Plane - not the same kind of hurricane, but I'm always happy to name drop Red Crayola

And though I don't want to encourage this sort of thing - under the circumstances, I suppose I must: here are the Scorpions with the Berlin Philharmonic, performing with all the subtlety and good taste of a tree coming in through the roof. WIth subtitles!

And I guess - this too was inevitable, wasn't it? a little bonus history lesson in there too!

Be safe, dear readers, if you are in the path of this thing...

Fifty-Five

2011-08-21T12:52:00.003-04:00

Three films from 1955 here... three conversations...

All Good Cretins Go to Heaven

2011-08-19T07:36:00.003-04:00

Keepin' it short and sweet - 100% Random Friday Random 10!

1. Erase Errata - Dexterity is #2
2. The Go-Betweens - Right Here
3. Earth - Dissolution III [only 15 minutes of feedback, that's hardly nothing; the other track on the record goes an hour.]
4. The Young Knives - Another Hollow Line
5. Ramones - Glad to See You Go
6. Steely Dan - East St. Louis Toodle-oo
7. Beastie Boys - Live at PJ's
8. Ramones - Cretin Hop [well - this is kind of old iTunes! 2 Ramones tunes!]
9. Bishop Allen - Cue the Elephants
10. Blue Oyster Cult - Godzilla [with a purposeful grimace and a terrible sound...!]

Video - obviously:

New Films Reviewed

2011-08-15T21:11:00.001-04:00

It's been more than a month since I've posted one of these roundups - it's been an odd month. I didn't watch anything in July, on vacation - but since I came back, I have kept up a pretty steady stream of films. Nothing like Sam Juliano - but there's nothing like the big pre-code series he's talking about to keep me that busy... What is keeping me busy is taking advantage of my last month of 4-at-a-time Netflix - and a nice series of revivals in town. In the last couple weeks I've seen screenings of Baby Face, It's a Gift, 3:10 to Yuma and The Man Who Fell to Earth - new films have had a hard time competing with that. Still - I've managed a few new films...

Tabloid 10/15 - funny, engaging, strange story of a woman, Joyce McKinney, a former beauty queen who fell for a Mormon, went to England and kidnapped him, maybe, raped him, maybe - maybe he ran off with her for a randy weekend and had second thoughts, or was brainwashed, or rekidnapped - maybe... In the end, they - she - became a huge Tabloid Scandal in England - manacled mormons and naked pictures and prostitution and what not... Errol Morris tells this tale - or gets many of the participants, especially McKinney, to tell it - and the sequel - when she turned up again, in 2008, paying to have her dog cloned in Korea... All this is quite entertaining, very funny - and she is a remarkably entertaining character, though apparently a genuine nut case - Morris knows how to let people tell their tales.... the whole business seems a bit slight, but well worth the watching.

Friends With Benefits - 9/15 - another try at a decent rom com, this one with the leads breaking up with the latest in a string of losers (though they are kind of losers too) - they hit it off fast as pals, and then start sleeping together, with no strings. This works well enough for a while, but sooner or later, they start looking for more - with other people? with each other? It's an odd film, a bit hard to really figure out. Enjoyed it, beginning to end, but felt like a couple things weren't quite there. There's too much talk about romcoms and such - too explicit in its need to act out the old Umberto Eco bit - "like they say in the movies, I love you madly"... That and - unlike all the other comedies I've seen this year - this says nothing whatsoever about money, or work. I can't convince myself that that should matter - but I can't convince myself it doesn't, either. Maybe I'm condemning this for not being a different film - maybe. Still - all those films - Cedar Rapids, WIn Win, Bad Teacher, Bridesmaids, even Larry Crowne - are about money, work, status - they are - interesting that way. This one? while the surface is quite good, it lacks that particular subtext, and - sometimes - any other subtext as well. (There are big subplots with both families - which have some nice moments, but seem to have been imposed on the film - and both of which turn into lessons on Letting Your True Love Get Away. Yeah yeah, so much for undermining Hollywood cliches, huh?) Anyway - I can't stop without noting that I really enjoyed the leads - Justin Timberlake has the makings of a real actor, I think; and Mila Kunis is great. I think, especially after the fact, that they sell the material more than it deserves - the script is funny enough, but they make it work better than it might deserve...

Road to Nowhere - 11/15 - Monte Hellman's return after 20 plus years without a film - a noirish tale about a politician and his girlfriend, who is actually a double for the woman she's supposed to be (Velma Duran) - they steal 100 million, fake their deaths.... No, not quite - the film is actually about a film being made from that story - Road To Nowhere, too, directed by Mitchell Haven, written by Steve Gates... In this film (within the film) the girl hired to play the lead role (Velma) in the movie might have been the girl already playing Velma in the underlying story... Except - how much of this is in the movie in the movie, and how much is the plot of the movie about the movie of the story, I don't know... Just to add to the fun - at the end of the film, people get shot (allegedly in the diegetic reality of the movie we're watching) - the director of the film (in the film) then picks up a camera (as directors, especially of films within films, are wont to do, even in the most extreme circumstances) and films the carnage - and, turning round the room, films the "real" crew of the "real" movie... (Hellman, who was visiting for this screening, says this was improvised by the actor - he had a camera in the scene, and picked it up and shot what he shot - and the editor used the footage from the shot, to uncanny effect. It is certainly a cool shot.) It is all very clever, this movie - packed with quotes, open and covert - clips from The Lady Eve, Secret of the Beehive, The Seventh Seal - references to Vertigo obviously, and probably more - Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive? At least, strong similarities. It is, in any case, a great looking film, shot with a digital still camera, of all things - it looks digital, but a gorgeous kind of digital, with deep, rich textures, superb low light qualities... I suppose in some ways it is, in fact, too clever for its own good - there's a sense, I think, that the convolutions of the narrative is a cover for the banality of the plot - and the convolutions themselves are not that extraordinary... But this is a very mild quibble - if the narration covers for the lack of plot - it does so very well - it keeps you quite engaged in the story, all the levels of the story (and the surfaces - faces and spaces and such) - it is a very neat piece of work.

The Future - 8/15 - new Miranda July film, a rather dull indie drama - twee, though more damning, it's empty, built around two utterly passive characters... They are scheduled to pick up a cat from a shelter in 30 days - after that, they don't know if the cat is supposed to live 6 months or 5 years - this brings them face to face with the fact that they are coming up toward middle age.... So - they have crises - they quit their jobs - he starts canvassing for some kind of environmental outfit selling trees; she sets out to to create 30 dances in 30 days. He instead of working spends most of his time hanging out with an old man that he suddenly realizes is himself in 50s years - she starts up an affair with the father of a little girl they met at the animal shelter. Somewhere in here - he can stop time and does - then?... All this - there are a couple moments where things click - the time stopping bit is, in fact, stunning - a great piece of filmmaking. But - most of the rest is - not that bad, just centered on people who are very hard to give any trace of a good god damn about - with nothing special to look at...

Carol Reed's Sunday Screenshots

2011-08-14T14:32:00.002-04:00

Decided to catch up on Carol Reed lately -to watch and rewatch his films, in a bunch. Spies, windows, grids, rooms -

Darkness and shadows, things just out of sight -

And streets - oh, the streets...

Our Friday Rituals...

2011-08-12T07:36:00.002-04:00

I am still trying to work myself back into blogging habits. This has been complicated a bit by Netflix - their upcoming price change has led me to try, very hard, to get one last month's money's worth from my old fashioned 4 at a time DVD plan - might be the first time in about 5 years I've got my money's worth from it, but what can you do.... anyway - it's Friday, it's time to look to iTunes for inspiration - what, oh magical digital jukebox, have you for us today?

1. Brian Eno - Some of them Are Old
2. Dinosaur Jr. - Thumb
3. Jon Spencer Blues Explosion - Over & Over
4. Radiohead - Weird Fishes/Arpeggi
5. The Byrds - 5D (Fifth Dimension)
6. Meat Puppets - Flaming Heart
7. John Zorn - Batman
8. Pere Ubu - Waiting for Mary
9. Monks - Cuckoo
10. Richard Thompson - Miss Patty

Video? This seems pretty obvious, right? The Monks on German TV...

The Furies

2011-08-07T11:26:00.005-04:00

The Brattle is showing Baby Face this afternoon - as good a reason as any to post some Stanwyck pictures.

Never someone you'd want to get mad at you...

Friday Music Post Returns!

2011-08-05T07:38:00.002-04:00

Well - not that exciting a guess. But here goes anyway - what shuffle offers up today:

1. Tin Huey - Chinese Circus
2. Mercury Rev - Frittering
3. Antony & the Johnsons - Bird Gerhl
4. Bob Dylan - Love Minus Zero/No Limit
5. Bruce Springsteen - Reason to Believe
6. Grateful Dead - Til the Morning Comes
7. Love - Good Times
8. Spirit - Fresh Garbage
9. Ghost - Gerecki No Toshi
10. Slapp Happy/Henry Cow - Apes in Capes

And - video? I find that I can still learn things - looking to see what kinds of Slapp Happy or Hendy COw videos were around - I found this - a magnificent song, that I did not know was a cover.... I am - pleased:

And a live recording, complete with a very amusing intro - "they said it was okay to play two chords for half an hour, and we've done all right!"

I knew the Mazzy Star version, of course, channeling Jim and William Reid as much as Lou...

Speaking of all those Reids:

Holidays and Politics

2011-07-29T21:52:00.002-04:00

I have been on vacation - thus the blog silence, after a run where I almost got back to a regular posting routine. (Mostly gimmick posts, I admit - Friday Random Music posts, Sunday screen shots, that sort of thing - but still, content!) I have been to a strange and mysterious foreign land where the temperature never gets above 30 (at least not where I was - it might have gone higher in the plains), where they give change in $2 coins, where they eat poisonous concoctions like rappie pie. As well as more conventional pies...

It was, I'm happy to say, very nearly off the grid - what news I saw on TV was all local, Maritimes stuff, and that mostly weather related (how to stay cool when the temperature hits 32! sort of thing.) That and Anne Murray... Even so, I couldn't completely avoid the news back in the USA - mostly bad news, daily idiocies related to the debt ceiling... I managed to get on the internet and got to follow the whole sorry mess. I don't have anything profound to add to it - I might as well link to Krugman (like every blog I read) - the joys of balance... I did notice, on the road, the tendency by the TV news to seek out people who would bewail the "partisanship" in Washington for their vox populi bits - spreading the blame around evenly. Christ. We all know, the GOP is doing this deliberately, creating a false crisis over the debt limit business, figuring they can force the politics right - though they don't seem to be satisfied with that. I suspect they are playing a longer game - deliberately trying to crash the economy, and blame it on Obama - figuring the president gets blamed for everything anyway, and they will reap the benefits. They may have a point - I keep seeing these bits on facebook:

Dear Mr. President, I heard you say you will not guarantee SS checks if the debt ceiling isn't raised. Why does it always has to do with SS, Medicare, & our Soldiers pay? Why not stop your pay, your staff, or Congress and the Senate? Lets hold the paychecks of all house & senate members, then see how fast they resolve the debt ceiling crisis ! If you agree repost this & keep it going across the whole USA

I dunno where that started, though now it seems ubiquitous... it's pretty friggin' sad. From the implication that the president is creating this crisis (oh sure, it's got congress in there too - see what Krugman said about "balance"...) - even the implication that the president controls spending... to the magic thinking in all the variations on the "let's cut congress's salaries and balance the budget" spam going around... to the fact that even my tea party loving friends are posting it - shit - I thought they wanted to kill social security and medicare! they voted for the Republicans - what did they think they were voting for?

I'm not hopeful about any of this. I don't see any good coming of any of the possible results. If the dems cave - that's bad. (And, of course, once Obama and Reid agree to cut social security and medicare, the GOP will blame them for cutting Social Security and medicare. Everybody knows this, but somehow, the dems don't seem to notice.) If there is not a deal - the GOP will blame Obama for any bad fallout. If Obama does anything more aggressive to get around the problem (I like Matthew Yglesias' trillion dollar coin idea!), they will howl about tyranny and usurpation of congressional powers (powers they deliberately failed to exercise) - until they win the White House, then they will embrace and extend them. (There's probably a larger story here, of the ultimate triumph of the executive branch, of the legislature's complete abandonment of its responsibilities. I fear this - and with the increasing willingness by Congress to simply refuse to govern, beyond the structural deadlock - executive government is a real possibility. That is too depressing to go on about....)

Right. Meanwhile, since almost any result of this vote will be less government spending, with unemployment still pushing 10% and the economy starting to tank again, we are likely to see the economy crash again... Amazing.

I think I might go back to the Great White North...

Summertime Movie Viewing Report

2011-07-10T20:42:00.002-04:00

The last couple weeks have been a good example of the kinds of films I seem to be driven to lately. Mid-level Hollywood comedies, (I've never been so desperate to pay money for something like Transformers, or the Hangover, for that matter) and amiable documentaries, that maybe belong on TV. This is not exactly a bad thing - the films are generally edifying in some way - but they do seem like a lot of filler. There aren't enough movie movies to see. When one comes along - a revival of The Leopard, say - what bliss!

Anyway - what have I seen lately? Well - start with Pianomania -a fascinating and lovely look at the backstage of concert music, through the eyes of a high end piano tuner, Stefan Knupfer. We see him working with a variety iof musicians - Lang Lang, Alfred Brendel, etc. - we see him working with Steinway to buy a new piano (for the Vienna Concert House), and overseeing the sale of another piano. Much of the film is devoted to a recording session with pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard - Aimard is recording Bach, and wants to use different kinds of sounds from his piano - tuned like a harpsichord, a clavichord, an organ, etc. - he and Knupfer work on that for a year. It's quite a fascinating film, showing the details of piano tuning, the manipulation of sound - and quite entertaining. Knupfer is a witty, amiable fellow - "I think I'll have a very sportive day" he says, in the midst of running up and down stairs between Aimard and his piano, and the room where the recording engineers are set up. What's best about it, though, is probably that it shows something I know nothing about, and teaches me something about it.

That's also true of Buck - a nice doc about Buck Brannaman, a horse trainer and trick roper and cowboy, who runs clinics on training horses - he had a hard childhood, which has somehow left him almost saintly seeming, and utterly devoted to training horses gently - and people too... It's a nice story, and Buck and his family and other associates are nice people to spend a couple hours with though there isn't much more to the film. Except, again, showing me something I don't know anything about, and leaving me knowing more about it - not a bad thing...

Page One:Inside the New York Times - In a way, I'm not sure this is all that much different from previous two - it is, as subtitled, a year inside the New York Times, specifically the media desk (editor Bruce Headlam, reporters Tim Arango, Brian Stetler, and most of all, reporter and columnist, David Carr.) It is, basically, a fly on the wall type film, put together after the fact - it's not quite pure hagiography (of the institution, let's say) - but close, and certainly, one imagines the Times was able to exercise a good deal of control over what ended up in the film. Though like the films above - it shows us the day to day workings of a big newspaper (the big newspaper, at least in the US) - and that too is inherently fascinating stuff. But as a film - maybe just a nice look at something....

But it feels like more than that. A lot of it, I have to admit, is just that there is something so exhilarating about newsroom films - I am a sucker for that stuff. Hecht and Hawks and Capra - and this is right in that tradition. I get twinges watching these guys working the phones, typing away on their laptops, pitching stories, walking the halls looking for that last paragraph, waiting for the lawyers to call back - even just the simple stuff, watching how fast and easy they type - great stuff. It's a great genre, because newspapers are a great setting, and this is a ,ore than worthy entry in the tradition. But I suppose, there is more than that - there is, after all, the Big Question, whatever that is - here, it takes the form - will the New York Times survive? - and spreads out from there. Whither journalism? Whither print? Whither the web? Etc. And how will these changes change society? the body politic? etc. etc.

I don’t know. The issues raised are, undeniably, vital questions, and they are given something of an airing here. And their importance gives the film heft - though in the end I'm left a bit unsatisfied. I don't know if that is the film's problem, or if it's broader - I am not sure I have ever been all that happy with the debates I've seen over these issues (the whole Whither Media stuff). It's hard to say why - here, a lot of my dissatisfaction seems to come from the way the discussions always seem to get sidetracked, bogged down, or how single issues come to take over for the whole range of issues. As an example here - there is a panel where Markos Moulitsas and David Carr get into a discussion about the place of the Mainstream Media - which Kos turns into a discussion of Judith Miller and Jayson Blair, and the failures of the New York Times, a position Carr routs mainly by pointing to the rest of the paper. But really - both seem to be evasions - Kos of the general value of the paper (and other papers), Carr of the fact that the authority he claims relies completely on not fucking up like that.

Now - I have opinions on the subject. In fact, I think the problem for print newspapers (and not necessarily just print) is driven by two things - 1) the big one is the advertising crisis - I mentioned this last year, days where I could not find a classified section in my local paper. (At least not in print.) That trumps everything else, since the daily paper lives on its ads. (Monthly publications, books, I think, will find ways to continue to make money through sales - I don't think daily papers can do that enough to survive.) 2) The digitization of information - and the web - which makes bits easy and cheap to exchange. ("Free" - or - free as far as the information goes - the cost revolves around the connections and servers - you get on the web and then do what you do, and it doesn't much matter what....) This changes the economy - it's one thing to charge for objects - something else to charge for information that can be reproduced for almost nothing. I can hold these opinions, and a variety of opinions based on them (that you can't control the flow of information enough to charge for it like you could for a piece of paper, things like that) - but... I hold other opinions too - that nothing on the web except web-based newspapers can do what newspapers can do. That without all the things newspapers have - the departments and bureaus, reporters and editors, people doing the legwork, the cold calling, grinding through the archives, interpreting the data - you cannot provide the real service newspapers provide. And this opinion collides with the ramifications of the first 2 - because I don't know how newspapers can survive in their current form with the current models of revenue. I don't think you can afford to put out a daily edition on the revenues you can get from ads, now - and I don't think (the Times' attempts to the contrary) you will be able to maintain much headway charging for online content. It's too easy for the information to get out of the paywall. And maybe more importantly - even if the Times and a couple others survive - having one or two or a dozen great papers in the whole country is not much better than having none. Someone will have to work something out. And - someone will work something out. That is not "optimism" it's just a fact - news and information will circulate in the future. But I don't know how, who will pay for it, what it will look like, what kinds of (valuable) things will be lost (or gained) - or who will be ruined getting to that point. We are kind of stuck in limbo for a while. There was someone in the movie, testifying before Congress, who said, we are early in the process - John Kerry took the opportunity to pontificate about the people who have lost their jobs - but she was simply right. Things have not worked themselves out in the least yet - the process is just starting....

Okay - crap - that went on longer than I expected. Well - what of the fiction?

Well - there's Bad Teacher - Cameron Diaz as a bad teacher, who plans to quit to marry a rich kid - when his mother intervenes, she's got to go back to work, and does so, with all the enthusiasm we might expect. She shows films every day in class; she smokes pot in the parking lot; she steals money from the class car wash to fund her breast enhancement surgery. She's surrounded by loons - Lucy Punch as Amy Squirrel, the probably mad do gooder neighbor; Jason Segal as a randy gym teacher; Justin Timberlake as a rich goofy christian (not stated, but the "pro-choice" joke, and a dry-humping scene make it clear enough); John Michael Higgins as a dolphin obsessed principal; Phyllis Smith as a nice old lady who's up for anything... All this rolls along amusingly enough - the jokes are good, the performers on their game, the story manages not to turn sappy - or gratuitously nasty - I mean, of course people sort of change, and things sort of get better for people, that's what stories do, they change people... to do this without lapsing into life lessons (beyond obvious stuff like don't be a[ny more of a] dick [than you have to be]) is a small triumph, and I'd say it gets there.

Larry Crowne, on the other hand - not so much. It's a likable enough film, I guess, but not a very good one. I have to blame Glenn Kenny and Sam Adams for this one - Kenny kind of liked it; Sam Adams - abetted, I think, by the Most Interesting Man in the World - played a great role the day before in making me miss an 11 AM screening of the African Queen - The Larry Crowne Affair turned out to be a bit more convenient... So what do we have? Tom Hanks is a master criminal laid off from his job at Goldman Sachs and is pursued by Faye Dunaway, or Julia Roberts, as Elizabeth Warren - no, wait, no, that's wishful thinking... Larry Crowne is laid off from UMart because he lacks a college education. He goes to community college, where he has classes with Julia Roberts (another Bad Teacher, though she already has a lousy husband, so isn't looking for another) and George Takai (being very strange). Also in the latter class is a Manic Pixie Dream Girl (in the person of Gugu Mbatha-Raw) who rides a scooter (like Crowne) and so orchestrates his midlife crisis makeover. The potential for age inappropriate sex does not materialize, and Hanks and Roberts pair up in the end. He gets A's in his class, but the MPDG drops out (and Crowne doesn't repay her generosity to him by telling her to see Bridesmaids for a lesson on what happens when you start a quirky new retail store in the middle of a fucking recession. Jesus lady! get the degree, so at least in 10 years you can get temp work for an outsourcing firm!) Where was I?

The truth is - there's an interesting story lurking in the shadows here. The MPDG who revivifies poor middle aged Tom Hanks - and Tom Hanks who revivifies mopey Julia Roberts. The little side step - where someone wakes him up and he wakes up someone else - is a cool twist. And some of it is played with some wit and grace. Just not enough. Or really anything beyond the actors pouring on the charm and treating it all like a lark. There's a good idea there - but it's just an idea. Even the idea that Hanks saves Roberts - the film tells us that she saved him (that is, he says that to her), but - we've seen the film - seen her class, which is atrocious, we know she's mailing it in, but his enthusiasm, and his ability to engage his classmates, wakes her up. It would have been nice to have the filmmakers notice this - they might have gotten around to writing a decent film if they had... Instead - it plays like a very sketchy first draft.

Friday Ulster Genius Edition

2011-07-08T07:26:00.002-04:00

Since I've had Suspect Device running through my head lately - let's let Genius do it's thing...

1. Modern Lovers - Roadrunner
2. Devo - Mongoloid
3. Public Image Ltd. - Public Image
4. The Pogues - a Pair of Brown Eyes
5. Television - Marquee Moon
6. Gang of Four - Damaged Goods
7. Replacements - Bastards of the Young
8. Echo & the Bunnymen - The Cutter
9. My Bloody Valentine - Only Shallow
10. Jesus and Mary Chain - Some Candy Talking

sounds good... for your viewing pleasures - Still Little Fingers Live, in 1978:

And - this seems quite different, but I'm glad it came up. Here's Echo & The Bunnymen live, with strings:

Sunday With the Duke and Friends

2011-07-03T20:18:00.004-04:00

Just keeping it simple this time around, Howard Hawks and the Duke on a Fourth of July Weekend...

2011 Halftime Report

2011-07-02T10:08:00.000-04:00

We have accomplished half a year - what kind of year has it been for films? Looking at my lists - 10 deep, it seems pretty good. But it's felt awfully thin, at times. There have been stretches where there seem to be lots of good films out - but also weeks at a time when there is next to nothing that seems worth the trouble. I have resorted to Hollywood comedies (Bridesmaids; Bad Teacher - both quite enjoyable, don't get me wrong), to ho hum documentaries, the sort of thing they'd show on TV if the non-fiction TV channels didn't suck so bad (Blank City; Pianomania, etc.) - enjoyable and informative, but.... I suppose a lot of this is me - though I don't seem to lack for enthusiasm when there is good stuff out.... so - maybe.

Anyway - here are a couple lists for the first half of the year. First - 10 best films released this year:

1. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall his Past Lives
2. Certified Copy
3. Quattro Volte
4. Poetry
5. 13 Assassins
6. Dogtooth
7. Meek's Cutoff
8. Strange Case of Angelica
9. Jane Eyre
10. Rango

And - best films made in 2011 (from what is still a pretty short list...):

1. Meek's Cutoff
2. Jane Eyre
3. Rango
4. Cedar Rapids
5. Bridesmaids
6. Bad Teacher
7. Win WIn
8. Midnight in Paris
9. Rubber
10. Tree of Life

And, since it takes a while for a year's films to turn up - here's a look back at 2010 - a pretty good haul of which have come out this year (with positions on original list marked):

1. Carlos (long Version) - #1 at the end of the year
2. Uncle Boonmee - seen in 2011
3. Certified Copy - ditto
4. Quattro Volte - ditto
5. Poetry - ditto
6. Exit through the Gift Shop - 2
7. True Grit - 4
8. The Social Network - 3
9. Oki's Movie - seen in 2011
10. 13 Assassins - ditto

Canadian Music Day

2011-07-01T07:06:00.003-04:00

In honor of Canada day - today's top 10 is devoted to Canadian rock! Something like - 5 favorite songs, with 1 per band, something like that...

1. Neil Young - Like a Hurricane
2. Leonard Cohen - Bird on a Wire
3. Gordon Lightfoot - Sundown
4. The Band - Up on Cripple Creek
5. Tragically Hip - Courage
6. Joni Mitchell - Court and Spark
7. Rush - Tom Sawyer
8. Arcade Fire - Month of May
9. BTO - You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet
10. New Pornographers - Mutiny I Promised You

Video? Maybe a couple who have been overlooked above.... for instance - I did not know that Terry Jacks was Canadian!

And no tribute to our neighbor tot he north would be complete without their tribute to the USA:

And a band featuring long form music, I can't really fit on a list of great songs - Godspeed You! Black Emperor:

Farewell Columbo

2011-06-27T20:42:00.003-04:00

I will miss Peter Falk - one of the most consistently enjoyable actors of the past 50 years. He made everything he touched better - he was always a joy to watch. He was part of some of the best films of his era, specifically his collaborations with Cassavetes - and that after working with America's greatest filmmaker, even getting an Oscar nod out fo it.... And if he is best known for Columbo - that's just about as good - for my money, Columbo might be the second best television show of all time. Looking at why it was so good - you can start with the character, with Falk's performances, as well as his look - you can look at the writing, the care taken in building those mysteries, the care taken in working the formula. It was a very formulaic show - quite unapologetically - start with the crime, then bring in Columbo, almost as an afterthought, and have him find something... then work off the guest stars of the week. And that, I think, is really what made the show so great. All the pieces are there - the stories, the dialogue, the actors, the guest stars, Falk - but they are all worked together with such skill, and especially, the interactions between Falk and the guest stars. That's the core of the show - those direct confrontations between someone who thinks they've committed the perfect crime and Lieutenant Columbo - it's where the show worked all the variations it needed to stay fresh through all those mysteries. It's notable - the concept of the show derives pretty explicitly from Crime and Punishment - and don't forget that Raskalnikov is the main character of Crime and Punishment. I don't know if Falk got more screen time then the crooks or not - it had to be close a few times - but the show's ability to get close to the killers and stay there gave it it's poignancy. It may have been mostly from Columbo's POV, but you always got the crook's perspective too - the sense of something closing in, even if they couldn't be sure what... Yes. And it matters that a good number of the killers come off - well - some of them are positively sympathetic. Even some nasty sons of bitches come out - well, almost regrettable. They build rapport with Columbo - he seems almost disappointed when he catches them, disappointed in them, I suppose - and we share in it.

It depends on the guest stars - but they depend on Falk. Who shows, in those Cassavetes films, how well he works with other actors, how much he integrates into the ensemble. He does it here - he plays off the guest stars, they play off him - the best of them - Cassavetes himself, the Patrick McGoohan episodes, or the Johnny Cash episode (maybe the best of the series) - just sing, as the stars maneuver around each other. The formula allows for infinite variety - there are shows with sympathetic villains, others with monsters, who draw out a kind of shivery delight in Falk when he catches them - everything in between. It was an exquisite show - even when the stories weren't the best, the interplay between Falk and his victims could carry the show. I am eternally grateful to him for it...

Classroom Triangles

2011-06-26T21:26:00.004-04:00

Father, Son, the Knack - coincidence?

Rainy Friday Songs

2011-06-24T07:13:00.002-04:00

It's Raining Today - and that makes a good starting point - set Genius off from Scott Walker:

1. Scott Walker - It's Raining today
2. John Cale - Fear is a Man's Best Friend
3. Robert Wyatt - Sea Song
4. Young Marble Giants - Eating Noddemix
5. Roxy Music - 2 H. B.
6. The Modern Lovers - Girlfriend
7. Wire - Marooned
8. Richard & Linda Thompson - I Want to See the Brights Lights Tonight
9. PJ Harvey - The Words that Maketh Murder
10. Captain Beefheart - Ella Guru

And video? In memory of Clarence Clemons:

Spring Film Roundup

2011-06-23T21:29:00.001-04:00

I have fallen back out of the habit of posting occasional roundups of recent films - not even monthly anymore. The last one I can find is from January... youch. I can take some comfort in the fact that I've managed to actually write about a few movies in that time, but I think the shorter pieces have their place... So here goes, again, a month or so worth of new films...

Bridesmaids - 10/15 - Very funny film with Kristin Wiig as Annie, whose best friend gets married and asks her to be the maid of honor. But - KW is broke (put all her money into a bakery and lost it), has a crappy job, crazy roommates, a lousy lover (a rich guy who throws her out every night) - she has no money for the gig, but everyone else in the party has money to spare.... hilarity ensues. It's quite single minded in being about money - everything that happens happens because Annie is broke and the rest of the party is not. Everything - the Brazilian barbecue, the dress fitting, all that happens because ANnie is saving money; the trip to Vegas goes like it does because Annie is stuck in coach; the shower? Annie offers a person gift and Helen tops it by flying the bride to Paris - an idea she stole from Annie. I mean, everything is about money - even the romance - a busted taillight that Annie can't afford to fix? It's rather unusual for that direct attention to money as such, sometimes interesting with bits of class as well - especially the way everyone tries to pretend that they are all equal, even while cash considerations create obvious problems. It's a pretty sharp look at people with similar backgrounds - and here, creative, smart people at that - who have significantly divergent fortunes. A phenomenon I've seen in my day... and here, played out with lots of variation around the edges - the people who have money and those who don't, the old money and new money, etc... Not bad...

Princess of Montpensier - 10/15 - set in the 16th century religious wars in France, a girl marries a prince instead of the duc she loves (the duc of Guise, head of the catholic league in future) - she is tutored by a mercenary turned pacifist who also loves her - and eventually runs into the duc of Anjou (brother of the king), a fop (a rather brilliant fop) who also loves her and makes trouble for everyone else. A very handsome film, and also very sharp in its delineations of the politics, obligations, social positions of these people, and the complications of their loves and wars.

The Trip - 10/15 - Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon tour the north of England, eating at gourmet restaurants and visiting historical sites. The story is formulaic, the actors playing caricatures of themselves - Coogan the restless movie star worried about his career, compulsively womanizing, etc. - Bryden joking his way through the trip, doing impressions and underplaying his real jealousy, with a wife and kid waiting at home... But it is a handsome film to watch, and they are hilarious when they get going...

Nostalgia for the Light - 12/15 - Gorgeous documentary about Chile's Altacama desert, where the clear skies and perfectly dry climate create perfect conditions for looking at the stars, and preserving the dead. ALternating between astronomers and their telescopes, scanning the skies, looking for the story of where the universe came from - and the story of political prisoners, kept here in camps, murdered by the thousands, buried, then exhumed and reburied to hide the crimes.... And the women, searching for the dead. And a third perspective (alongside the astronomers and political victims) - archeologists studying the remnants of the millennia of inhabitants of the desert - their sites and bodies preserved in the dry earth...) Beautiful, very moving film.

Blank City - 9/15 - Documentary about the film movement in NY in the late 70s early 80s, where Jim Jarmusch, Ann Magnuson, Steve Buscemi etc. got their start. It's an interesting story, but the film is rather bland. There are a fair number of clips from the films of the day - but they seem very bland. Hard to tell if this is because the films aren't very good or because they are badly chosen and integrated, or maybe because the aesthetic depends too much on patience and duration so the editing drains them, or something else. Where it does work (both the films in the film and the film itself, as a documentary) is as a documentation of NY in the late 70s. It's a fascinating time and place, and the film does a decent job of showing it to us.

Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen - 6/15 - Donnie Yen as Chen Zhen, the character from Fists of Fury - here, he's survived, and comes back from WWI (where he wiped out a platoon of Germans with a pair of bayonets) with a new identity - he gets a job working for a gangster - he's surrounded by intrigue - Japanese, Chinese warlords, cops, assassins, bargirls, etc. - he's part of a secret organization fighting the Japanese... and - lots of death and posturing and traces of romance, lots of flashy camera movement and hinted musical numbers (that don't come off), plenty of anachronism (from the name of the nightclub to the 40s style cars) - in the end - the girls are all spies, his allies mostly get killed, and he wipes out the Japanese, in a less interesting fight than you would hope. All this was made worse by being digital projected from a DVD, which killed off the opulance of the sets and cinematography (which is a big part of what appeal the film has). Nothing terrible, but nothing very impressive either.

13 Assassins - 11/15 - conventional seeming assassin story, set in 1844, the usual thing - the shogun's nasty half brother is getting too close to power - the shogun's advisers decide to kill him and recruit Shinzaemon Shimada (Koji Yokusho) to do it. He recruits a band of samurai, 12 total (then they pick up a peasant to make 13), and ambushes the lord... mayhem ensues. It's firmly in the tradition - the recruiting, the retainers and retainers of retainers, there is the inevitable sword expert, a spear expert who does it for the money, a dissolute nephew, etc. - and the peasant, who they cut down from a cage in the woods, who leads them out amd joins them and has a blast... On the other side - the mad lord, his faithful retainer who is, of course, Shinzaemon's old pal - etc. It's relatively restrained, though given the kinds of things you saw in old chambara, that's a relative term indeed - you do get a couple Miike specialties - a woman with her arms and legs and tongue cut off.... a bunch of wild boars with fire strapped to their back... the immortal peasant... and a steady string of details - the village, samurai swinging hopelessly away in their death throes, a fight shot upside down from the POV of a dieing man, etc. And a very cool villain, who'd be right at home in Ichi the Killer - deliberately walking into the ambush - "the foolish road is more fun" - and carrying on during the fight in perfect delight - dying in the mud, in agony, thanking his killer for the best day of his life... In this - his love of war and the others' mixed feelings - you see Miike, a bit - the fight starts exciting but becomes drudgery, people slogging around swinging at eash other... though then it ends for the inevitable duel, though this is undercut by the lord commenting on it - that happens a lot - there's plenty of monologuing, but a lot of it is metacomment - commenting on the duel, etc... He doesn't undercut it as he is sometimes wont to do, but he doesn't seem quite willing to let anything stand as a straightforward representation of some kind of grand serious politically motivated bloodbath.... Great stuff anyway.

Meek's Cutoff - 11/15 - I think Kelly Reichardt is well on the way to becoming one of the great American filmmakers of the age. May or may not be fair to say she is there (the level of the Coens, Lynch, Anderson and Anderson, etc.) - but she's well on her way to becoming one of them. This story is set in the old west - a small wagon train, 3 wagons, 3 families - are following a mountain man on a new route to Oregon. They begin the film by crossing a river, but tat is the last water they see for a while. Things go badly - they scheme against Meek, the guide - then they spot and Indian, then catch the Indian, and compel/convince him to lead them to water. Which he may or may not do. The film is slow and patient, a hard story about hard people in a hard land, and Reichardt conveys the sense of a bunch of farmers looking for a better life, with everything at stake.... It is interesting, though, to think of how it compares to the history - the real story it is based on involved hundreds of wagons - though I suppose plenty of people crossed the west in groups of 3 or 4 wagons... Sometimes, though, I think the real story competes with the story on screen - the small party gives it more of an abstract feeling, a kind of dream state, that maybe contradicts the matter of factness of the real story. Certainly the scale of the real story, the scale of the whole westward migration in the 1840s and 50s. Either way though - this is a fine movie...

Father's Day Ozu Style

2011-06-19T09:24:00.009-04:00

Of course he's no sentimentalist - father's can be monsters as easily as heroes.

...sometimes no better than kids themselves -

Families are trouble -

- but

Things do work out sometimes, whether you like it or not.

Happy father's day!

Summer Quiz

2011-06-18T21:29:00.000-04:00

Time for the latest quiz from Dennis Cozzalio - Professor Ed Avery's Cortizone-Fueled, Bigger than Life, Super Gulp-sized Summer Movie Quiz. ALways fun, and always a challenge - these things are harder than most class work I've had! This one has taken me an awful long time, thanks to my inherent sloth, the Bruins, the fact that it's summer and, you know - summer and stuff... But it's done, more or less... Here goes:

1) Depending on your mood, your favorite or least-loved movie cliché

I'm not sure - though in general - montage sequences, set to some pop song - are getting old, and are almost self-parody when they start... though when they work - they switch to one of the best. If they substitute for the plot...

2) Regardless of whether or not you eventually caught up with it, which film classic have you lied about seeing in the past?

I am sure I have done this, though I don't remember any specific instances. I think I did claim to see Paths of Glory for a while, when all I had seen was a kind of filmstrip version of the film... of course it was worse than that, since the history teacher that showed us the film strip claimed that it was All Quiet on the Western Front. I knew better, having already read the book...

3) Roland Young or Edward Everett Horton?

Horton, easily.

4) Second favorite Frank Tashlin movie

The Girl Can't Help It

5) Clockwork Orange-- yes or no?

I used to love it - now - I guess it’s still a pretty good piece of work. I have been coming back around toward Kubrick, after a long stretch of tending to look down on him. Though I can't really deny the entertainment value. I prefer the book, though, for whatever that is worth.

6) Best/favorite use of gender dysphoria in a horror film (Ariel Schudson)

I looked it up, of course - unease with ones gender. Well - this comes to mind:

But in a horror film? blimey... back to the drawing board. Where I feel guilty about just using the obvious - Psycho, Silence of the Lambs, that sort of thing. I could say Antichrist, I suppose...

7) Melanie Laurent or Blake Lively?

Hard to say I have an opinion, though I liked what I've seen of Melanie Laurent.

8) Best movie of 2011 (so far…)

Genuine new movies - Meek’s Cutoff; last year’s movies, released in 2011 - Uncle Boonmee, followed (not too far off) by Certified Copy and Le Quattro Volte

9) Favorite screen performer with a noticeable facial deformity (Peg Aloi)

interesting question, sort of. Does Peter Falk's glass eye count? though I only notice it when I am thinking about it. Let's see - Owen Wilson's nose? W. C. Fields' nose? Belmondo's nose? or maybe Denis Lavant's acne?

10) Lars von Trier: shithead or misunderstood comic savant? (Dean Treadway)

Are the two incompatible in some way? I didn't find his remarks at Cannes all that offensive, or even unusual. I suppose bad taste to joke about nazis, and probably a bad idea in general to use Hitler as a metaphor for something else (Hitler and Nazis as a matahphor for depression, right?) - but still... he does this all the time, of course - most of his public pronouncements seem calculated to confuse and annoy, and part f a more or less elaborate private joke. And usually in some strange way - funny, clever, worth considering.

11) Timothy Carey or Henry Silva?

They are both wonderful, but Carey is something else again.

12) Low-profile writer who deserves more attention from critics and /or audiences

I should be able to come up with an answer for this, but I can't.

13) Movie most recently viewed theatrically, and on DVD, Blu-ray or streaming

Theater = Nostalgia for the Light; DVD = You Can't Take it With You; Streaming = The Knack and How to Get It

14) Favorite film noir villain

There are too many choices... I think I'll go neo-noir, and, since I'm thinking about the Bruins and the Stanley Cup - go with Peter Boyle in The Friends of Eddie Coyle.

15) Best thing about streaming movies?

I don’t really like them, but they do let you make a decision on the spot, which can be nice.

16) Fay Spain or France Nuyen? (Peter Nellhaus)

I don't think I can answer this one. How about Marie-France Pisier instead?

17) Favorite Kirk Douglas that isn’t called Spartacus (Peter Nellhaus)

Ace in the Hole? though this could be the answer to 14 above too. (Out of the Past)

18) Favorite movie about cars

Two Lane Blacktop, probably.

19) Audrey Totter or Marie Windsor?

No idea

20) Existing Stephen King movie adaptation that could use an remake/reboot/overhaul

I don't think I care all that much. The ones I've liked, I've liked, and the ones I haven't I don't care about.

21) Low-profile director who deserves more attention from critics and/or audiences

I could probably come up with a lot of people, though this sort of thing usually comes to me after the fact.... But right now, I think I would say, Ira Sachs.

22) What actor that you previously enjoyed has become distracting or a self-parody? (Adam Ross)

I should be able to come up with a good answer for this. I don't know though - there seem to be a few actors I am tired of, but then they make a good film, or a film with someone who understands their talents, and all is forgiving. I don't know. I suppose there are obvious cases - Woody Allen, say... but that's boring, he barely acts anymore. Maybe Ellen Page? who does not seem to be going anywhere. Or even more depressing - Zooey Deschanel? I do not mind them, but they do not seem to progess much. I doubt either of those young women are to blame, though.

23) Best place in the world to see a movie

I don’t know. Anywhere that’s showing Ozu, I guess.

24) Charles McGraw or Sterling Hayden?

I always like Hayden

25) Second favorite Yasujiro Ozu film

Late Spring

26) Most memorable horror movie father figure

Has to be Dr. Pretorious in Bride of Frankenstein.

27) Name a non-action-oriented movie that would be fun to see in Sensurround

Another one I might think of over time.... How about Duck Soup?

28) Chris Evans or Ryan Reynolds?

Not sure, though Reynolds is usually watchable.

29) Favorite relatively unknown supporting player, from either or both the classic and the modern era

Modern - Garret Dillahunt usually makes me take notice... classic: there's nothing unknown about Dwight Frye, but boy, he was good...

30) Real-life movie location you most recently visited or saw

I walked by the Thirsty Scholar today, same as almost every day. Why would a Harvard kid and a BU kid go drinking in Somerville? no one has answered that question yet...

31) Second favorite Budd Boetticher movie

The Tall T

32) Mara Corday or Julie Adams?

I don't know...

33) Favorite Universal-International western

Winchester 73.

34) What's the biggest "gimmick" that's drawn you out to see a movie? (Sal Gomez)

If it counts, probably live music for silent films, including some odd mixes. (A DJ for shows of old Martial arts films - Red Knight Errant and Swordswoman of Huang jiang - which worked better than you might think...)

35) Favorite actress of the silent era

This is difficult - partly because I don't have quite the systematic experience with silent films I should. Lillian Gish has to rank high; or maybe Kinuyo Tanaka, who is in some fine early films, as well as having a big career in sound films.

36) Best Eugene Pallette performance (Larry Aydlette)

I'm going to say My Man Godfrey, though there are few more welcome presences in films...

37) Best/worst remake of the 21st century so far? (Dan Aloi)

The best, I suppose, is True Grit - the worst - I can't say I've sought out a lot of remakes... Planet of the Apes seemed particularly pointless, and I did see it, though not in a very conscious state...

38) What could multiplex owners do right now to improve the theatrical viewing experience for moviegoers? What could moviegoers do?

I am not sure. I think - keep projecting film is a big one. Similarly Moviegoers - show up on time? Though I have become more and more guilty of showing up in the middle of the trailers, so I shouldn't complain.

Icy Friday Music

2011-06-17T07:15:00.003-04:00

In honor of the local http://sports.espn.go.com/boston/nhl/columns/story?columnist=mcdonald_joe&id=6671740 triumph:

1. Meat Puppets - Ice
2. Joy Division - Ice Age
3. Husker Du - Ice Cold Ice
4. Van Halen - Ice Cream Man
5. Pere Ubu - Ice Cream Truck
6. Ugly Casanova - Ice on the Streets
7. Wiley - Treddin on Thin Ice
8. Yoko Ono - Walking on Thin Ice
9. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah - In this Home on Ice
10. Cibo Matto - WHite Pepper Ice Cream

Video? Husker Du is always indicated:

June 16

2011-06-16T12:37:00.001-04:00

Hoopsa boyaboy hoopsa! Hoopsa boyaboy hoopsa! Hoopsa boyaboy hoopsa!

Happy Bloomsday!

UPDATE: for one single post to read on Ulysses and the joys of Joyce, I would recommend Sheila O'Malley...

Bruins!

2011-06-15T22:44:00.002-04:00

Bruins win the Stanley cup!

That takes me back - I was a hockey fan, back in the day, the Don Cherry years, the Middleton/Pederson/early Bourque years especially - then sort of drifted away. it's nice to see.

Sunday Screen Shots - Space

2011-06-12T17:03:00.001-04:00

Posted without comment, today - mostly. A quiet weekend....

...and back to work in the morning:

Mid June Music

2011-06-10T06:49:00.003-04:00

There could be a theme here:

1. Little Feat - Old Folk's Boogie
2. Captain Beefheart - Old Fart at Play
3. The Pogues - Old Man Drag
4. Richard and Linda Thompson - Old Man inside a Young Man
5. Neil Young - Old Man
6. The Pretty Things - Old Man Going
7. REM - Old Man Kensey
8. Modern Lovers - Old World
9. Scott Walker - the Old Man's Back Again (Dedicated to the Neo-Stalinist regime)
10. Volcano Suns - Old Paint

Any excuse to post the Pogues will do:

And I should really post this too - the Pretty Things, with Dave Gilmour:

First in from Cannes

2011-06-09T21:20:00.000-04:00

The first two films from this year's Cannes festival have made it to Boston, Midnight in Paris and Tree of Life. They may not seem to have much more than playing at Cannes in common, but to me, they are linked - films by auteurs I don't much like. I've written about my troubles with Woody Allen - I could say more. That I was once a fan; that I still love the early, funny ones; that I truly admire his work ethic - making a film a year is an achievement... I wish more of his films were better - though one of the advantages of knocking them out all the time is that you increase your chances of making something good. And so it happened, that breaking my one-every-seven-year pattern, I saw it, and was almost shocked to be rewarded with a perfectly enjoyable film. You've got Owen Wilson in Paris, with Rachel McAdams as his fiance, and her insufferable rich parents, and Michael Sheen in the person of an appalling pedant, and... so poor Gil (that's Wilson) starts wandering the streets alone and night and before long is pulled off into the 1920s to hobnob with his idols and romance imaginary art groupies. Lessons are learned and such (partly through the expedient of going even further back in time), decisions are made, work might be done... The lessons (You Can't Live in the Past, or some such) aren't particularly convincing - the Allen films I've seen lately all seem to be about some kind of renunciation of some kind of pleasure, and getting on with the life you have - but this time, the whole affair is light and off-hand enough to go down without any sourness... It is funny - the caricatures are great - Hemingway talking in Hemingway sentences about Love, and Death, and Honor, and Boxing; Bunuel looking confused and Dali acting the fool.... The modern parts are almost as good, at least when Paul (the pedant) is on screen - the character is very funny and Michael Sheen nails him... And Wilson is his usual enjoyable presence. It's not a great film, in any sense, but it's perfectly fine - funny, handsome looking, sharply performed across the board, a loose, clever, entertainment... I liked it without reservations.

That's not quite the case for Tree of Life. If Woody Allen is a problem (an established auteur with a certain ongoing reputation in some corners of the cinephilic world, who I find almost unwatchable at times), Malick - is a bigger problem. Allen is a bit past his prime - all those films, so many of them mediocre - a lot of people have given up on him. But Malick, knocking out a film every half decade or so (after taking almost 2 decades off), still seems to be the critics' darling. People I like and respect consider his films among the best of the decade! how does that happen?

I do not share that opinion, you may have guessed. And this film - I have been dreading for a long time. I dread it because of his last couple films, neither of which I find particularly good; but I know what he is capable of - and have no intention of risking missing another Badlands (or Days of Heaven, for that matter) - so I would see it, no matter what. And I dread it because it will inspire gushing reports all around the internet, and I was all too sure they would get under my skin - and maybe poison me against the film, more than it deserves. All that came before the film did - now that the film is out - well - no surprises anywhere. The reception, at least among the blogs and writers I tend to follow, is (mostly) rapturous - there are nay-sayers, though more than one of them seem to be aiming at targets beyond Mr. Malick... And the film itself? kind of a bore, really, though the middle part is quite good....

What I guess nags at me the most is the idea that this is some kind of masterpiece, some kind of experimental film - that's the gist of a lot of the praise and complaints. (It's worth noting just how many of the reviewers and commentators mention that Malick once lectured on philosophy (see? I did it too!), as if proving his intellectual bona fides.) But I don't see it - there's nothing experimental about the film, unless making a feature length movie that looks sounds and feels like a mashup of Levis, Louis Vuitton and Latter Day Saints ads is experimental. (And the sad fact is - the Levi's ad had freaking Walt Whitman himself doing the voiceovers! instead of Malick's banalities... it's an ad that couldn't exist without Terence Malick, and at this point, is - except for the quality of the poetry - almost indistinguishable from him.) That complaint, I will say, applies mostly to the frame story - the opening 20 minutes, the end, etc. - the Creation of the Universe stuff isn't quite so bad (it has its own problems, though, especially the nonsense with the dinosaurs) - and the middle part is quite good. It's nicely set up - after another montage of babies being born and growing up (an insurance ad?), Malick lands us at the dinner table one evening, and the plot kicks in and suddenly, you have something worth watching. Better than that, maybe.

It's still montage heavy, still occasionally marred by voiceover (and always stupid voiceover) - but this part is much more engaged - the people resemble human beings, the dialogue, though on the nose, feels closer to true - it feels like memory. The sequence plays as a kind of memory/dream, and is very effective at it. Does some interesting things - the Pitt character is something of a tyrant - or rather, the kids see him as a tyrant - he is strict, he occasionally gets mean (and he plays Bach on a pipe organ like a monster movie villain) - but it’s still odd; he never quite does anything wrong - he seems more sad than cruel. You wonder if Malick is deliberately undercutting the emotional core of the film - this is Jack’s movie - we see his reactions to his father the monster - but don’t see father quite as a monster. Even if it’s not meant quite to undercut the narrator (the implied POV), it certainly seems aimed at giving us a complicated view of the father. The grown son remembering, doubting himself, his memories, his emotions as a kid, and so on. The father emerges as the richest and most interesting character - I suspect that is intentional. (The flip side of this is that the mother never emerges as anything - she is a wet dream, there’s nothing else. She wafts around with no personality or self, just being ethereal and interacting with nature and such. She is more imaginary than the rest of the family.) Anyway - things happen - fights at home, playing with the brothers and other kids, kids die, kids get hurt... There are some key moments - the father going away and freeing the rest of the family for a day or so... Jack's sexual awakening (breaking into a lady's house to - well - masturbate onto her nightgown, right? Malick makes this look as ethereal as the rest - the kid looking to hide the nightgown, then throwing it into the river - but it shouldn't take too much imagination to figure out why he had to hide it....) Not surprisingly, Jack immediately transfers this business onto his mom... (About the only real complaint I have with this section is that it's basically acting out the monologue from "The End" - which Jim Morrison got through in a minute and a half, and it takes Malick an hour...) And then - Dad loses his job and the family has to move - and somewhere in the future, one of the boys dies, and the others suffer.... And Malick cuts away from this memoir to Sean Penn wandering around in deserts and beaches and salt flats to no good end.

So - I'm left with a very split opinion of the film. I wish it were all like the middle part; I found the opening and closing sections inane and dull. The creation stuff - nothing NatGeo doesn't go better... But the middle - isn't stylistically that different from the rest. It's elliptical, it's impressionistic, it's as aestheticized as the beginning and end - but hooking into the story, and into the subjectivity of its originating intelligence, and exploring the washes of memory and impression as it does - is fascinating, engaging, the seeds of a good film.

D-Day

2011-06-06T07:02:00.000-04:00

This week's Sunday Screen Shots come a day late, to honor the history - D-Day, in one of the best war movies of them all. It's a marvel of low-budget filmmaking, and a marvel of efficiency - capturing the chaos, violence, then the blood-curdling heroism of battle, the matter of fact horror of counting off who gets to risk their life next...

Music Friday

2011-06-03T07:22:00.003-04:00

Another simple random ten, this Friday. I have some new records I have to listen to, and maybe get around to writing about - but that is still to come... Right now - Friday 10:

1. You La Tengo - Lost in Bessemer
2. Richard Thompson - Burning Man
3. Pere Ubu - Synth Farm
4. John Hartford - I Am A Man of COnstant Sorrow (Instrumental)
5. Pere Ubu - Heart of Darkness [specifically, a demo from one of their collections, a rehearsal session, working out the pulse... Neu would be proud]
6. Richard & Linda Thompson - Hokey Pokey (live)
7. Rites of Spring - Drink Deep
8. Merle Haggard - Silver WIngs
9. Yoko Ono - Why Not
10. The Doors - Back Door Man

That was interesting. Here then - video? Rites of Spring thrashing in the dark might be a good place to start....

And while the video is just an odd piece of animation - one never goes wrong with Pere Ubu:

John Doe Footnote

2011-06-02T21:10:00.000-04:00

(A follow up to the previous post - expanding a bit on some of the remarks about Meet John Doe. This comes from the paper that belongs with the images in this post.)

To quote the last post: "I think Capra tries to take a look at how fascism works. I think this is quite explicit at times - the big John Doe rally in the rain strikes me as a fairly deliberate parody of Triumph of the Will - or at least, of Nazi iconography" - here is what I mean:

The rally has all the trimmings of a big Nazi rally - huge crowds, radio mics and reporters, cameras and lights and hoopla - but all this imagery is undercut. The rally occurs in a torrential downpour - neither the bright daylight of the daytime scenes at Nuremburg, or the dramatic torchlight of the night scenes. John Doe arrives, passing like Hitler through the masses waiting for him, but unlike Hitler, with almost no fanfare. No one recognizes him as he passes through the crowd; Capra shoots his progress from a long distance in one shot, emphasizing his anonymity. Only when he reaches the stage does anyone recognize him. He then stands in front of the crowd, in front of a microphone, expected to speak; Capra frames him alone on the podium, in shots that do recall Riefenstahl’s shots of Hitler, but to opposite effect. Doe is alone, isolated (like Hitler in that, too), but with the opposite of Hitler’s commanding gaze and presence. He looks down, his face is desperate, and of course, he is sopping wet - a dripping, downcast man who doesn’t know what to say. The crowds are not arranged in ornaments, at least not in the lighting Capra provides - they are a sodden mass of people, obscured by umbrellas and hats and newspapers held over their heads, the whole thing swallowed up in mist and rain and darkness. The whole rally is a farce - the whole story a very complex mass of fraud and delusion, cynicism mixed with misapplied idealism, and this its point of collapse. Capra makes superb use of the imagery of Nazi propaganda, and of mass ornaments, undermining them, to expose the sordidness of the rally, not to mention the Nazis.

The Listening Ear

Random Musical Friday

Very Random Friday Music Post Here

Stopping SOPA & PIPA

Short Reviews of Recent FIlms

Sunday Shopping Report

A Noisy Musical Friday

Desert Island DVDs

My Favorite Music of 2011

Best Films of 2011

Film Posts 2012

Ring out the Old, Ring in the New

It's Still Friday, Isn't It

A Melancholy Christmas

More Random new Music

Where they Really Know About Winter

December is for This Year's Music

The History of Cinema is Still a Short One

One Hundred Three and Counting

Another 2011 Music Sampler

Exhilarating Misery at the Movies

Happy Birthday, JLG!

Random 2011 Tunes

Happy Thanksgiving!

Platinum Blonde

Great Googlymoogly!

Sergeant York

Friday Random Ten Plus One!

Armistice Day 2011

Musicals

Scribblers of the World, Unite!

Friday Random Ten

Frankenstein

Halloween Quiz Time

Scary Music Friday

Thirst

No Rapture? Well - Music then!

Let the Right One In

Musical Friday

Recently Viewed New Films

Horror of Dracula

What iTunes has Wrought

Steve Jobs (And Me)

Flann O'Brien Centennial

Rio Lobo

Crash and Burn, Crimson Hose Department

Friday Random Ten

Rules of Threes

Belated Maddin Post

REM Retires

In The Theater Old and New

Fassbinder - Capitalism, Violence, Media

Guilty Pleasures

September 11, 2011

Friday Music & Otis Redding

New Films Recently Viewed

Quick Links - Nick Ray Plus

Kick Me Deadly

Labor Day Weekend Friday Music

Hurricane Day

Friday Hurricane Music

Fifty-Five

All Good Cretins Go to Heaven

New Films Reviewed

Carol Reed's Sunday Screenshots

Our Friday Rituals...

The Furies

Friday Music Post Returns!

Holidays and Politics

Summertime Movie Viewing Report

Friday Ulster Genius Edition

Sunday With the Duke and Friends

2011 Halftime Report

Canadian Music Day

Farewell Columbo

Classroom Triangles

Rainy Friday Songs

Spring Film Roundup

Father's Day Ozu Style

Summer Quiz