I Return

Given my erratic posting habits in the best of times, you probably can't tell when I have been away and when I'm just lazy. Well, this time, I have been away. I have been abroad, as it were, though a rather tame form of "abroad" - our neighbors to the north. I was, however, completely off the grid for a week - a novel experience indeed. It was a vacation indeed - I did nothing but eat sleep read a book or two and chat with various cousins and uncles and aunts and the like. Drank a lot of tea. Walked around looking at fields that used to be houses (and a lot of houses on what used to be fields and brushland.) And looked at nature. For example: birds - primarily seagulls, such as this example:



Though also these hummingbirds (my inaugural YouTube upload, for that matter.)



UPDATE: I changed the pictures a bit, stripped them down a bit more, because it was starting to get realy slow loading. I hope that was the cause. Sometimes I have to pay attention to the tech stuff, I guess. Learn the damn code.

Friday Ritual

Yes, it's time for the random ten - still Friday, even! Here goes:

1. Deerhoof - Sealed with a Kiss
2. Wilco - The Late Greats
3. Jay Farrar - Vitamins [I see the iPod is playing games - Wilco and Farrar back to back?]
4. Grateful Dead - New Speedway Boogie
5. John Cale - Outta the Bag
6. English Beat - Save it for Later
7. Byrds - Time Between
8. Sunny Day Real Estate - J'Nuh
9. Jacques Brel - Sans Exigences
10. Jacques Brel - Orly [uh - how does this happen?]
11. Stereolab - Bonnie & Clyde [had to include that - 3 French songs in a row?]

We'll have to return to the original for our video treat: Serge and Brigitte, in all their cool majesty.

Kids

Well - here's an interesting post. Pandagon, picking up on Alas, A Blog, picking up on The Daily Mail - on how kids are boring, and making your life revolve around your kids is a recipe for having a dull tiresome and pretty much useless life. And how this is primarily a problem for women: men can opt in or out as they will.

I suppose it's a kind of heresy but, yeah - they're right. Kids are b0ring. Or, more accurately, kids are fun some of the time, but boring most of the time - though some are boring 24/7. The needy clingy ones, especially. The truth is - the other side of this is - that adults are also boring, to kids. They were when I was a kid. It was fun, now and then, to join the grown ups for a game of dominos or hearts, or shooting baskets, or getting an adult to hit you fly balls - but grownups generally don't want to sit around playing with toy cowboys, and when I was a kid, that's what I lived for. Not so much now. Now I want to sit around with the other grownups and watch the Red Sox. (Actually, one of the weirdest things about the kids I know is that they don't want to sit and watch sports. What is wrong with them? communists!) Doting on kids, running every inch of their lives - that can't be good for anyone.

Politics

I haven't been writing about politics much lately, but sometimes... two big stories to comment on: there's the terror plot for one. And the defeat (though not yet the end) for Holy Joe Lieberman, Connecticutt senator and all round jackass. The former is an odd tale. It's always good to hear about these things being foiled, but I'm not always sure I trust the reaction. Security changes for instance. There may be good reasons for it - but isn't the point that the plot was discovered? I don't know - I don't know enough about what happened to say. I just get the impression sometimes that a lot of the reaction to terriorist plots and acts is just that - a reaction, more about appearing to do something than about actually stopping them from happening. That's obviously not true of every security measure, but it's true of enough that you wonder about others. (The temptation to post about the security barricades office buildings put up - just run of the mill office buildings, nobody special, not one any terrorist is going to blow up, not even one a disgruntled employee is all that likely to want to start any crap in - is very strong. I'll resist. I wouldn't want anyone to think I don't take the war on terror seiously.)

There's some of that ocming out of the Lamont v. Lieberman race. Roy Edroso has rounded up some of the right's reactions to Lamont's win (and the terrorism plot) - a miserable spectacle; two miserable spectacles. There's the sad tale of one Brendan Loy - who can no longer "cling to the label of Democrat" now that Joe Lieberman has lost his primary. This Loy person is your basic "9/11 changed everything" type, but for some reason, it took him 5 years to change. And that, friends, is incomparably freakish. I suppose there is some logic in becoming a hawk after 9/11, and thinking the republicans were more hawkish than the democrats - but it's been 5 years! You should have picked up that just about everyone became a hawk after 9/11 - it's only whenn the GOP went off message (and went after Iraq instead of terrorists) that the dems and the left in general dug in their heels. But more to the point, and to the point that giving up on the dems now is just plain freakish - the GOP has completely failed. Their foreign policy has been a miserable failure for years. Going into Iraq was an abandonment of the "war on terror" in a meaningful sense; it was an immoral war, that served no discernable national security interest - and it has been a wretched failure.

So - if Lamont won because Lieberman continues to support the war as uncritically as it is possible to do - well - that's because most of the country has pretty much come to see the war as a failure as well. It's the majority position in the country and not just in liberal Connecticut. At this point - why would even a hawk support Bush? What good is an aggressive foreign policy if it is that badly applied?

There's a lot of wailing in the pundit classes and on the right just now. Holy Joe's defeat has them unnerved - maybe because they realize they are in the minority, and have to ratchet up the noise to get people to forget what a disaster GOP rule has been. They certainly waste no time seizing on the thwarted terrorist plot as proof of something - usually something about the need to kill more Arabs, once you get through the details. I don't know. Holy Joe himself won't be missed: it ain't just the war, it's the whole package. Can't say we'll miss him.

Friday Randomness

Actually put some content up between fridays this week - I am so proud of myself! Anyway, as customary, here is your Friday Random Ten:

1. PJ Harvey - Electric Light
2. Johnny Cash - I don't know where I'm bound
3. Rod Stewart - Mandolin Wind
4. Earth - Crooked Axis for String Quartet
5. Jimi Hendrix - Rainy Day, Dream Away
6. Doc Watson Family - I heard my mother weeping
7. Peter Laughner - Amphetemine
8. Patti Smith - Revenge
9. Captain Beefheart - Alice in Blunderland
10. The Waterboys - The Thrill is Gone

Not having much luck turning those songs up on YouTube - so to compensate, here's the Waterboys doing Pagan Place, somewhere in their early years...

Avant Garde Blogathon

...underway, as we speak! hosted by Girish, who has a post up about Joseph Cornell, an artist I like very much. The only film of his I have seen is Rose Hobart - a fascinating film constructed out of clips from East of Borneo - no slouch itself in the surrealism department (I refer you to Guy Maddin's review for the Village Voice.) But for a movie geek like me, Cornell's art has cinematic qualities - using cinematic source material (Penny Arcade Portrait of Lauren Bacall), but also all those grids and repetitions reminiscent of film strips, or Mubridge. (A quality he shares with Warhol.) Look at that Bacall box: the grids, repeated images, even the holes around the boxes at the top, enough like sprocket holes for me. The formal elements - grids, repetitions, etc. - are fundamental to Cornell's work, and hard not to associate with film. The "window" box at the bottom here - would make a pretty good strip of avant-garde film.

I wish I had more to offer to this blogathon - check it out, there's some good reading there.

Halfway Home

It's rather late for this sort of thing, a halfway report, I should have posted something like it about a month ago. But it's worth a shot. What are the best films I've seen so far in 2006? New films, I mean - in theatrical, commercial, release, in Boston, in 2006? As usual, it's mostly last year's best foreign films - decent domestic films generally come out in the fall. But it's not a bad crop:

1. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu - easily the best, one of the best films of the decade
2. L'Enfant - the excellence one expects from the Dardennes brothers.
3. Three Times - Hou Hsiao Hsien revisiting his life and his career in a ravishing three part work.
4. Cache - "an examination of guilty consciences and the unexpected results of casual, careless cruelty, and just a hint of Duck Amuck..." (I'm rather proud of that line)
5. Clean - Olivier Assayas making the most of two brilliant performances from Maggie Cheung and Nick Nolte
6. Sympathy for Lady Vengeance - a powerful conclusion to Park Chan-wook's vengeance trilogy
7. Pulse - holy crap! I thought the American remake had disappeared without a trace - but no! it's up for release next week! Anyway, Kurosawa's original is a haunting and masterful work.
8. A Scanner Darkly - Philip K Dick brought to the screen...
9. Tristram Shandy - another adaptation, one less suited to the direct approach - which Michael Winterbottom and company handle by making the film as much about adaptation as the book is about writing. Quite enjoyable, and not requiring the facility with 19th century prose style as the novel.
10. Bubble - somehow feels as though it has been forgotten already, but deserved a better fate. Interesting experiment, and very well made.

Honearable mention to Army of Shadows, which at 37 years old is too much for me to list, even though it was released this year. Also to Cafe Lumiere, L'Intrus, Regular Lovers, Good Morning, Night, The President's Last Bang and Innocence, all of which played somewhere, once or twice maybe, but should have been given a halfway decent release, and need to be seen, however you can find them. Still - I suppose it is something of a joyful miracle that The Death of Mr. Lazarescu got a straightforward commercial release (and drew a modest crowd - better than some films I would have expected to draw, like Pulse). But it would be nice.

Love of your Fellow Man

The Death of Mr. Lazarescu is by far the best new film I have seen this year. An old man - Lazarescu Dante Remus - is feeling bad. He has had a head-ache for four days; his stomach hurts; he can't keep food down. He calls an ambulance, but no one comes. He has a bad life - he lives alone, with his cats, he has run out of food; he drinks; he has a sister living in another town, but they are quarrelling - they nag him for money; he has a daughter in Canada who talks to his sister but not him. He suffers. He goes next door to borrow painkillers from the neighbors, and in the middle of their lectures, their quarrelling, he starts vomiting blood and can't stand up - so they call an ambulance. The ambulance arrives, and he is prodded and questioned, lectured for drinking, and finally totters off with the paramedic, begging his neighbor, as he goes, to feed his cats. On the TV, meanwhile, half in the background, we hear a news report about a truck hitting a bus full of tourists. His death sentence. He will go to four hospitals before the night is over - the first will be full of bus accident victims, and will send him elsewhere for a CT scan, after harangueing him for drinking. The second will do the tests, diagnose the problem - a blood clot on the brain - and tell him he needs immediate surgery: but they will be full of bus crash victims too. The third hospital will earn a special place in hell. The fourth hospital will operate, but by then he will well on his way to another world.

It is heartbreaking, funny, a tour of hell with a sympathetic guide (the paramedic) and a fascinating array of people. The film has been billed as an indictment of the Romanian medical profession - it is, though it's more than that. No one treats poor Lazarescu Dante Remus with any decency - they bully him, lecture him incessantly for his drinking, blame him for his troubles, or just ignore him, treat him like a car in the shop. The neighbors and his family as much as the doctors. But for all that, most of the people, when push comes to shove, do what they are supposed to do. The neighbors whine about his drinking, his cats, the mess in his flat, but they give him medicine, they bring him food, they try to help. The doctors and nurses are rude and arrogant, but most of them do their jobs. When they see what is wrong, they try to fix it. (Though one of the themes is that most of the people who would help him can't: the neighbors don't know what to do with him; the paramedic can’t really fix anything, and her treatment might make things worse; the neurologists who figure out what is wrong with him can't do anything, they have nowhere to operate. There is an odd scene here, at the second hospital. The doctors say he needs immediate surgery, but their ORs are full. The paramedic and her friend the nurse try to convince them to let him stay - they see that he has been dragged from pillar to post too long, it is becoming cruel - but the doctors know he can’t wait for morning - it's an odd argument.) There are exceptions of course - at the third hospital, an intern and then the doctor are rude to the paramedic, arrogant, sarcastic, and completely disdainful of the old man. They try to get him to sign a waiver for his surgery - but by this time, he is very far gone. All he hears is the word "paralyzed" and he panics and starts refusing everything. The paramedic tries to tell them he in incompetent, but they are so against her, they won't listen. They tell her to drive him around for an hour until he is in a coma, then they will operate. It's a particularly vicious moment. But outside that scene - the film may be a towering denunciation of the human race, but not so much of its individuals. Who, whine and gripe and play politics though they may, do, basically, do their jobs, under very difficult circumstances.

All of this, anyway, is shot in almost documentary style (comparisons to Frederick Wiseman are apt), simple, direct, mostly hand held camera, long takes, long stretches in almost real time, with nothing much going on (we see most of the rides between hospitals in real time, nothing going on, the old man dying, the paramedic watching, taking her gall bladder medicine, sometimes making small talk with the driver). Restrained acting (though some pretty obnoxious behavior), lots of digressions (following, for a moment or two, the plight of another patient - one woman trying, I think, to hustle drugs, complaining about her prescription, another couple talking about whether their vacation would constitute strain), and lots of fairly legitimate sounding medical talk. This - the systems and routines of the medical profession - is what comes in for the most abuse. Lazarescu keeps being sent along to new doctors - who insist on starting from the beginning, asking the same questions, making the same examinations, drawing the same conclusions - he's drunk, it's his liver... It's the arrogance - not listening, not paying attention to what they see and hear, that damns the ones who are damned. The ones who act do what they are supposed to - listen, look, ask for what they don't know.

It all adds up. It is intensely sad - the lonely old fool, his rotten life, his cats, who he loves though no one else does, sinking into oblivion. He starts feisty and defiant, arguing with the neighbors, with the paramedic when they try to cram him into a dinky looking van of an ambulance, the doctors who tell him he brought it on himself drinking - but he falls apart, a piece at a time. It starts at his flat - he falls - and after that, can't walk well. Then he can't stand. He starts falling asleep, and every time he wakes he is less coherent. And do it goes. And the film watches, him, and the people around him, doing good or bad things, paying attention to detail, patient, insisting on the details, the corners of our lives, the details of a room, or the way a person sits. Its love of its characters is evident, even in its refusal to absolve them for their failures, while never slighting them on their achievements.

Movies

I haven't put up a movie post in ages. I haven't done much blogging of any kind this summer, but film posts (like Fun With The iPod), are supposed to provide a bare minimum of prose.... Well: at this point, I am not going to run through any major reviews - just run through a bunch of recent films, with some comments. A couple of these will get longer posts eventually...

Death of Mr. Lazarescu - the best film released this year, and one of the best of the decade. More will definitely be coming here.

Rome, Open City
Flowers of St. Francis
My Dad is 100 Years Old - Roberto Rossellini double feature, plus Canada's greatest director paying homage to Italy's greatest director through the medium of the latter's daughter. Staged as a kind of dialogue between RR's belly and certain of Rossellini's contemporaries (Hitchcock, Selznick, Fellini, all played by Isabella Rossellini), with interventions from Ingrid Bergman and Charlie Chaplin - it's a pretty good statement of the issues, and of Rossellini's positions. Interesting too for the way Maddin's surrealism pays homage to Rossellini's realism - and a reminder that Maddin's expressionistic surrealism is as far from the mainstream as anything Rossellini did, and that their stubborn individualism has quite a bit in ocmmon.

The 2 Rossellini films, of course, are masterpieces. Flowers of St. Francis is in a new print, looking about as good as films get the right to look. It's a joy to watch - direct and clear and simple, funny and generous - dwelling on faces, landscapes, the sky... beautiful and very moving film.

Nacho Libre - not so beautiful of moving... the idea of Jack Black as a wrestling priest is very appealing - the actual execution is not. It's an interesting problem, though, why this film is so bad - the absurd concept, the deliberate underplaying, the jokily cheap looking sets and costumes and effects, the use of actors for their faces and bodies as much as any kind of acting, and the willingness to have the actors pretend rather than act, so that it looks like a bunch of kids pretending to be in a movie - is slipping disconcertingly close to, well, Rossellini territory. Maybe Luc Moullet is a better example. But it doesn't work. Jared Hess doesn't seem to be a good enough director to make a real "bad" film. That's a strange thing to say, but it's the impression this one left me with - if they hadn't been trying to make it sort of look like it wasn't all a joke, maybe....

Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man - somewhat disappointing documentary about the great man... interesting interviews interspersed with all star tribute concert, which never really went anywhere. With dumb camera tricks to try to make it all seem - filmed. All star tribute concerts are usually pretty lame, especially on film - though they can be much improved by the presence of the star being lauded. This one didn't have much traction... Still worth seeing, given the quality of the music, and the performers are no slouches...

Withnail & I
The Big Lebowski - as quotable a doulbe bill as one is likely to see, I guess. As the years pass, I find that the Big Lebowski rises steadily in my estimation - every time I see it I like it more. It is something of a comic counterpart of David Lynch's Lost Highway - maybe because they are both about LA, and LA in the movies, in related ways - and certainly because both seem to be better films every time I see them. Anyway.... the dude abides.

A Scanner Darkly - speaking of LA masterpieces... this is one of the great adaptations, getting the tone and ideas of the source novel almost perfectly. And being an adaptation of a great book, makes it pretty much a great film.

Friday, Music, Rain

This does seem to be the only time I post anything these days. Have to fix that this weekend, if I can. And - after a week of humid heat, we have the standard issue torrential downpour, with thunder and lightning and wind. Black as night out there, thick curtains of rain. Thrash and bang. Hopefully nothing untoward will occur in re the computer. All that electricy and water flying around, ya never know.

1. Charlie Parker - Out of Nowhere
2. Sonic Youth - Winner's Blues
3. Minutemen - West Germany
4. M.I.A. - Fire Fire
5. Rolling Stones - Ventilator Blues
6. Stevie Wonder - Living in the City
7. Sonic Youth - Shaking Hell (that would descriobe the weather just now, well enough)
8. Husker Du - Somewhere
9. Captain Beefheart - Korn Ring Finger
10. Nick Cave - Nature Boy

Friday Randomness

I see I am back on a post-a-week schedule. Sad. We must address that. But in the meanwhile, thank god for friday, since that's the only brainless post I bother with anymore - the Friday Random Ten! Hooray and all. Here's to it:

1. Minor Threat - Straight Edge
2. Dr. Nerve - Don't Call Too Late My Husband's a Baker
3. Beatles - If I needed someone
4. Big Country - Broken Heart (13 Valleys)
5. Klaus Nomi - After the Fall
6. Tom Waits - 9th and Hennepin
7. Beatles - She Came in Through the Bathroom Window (multiple Beatles! good thing! odd hearing songs from Abbey Road by themselve though....)
8. Danielson - Ship the Majestic Suffix
9. Big Country - Where the Rose in Sown (multiple Big Country though - that's weird)
10. James Blood Ullmer - Sittin on Top of the World

...plus, of course, thunder and lightning and pouring rain...

And, as this week's bonus - Minor Threat video!

Serge Gainsbourg -- Initiales BB

Happy Bastille Day!

Friday Music Stuff

This video war thing is getting confusing. First came the Shaggs video, just a little out of place - Tiny Tim doing Do You Think I'm Sexy - that's what we expect here! Star Wars crap! not - The Shaggs.

But now - lately - Dr. Seuss? Kate Bush? (Though mixed with more traditionally awful material like the Osmonds.) Klaus Nomi? Something is amiss here. Points are being missed. Someone's gonna post Matisyahu or the Bastards of the Young video if we're not careful...

And finally - I see appearances of a new trend: Friday Top Ten with YouTube links. Now - it's an obvious idea, obvious enough that I picked it up without any help at all - but - I did pick it up, 2 weeks ago! Not that anyone's ripping me off or anything - but for once, I'm not the last to the party!

Anyway: today's random ten? Not entirely randomly starting...

1. "...I don't know why I call him Gerald" - Pink Floyd - Bike - bye Syd...
2. REM - Old Man Kinsey
3. Three - Domino Days (that Dischord collection...)
4. Yo La Tengo - Double Dare
5. Bloc Party - Tulips
6. Modest Mouse - Gravity Rides everything (one of those moments there a couple years ago, when this turned up in a van commercial - strange stuff. The moment, I suppose, when they slipped across some line. I guess.)
7. Undertones - Billy's Third
8. Undertones - She can only say no (okay: what's going on here? it's a good thing, we have to say)
9. Neil Young - Words (Between the Lines of Age)
10. Devendra Banhardt - Tell Me Something

and that's that.

Well, wait - YouTube Minutemen search. There you go.

Update! Since you can't have too many Minutemen videos: let's see how this works.



Looks like it's working well. Happy day!

Goodbye, Syd

Syd Barrett has died. His story is not that unusual, unfortunately - talented and unstable young man, ruined by drugs (or nature, plus drugs), leaving a moment or two of brilliance. And the base of a band that would drag on forever with rapidly diminishing returns. Piper at the Gates of Dawn is the only Pink Floyd record I really love, and Barrett's guitar playing is one of the reasons - he was inventive and imaginative and surprising - he could keep those long jams interesting, which the rest of the band could not. His songs can be a bit much, all those gnomes and such, but that's not a very strong objection - they are clever, funny, and inventive, and bear up well over time. He was a seminal figure, he lives up to the hype. His loss - which to the music world, occurred about 35 years ago - is very sad. One hopes his life in those 35 years had its contentments.

Friday Music Extravaganza!

First the bad news - word getting around that Sleater Kinney is breaking up. "America's greatest rock band"? you know - well, for a while - probably, yeah, especially if you say "greatest" - they were a mighty force, weren't they, in the late 90s? Their recent records have not held the same power, to my ears - the last one, for all the guitar wanking on top - a good thing, generally, I'm all for guitar wankery - sounded far tamer than Call the Doctor or Dig Me Out. I don't know. I got to them, like most things, just after their peak - but for a couple years (while they were putting out Hot Rock and All Hands on the Bad One) they were just about it. Now - I hope the various members soldier on in other endeavors.

In their honor, then, YouTube footage, live, "Let's Call it Love" - in which Carrie Brownstein is, as usual, the coolest looking person alive - but unfortunately, in the service of a rather mundane Blue Cheer impersonation. Not that there's anything wrong with that - but they were better in their Wire impersonating days.

Now - ten songs, or so... It's been a couple weeks, since I posted such a list, so this time - instead of real randomness, here's a random selection of 5-star songs. I will not be able to resist commenting here....

1. Big Star - When my baby's beside me
2. Roxy Music - Virginia Plain - all right, lately I have been obsessed with Roxy Music. The early days, the 2 records with Eno. And - maybe thinking about that Sleater-Kinney quote up there, I thought - for those two records - they were the best band in the world, weren't they? Early 70s, before the Ramones got going (or Pere Ubu, which would be the other late 70s contender, like it or not, Mainstream American Music Fans) - after the Beatles and the Velvets were done, after Who's Next, after Beggar's Banquet and Let It Bleed (I'm not an Exile on Main Street afficianado - good record - not their best.) Even after Trout Mask Replica, the Stooges first 2, etc. So for that period of time, those two records - I think they might have been the best band in the world. And in the YouTube spirit - here's a Ladytron video. Now that is hwo you end on a freakout!
3 Stiff Little Fingers - this YouTube thing is habit forming: suspect device
4 From Monterey Pop: a quick one while he's away
5 Butthole Surfers - moving to florida - maybe it's just as well I can't find this. Though it is also probably a good idea to make sure someone potty trains the Chairman Mao.
6 Gordon Lightfoot - Sundown - this is what iTunes randomizing is all about. The fact is, however much I like both of them, I probably never would have put moving to florida and sundown back to back on a CD. And is there a radio station on earth that would play such a combo? No, I doubt it. And YouTube, after disappointing me on the is LBJ is a Soviet Jew? front, comes through, with live Lightfoot!
7 The boy with perpetual nervousness - one of the reasons it is so hard, and so dubious, to say, Band X was the Greatest in the World, between years Y and Z is that, for someone like me, with some years on him, and a willingness to change and explore, without abandoning the past - you change. What you value changes. Tragically, in my video scrounging, I could not find this song - but I found a really old clip of Crazy Rhythms - that's about as exciting as music gets, and they were like that, even when I saw them, about twice a year from 85-86 on.... But in those days, I would have sworn - and did - that The Good Earth was one of the great records of all time - certainly their masterpiece. But now - the influence of Roxy Music and Gang of Four and the Minutemen, Wire, Pere Ubu, all those jagged edgy bands, that I listened to 20 years late, have changed me - Sleater Kinney! - have changed me. In the 80s I listened to REM and the Feelies and lotsa jangle, but now, it's the post-punk stuff that gets me. This week anyway.
8. B-52's - Rock lobster - then too.
9. Mama's and the Papa's - California Dreamin'
10. Mission of Burma - Forget
11. Serge Gainsbourgh - requiem pour un con - il est terrible, c'est le rat; check out the Whitney Houston clips...

Bloggity Bloggy Blogging (& sport)

Yes, it's another links roundup post, since I spent the weekend watching soccer and baseball and eating. The former ended with the most disappointing game of the world cup so far - the Netherlands and Portugal game looked like it was going to be a gem, but instead turned into a hockey game. Better informed football fans debate how much blame goes to the ref - my take is that he seemed to miss a number of early fouls, while handing out cards for very borderline offenses (and underbooking the obvious hacks, like the attack on Christiano Ronaldo) - and when that happens (cheap calls plus missed calls) the players start taking matters into their own hands (or feet, in soccer). The ref saw all the relatiations, and - since they were obvious and nasty - had to card them all. The result? an unpleasant and tiresome display of hacking, diving, whining and offensive ineptitude in a game that could have been very entertaining.

Meanwhile - going round the blogs these days - several respectable blogs are devoting precious space to discussing something called The Brights. Someone got the, uh, bright idea that if they gave a spiffy new name to atheists/naturalists/freethinkers/godless heathens, they could, um, not have Christians hate us so. Unfortunately, the new name did not turn out to be spiffy at all, going instead for something that manages to approach "special" in its unintended connotations, while managing to sound insulting to the, uh, not-Brights. Strangely enough, not all commments on the term are comic or abusive, some going so far as to defend it, sort of. Dunno there. The defenders try to pretend that the problem is that it either is insulting to Christians or seems to be or that Christians try to make it into an insult to christians - that's not it at all. The problem is that as the first things that pop into mind when you hear it are jokes about dimwits (see the Crooked Timber link above), and then - doesn't it sound like a cult? one of those California cults who believe the space aliens are coming to take them home, but who only take you hoome if you smile and can solve the New York Times Crossword puzzle in pen without a dictionary. Help me Jesus.

Meanwhile - too many posts going around about some Bright(s) at TNR huffing and puffing about "blogfascism". This is too stupid and circle jerking a topic to say anything about, other than to link to Berube, who sums it up the most. There might be something behind all this - whispers about payola, clubbiness, and the like - but really. Still, Berube is in fine form, and that is enough to make even 10,000 daily kos puns bearable.

Linking Out On Many Topics

Kind of keeping up appearances a bit, some links: first, at Girish's blog, a post about "cinephiliac moments" - "small, marginal moments that detonate an unforgettable little frisson in the viewer." As usual there, the fine inciting post has blossomed into a wonderful discussion in comments....

And, some nice posts from some of my long time internet buddies - Joseph B. reminisces about radio, and talks about current music he likes... and at Club Parnassus, Evan Waters follows up reviews of the Matrix movies with a review of the Metroplis Musical.

Leaving the arts for politics - is, as usual, a miserable experience. Lots of posts about Ron Suskind's book, The One Percent Doctrine, which judging from the reviews, seems to be infinitely depressing. News from Iraq remains bad - domestic response remains disgraceful. (Links from Arthur Silber, who also refutes Rush's crap.) That's about my limit these days....

So - let's raise the discourse again! I would be terribly remiss (though infinitely more dignified) if I did not link to Monkey Fluids, which seems to be celebrating Obvious Week. Fluids, monkeys, horses and gerbils figure in obvious ways. Not for the kiddies!

And sport? The USA's last chance in the World Cup comes tomorrow - it is a cruel irony, but at this point, their chances to advance may depend on the acting talents of the Italian team. The latter need only draw to move on, so the odds are they shall pack the box, and the only offense they will even attempt will consist of dives in the box. Maybe some opportunistic flops in the midfield, who can say.... If Italy can't win, the Americans have to run up something like a 4 goal win, which is not the most likely scenario. Though more likely than Italy playing more than about 2 people on the offensive side of the field at any time...

And finally, in sporting events of domestic interest - is Jon Lester in the process of saving the Red Sox season? They've done okay this year, but the pitching has been shaky, lots of guys hurt - but he's starting to make an impression, slotting in there behind Schilling and Beckett and Wakefield and doing what he's supposed to. Why not? Papelbon's thriving - why not Lester? They need to get younger and this is very helpful.

Movies and Music

It's not Friday yet, but let's pretend it is: Random Ten! Quite a day for the Guitar Heroes.

1. Theoretical Girls - Mom & Dad
2. A Hard Rain's A-gonna Fall - Bill Frisell
3. Carter Family - He took a white rose from her hair
4. Pavement - Two States (live)
5. Audioslave - Doesn't Remind me of Anything
6. Brian Jonestown Massacre - Vacuum Boots
7. Love - Laughing Stock
8. Richard Thompson - Mingus Eyes (live)
9. Pere Ubu - Turquoise Fins
10. Pink Floyd - Take up thy stethoscope and Walk

Elsewhere - in my recent movie reviews, I neglected to mention Banlieue 13 - nothing special, maybe, but a pretty enjoyable bit of b-movie nonsense. There's a plot of sorts, involving stolen nukes and double crosses and the like, but it is best forgotten. The acting is non-existent, the dialogue and such functional at best (not very) - but the action scenes are done with real flair. One of the stars, David Belle, apparently invented a sport called parkour - which consists, I guess, of jumping over stuff. It's like those bits in Jackie Chan movies where he runs up walls or dives through windows, extended for 15 minutes at a time, through dingy high-rise tenement building and warehouses. It makes for some pretty damn great cinema - it really is hard to improve on filming human bodies in motion - these bodies move with amazing grace and strength, and the filming is mostly free of annoying effects: just show a guy jumping off a building without breaking stride, and you're halfway home already. It keeps the film grounded, human scaled - the emphasis is on what the stunt men (and the stars are basically stunt men themselves, I think) are doing, their movement through the environment. It may be cheese, but it's great fun.

And finally - in totally different film type news - I see from Wiley Wiggins' blog that David Lynch's short masterpiece from Lumiere and Company is on Google video. More there in 55 seconds than his imitators could dream of.

Big Weekend at the Movies

Last weekend was one of those weekends I live for, as a film geek. Three films out in the theater that I absolutely must see - Altman, Park Chan-wook and Olivier Assayas directing Maggie Cheung and Nick Nolte - life is good. It would have been better if the US hadn't choked in that soccer game (I hope they choked - if they choked, they might come back in the next couple. If they're really that bad - anyway - no one asked for soccer posts...)

Sympathy for Lady Vengeance - Of the three, I have to admit, this is the one I was most eager to see. The third of Park Chan-wook's vengeance films, this one concerns Lee Geum-ja ("kind hearted Ms. Geum-ja" is the literal title) - a woman serving 13 years in prison for murdering a child. She gets out, and sets out to get her vengeance on the one who put her behind bars. She does - there's no point denying it - though getting there Park gets a lot of things done. He uses a complicated time structure - as Geum-ja goes about carrying out her plan, we flash back to her stay in jail - to the crime - to how her crime played in the media, for it did - a hack director wanted to make a Lee Geum-ja movie! we are told - and we see her reenacting her crime for the cameras... It's a beautiful film, and very dense - it's not so hard to follow, but hard to get a grip on all the threads with just one viewing - harder still to talk about them without giving away the whole story. Park's style, the story structure, helps develop his themes - the way vengeance runs alongside other stories - her relationships to other people, her relationship to her daughter especially - these things become as important as the revenge plot. On first viewing, I confess that I still think Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance might be better - the harsh twists of that film, the horrible results of mere bad ideas, resonates - but this is superb itself, and stands to deepen with time.

Clean - this has been out there a couple years and finally made it stateside. I have been waiting for it - Assayas directing Cheung and Nolte promises much - it delivers. On first viewing, at least, the best film of the week - I don't know if I'll feel that way in a year, or even a week, but it's still a powerful movie. Maggie Cheung plays the junkie lover of a junkie rock star; when the rock star dies, she is cast out on her own. Nolte plays the rock star's father, who has been caring for their son. He shows up in the film after his son's death, and from the beginning, confounds our expectations. He and Assayas play off his hard-ass side - we expect trouble - but don't get it - yet - they extend this through the whole film. He proves a mountain of decency and strength, made more remarkable by the way they suggest the potential for destruction. It is Maggie's film - she is on camera most of the time, forced to perform a kind of stunningly beautiful woman who has made utter hash of her life, and now has to unhash it. Without losing herself.... it's a tightrope, and she pulls it off - making the character seem both worth saving, and worth not turning into just another dutiful mom. (It occurs to me, in fact, that this is almost exactly the same story as Sympathy for Lady Vengeance - a bad mother trying to connect to her lost child, and shed the demons that are destroying her - heroin, vengeance, as the case may be. That's simplistic, but it's not far off....) But one of the things that makes it work - makes it possible for her to become a decent person and not become a boring person is Nolte's character (which is utterly dependent on Nolte's performance. A lesser son of a bitch could not do what he does.) It's good stuff. The film itself, meanwhile, is reminiscent of Assayas' earlier films - the odd rhythms, the aestheticism and humanism. He has a habit of fading out after the key line in a scene - and a way of taking scenes in strange directions, shifting the attention between different characters, making new story points appear over the sequence. There is one sequence - Maggie Chueng meets a former boss and lover played by Jeanne Baliban - they talk, Baliban is catty, Maggie is desperate - then they go to Baliban's house, where she has locked her current assistant and lover in the bathroom. They turn her loose, and the assistant and Maggie leave, talking about Baliban - they go to the assistant's house, have a couple drinks and then Maggie is digging through her file cabinets looking for dope. She passes out. Cut, to some time later, Maggie out looking for a job... That style reminds me of Arnaud Desplechins - where they picked it up - Rivette maybe? Assayas probably got some of it from Asian films - those odd swerves, and the mixture of extended scenes and truncated scenes seems more common there...

Prairie Home Companion - And finally, Altman. Made with Garrison Keillor, purporting to be the last show of a live radio show - we see the stage, we see backstage (we don't see the audience much though). It looks like vintage Altman, with its cluttered sets and mirrors and frames and zooms and drifting camera, sounds like Altman, with all the chatter and noise going on all around... Has that sense of probing an invented world he offers, and the way he has of trying to get a world from inside and outside. (It's an animating principal, isn't it? His proclaimed love of actors, improvisation and so on, combined with his less proclaimed, but unmistakable, control of the way his films look can be seen that way - characters free inside the films, but yet seen from outside, almost pinned in place. He allows them their freedom, but puts them in their place, as well. Almost like shifting frames of reference - as they see it - as the universe sees it.) Anyway - it is a great joy to behold, funny, packed with outstanding actors chewing scenery like no tomorrow - it offers some reflection on mortality and the like - life and death and all that. It has a valedictory feel. Enjoyable as it is - it seems a bit soft. The sarcasm of Nashville, say, works both to mock the conventions of country music, and to give a kind of rhetorical flourish to its "real" music - "I'm Easy" cuts a little more after the buffoonery - and Barbara Jean's songs are heartbreaking. This film - is okay, but a little too likeable. It's strange - even The Company seems more inventive, though not as good, probably. But its complete abandonment of the plot (while maintaining most of the plot devices of classic backstage musicals) gave it a kind of structural interest the new one doesn't have. But that's a pointless complaint for something this entertaining and generous.

Recent New Movies

This is another post that's been stewing on the back burner a while. Long enough that I should add another film to it! I saw The Puffy Chair - another indie picture made, it seems, by a bunch of friends with a couple nice video cameras, in the vein, let's say, of Andrew Bujalski's films (duly thanked in the credits), maybe Caveh Zehedi's (also thanked...), or Andrew Wagner's The Talent Given Us. Like those films it is low budget and looks it, but carefully written and acted, and a certain amount of attention has gone into making the style (the shaky camerawork, the tight framing, the video textures) functional - making it intimate and casual seeming in a way that connects (or should connect) you to the story. It's a road movie, with the usual themes of relationships and families and responsibilities, as well as the importance of using credit cards when you buy stuff on e-bay. These films share quite a lot - the style, the themes, their fondness for sharp, surprising endings - and their willingness to look for alternative modes of distribution. The Puffy Chair is doing even better than Bujalski's films, or Wagner's - getting into the local Landmark theater - though there were only 4 people at the showing today...

Meanwhile, a bit closer to the mainstream - I've seen a couple fine Australian films recently. Somersault is a film about a teenaged girl who runs away after making a pass at her mother's boyfriend. She ends up in the ski country of southern Australia, where she gets a job, a boyfriend and a lot of trouble... In some ways, it felt rather familiar - a kid doing stupid things, getting away with a lot of it because she is beautiful, but some of it, maybe, because she is in a movie... but different, for telling a young woman’s story, from her point of view - and not actually turning it into quite the cautionary tale you expect it to be. It has some interesting ideas tucked into the corner. It haunts you a bit. Someone on a message board asked how it compared to L'Enfant, which they should see first - it's a strange thought, but it compares rather well to the Dardennes brothers. It's a good deal more conventional, with hints of sentiment and romanticism, especially in the filmmaking style - but in its interest in young people trying to figure out what they should do, in a fairly direct and unjudgmental way, it's closer than you might expect.

Meanwhile, The Proposition brings us an Aussie western starring Guy Pearce, Danny Huston, Ray Winstone, plus John Hurt, Emily Watson, David Gulpilil and David Wenhem - directed by John Hilcoat and writen by Nick Cave, like he was fleshing out one of his murder ballads.... Huston and Pearce are the Burns brothers, Arthur and Charlie, Winstone is a trooper, trying to catch Arthur, in particular - he offers to pardon Charlie (and their simple minded younger brother) if he will kill his brother. So Pearce heads off into the bush looking for Huston, and Winstone heads back home, to shuffle between the vengeful citizenry and his civilized wife, trying to keep the peace at least until Arthur Burns is dead. But the townsfolk have to have their pound of flesh... Meanwhile, out in the hills, Charlie finds Arthur, who we should not be shocked to learn, is a poetic psychopath - they all are, after all, in the end... Anyway, all this goes where it is supposed to go, and when heads get blown off, they get blown off in fine style.... It's not perfect - it's marred by Irony, a bit of wateriness in some of the characters (Huston's and Watson's, especially - they are good ideas, but not quite finished, and their outlines have appeared in far too many films already to be quite as effective as they should be), and some plot stumbles, but is still a tense and intelligent film, with uniformly outstanding performances and a strong sense of visual story telling. It has a well wrought sense of moral ambiguity too, slipping back and forth between the various factions, giving both Winstone and Huston their due, worrying their contradictions and redeeming features - and letting Pearce stand between them, in a way, as their judge. It works. It also grains power from its occasional nods to history, drawing on things like the Kelly gang and the abuses of the aborigines. Those old Aussie gunslingers were an interesting lot - poking around reading about them led me to the information that the world's first feature film was - an Australian Western!

Finally, on a more genteel subject - if anything involving Whitey Bulger, the IRA and a guy without a nose (the hero of the film!) can be called genteel, there's Stolen - a documentary directed by Rebecca Dreyfus about the robbery of the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum in 1990. Mostly about one Harold Smith, an old art detective, suffering from skin cancer (which makes him strangely photogenic, with his false nose and scars and scabs, his head bandage and black derby). He seeks the pieces - Manets and Degas’ and 2 Rembrandts, a gorgeous double portrait and the Sea of Galilee painting - and The Concert, a Vermeer. The film flips between three threads: Smith’s quest for the art (which leads us to speculation about Whitey and the Irish mob); Gardner’s collecting, especially through her letters to Bernard Berenson; and critics (and a couple novelists) discussing the Vermeer (mostly.) It’s a pile of loose ends (the Phoenix called it) - which it true; edifying, the Phoenix added, also true. It is hard not to be moved by the story - the art is quite magnificent, and the museum itself is a unique and fascinating place that has had a personal impact on people. (One interviewer talks about being "adopted" by Sargent's portrait of Gardner as a child.) The chances of getting it back don't seem promising. It is interesting that many reviews of the film refer to the complexity of the theories about what happened to it - in fact, the film really only covers 2 scenarios: one involving Myles Connor, art thief, who claimed various ex-associates of his must have done it; the other involving the Irish mob, and possibly the IRA. Neither have led to the art - but they make a good story.

Still - the film spends as much time talking about the art itself as about the search for the art. Dreyfus focuses on her experts' personal reactions to the paintings, especially the Vermeer - and it is hard not to take the robbery personally. The museum and its history, as the creation of a single person, a work of art itself, invites that reaction. The Gardner has a personal impact that other museums don't have, no matter how great their art is. I'm not immune to the feeling. It is a fact that I have not been to the Gardner museum since the thefts, despite being a fairly regular visitor to it's neighbor in the fens in recent years. I can't say there is a direct correlation - but I can't deny some. When I was in college, I went there a lot - not just because you could get in for $2 in those days. It is quite a place. Dreyfus concentrates on the Vermeer, and its affect on people: I was more moved by the Rembrandt, back in the day. I was young - 20ish, and impressed by grandeur and virtuosity and ambition, and inclined to identify those things with dramatic subjects, scope and scale. The Vermeer, then, was just another nice picture to me. But that Rembrandt - I could get lost in it. Today, I am sure I would still be impressed by the Rembrandt, though I am also much more likely to see the Vermeer for what it was. I have not seen a lot of Vermeer - I've been to the Met, I paid attention to the Vermeers there, but that was a hurried visit, as most first trips to the Met must be. And a couple years ago, the MFA had Young Woman With a Water Pitcher on display - set up like a shrine, in the middle of the floor, with lines going out the door to look at it. And is is a painting that deserves such display - the brilliance and delicacy of the painting, the effect of that beautiful light, is almost shocking.

But it was the Rembrandt that got to me in the early 80s. Probably as much as any painting I saw in that period of time - it's the one painting, from any museum, that I went back to over and over. It's the one I remember, the one that defined the Gardner to me, the way, now, the MFA is defined by, say, Sargent's "Daughters of Edward Darley Boit" or its Hoppers ("Room in Brooklyn" and "Drugstore"). Things I just have to see before I can leave. And without really thinking about doing this, I think this is why I haven't been back to the Gardner: it is intimidating. The loss of what was probably the first major painting to really hit me, to haunt and thrill me, is something I don't want to think about. And that feeling (applied more to the Vermeer) is what the film gets across - the shock and pain of losing something like that. I hope Whitey or whoever has them is enjoying it.

Heaven

It's taken me longer to write this up than it should. There have been some good films around town lately. I finally saw The Spirit of the Beehive - not sure how I missed it all these years, but did... It's wonderful. It's not the kind of movie that lends itself to analysis or discussion - it is beautiful, dreamlike, haunting, an evocation of childhood, an elegy to the movies - everything it is said to be. Considered to be one of the great films about childhood, and it is.

Earlier last week, The Brattle was running a series of musicals starring Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. I should have gone to more - I didn't see any of the Kelly films - I especially wanted to see The Pirate, but wimped, since it started at 9:30. I am getting old. Now I must live with the regret. What sorrow! But I did get to a good part of the Fred Astaires: Top Hat, Shall We Dance, The Gay Divorcee and Royal Wedding.

I watched Top Hat and Shall we Dance a few months ago, and wrote about them - I've never seen Royal Wedding before. It's a 1951 film from the MGM Freed unit, written by Alan J. Lerner, directed by Stanley Donen, starring Fred and Jane Powell as a brother and sister act who go to England and find love. It is packed with music (Burton Lane's, with Lerner's words), dance, showstoppers on stage and off (has all three of my pet schemes, outlined back in my Berkeley posts) - but it's pretty dull anyway. It's not the music's fault, though I don't have much use for Jane Powell's singing - the songs are fine, the numbers are entertaining - Fred gets to bring down the house (or turn it upside down, if you prefer - it's the one where he danced on the ceiling) - it's not that. It's the story. There's plenty of plot going around - Fred and Jane fall in love, with other people - and there's an obligatory older couple who've split and are getting back together - but with three love stories, a dozen musical numbers (it gets close to as dozen), and Keenan Wynn apparently playing both Eric Blore and Erik Rhodes, it's still the slowest moving musical film I've seen in ages. It's all filler - all the dialogue scenes are filler - full of references to things happening off screen, that don't come on screen; the jokes fall flat; no one mistakes anyone else for a gigolo - it's hopeless.

The other three, though, are as good as it gets. Seeing them together, I have to admit that Shall We Dance comes off a bit weaker - the music and dancing are as good as the earlier films, but the stories, writing, all the rest are not up to the earlier standards. But those standards are so transcendent, that you can come well short and still have an unqualified masterpiece, which Shall We Dance is.

But the other two... Shameful as it is to parse films like this, which is better and all that, I did it - and would say, in the end, Top Hat comes out the winner. Everything there runs together flawlessly - the formula has been perfected, and everything - words, movements, music, sets, direction, everything - is exactly as it should be. The Gay Divorcee has some rough edges, some awkward transitions and plot points and the like - not Top Hat. On the other hand, The Gay Divorcee - made before Breen came in full force, is sexier, looser, and being less formulaic has its advantages - Edward Everett Horton, in particular, gets to offer a wider array of straight lines, not just one double take after another. Musically - well - they're all working with the best. Shall We Dance probably has the best music over all - all Gershwins, all the way through - that's good. Top Hat also benefits from the Irving Berlin only songs - first rate material, all through. The Gay Divorcee has good music, but not first rank music...

Except, of course, for "Night and Day". Which is not only the best song in any of these films (I mean, it's the best pop song ever, isn't it?), it's the best dance, and the best piece of filmmaking in Astaire's career. It's a seduction, that grows into full fledged romance - in story terms, it mixes the functions of "Isn't this a Lovely Day" and "Cheek to Cheek" - and not only Astaire and Rogers, but Sandrich, make a story of it. The give and take, with Fred following Ginger around, inviting her, pulling her back, anticipating her - they come together, pull apart, come together, explore and finally fall in love - the music and filming complimenting the dance, the music swelling and fading in turns, the camera coming closer, pulling away, spying on them, then nearly joining them - how beautiful it is. As good a reel or so of film ever made, I think.

Friday Music Post

Just your basic random ten here. Movie posts, and there could be a bunch of them, might follow over the next couple days...

1. Mercury Rev - Something for Joey
2. Madvillain - Rainbows
3. Byrds - Sing me back Home
4. The Strokes - Juicebox
5. Carter Family - Something Got a hold on Me
6. Mission of Burma - Wounded World
7. Michael Jackson - Don't Stop til you get Enough
8. Smokey Robinson - The Tears of a Clown
9. Cassandra Wilson - Love is Blindness
10. The Residents - Seasoned Greetings

Is Being a Human Being So Disgusting?

Shohei Imamura has died. One of my favorite directors, very possibly my favorite living director over the last 7-8 years. I saw the retrospective of his films that toured in 1998, and came away more than a fan. Right up to the last thing he did, his section of the 11'09''01 film, itself a mini-masterpiece. He set it at the end of WWII -a returned soldier thinks he is a snake, crawls around, eats rats, and finally crawls off into the jungle... it struck me then as being to Imamura's career what David Lynch's piece in Lumiere and Company was - both for being a stunning short film in the middle of an inconsistent, though interesting, project - and for being a distillation of their work: "is being a human being so disgusting?" Well - no, not when some people make films like he did.

Fr- no, Saturday 10 (plus)

Here I am. Managed to let a whole week go without posting again - good job! It was a strange week - I saw some films - Fred and Ginger on the big screen! Fred sans Ginger, not quite up to those high standards... In between movies, suffered some plumbing troubles - a burst pipe or two - nothing quite so delightful as coming home to find the bathroom full of steam with water spraying out of the walls. Great fun. An excuse to take a day off work and go see Fred Astaire - and do some random shopping on the way. A bunch of new music out - Racanteurs, Gomez, Danielson, Scott Walker, Mission of Burma, even Tool (I am not immune to the occasional bit of prog-metal wanking....) Will any of it show up on the old Random Ten? We shall soon find out! And hopefully, it will not be another week before I post again - I have films from Fred and Ginger, Luc Moullot, Australia! (x2!) to write about, and hope to do so soon.

1 Red Krayola - Stil de Grain Brun
2 Postal Service - Such Great Heights
3 Acid Mother's Temple - Daddy's Bare Meat
4 Decembrists - We Both Go Down Together
5 Tom Verlaine - Shadow Walks Away (that's the closest we're getting to the new stuff)
6 Blind Faith - Presence of the Lord
7 John Cale - You Know More than I Know
8 REM - 9-9
9 Devendra Banhardt - Chinese Children
10 The Clash - Wrong 'em Boyo

Random 10 for Friday

1. Pere Ubu - Busman's Holiday (live, from Apocalypse Now)
2. The Kinks - I'm not like Everybody Else
3. Richard and Linda Thompson - Walking on a Wire
4. Joy Division - The Kill
5. Damon and Naomi - Tanka (live, with Kurihara)
6. Liars - Steam Rose From the Lifeless Cloak
7. Husker Du - Dreams Reoccurring
8. The Kinks - Who'll be the Next in Line (it's a Davies extravaganza!)
9. Can - Halleluhwah (there goes 17 minutes - but as well spent a 17 minutes as you can ask.)
10. Sigur Rus - Untitled 6 (from the () record) (another long, but lovely piece)

There you go.

Art School Confidential

I know this is an odd choice of a film to expand on in its own post, but I've been interested in art lately, so, I might as well write about it.

Ebert's review starts off with one of the foundational lies of western culture: "I am not sure you can learn to be an artist. Artists are born, not made". It's a lie films like this sometimes give some play to, though the confusion may arise somewhere else. Great artists are most certainly not born - art requires skills that you don't pick up without training. One might ask how useful college is to artists, though. But Clowes and Zwigoff are mocking the conceptualism of art school, the theorizing, the emphasis on ideas over skills - that is, they are attacking the results of thinking that you can be an artist by being clever, not by executing certain physical actions particularly well, in a way that moves other people.

It's a disappointing film - which is different than just being bad. It is bad, I have to reiterate that - the stories (Jerome chasing the girl; the serial killer stuff) are dreadful. Cliches wrapped in gimmicks... the whole thing loses momentum, sinks down into tedium and whining and everything interesting disappears.... But the world is full of bad films: the world is less full of bad films that should have been good films, and this one should have. It started well enough - it sets itself up to have a great deal of fun, taking some shots at art school, the art world, probably the comics and film world while you're in there, Clowes and Zwigoff generally being up for self-criticism...

I liked that it didn't make anyone perfect, perfectly good or bad. Almost everyone is a target for the satire - and almost everyone has something to offer, or gets some kind of moment of grace. Take Malkovich - he's cynical, a careerist, bitter, and even his better moments tend to come in the service of his cruising - but he has some connection to the kids, and what he says - particularly his advice to Jerome - "you're 18 years old - what do you want with a style?" - is pretty much dead on. Jerome has skills - he doesn't have much personality - he shouldn't be thinking about what he has to say, he should stick to perfectly his abilities. The rest, if it's going to come, will come. And Malkovich isn't the only one like that - Broadbent, obviously, is not a good person - he's a dark cave of nihilism, a miserable failure indeed - but he's funny; he punctures the pretensions of the other artists; and he isn't half bad as an artist himself. (I pass in silence over the rest of it - I wish the movie had passed in silence as well - he worked quite well as a poisonous Charles Crumb figure - tarting that up was stupid.)

And of course, Jerome. The story betrays him, turns him into a stock figure indeed - but he's an interesting character while it lasts. It is to the film's credit that he is not all that interesting an artist - he's good, he's got skills, I say, maybe more than his classmates - but he doesn't have much personality, his art is nice, but doesn't stand out. He makes it worse by constantly trying to define himself, to please others, and denigrate them for not being him. If he could do his thing, perfect it? or if he took Malkovich's advice, and applied his abilities to every style he could think of, without worrying too much about doing anything unique? he might be all right... This, along with his squabbles with the class, and their personalities, gives the film its kick - an odd, muted kick - but... it is interesting to think about: Jerome takes positions - he's more willing to attack his classmates (which invites them to go after him) - the dynamics are fascinating, and recognizable. It makes it more interesting to think that Jerome might not be all that good - might not really know what he is talking about. He's presented as if he's the voice of reason in the film, but he doesn't seem all that better off than the rest of them - especially as the film goes on, he seems to counter their groupthink with his own unthinking reaction. His judgment isn't all that convincing - and though he's the POV character, I'm not sure how much the film really takes his POV.

All of this leads us around to the other maverick aspiring artist in the film, Jonah. Jonah's big colorful cars and tanks play an interesting role in the film. Jerome invests them with everything he says is wrong with art school, and Zwigoff and Clowes let Jerome get the last word - the rest of the kids sound like the sheep they are talking about Jonah's art. But there are the pictures on the screen - and to be honest, there's nothing else in the film half as good as those paintings. They aren't original, obviously - but they aren't junk, and (despite the clamor of the kids), they aren't really naive either. Unless this is a world without Andy Warhol or Roy Lichtenstein. And they jump off the screen at you - the moment when Jonah's car appears on the screen is the first, and one of the few, moments when art in the film really catches your eye. (Broadbent's art has that too, even without its plot significance.) I don't know how important it is that Jonah's paintings are credited to Dan Clowes - probably not irrelevant.

This also brings us back to Ebert: Jonah is the closest to the demonstration of the great lie - he's untutored, natural, and he does, indeed, make the best art in the class. At least everyone says so - but that's the point, and what might have been very worthwhile in the film: what if everyone in the film was right about Jonah? Yes the film is set up to make Jonah's art seem bad and Jerome's good. But why not? why not make a film that uses narrative conventions - the lead character is right; the lead is the best artist (in a film about artists), his judgments are right; the maverick, the one who goes against the group is right - why not use those conventions, but counter them? The popular kid, the villain in any standard high school film, turns out to be, first, the real outsider - second, the real genius, the one who has real talent - why not? That's the most interesting idea the filmmakers came up with - assuming they actually came up with it. I'd guess the odds are pretty good, actually.

Recent DVD Watching

I suppose I should post this - a pretty flat roundup of DVD's I've watched in the last few weeks. I need to try to write something up - but I'm thinking I want to do it a bit differently. I had been taking a class, and ended up writing about Cindy Sherman - specifically, about her film still series, and how she uses cinematic space (especially, offscreen space) in those stills. That got me looking through my DVDs, looking at specific examples of how films arrange space, and people in space. And then I started reading Bordwell's Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging... (And looking through his new Hollywood book.) So my head is full of staging, composition, activation of off screen space, the play of on and offscreen space (reading Metz and Burch, as context for the Sherman paper), the elements in a shot that draw your attention off screen - all that stuff. It's exciting! And a few of these films, listed below, are particularly excellent objects of examination. The way Altman's camera prowls the room in Secret Honor, creating his own level of affect to the play... or the gorgeous deep spaces and deep focus shots and widescreen compositions and stagings in The Apartment - I watched that a couple years ago, and liked it okay, but didn't feel exactly overwhelmed - but this time, paying close attention to what I could see - good heavens, what a beautiful film. Anyway - I might pursue some of those ideas. We'll see. For now, capsules...

Secret Honor **** - comments above. pretty awe inspiring movie. Altman is superb - and Hall gives a performance of many a lifetime.

Mr. Jealousy *** - nice film; I need to see Kicking and Screaming again - I saw it when it came out, liked it enough, but nothing more - but now, having seen this and the Squid and the Whale - and liked both fo them very much - I need to see K&S again.

The Apartment **** - see above for some of it. Wilder can be deceptive - sometimes his films are so well written they almost erase their appearance; when I was looking at this for the Sherman paper, slowing it down, looking at individual frames, I noticed just how fantastic it looks. Almost as if the words get in the way of the pictures. Take away the words and you see the pictures.

Marie and Julien **1/2 - recent Rivette; gorgeous looking film, all those weightless tracking shots, but a rather hopeless experience, since the DVD was badly fucked up. I don't know why Rivette films are not released theatrically in the United States, just as a matter of course. There should be something written into international law that Rivette, Rohmer, Godard, at least, should have their films shown as a matter of course. I should not have to try to pry something watchable out of Netflix.

Oasis **1/2 - strange but rather interesting Korean film about a dim-witted thug who falls in love with the daughter of a man he killed in a hit and run - who (the girl) happens to have cerebral palsy. This doesn't go all that well, but there you go. Some ill-conceived fantasy bits, but well made...

Forty Guns *** - finally got around to watching this; bought it at Christmas, and let it sit on the shelf since. (I bought 2 copies at Christmas: I was buying cowboy movies for my brother and was thrilled to find this, Winchester 76 and Seven Men From Now on DVD; I was more thrilled to find 2 copies of this - if I hadn't I'd have had to find something else to get him.) Finally righted that wrong a couple weeks ago - was not disappointed. She's a high riding woman with a whip all right.

Broadway Melody ** - another DVD I bought some months ago, and has been sitting on the shelf... very early talky, with intertitles explaining scene transitions - odd. Some okay music, very theatrical staging. Melodrama about 2 sisters, one pretty and talented, the other named Hank. Whatever they thought in 1929, in 2006, Hank is the only character with an ounce of life in her, but she suffers. Men prefer her sister's legs. Anyway, mostly interesting for the history, though a pretty well made film for all that.

Today's Bad News

Updating my last political post - Think that's bad? Look at this! I suppose it's a comfort that it's being talked about - ABC? USA Today? I hope it translates into action - maybe it will. Even my mother, loyal republican through the years, was griping about the spying. Of course, the odds are that George W. Bush will take the rap, in the end - the GOP will survive. Though possibly they will abandon some of their evil ways. Maybe....

Meanwhile, the lesser devil's are sending up trial balloons... "If it took the Germans less than four years to rid themselves of 6 million Jews, many of whom spoke German and were fully integrated into German society, it couldn't possibly take more than eight years to deport 12 million illegal aliens, many of whom don't speak English and are not integrated into American society" - lovely. This desperate ploy to find enemies - on one hand, the sense that they are flailing, the fact that the public is not really responding, is encouraging - on the other - depends how desperate they get... And whatever happens to the government, the stirrings among the kinds of fools like this Vox Day character can generate violence, intimidation... We live in interesting times.

Recent Film Viewing

It's been a while since I have posted anything about movies - all the way back to when I saw the The Notorious Bettie Page - that was a while ago. (I'll leave you with Stephanie Zacherek's Salon review - maybe more positive than I would give, but no harm in that.) I haven't seen an awful lot of films int hat time - fortunately, I have been able to see a couple good ones... So let's see if we can round things up.

Three Times **** - the new Hou Hsiao Hsien film. Three love stories starring Shu Qi and Zhang Zhen, set in three different eras, 1966, 1911, 2005, shot in different styles, that evoke his earlier films from similar times. The first story has the lovers shooting pool in 1966 - he's just been called into the army; she works as an attendant at pool halls. Hou returns to something like his classic, 80s style - the long, fairly static shots (though the camera tends to float these days) from a limited set of positions, often with doors or windows opening up to the outside world in the back of the shot. The boy comes back on leave, looking for the girl, and when she is not there, goes looking for her, riding around Taiwan trying to find her. All of this to a series of pop songs - "Smoke gets in Your Eyes", "Rain and Tears" - in place of dialogue... Romantic and simple and very affecting... The second part, in 1911, is set in a brothel, like Flowers of Shanghai, and adopts that's film's rich colors and gliding camera, as well as its restrictions - everything occurs within one set, the 2-3 rooms where Shu Qi's courtesan lives. She's in love with a rich married revolutionary who disapproves of concubines, though he's willing to help one of the other girls when she gets pregnant - thus unintentionally crushing "his" girl. This section is also "silent" (no diegetic sound, just music) - it's a strange effect, the silent movie conventions combined with the colors and camera style. But it's effective, conveying the claustrophobia and inevitability of Shu's circumstances, as well (I suppose) as the political hopelessness of the Zhang's Taiwanese patriots.... The third section is set in contemporary Taipei, and looks contemporary - the crowded streets, narrow, dank apartments, noisy clubs, electronic pop music, computers and phones and beepers - shot in long takes, camera skulking around through these spaces, light and sound blurry and encompassing... Hou has used this style for most of his contemporary films - Millennium Mambo, Goodbye South, Goodbye, the modern half of Good Men Good Women, Daughter of the Nile... The three sections, revisiting as they do, different parts of his career, different subject matter in his career - and different filmmaking styles - make an interesting survey. Hou's reputation is immense - but it seems sometimes critics have some difficulty getting their minds around what he has done. He doesn't quite have a recognizable style - or rather, he has 2 or 3 recognizable styles, on display here. And he has been moving between them for the past decade or so, exploring how to tell stories, how to examine the spaces of the stories, how to relate space to story... It's an adventure.

I am a Sex Addict **1/2 - Caveh Zahedi's latest, an amusing sexual autobiography of sorts, concentrating on his addiction to prostitutes and the damage that did to his relationships. It's a neatly constructed film, with its direct address to the camera, slipping in and out of fiction and documentary modes, commenting on the processes of filmmaking, especially no budget filmmaking and the rest - it's funny and smart, but it tends to overstay its welcome. Not that it gets boring exactly, it just stops surprising you at some point.

Art School Confidential * - The reviews have been bad. They were right. It starts out okay, a fairly conventional geek goes to college routine that makes a nice starting point for skewering the art world - unfortunately, after half an hour of amusing comedy about artists and art school, the plots start to kick in. The hero is one of those high school losers who never made it with the ladies - so he worships the symbolic girls, and soon enough manages to meet one, only to suffer fresh humiliations - this is complicated, not in a good way, by a serial killer plot. The hero, Jerome (played by Max Minghella), doesn't get the recognition he wants so steals it - from the wrong person... Whatever. The whole thing sinks into misery and cliche, which is a shame - there was some bite at the beginning - John Malcovich is around to embody a mix of cynicism, self-promotion, self-pity and predation, plus intermittent flashes of sympathy; and Jim Broadbent is on hand as an old, drunk madman, mean and depressed, but still talented - Charles Crumb in the flesh. He's fascinating, and deserves better than the fate he suffers in the film.

Badlands **** & Days of Heaven *** - Should I complain about the weather? It has been raining - a more or less uninterrupted downpour since Friday night. So it is good to spend at least one day in the shelter of a Terence Malick double feature. I hadn't seen these two on a big screen before - video, and Badlands on TV, a few times - though apparently always the very beginning or the end - I had completely forgotten about the interlude in the woods. Badlands really is a great film, justifying Malick's reputation. Malick's an odd case - he can tell a story, though he does it obliquely, getting the story info across, but dwelling on other things. In Badlands, he dwells on the characters and the world they live in - in later films, he starts to dwell more on the look of things. So Days of Heaven, though gorgeous to look at, and efficiently enough told, comes off static, abstract - there's no time in the film - no duration, no spaces - scenes don't develop, there's no dramatic development, no chance for people to emerge as anything more than ideas. I don't want to make too much of that - for one thing, it works a lot better on the big screen than video - seeing it on film once more opens up the spaces of the film. But still - Malick's other problem, on display in Badlands, a little, and The New World a lot, is that the stories he comes up with are just a bit too generic - and because he abstracts them so much, their blandness serves as a kind of void in the images - the beauty becomes weightless because the stories are weightless....

Friday Random Ten

Yes it's that time again... and actually on Friday still! triumph indeed...

1. Butthole Surfers - Jimi
2. Sister Rosetta Tharpe - Beams of Heaven
3. Sonic Youth - Pattern Regonition
4. Van Morrison - Beside You
5. Iron and Wine - Cinder and Smoke
6. Mercury Rev - CLose Encounters of the 3rd Grade
7. Outkast - Last Call
8. Black Sabbath - Lord of this World
9. Tom Verlaine - The Sun Gliding (from the new record)
10. Grant Lee Buffalo - We've only Just Begun (from the Carpenters tribute record...)

Villainy Indeed

On reason I haven't written much about politics since the 2004 elections is the simple point that there is very little to say. Somewhere back in 2003 or 2004, the government passed all limits of what I can accept from an American government - and since then, has just kept repeating the same note over and over again. Note? "Think that's bad? Look at this!" Or, put another way, "Think that's is bad? Look at this!" Over and over again. Here, today - we just have to grind it out and hope that things turn. It's not as if this government was particularly strong - they can't run anything, accomplish anything - anything they do they fail at. So we can hope, can't we, that if We - you and me the voters, the citizens - and our representatives - can take responsibility and hold these incompetent liars and petty wanna be dictators accountable we can, in fact, do it.

We'd better. Though if anything were going to do it, you would think this would be it.

Return of Friday Random Tem

Yes, I've been amiss*. But today - it's early! Here goes - 10 songs, random, off the iPod:

1. Rolling Stones - Yesterday's Papers
2. Leonard Cohen - Suzanne
3. The Cars - Bye, Bye Love
4. Son Volt - Drown
5. Jane's Addiction - Stop
6. Pere Ubu - 30 Seconds Over Tokyo
7. De La Soul - Tread Water
8. Smokey Robinson and the Miracles - Who's Loving You
9. Damon and Naomi - Beautiful Close Double
10. Minutemen - Sell or Be Sold (Hey! the most played song on my iPod! One of the strange effects of the history of the machine - though not an unwelcome one. The Minutemen were very very cool.)

*Update: did I write this? "amiss"? It must be early... "remiss"! Boy!

Midweek Update

I need to get something in here, been a while. I have been remiss in my movie going, if not my movie watching. Finally got around to watching Forty Guns, which I found back before Christmas - 2 copies, actually! bought them both, one as a Christmas gift, one for myself.... But then it sat on the shelf...finally righted that wrong. Wil I review it? Sooner or later, right?

Not now though. Sitting in starbucks: a bit of a zoo, actualy. A host of eager youth being trained in the jargon of coffee making - a "red eye"? how to make 2% milk? how to mark down the more appalling concoctions - non fat mocha chai with raspberry... something. My head. Meanwhile - 2 people sharing a table, having 2 separate conversations on their phones, in 2 different languages - not English! makes you proud to be an American in the 21st century!

I could blog about politics. Look over at Lawyers, Guns and Money, where you can find a cornucopia of bad ideas being swatted down. (With or without wildly inappropriate metaphors.) If only we could invade Saudi Arabia and seize their oil fields! then there'd be no gas crisis! But you damn liberals would call that "imperialism"! (That's Glenn Reynolds, more or less.) Or - if only we had the will to kill everyone who moves in Iraq! then we could win! (That's a good deal of the right blogosphere, Jeff Goldstein being singled out.) It makes you wonder. It makes me wonder - what would actually be a victory in Iraq? Some of the comments at LGM mention this - that no one seems to quite know what winning means. (This is partly because winning in a war means achieving your political goals - but those have never been defined to anyone's satisfaction, have they?) As far as I can see, this is a war that wwe can't win, because the only political goal we can come close to articulating is that we leave it stronger and more secure than we went in - there is no way we could have accomplished that. Iraq never posed a problem for us (not since 1991) - the only way they could hurt us would be if we invaded them, and made their problems ours. Done and done.

It strikes me that there are basically two outcomes that could be, in fact, won or lost. 1) The establishment of a client state, with not regard to its domestic policies; 2) the partition of Iraq into a series of states, without a civil warm, and with some of them, at least, clients of the USA. These are outcomes that could be achieved (or not) - but neither are poltically viable, really. First - either would almost certainly lead to prolonged bloodshed and chaos. It is hard to imagine either outcome appearing without a long period of violence. Second - is either of those better for us by any standards than the pre-invasion status quo? Let alone the main objection: would it be possible to wage this war (at all) for those ends? and would it be possible to achieve those ends without the kind of commitment we don't want to make (that is to say, The Draft, first and formost.)

That reminds me: anyone who talks about "will" or "toughness" and does not start with the necessity to bring back universal conscription is not worth listening to. It is notable how many of these arguments are in fact quite explicitly about how to avoid making any actual sacrifices, or showing any actual will. Calls to nuke Iran are not calls for national will - they are calls for a way to accomplish some end without any risk to ourselves. Start with a draft and the assumption of years of war, gas and oil rationing, etc., and maybe you have a right to be heard. Otherwise - how can you even pretend to take these people as anything more than cowardly sadists? There's not much more dangerous, I have to admit, than people unwilling to run any risks who insist on the importance of willpower and strength.

I am not in the mood to get into too much of this, though having started... I will leave it. Confuse my poor innocent readers, thinking they'll find more Roger Clemens hagiography, or maybe something about Barry Bonds or the Clippers. Sorry! Politics! duck!