Weekend Update

Music! with the iPod misbehaving, this playlist may be entered in something close to Real Time! That may lead to something.... Having gone a week without a post, I should try to make this more substantial. Like - what is happening in the blogosphere this week?

There are Blogathons going on and starting up: Simpsons blogathon, just concluding. A Ghibliathon just started - no roundup post up, but entries exist! UPDATE: now the headquarters post is up. And on Tuesday next - Film Experience hosts an Action Heroine blogathon - certain names come to mind... And (another late night update) - I didn't mean to forget Moviezzz' Grease 2-a-thon, Monday...

Discussions of films I don't plan to see: Dennis Cozzalio hosts a discussion of Hostel II. Michael Guillen posts a two-part interview with Eli Roth at the Evening Class: many others are less enthusiastic (more from Damian Arlyn). I don't have much to add to the comments I left at Moviezzz' place: there's no such thing as bad publicity; it really does matter what the film is about - texts and subtexts and context and all that; and I doubt it's about anything more significant than freaking the squares. Or maybe what I mean is - I can think of plenty of things to say about it, but it's all speculation without seeing the film, and I have no intention of doing that. Not because it's gross or evil or anything like that - because it sounds stupid. From what has been said (by defenders as well as distractors) it sounds like whatever meaning the film has, it has as a concept - "Torture Porn!" It may have some political implications, but I don't know if they depend on the film itself - just on the idea of what is in the film. It occurs to me, for instance, that Roth is to be commended for treating torture as a psycho-sexual pathology, instead of trying to pretend that real world torture (Abu Ghraib; Gitmo) has something to do with a "war on terror." Obviously not - it's all about causing pain, and symbolism - torture a Moslem as payback for 9/11. But that you can get from his interviews and the arguments; seeing the film seems superfluous.

And finally, updating links - either the Shamus has been on vacation in Bangkok, or has moved to a new location: Bad for the Glass.... Also some changes to the blogroll: a few additions; a sad subtraction - as we note the death of Steve Gilliard, an excellent political blogger and journalist. A good roundup of goodbyes can be found here.

And the Random Ten:

1. Liars - Hold Hands and It Will Happen Anyway ****
2. Eels - Novocaine for the Soul ****
3. Velvet Underground - Black Angels Death Song (live - thanks to Robert Quine)
4. Acid Mother's Temple - Stone Stoner [I'm listening this while reading Jim Emerson's response to a bit of Bill O'Reilly bullshit: somehow, seems right, especially when they get talking about dope. Legalize drugs, and this is what you will be hearing, from every car window!]
5. Sonic Youth - The Sprawl
6. Stanley Brothers - Man of Constant Sorrow ****
7. Miho Hatori - Barracuda
8. Byrds - Time Between
9. Burnt Sugar - Gibberish & Bushwhack
10. Feelies - Too Far Gone ***

And for video? Nice lot of songs up there, but let's add another. Nick Cave as Elvis!

Boss of it All

If you're expecting a review of Boss of it All - well, okay. Though my main reason for posting is to complain. And complain about utterly local things... Specifically about the Coolidge Corner movie theater, who are showing this film - in their digital screening room. Which means - it's shown on a DVD. A nice DVD projector, sure - but still... This is the second time in a month that I have been annoyed to find a film I wanted to see was being shown there on video - the last time was Zoo. I was annoyed because I had been reading about the film somewhere and the director specifically mentioned that he'd shot it on film. So - I was displeased to find it on video. (And before that - Bamako.)

I feel guilty about complaining - the Coolidge has doubled its number of screens in the last couple years, and uses them to bring in marginal films. This means - that digital screening room is bringing in more films that might otherwise not be shown. But I am going to complain anyway. First - because it is a bloody shame to show Lars Von Trier films (or films as visually rich as Zoo or Bamako) on video, not film... And second, because the result seems a bit less that there are more films getting a theatrical run than that the Coolidge can keep films like The Lives of Others around for half a year. I don't mean that's a bad film - or the other films at the Coolidge are bad (right now, that would be Once, Away From Her and Day Night Day Night) - but those other four films have all played elsewhere - and three of them are still playing elsewhere. And now, between them, they are keeping a Lars Von Trier film off the real screens - and it is not playing anywhere else. And it worries me that this allows the Coolidge to bring in films instead of someone else - to get them instead of the Brattle or something like that - where, even if they only played for a day or so, at least they would get shown on a real movie screen.

Nothing to be done I guess. The irritating part is that these films aren't going to play anywhere else - it is precisely the films that won't show up somewhere else that get shown in the digital screening room - so I can't just choose to go where they'll look right. Very annoying. Anyway - as for the film itself - it's pretty good. A comedy - an IT company is run by one Ravn, who pretends there is a "boss of it all" in America. He wants to sell the company to Icelanders - he needs the boss on hand to seal the deal. He hires an actor - who has too many theories, including an infatuation with a crank ploaywright named Gambini - there are complications and the actor has to convince the employees as well... Things proceed. It's quite funny, a worthy Danish successor to Office Space or The Office - though it's Lars Von Trier and he's up to a good deal more. Brechtian jokes, jokes about Dogme (the crazy playwright sounds a bit like that), about filming in Danish instead of English - and a new trick called Automavision - a way of programming the camera, to randomly change position, angle and so on... Another way of giving up control, you could say - which of course is part of what Dogme was about as well... It's disorienting, but also rather funny, in itself. Von Trier's theories tend to be almost as funny as the films - serious or not, it's a bit of a put on.... And usually entertaining, in its utterly bizarre way.

Saturday Morning

My iPod, I fear, is starting to give up the ghost. Seems - and I may be imagining this, but I doubt it - that it starts out playing well, but after playing half an hour or so, starts to degrade. Like a warped LP, feeding through a radio station with bad reception. The nostalgic possibilities do not quite justify the annoyance.

Anyway, here goes, with the ritual Friday Top Ten, which as usual, appears on Saturday:

1. Spacemen 3 - Revolution (live) ***
2. Bob Dylan - Absolutely Sweet Marie
3. Butthole Surfers - Pepper ****
4. Pylon - Springtime
5. Motorhead - Bite the Bullet
6. Dr. Nerve - A Hammer in his Hand [Chicago meets - what? Albert Ayler? close enough. Got the groove part down, got the noise down too. Hell of a band.]
7. Beatles - Here, There and Everywhere (lack of stars more due to the pointlessness of distinguishing Beatles songs from one another...)
8. Franz Ferdinand - This Fire
9. Fripp & Eno - Tarazed
10. Pere Ubu - Electricity ****

As for YouTube - who else is going to link to Dr. Nerve videos?

Making the Rounds

I have nothing in particular to say, this fine Tuesday evening, so I will point to various people who do have something to say.

David Bordwell, as usual, has something interesting on top opf the page: an illustration of "intensified continuity" using The Shop Around the Corner and You've Got Mail as texts...

Girish offers a fascinating rumination on memorizing movies, along with a collection of links (mostly to coverage of the recently concluded Cannes film festival) - and a lovely illustration of Au Hasard Balthasar by Seth.

And another reminder why I don't watch American Idol - it inspires loathsome morons to opine loathsomely - take a look at the clip at Majikthise - one MeMe Roth pontificating that finalist Jordin Sparks should lose because she's too fat. I see she won: maybe this will make MeMe see the error of her ways and sit back, relax, crack open a pint of Chunky Monkey, and stifle.

And - Charles Nelson Reilly has died. How much of my youth was driven by trying to guess whether he or Brett Somers would make the "tinkle" joke this afternoon? For such a shitty show, it's amazing how much I miss seeing him on TV every day.

Another Musical Extravaganza

Once more, this weekend, this long weekend, we come to a random ten post. Oddly, not the only post of the week! Amazing productivity by my standards, 2-3 posts in a week. Anyway - here goes this one....

1. Red Crayola - Come on Down
2. Captain Beefheart - Crazy Little Thing
3. B-52s Strobe Light **** -
4. Devendra Banhardt - Rejoicing in the Hands
5. Fugazi - Burning
6. The Iguanas - Again & Again
7. Bruce Springsteen - Atlantic City ****
8. Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers - Born to Lose
9. Bloc Party - Positive Tension
10. Modest Mouse - Teeth Like God's Shoeshine ***

Nice collection there - fewer stars than you might think, though it's a lot of good songs by great bands, songs maybe buried down in the middle of the record...

For video? Let's go with Bloc Party, channeling The Fall, mostly, in this instance (they're always channeling someone, usually The Cure, I think...), but doing well. As an 80s tribute band, they're one of the best:

Do I look like I'm joking?

I wish I had written this last week. This is what the misunderstood blogathon was made for. I was thinking about it, reading this defense of Batman Forever - I was thinking, you're defending Batman Forever? - ho hum; I am going to defend Batman and Robin! Now that's some contrarianism, there! But I couldn't really think of a reasonable defense of the film - at least nothing misunderstood: all I've really got is, Uma Thurman is funny as hell! Is that enough?

But there's something in that Sophomore Critic post:

Furthermore, It's important for everyone to realize that since Batman's creation in what I believe was the 1920s, there have been two parallel versions of Batman going on. One is the "dark knight" Batman, the mysterious force of good who no one knows about, and then there's the "camp" batman, who's more family-friendly, and more colorful, put it that way, his costume has blues and purples in it, rather than just plain black.

(There's quite a bit more - some nice comments on the differences between types of Batman, and Robin's place in the scheme.) That's a nice statement of the opposition between the Dark Batman and the Camp Batman - a common theme to commentary on the films, in particular. And I remembered it when the shots of the Heath Ledger as the Joker started turning up - to great enthusiasm in the blogosphere. With a certain level of disdain for Jack's Joker being expressed - these days, the Dark Batman gets a lot more love than the Camp Batman.

But let me point out: Sophomore Critic refers to Batman Returns as one of the Dark Batman stories. He's not the first - the Burton films were originally pushed as heirs to The Dark Knight Returns, not to Adam West. That happened even as they were dominated by their campy villains and black-comedy scripts - the aspects that survived (and were extended) in the Schumacher films. The truth is, Burton's Batmans straddle the two sides of Batman, Dark/Camp. And so do I. Unlike a lot of the Batman fans I've known through the years, I like both: Miller's book is outstanding - some of the other stories in that vein, like Alan Moore's The Killing Joke, might be even better. But the TV show is better still - eye-popping colors and absurd dialogue and goofy plots and villains and West's dead pan - it's up there with the best TV has to offer, not far off the standard set by Get Smart or Police Squad (how did that only last 6 episodes? Lord).

This is what I think (and why this should have been for the misunderstood blogathon): posing the Dark Batman against the Camp Batman is itself a misunderstanding of the power and importance of both. The real opposition should be between the Dark and Camp Batman, on one side, and the straight, "heroic" Batman on the other. The real opposition should be between the ironic forms of Batman and the unironic forms.

Here I speak a bit from faulty memory, but I believe for much of its run, at least early, Batman was a fairly straightforward heroic comic. Batman the character was not a joke - nor was he a twisted weirdo or tormented vigilante. Both tendencies get some play, with the noirish tones making the most impression in the early works, and the silliness becoming excessive later - but mostly, it's pretty straightforward good guys and bad guys.

Both the Camp Batman and the Dark Batman ironize this. The Dark Batman tends to add a twist to the story - instead of a straightforward protector of the innocent, Batman becomes a bit sinister. Driven by vengeance, violent and cruel, solitary and haunted - he becomes fearful, himself, constantly in danger of lsipping over. Or, a variation of this - the world around him is made utterly corrupt, irredeemable - and his place is as one able to master the evil and corruption in himself, and turn it to fighting evil in the world. He becomes something of a necessary outlaw - only outlaws can fight crime effectively, this version goes. He has to be almost a crook himself to fight crime... These kinds of stories make plain their relationship with the "straight" Batman: sometimes by variations on the stories, though, interestingly, often by opposing Batman to Superman - that's Miller's take, for instance. Though he also twists Superman - but the basic idea is of Batman as a dark knight, vs. Superman as the fairly unambiguous conventional hero. Batman as flawed - Superman as superhuman.

Now - the Camp Batman has it easier: those stories get to make fun of the conventions of crime-fighting and superheroes directly. They also make fun of the aura of dread and fear in the Dark Knight stories, and all the supercriminals, the conspiracies, the terrible secrets of those stories. And - at some level, as comedy is wont to do - they undermine the desire for order that underlies the Dark Batman stories. Since - no matter how terrible things are, no matter how chaotic - they suggest there's a reason for the bad things, a unifying force to the pain and suffering in the world. Not just people being dicks, which, when you get down to it, is what comedy argues. This is, of course, one of the reasons comedy (including satire, irony, parody, and other meaner types of comedy) is superior to other art forms. Most of the evil in the world does come down to people being dicks. But even with this opposition to the Dark Knight type stories, there is kinship. The world of Heroic Batman is a world that can make sense - it is possible, through hard work and effort, to make things right. Dark Batman stories say no - the world is corrupt to the core - all you can do is hold the evil at bay for a while (usually at great sacrifice). There is a desire for order, and conspiracy theories and supervillains and the like project an imaginary order on the world - but it is not, really, there. And the Camp Batman stories deny the possibility of order, at least, some transcendent order, something that explains it all. Beyond, maybe, the fact that people are going to be dicks about it.

But getting back to cases: what makes the Tim Burton Batman films so wonderful - is that they do both: they have the horror, the dread, the ugliness, the angst and madness in hero and villain alike - and they are funny: and they make their villains campy, ironic, superior - The Joker and the Penguin both spend a lot of time outside the story - they manipulate the story - they are artists (as the Joker insists) - they are in on the joke. This tendency goes overboard in the Schumacher films - with some of the edge lost. It stays funny - at least Carrey and Thurman are funny, mostly because they are so good (the scripts aren't much) - but they're different. They're in on the joke, but the joke is all there is. Which, if the films were better made, would be more than enough - but it still missed the degree to which the different sides of Batman beling together. It is a dark character - but the darkness works even better when it is tied to the basic absurdity of the whole affair. Burton combined them, and his films remain the standards for the franchise, and I don't see that changing.

Scattered Gleanings

I should do this more often...

Girish points to an interview with Chris Fujiwara and Mark Roberts on crime films: a wealth of material to digest there...

David Bordwell, meanwhile, takes on one of those questions that circle the internet - do sequels suck? He's too dignified to phrase it so, but I have no dignity. His answer? A roundtable discussion of sequels, historical, aesthetic - praise the lord!

Do I want to dip into politics? or social criticism or some such a thing - Garance Franke-Ruta digging in deeper in defending an extraordinarily bad idea about how to control shit-bag pornographers of the Joe Francis ilk: raise the age of consent for participating in erotic imagery. The reasons this is a bad idea are legion, from what it says about the agency of young women, to the ease with which Ms. Franke-Ruta slides from "participating in the making of erotic imagery" to "participating in pornography" - how old was Margo Stilley when Nine Songs was shot? Such distinctions matter to the cinephiles among us. Instead of addressing the many arguments raised against her proposal, she calls her distractors "leering louts" and rants against Joe Francis (not that there's anything wrong with that). Lance Mannion, singled out for his "lechery", responds.

And finally - Eszter Hargittai's post at Crooked Timber about her blogging history sends us down memory lane. And - looking at her 2002 blog, I see an interesting link on the side: "blogathon03" - the link is dead, but through the miracle of google we find - blogathon 2003 - an odd reminder that the word has been around a while. Outside the film blogiverse, it's used more like the "real world" of marathons and walkathons and telethons and such - in this case: staying up blogging for 24 hours for charity. I remembered that, in fact, in the back of my mind - and if I'd clicked on all the links in Filmsquish's excellent history of the blog-a-thon, I'd have been reminded sooner... but still... somewhere out there is a project to trace through all the various organizations of blogs and such: blogathons, carnivals, etc...

And speaking of blog-a-thons (filmsquish aside, there is no way I am typing the damned hyphens every time) - the Misunderstood Blogathon has wrapped up - a nice collection of posts there... coming up fast, May 25 - Edwards Copeland's Star Wars Blogathon in honor of the 30th annivesary of the release of the film. After that, they come thick and fast in June - Simpsons (June 4-8) - Studio Ghibli (June 4-8) - Action Heroines (I feel a Bridgit Lin post coming on) (June 12) - Film Music (June 21-25) - John Ford (June 29-July 9)... It's a blog-a-thonathon!

Anyway - I must hit post. Again, unfortunately - I posted this accidentally half-written. Clever work!

Saturday Singalong

...well, the singalong part is optional. The usual routine - 10 songs tossed up by iTunes' shuffle, comments if I can think of any....

1. Wilco - Via Chicago (live) - perhaps the demon dj in the iPod knows there is a new Wilco record out? if so, it worked, since I rushed right out and bought it! but I suppose I was going to do that anyway...
2. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Supernaturally **** - of course, lately, when the iPod isn't on shuffle, I've been listening to a lot of Nick Cave - especially the new Grinderman record, but also the live record...
3. De La Soul - Transmitting Live From Mars - isn't this a Pere Ubu cover?
4. The Fall - M5
5. Nirvana - Lithium
6. The Stanley Borthers - Angel Band
7. Johnny Cash - San Quentin *** - this is the second take; the audience has calmed down a bit...
8. Yardbirds - Shapes of Things ***** - that's a heck of a guitar solo in there...
9. The Who - Tattoo (Live at Leeds)
10. Wire - Mr Suit - Wire is always welcome

Video? Let's try the Yardbirds - not the greatest quality, but nice footage of Jeff Beck doing his thing:



And for no particular reason except it's also on YouTube, and a rare moment of economy by the principal guitarist, the same song with Jimmy Page doing the honors:

Understanding Inland Empire

This is not the direction I had expected to take for Culture Snob's Misunderstood blogathon, but in the last couple weeks I have come across a couple complaints about Inland Empire that made me think. Well - that distracted me from parsing out the relevance of the pharmakon to Ikiru, at any rate. But thinking about it - being misunderstood certainly seems to be a fundamental condition of Lynch's films, and Inland Empire courts incomprehension as aggressively as films do. I say - many of Lynch's films are misunderstood from all sides: those who say they make no sense, those who look for a clear, stable explanation of the story. I think of the explications of Mulholland Drive or Lost Highway - the articles explaining who's dreaming who. I have little truck with such things. Those explanations quite clearly miss the point. So far, Inland Empire seems to have resisted such explication. No one's managed to reduce it to one character's dream yet. Thank goodness.

But that does not mean it doesn't make sense. For one thing - there is a plot. A rather simple and identifiable plot, actually, told in a reasonably straightforward manner. The plot of the film in the film, On High in Blue Tomorrows, is, in fact, basically the plot of Inland Empire. A woman with a jealous husband gets involved with a man with a jealous wife, and actions do have consequences, and bad actions have bad consequences. That's it - and what happens in the film fits the plot line consistently. I suspect, further, that the plot has a fairly standard structure - rising action, turning points, the subplots and parallels that go into making a good story are all there, more or less in their proper places. I think you can trace the plot's structure through what happens in the film without much difficulty. What makes this film Strange, though, is that this plot line is not enacted in anything like a unified story world. Instead, characters change, actors sometimes change, settings change, the ontological status of what we see changes (as we move from the Hollywood frame story, to the film within the film, to the world of the film in the film, to the flashbacks or scenes from 4-7 or a radio play or whatever the Polish scenes are meant to be), the ontological relationship between different scenes change (as we move from seeing actors playing in On High in Blue Tomorrows to following the story "directly" to scenes like Laura Dern watching herself on a movie screen, as she lives the story), with all of it filtered through unspecified layers of subjectivity - dreams, visions, memories, thoughts, etc....

Lynch does not stabilize these different worlds. He does not maintain stable levels of reality. Nikki and Devon are not more real than Billy and Sue - Lynch moves back and forth between the different worlds, an uncertainty the characters share - they often seem unsure of which world they are in at any given moment. Mulholland Drive and Lost Highway both received a good deal of attention on that question - critics made claims about what was real, who was real, they tried to stabilize the ontological relationships between Diane and Betty or Fred and Pete. It didn't really add anything to those films, and it would truly be a fool's errand with Inland Empire. It probably can't be done, and spending time on it tends to obscure the formal systems actually at work in the film.

Because there are certainly consistent principals at work. Most of them resolve around the structure I've been writing about: the way (using linguistic terms) the syntax of the film is relatively stable, while the semantics is relatively free. That is - the plot, at an abstract, structural level (a married woman and a married man have an affair with dire consequences) is stable; the story - the people things happen to, the places they happen in, the way things happen, the way the characters seem to experience things happening - is mutable. It's a structure that relates to the outside world: it relates, I think (and have said before), to the mechanics of dreams. Comparing Lynch's films to dreams may be a commonplace, but it's justified - they work like dreams: the way images, words, situations, places, cycle through dreams, and are put together into stories by the subconscious. Lynch's formal strategies also relate to other art forms and traditions. Dada, for example - we could compare it to Max Ernst's collage work, for one. Ernst often built collages out of similar principals - take an identifiable form (the body, say), and while maintaining its basic shape, change its "contents", as here, Ubu Imperator:



In that example - the "form" of the body remains - the parts are arranged in a recognizable pattern: but he "content" has been switched out - the torso turned into a building, the legs and feet into the point of a top.

What Lynch does isn't all that different. He maintains the form, the syntax - the logic of the plot - while abandoning the requirement for ontological unity. But the lost unity (of world, character, etc.) is replaced by the logic of the plot - and of the image, the face, of words and phrases. Wagstaff's crack (in the comments to the post on Edward Copeland's site) that this film is basically about Lynch's obsession with lamps isn't so far off. It's certainly about the other kinds of logic possible in a film: the logic of the plot, as a kind of abstract equation; the logic of objects and spaces and colors and qualities of light; the logic of words as objects (the passage and cycling of words, phrases, sounds, through the story - "look at me, and tell me if you've known me before"; everyone who's "good with animals"). It might be justifiable to say as well - it is about logic itself. Relating back to dreams - our subconscious finds the logic in the disparate images our brains throw up while we are dreaming; Lynch invite us to find and follow threads of logic through his films. They have a contingent logic, a series of substitutions and associations, that lead us from scene to scene, shot to shot - and, at a higher level, tend to resolve into broad, somewhat abstract patterns, like the plot, or the general emotional quality, like that of a woman in trouble.

And even then: it is possible to interpret Lynch's films - they are, usually, grounded in fairly clear emotional and moral positions. Going back to the comments at Edward Copeland's place - Chris Stangl's defense of Inland Empire sounds about right. What does it mean? Something about acting, and something about how life is acting, and something about our complicity with everyone and everything else. (And some good old fashioned moralism, too - the bonds of marriage are real bonds - I think he means it.) But how it works - and whether it's a hodge-podge of unconnected scenes, stitched together randomly after the fact, or, for that matter, whether there's a way to read it as a simple, stable, realistic story - well, you now have my thoughts on the subject...

A Certain Convocation of Politic Worms...

I hesitate to note the passing of Mr. Jerry Falwell. You can tell I'm hesitating - it's taken me a day to get round to a post! I hesitate for obvious reasons - never is Thumper's mother's advice more apt than when speaking of the recently deceased: if you can't say somethin' nice, don't say nothin' at all. Nor is there any point, really, in piling on - he lived a long life, died conventionally enough - there are no points to be scored, and it is just as well. There are those who loved him, and they deserve respect; and none of us want to see our heroes abused when they shuffle off this mortal coil, so perhaps we should forbear when our villains go to the dust.... But still - insofar as a man's death is occasion for reflection on his life - he was a rotten son of a bitch, and the best thing I can come up with to say about him is that there are far worse, even among his fellow god peddlers. Pat Robertson? James Dobson? working your way down to Randall Terry, Fred Phelps - a vicious lot of sinners, poisoning the republic with their "christian" thuggery... they - and Falwell - make a better case for atheism than a hundred Richard Dawkins' could.

On the other hand - as Jay B said in comments at Alicublog, he did what he did and said what he said and apparently meant it, and did not weasel about it, and made a lot less headway doing it than he gets credit for. I refered to the New York Times obit for a reason, actually - it was sitting side by side (and still is) with this story: Bush Intervened in Dispute Over N.S.A. Eavesdropping:

President Bush intervened in March 2004 to avert a crisis over the National Security Agency’s domestic eavesdropping program after Attorney General John Ashcroft, Director Robert S. Mueller III of the F.B.I. and other senior Justice Department aides all threatened to resign, a former deputy attorney general testified Tuesday.

Mr. Bush quelled the revolt over the program’s legality by allowing it to continue without Justice Department approval, also directing department officials to take the necessary steps to bring it into compliance with the law, according to Congressional testimony by the former deputy attorney general, James B. Comey.

That sort of thing, gutting the constitution in the dark, over the objections of that noted civil libertarian John Ashcroft - that will give you pause. Talking Points Memo, as usual, is a fine source of commentary on the subject. They have video, for example. And Glenn Greenwald, of course: this post will probably still be around in a year - discussing its relevance to the NSA spying scandal.

In any case: I'll draw once more on the bard to sum up Falwell's kind:

Indeed this counsellor
Is now most still, most secret and most grave,
Who was in life a foolish prating knave.

His silence is most welcome. Too bad for him, it has only come from death, not wisdom or decency.

Is it Friday Again?

Another one post a week, I see. Very bad. I will blame Deadwood - finally decided to get the DVDs and watch it. Oh well - there goes the next month.... I oculd blog about it, I suppose, which would only put me about 3 years behind the rest of the world.

Anyway - at least you can count on a music post a week! And next week - don't miss Culture Snob's Misunderstood Blogathon. That one's likely to get me to actually write something! But now - what's on the iPod's mind this week?

1. X - Once Over Twice - hey! why didn't this have any stars? let's retrofit - *** is about right.
2. Sonic Youth - Pipeline/Kill Time - ooh, back in the mood for some post-punk/avant garage/noisemongering, are we?
3. Comets on Fire - Whiskey River - hmmm... guitar wanking? always welcome...
4. Outkast - Roses **** - shifting gears a bit...
5. Stooges - 1970 ***** - back to the skronk then
6. Destroyer - Painter in Your Pocket - or now it's Canadian indie pop
7. John Lennon - Look At Me - or... this is what makes last week - or those weeks where a bunch of 5 star songs come up - so strange: there's 9500 songs on the damn thing, from all over the place... some things are going to come up a lot - Pere Ubu, the Stones, the Minutemen, Sonic Youth, Ramones, U2, Yo la Tengo, Radiohead, REM - Outkast is going to be well represented - Beatles, Bowie, Dylan - stuff I have tons of... but that's a pretty broad sampling of styles I just listed - and it doesn't account for types of music, like kraut rock and japanese noise rock and prog and rap and new wave/pop that I tend to sample more broadly than deeply, but do sample, rather broadly... so or one style to dominate? you can tie the stooges and sonic youth and comets on fire together, but it's a lot looser than a grouping of pere ubu, red crayola, sonic youth, kills, nick cave, dinosaur jr.... randomness is very cool sometimes.
8. Radiohead - I might be Wrong ***
9. Van Halen - Feel Your Love Tonight
10. Beatles - Why Don't We Do It in the Road

So then - what sort of video marvels can we turn up today? Well - can't find the song that came up tosay, but X is always welcome. This is an old, scrappy live tape of Los Angeles:

Avant Garage Friday

Sometimes, the iPod randomizer seems to get an idea in its head. Like today - there's a definite pattern here - artsy surf and punk - avant garage....

1. Steve Miller Band - Jungle Love *** (good old Steve Miller - he's kind of the quintessential 70s MOR pop-rock singer, but he did it better than almost anyone else. Those tasteful, cool guitar riffs, neat little tunes, the occasional nifty turn of a phrase - probably the first rock star I actually noticed, other than the Beatles...)
2. Red Crayola - Tina's Gone to Have a Baby (sort of the original avant garage band.... one of them.)
3. Ella Fitzgerald - Cotton Tail (doesn't quite fit the theme, but you know - Ella and her perfect voice is always welcome)
4. Pere Ubu - Raygun Suitcase (where the term comes from, the estimable Mr. Thomas.)
5. Jacques Brel - Je Suis Un Soir D'Ete
6. Jackie-O-Motherfucker - Manchester UK Nov 3 (live)
7. Sonic Youth - Tuff Gnarl
8. Grinderman - When My Love Comes Down (I am quickly coming to really like this record. Nick Cave's guitar playing is a very inspiring thing....)
9. Dinosaur Jr. - Gargoyle
10. The Kills - Superstition

And video? oh hell, who can resist? The first rock and roll song I positively loved:



And - because I cut them from the "random" ten - here's REM doing Hyena, back in 1984...

Happy May Day!

In honor of which, a film review. The Red and the White, a 1967 Hungarian film, directed by Miklos Jansco.

This has to be on the short list of great war movies. It is set during the Russian civil war, 1919 - it follows, somewhat, a group of Hungarians who are fighting for the Bolsheviks. It is set in and around a monastery and a hospital, and in the woods and fields and rivers around them. It operates by stripping the fighting of all sense: it is all middle. It starts in the middle of something - two men running alongside a river, shooting back at something. One of them crosses the river and then a group of horsemen appear and chase him back to the river, where they murder him in cold blood. The riders ride off. The other man escapes. He turns up at the monastery where his comrades - Hungarians, POWs who have stayed to fight for the Reds - are humiliating prisoners. But they are captured in turn and humiliated and murdered and chased half naked through the countryside. They hide for a while in the hospital, but the whites turn up and start humiliating and killing people, until the Reds turn up and humiliate and kill the whites. Then there is a battle of sorts....

This is all very beautiful - stark, lush black and white photography, long, fluid takes, the camera prowling through the world around the men abusing one another, everything arranged, shot and staged in deep, complex spaces - every shot suitable for framing, as Michael Atkinson said of Jansco's countryman Bela Tarr. But what we see is as brutal and absurd as anything in Tarr's work - a seamless thread of cruelty and death, all of it stripped of all context. It starts in the middle of a scene, and everything afterwards remains in the middle - we never really learn who people are, where, why - even when fortunes of war change, all we see are the results - most of the actual fighting takes place off screen.

Instead we see a cycle of absurdities, repeated over and over: we see men running, stripping, forming up in lines, marching this way and that, shooting and getting shot, jumping into rivers, being separated into groups. Russians split from Hungarians, reds from whites, those who ran from those who didn't - or if all else fails, men are picked out of the group randomly. And on and on it goes, the same things repeated: strip, run, split, fall into line, march, shoot, run, strip, split, combine... murders, rapes or threats of rape, hiding, being found... There is no real pattern to any of this - it is a long, absurd skein, both what happens and how we see it, with those long, relentless tracks watching all this pointless brutality. It's as chaotic and insane a vision of war as you could ask - completely meaningless and unheroic.

The film maintains that relentless pointless logic, though there are a few moments that sharpen the point somewhat. One scene at the hospital - one of the Hungarians has been seducing a nurse, maybe to get her to help him send another man for help.... the Whites turn up and catch the man and force the woman to swim, naked, then come out of the water and stand on a jetty while they deal with the man. This starts in long shot - the man, woman, Whites on the jetty - the man is brought forward though, into a medium shot, sometimes even closer, while the Whites harass him. They mock him - they tell him to sing. He does - an insulting song in Hungarian. The woman, all this time, stands in the background, naked, watched by the guards. He finishes singing, he is marched back out onto the jetty and forced into the river where he is summarily bayonetted. The woman crouches down, still naked, on the jetty...



Or the ending, when we finally see an actual, coherent battle. A group of Hungarians run into a group of Cossacks - they exchange shots and see a whole army of Whites come out of the woods. They try to leave, but the cavalry charges - they are surrounded. For a few minutes the battle looks like the rest of the film - men walk back and forth, shooting in all directions - a couple of them fall... then - though we still don't see all the enemies, they form up into a line and march off singing, and the camera rises and shows a vast army of whites spread out to meet them.....

And the closeup that ends it.... A truly great film.

Get me to the Church On Time

Well, I dont know if it's because of Grindhouse or just coincidence, but lots of people posting about chase scenes lately. I think Piper at Lazy Eye Theater started it, posting a fine list, from the Blues Brothers, Raising Arizona, Road Warrior and more, with video. Then I saw Moviezzz' response, posting the chase from Bullitt. It's very exciting. And it happens that Grindhouse put me in the mood to watch some car chase movies - I watched Gone in 60 Seconds this weekend, there are more in the queue... The Gone in 60 Seconds Chase is a monster, after all - 40 minutes of it - one thing after another, and a stream of wreckage in the wake... But better than that, it's put together like a silent comedy, almost. A series of obstacles, situations, settings, each set up and paid off for the cars, with pieces circling back around to each other, and the added fun of the radio reporter's interviews on the street ("he hit a boat?"). I was going to comment at Piper's or ZZZ's place, but I was poking around YouTube, and found this - the chase scene from Harold Lloyd's For Heaven's Sake. Plot? Harold meets the daughter of a preacher, falls in love, turns into a better person, and then has to cross town for his wedding, along with a pack of bums from the mission, who have been into the hooch. So - a trolley, bus and dog wagon later, and a great many shenanigans on the way, they make it....

Lloyd, really, was the master of the chase scene - the race against time. This one is superb. And there are probably better - Girl Shy and Speedy, in particular, are absolute aces. But this will do:

Weekend Again With Music

Another week come and gone with no real content here. But at least there's music and YouTube!

1. Neko Case - Lion's Jaws
2. Neil Young - Alabama
3. Eric B & Rakim - Follow the Leader *** (might be better than that - not positive; that's the generation of rap I liked the most - though more Public Enemy, BDP, Run-DMC, up to NWA and De La Soul, which is more or less when I stopped listening. Not that anyone cares. Just reflecting...)
4. My Bloody Valentine - I Only Said **** - I'm not quite an actual fan of MBV, but here and there, their songs sound utterly wonderful, that swirling distortion, sighed vocals, and real melodies under it all.... some of those songs are perfectly addictive.
5. Distillers - Coral Fang - harmless neo pseudo punk. I had more hopes for this record, but it isn't bad I guess.
6. Elastica - Annie - ... given the degree to which the Distillers come off like a duller version of Elastica - who have tunes for those songs...
7. Big Star - I'm in Love with a Girl *** - the stars, I remind you, have to do largely with how often I want to hear the song - and a lot of my iPod listening gets done on trains and city streets - so... that tends to repress acoustic type songs. Which is why such a superb piece of work gets only 3 stars. Great song, great record, great band - but everyone knows that by now, I would hope.
8. Jay Farrar - Vitamins **** - I know I've shared my love of Jay Farrar before. This one particularly soars. "Really not mad at anyone you're just mad at the world."
9. Spirit - Nature's Way - another record I've commented on before (12 Dreams of Dr Sardonicus) - I should rank more of the songs on it, but it's all good...
10. Built to Spill - I Would Hurt a Fly (Live) - **** - for the studio version anyway, which I think might be better, surprisingly. That Built to Spill live record is pretty damned good - but Perfect From Now on is a masterpiece, one of the best of the 90s.

There's quite a lot of options in this week's bunch - lots of good stuff in there. Let's celebrate the fashions of the 70s and one of the most underrated records of all time - Randy California and the boys, live in 1978....



Update! that's the wrong video! I thought I posted this one - that was from the 80s; this is 1978. both have their merits, though.

Good Reading

While I continue to procrastinate and loaf, I can point to a couple useful things going on in the blogosphere.... Shakespeare Blogathon is underway... enjoy it now! three weeks til the next one, Culture Snob's Misunderstood Blogathon....

... the same day the Cannes Film Festival begins - IndieWire has the films....

Or - if you need a name for your blog - Adam Ross has 700 of them ready for action!

Meanwhile - at the House Next Door (always chock full of material, like a link to this astonishingly stupid response to the Virginia Tech shooting), a review of Claire Denis' Jacques Rivette documentary. I stupidly skipped this back in January, in the midst of my Rivetteathon... stupidly or exhaustedly, hard to say now. Still....

And finally, if you need a fix of theory every couple weeks - go to the source: David Bordwell writes about film as art. What kind of art? Ah, there's the question...

Oh gods. I'm going to be updating this post all night. I just have to note: Monkey Fluids is back in action - been back for a couple weeks, but you can count the posts around here... anyway, I should be ashamed of promoting such things, but anyone who recognizes the source of my nom de blog can probably guess my opinion on antique juvenalia and line drawings... Even when put to unnatural uses!

Weekend

I have to get in here at least once a week. Strange week. Right now, it is sunny and warm. A week ago? That was not the case. The weather and its results - power outages, traveling issues - kept me out of here,a nd kept me from caring for a while... Not to mention the Bad News, which was far too easy to opine about, but really - what do I have to say about something like that? Sometims it's better to keep quiet.

But that was last week. This is now. And, just to get things going, the most basic and simple of posts: the Friday Random Ten. On Sunday, you say, reproachfully, but I say - yep...

1. Patti Smith - Redondo Beach
2. Frank Zappa - Peaches en Regalia
3. Pere Ubu - Goodbye
4. Fire Theft - Summertime
5. Robert Wyatt - Cuckoo Madame
6. Faust - It's a bit of a Pain
7. Love - Doggone
8. Dangerdoom - ATHF (scourge of Boston!)
9. Velvet Underground - Some kinda Love *****
10. Jacques Brel - Les Bigotes

Video? How about some cruddily shot and recorded Krautrock? Still pretty cool stuff.

A Friday Musical Interlude

Without much ado, let's dive into our weekly ritual, while Jonathon Papelbon does his thing...

1. Fleetwod Mac - Teenage Darling (Live at the Boston Teaparty)
2. Flaming Lips - Stand in Line
3. Beatles - In My Life **** - no, I don't have a good reason for this to be 4 instead of 5 stars.
4. Bill Frisell - Live to Tell ***** - from one of the best records of the 90s...
5. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Dead Man in My Bed - I don't quite know why there's no stars on this. Who knows. Nice week or so for Nick Cave music - picked up the Grinderman record today, the new live CD/DVD a couple days ago... good to have
6. Modest Mouse - March into the Sea - so is there some kind of prejudice toward newer material in the iTunes/iPod randomizer? had that conversation today - is there anything to it, or just our imagination? I suppose I've got some data here, if I want to speculate....
7. Johnny Cash - Guess Things Happen that Way
8. Sheryl Crow - Solitaire - kind of dull, really - I think I'd prefer the Carpenters proper...
9. Wipers - My Vengeance - one of the great semi-lost bands of the 80s, this one. Very cool.
10. Sly & the Family Stone - Everybody is a Star - true enough, huh?

And to honor all that new Nick Cave: here's a live clip of the Grinderman group doing The Weeping Song....

A Month o' Movies

Going back through movies, as I said I was going to do yesterday:

Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima - seen as a double bill. I think they work better as a double feature. I've commented on Letters before - I liked it more than I let on, even then (hard to compete with Rivette), and seeing it again solidifies what I liked about it: the lack of heroism; the truth of Paul's comments on my later mention of the film - "people waiting to die". Oddly, despite the lame reception it got, and the fact that it disappeared in about 2 weeks - I think Flags might have been the better film. It isn't perfect - I'm not too impressed by the jumping around in time, the flashbacks, and flashbacks in flashbacks, and portentious framing devices - all of this serves a bit too much to sentimentalize the story. I will say - the way it jumps in and out of the battle, shows it in snatches, back and forth in time - breaks up the romanticization of the fighting. It breaks up the sense of adventure you usually get from war films, though not as effectively as Letters does telling its story straight, and just setting most of the film in a bunch of tunnels with a bunch of men waiting to die. (Both seem to me to be strategies for getting around Truffaut's rule about the impossibility of making an anti-war war film.) Still - there are cliches and melodrama aplenty in Flags of OUr Fathers, though no more so than in Letters From Iwo Jima. And it does avoid romanticizing the war; it does manage to convey the sense of betrayal the soldiers feel; it does it without quite betraying the folks back home. It's almost there. Together with Letters From Iwo Jima, the two form something very close to a truly great film. And yeah - Clint got robbed at the Oscars. There's no way The Departed can hold up as well as either of these films will.

Into Great Silence **** - shot over 6 months or so in the Chartreuse monastary, the Carthusan order, one of the most ascetic in the world - vows of silence, monks spend most of their time alone. This film shows them, patiently and beautifully, repetitively, patiently. This is rather more like Honor de Cavalerria or Colossal Youth than it seems - partly because of some of the abstract, beautiful imagery, partly because of the use of duration, partly because of the refusal of anything like plot. It is more motivated than they are, since it is about monks, who live like this - in a kind of ecstatic present that turns time into a kind of indefinite present. It is very long - 3 hours - but very effective. The aesthetics of religion, religions as aesthetics - when the monks do talk (they have one day a week where they walk outside the monastary, and are allowed to talk to one another), thet mostly discuss symbolism, the significance of things like hand washing and other rituals - this film, the way it looks, the monks' actions, reduces it all to signs, symbols, images, the pure aesthetics of contemplation. I am inclined to think this is true - that religion is aesthetics: it's philosophy and ethics and morality and everything else made into aesthetics - made significant, that is, wrapped up in fictions, signs and so on.

Bamako **** - the world bank on trial in a courtyard in a town in Mali. There are speeches and testimony, the occasional song (including a striking performance toward the end by an old griot), posed against the everyday comings and goings of the townspeople. There is a woman who goes out at night to sing - a ocuple corrupt policemen, a missing gun, a sick man, hungry children, all circulating through the film, creating more a sense of the life of the town than of a story. There is also, in the middle of this, a very funny African western parody, ostensibly on TV - starring Danny Glover and Elia Suleiman: Death in Timbuktu.

Mafioso **** - 1962 Italian film, given a re-release, starring Alberto Sordi as a Sicilian who's made it big in Milan, who goes home with his wife and kids for the first vacation in years. The first half is mostly a comedy about the clash of cultures, north and south - amusing enough, but nothing new.... Into this, though, comes a hint of menace - for our hero used to be a picciotto in the mafia. He pays his respects, and we get the idea that he got his start in life from the mafia - and now they are going to collect. I have read that the distributors are urging critics not to give away the ending - this is rather pointless, as by now most of us will have seen this basic plot a few hundred times, and will not miss it as it pops up here. Still.... an amusing, smart film, with a real sting in the tail, and a great lead performance by Sordi.

Colour Me Kubrick ** - Remember - 2 stars is still a good film! This is about Alan Conway, a con man who played Kubrick to hustle drinks, sometimes sex, and small sums of cash. The film is mostly a chance for Malkowich to camp it up, in shabby clothes, but just - at full speed. He is magnificent - it's that kind of film - there's no other reason for it to exist, but Malcovich's performance is more than enough.

July Rhapsody ***1/2 - Ann Hui film, a fine melodrama about a schoolteacher (played by Jacky Cheung, who I have not seen on screen in a while - it was a treat to see him again, he's very underrated) who confronts his wife's affair with his teacher 20 years ago, while dealing with a pretty girl chasing him. The wife is played by Anita Mui, in her last film - this gives it a particular poignancy, as it is largely about a dying man that Mui attends to. Knowing it is her last film twists the knife a bit. She and Cheung are outstanding.

The Wind That Shakes the Barley ***1/2 - The Irish rebellion of the 1920s, starting with a Black and Tans atrocity that radicalizes a pair of brothers, continuing through the campaigns against the English, to the establishment of the Free State. Then dramatizing the subsequent debates over the treaty, and showing the aftermath, as Irish turned on each other.... nicely done, handsome and respectful, though perhaps, at times, a bit too neat in its allegorizing. But a strong fine film nonetheless.

Brothers Quay Retrospective - 2 collections of short films: stop motion animation and puppetry, in strange, surreal worlds... several amazing pieces: Street of Crocodiles, their masterpiece; Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies; The Comb; a couple videos for His Name is Alive; and another masterpiece - In Abstentia, mostly shots of a woman writing - or trying to write, pencils breaking, sharpening, breaking, all of it set to a Stockhausen score featuring a horrifying mix of voices and synthezisers and electric drones and howls. Very disturbing and beautiful...

Tears of the Black Tiger **** - wonderful, campy strange melodramatic cops and robbers Thai western love story - film.... Starts brilliantly, with strange cutting patterns, very stylized sets - painted backdrops, animated clouds - the camp and glowing clors are on full display - gangsters dressed as cowboys, riding around to Morricone music, etc. It eventually settles down some, though it remains moving and strange and funny and entertaining to the end.

Indigenes *** - French war film about Algerian soldiers serving in Europe with the Free French. They fight well, but are treated badly - the film is about the racism against them as much as the war. As a war film, it's fairly conservative, with conventionally shot battles, and climatic last stands - but it's rather interesting in its treatment of the men. Especially in the characterization of the sergeant - a man of mixed Arab/French blood, who passes for European - he is complicated and strange. He is quickly established as a bastard, and remains a bastard in many ways - but reveals another side. He never indulges his men - he bullies and demeans them - but behind their backs, he pushes for their rights, their promotions (that don't come), he defends them and pleads for them, but never when they can hear.

Emperor Jones *** - Paul Robeson stars in the Eugene O'Neill play, directed by Dudley Murphy, a fascinating figure in early cinema. Not very good, but made watchable by Robeson, who is a towering presence. Murphy is competent enough. The main problems are due to the play - which is an odd mix of dignity and racism - and censorship: things like, forcing the lead actress to black up (so she wouldn't look like a white woman); the removal of all depiction of black on white violence; and in the original release, removal of the many instances of the word "nigger" - though this print reinstated most of them. The results are very strange - you can see why Robeson would want to perform in the part - it's a juicy one, he rises and falls in high style... but it's also unmistakeably racist and strangely condescending.

Lives of Others ***1/2 - suspenseful melodrama about secret policemen and compromised artists in East Germany in the 80s, maybe a bit forced in its conversions, maybe the symbolism - the way the main part ends with Gorbachev's ascent to power - is a bit too neat, but affecting nonetheless. A solid film, though I would not say it is better than Pan's Labyrinth, by any standards.

An Actual Movie Review!

I am aware that I have not actually written anything about an actual film here since - February? pretty much. It is time, I suppose to address this - eventually with a roundup post, but right now, let's start with the most recent film I've seen, Grindhouse. With stars - 1-5, weighted down, so that **= a perfectly decent film, *** being unreservedly good...

Grindhouse: **** - or, if you prefer: Planet Terror ***/Death Proof **** - it's odd that the reviews of this I've read almost all end up pitting the two films against each other. Maybe it's just the accident of what I've read - but: TalkingMoviezzz loves the Rodriguez and hates the QT - Walter Chaw dismisses the RR and loves the Tarantino - and Ryland Walker Knight loathes Planet Terror and adores Death Proof. Only Stephanie Zacharek at Salon praises both. Me? Annoying as he is (and his fans can be worse), I can't help loving Tarantino's film - Rodriguez on the other hand has always struck me as a bit of a hack, and definitely less than meets the eye. So I went in with those expectations - and found myself, instead, completely enjoying Planet Terror. It strikes me as a big budget version of films like Killer Klowns from Outer Space (which I was, of course, inspired to rewatch, after seeing Grindhouse) - an affectionate parody, that stays pretty close to the style and structure of the films it is parodying. That is - the story, the situation, is really pastiche - the characters, dialogue, details (like the tiny motorcycle the hero rides in Planet Terror) provide the parody. It's a hoot - goes down easy, fun and funny... but that's it.

But Death Proof... not when I was watching it, so much: it starts slow, it wanders and drags, and has way too much of Tarantino's signature pop culture blather, and most of that feels like filler... when Kurt Russell turns up, the thing starts to come alive, building to a rather shocking halfway point... Then starts over. 4 more women, sitting around talking - talk talk talk talk talk. Eventually, they head off to test drive a '70 dodge challenger with a white paint job - more talk first! but once they're in the car... The film goes off like a shot. And keeps going off, through the last third (or whatever it is) of the film - a long and really fucking great car chase, with stunts to make Jacky Chan or Buster Keaton proud. And the thing is, it keeps going off after it's done - it sticks in your head. The visceral thrill of it, the imagery of it - but also the artistry of it, the structure, its relationship to the films it refers to. It's got the mix of abrupt nihilism and moralism of an old fashioned exploitation picture, with charismatic villains and annoying, rather unpleasant "good guys" - it's got sudden swerves of tone and style, it's got freeze frames... It's also got a decidedly dualistic structure: split into a first half and second half, that reflect one another; then the second half is split into halves - the talking half/the driving half; then the car chase is split in two (black chaes white, white chases black) - right down to the 2 freeze frame endings.... (All of that, of course, as the second half of a double film.) Tarantino has always loved the patterns he can make out of stories, sometimes more than the stories themselves - this one maybe indulges in the patterns to the point where the stories dissolve - along with a lot of the humanity his films usually smuggle in through the back door.... The talking scenes don't do much - they occupy space in the film - they count off the number of reels you have to cover to get to the car chases.... But that, really, is true to the point of the exercise - the strange, slightly absurd scenes that pace the action in these kinds of films.... It is a strange film, and a pretty wonderful one, when you think about it.

A Good Friday for Music

Why, it's Friday again! and miraculously, here comes a Friday random music post on, miracle of miracles, a Friday! Hooray! Without any further ado (though this blog needs a bit more ado - needs posts now and again - I've been cleverly disguising my lack of content with big flashy lists and baseball pontification), here it is:

1. Swell Maps - Gunboats
2. Mars Volta - B. Part II - from Scab Dates - wait - can this count? That's just 1 part of a long song - that's not a real....
2. Pere Ubu - Lisbon - we seem to be working our way backwards through their ouvre. Next week, maybe we'll get sad.txt or something....
3. Sonic Youth - Pink Steam - certainly seem to be working a certain vein of music today.
4. Lampshade - Good Day Sunshine - off one of those Mojo compilations. Which don't seem to add much ot the originals - this being a passable cover, but blanded out. Just listen tot he Beatles!
5. Scott Walker - On Your Own Again - nothing bland about Scott Walker.
6. Swell Maps - International Rescue - never try to understand it - so why are 2 songs from the swell maps coming up? have they ever come up before? anyway, no complaints, after all.
7. Byrds - Drug Store Truck Driving Man - any Clarence White appearance is a treat...
8. Neil Young - Welfare Mothers (live - Weld)
9. The Fall - Rowche Rumble - hey! how did I forget to give this any stars? Anyway - back to the jagged guitar music, and welcome to it!
10. Sleater Kinney - The Size of Our Love

So video? I can't say I expected to find anything, but I'm glad I did - here are the Swell Maps, with Midget Submarines:

Lists By Decades

And finally - from the beginning of time! something like that. I will only have to cheat the pre 1920s, I think. I hope to update this every now and again - if I ever get really enthusiastic, I might start breaking down decades into years. (Steve Carlson has done so, back to 1953 - an inspiring project... it's certainly one of the things driving me to this process...) Anyway - into the breach! Just top 10 per decade for now, though that's a pretty narrow selection for some of these.)

2000s:
1. Inland Empire - USA - David Lynch
2. Yi Yi - Taiwan - Edward Yang
3. Kings and Queen - France - Arnaud Desplechins
4. 2046 - China - Wong Kar-wei
5. Death of Mr. Lazarescu - Romania - Christi Puiu
6. Mulholland Drive - USA - David Lynch
7. Colossal Youth - Portugal - Pedro Costa
8. L'Intrus - France - Claire Denis
9. Goodbye Dragon Inn - Taiwan - Tsai Ming-liang
10. Los Angeles Plays Itself - USA - Thom Anderson

1990s:
1. Rushmore - USA - Wes Anderson
2. Breaking the Waves - Denmark/UK - Lars Van Trier
3. Goodbye, South, Goodbye - Taiwan - Hou Hsiao Hsien
4. Satantango - Hungary - Bela Tarr
5. Fallen Angels - Hong Kong - Wong Kar-wei
6. Flowers of Shanghai - Taiwan - Hou Hsiao Hsien
7. Beijing Bastards - PRC - Zhang Yuan
8. Through the Olive Trees - Iran - Abbas Kiarostami
9. Happy Together - Hong Kong - Wong Kar-wei
10. White - France/Poland - Krysztof Kieslowski

1980s:
1. City of Sadness - Taiwan - Hou Hsiao Hsien
2. Blue Velvet - USA - David Lynch
3. Fitzcarraldo - Germany - Werner Herzog
4. The Elephant Man - USA - David Lynch
5. Do the Right Thing - USA - Spike Lee
6. Peking Opera Blues - Hong Kong - Tsui Hark
7. Brazil - UK/USA - Terry Gilliam
8. Blind Chance - Poland - Krysztof Kieslowski
9. Full Metal Jacket - USA - Stanley Kubrick
10. Raiders of the Lost Ark - USA - Steven Spielberg
[The Big Red One should be on here - except I think the restored version is probably more deserving than the original release. I certainly was more impressed - I don't know how much was the improvement in the film and how much was just seeing it in a theater vs. on video.]

1970s:
1.McCabe and Mrs Miller - USA - Robert Altman
2. Aguirre Wrath of God - Germany - Werner Herzog
3. A Woman Under the Influence - USA - John Cassavetes
4. Nashville - USA - Altman
5. Celine and Julie Go Boating - France - Jacques Rivette
6. Mystery of Kasper Hauser (Every Man for Himself and God Against All) - Germany - Werner Herzog
7. Killer of Sheep - USA - Charles Burnett [which is supposed to be getting a release sometime in 2007! it could make that list too.]
8. Killing of a Chinese Bookie - USA - John Cassavetes
9. The Long Goodbye - USA - Altman
10. Camera Buff - Poland - Krysztof Kieslowski

1960s: [An almost impossibly deep decade for this kind of list. I am, of course, a huge fan of French and Japanese new wave films - Godard and Imamura, particularly are among my very favorite filmmakers, and they were banging 'em out back in the day, at a sustained level of brilliance...]
1. Vivre Sa Vie - France - Jean Luc Godard
2. The Pornographers - Japan - Shohei Imamura
3. Gospel According to Matthew - Italy - Pier Paolo Pasolini
4. High and Low - Japan - Akira Kurosawa
5. Playtime - France - Jacques Tati
6. Pierrot Le Fou - France - JLG
7. The Sun's Burial - Japan - Nagisa Oshima
8. Insect Woman - Japan - Imamura
9. Alphaville - France - Godard again
10. Pigs and Battleships - Japan - Imamura again

1950s: [Same story here: a world wide renaissance in filmmaking after WWII, it seems.]
1. Early Summer - Japan - Yasujiro Ozu
2. Vertigo - USA - Alfred Hitchcock
3. Seven Samurai - Japan - Akira Kurosawa
4. Ugetsu Monogatari - JApan - Kenji Mizoguchi
5. Touch of Evil - USA - Orson Welles
6. Pather Panchali - India - Satyajit Ray
7. Tokyo Story - Japan - Ozu
8. Rear Window - USA - Hitchcock
9. The Searchers - USA - John Ford
10. Late Chrysanthemums - Japan Mikio Naruse

1940s:
1. It's a Wonderful Life - USA - Frank Capra
2. The Maltese Falcon - USA - John Huston
3. Late Spring - Japan - Yasujiro Ozu
4. His Girl Friday - USA - Howard Hawks
5. Ivan the Terrible - USSR - Sergei Eisenstein
6. The Big Sleep - USA - Howard Hawks
7. Fort Apache - USA - John Ford
8. Citizen Kane - USA - Orson Welles
9. Germany Year Zero - Italy - Roberto Rosselini
10. Stray Dog - Japan - Akira Kurosawa

1930s: [Another fairly miraculous decade for films - probably the best of the bunch, to be honest]
1. M - Germany - Fritz Lang
2. Rules of the Game - France - Jean Renoir
3. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington - USA - Frank Capra
4. Duck Soup - USA - Leo McCarey
5. I Was Born But... - Japan - Yasujiro Ozu
6. Bride of Frankenstein - USA - James Whale
7. Frankenstein - USA - James Whale
8. Osaka Elegy - Japan - Kenji Mizoguchi
9. Love Me Tonight - USA - Reuben Mamoulian
10. A Night at the Opera - USA - Sam Wood

1920s:
1. The General - USA - Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman
2. Nosferatu - Germany - FW Murnau
3.The Gold Rush - USA - Charles Chaplin
4. Our Hospitality - USA - Buster Keaton and John G Blystone
5. Man With the Movie Camera - USSR - Dziga Vertov
6. Earth - USSR - Aleksander Dovzhenko
7. Battleship Potemkin - USSR - Sergei Eisenstein
8. Sherlock Jr. - USA - Buster Keaton
9. October - USSR - Eisenstein
10. Greed - USA - Erich Von Stroheim

Pre-1920s: [this is definitely a mixed bag - shorts, features, what have you... probably biased toward features more than it should be.]
1. Birth of a Nation - USA - DW Griffith
2. Les Vampires - Louis Feuillade
3. Broken Blossoms - USA - Griffith
4. The Tramp - USA - Charlie Chaplin
5. Intolerance - USA - Griffith
6. Regeneration - USA - Raoul Walsh
7. True Heart Susie - USA - Griffith
8. South - UK - Frank Jurley [this is the footage shot on the Shackleton expedition]
9. Cabinet of Dr. Caligari - Germany - Robert Weine
10. The Champion - USA - Chaplin

And that is that.

2000s by Year

This I did last year - this year's version I did without looking back at that. Might be some interesting changes. Anyway - these are retrospective top 10s for each year of this decade:

2006: [I do want to make sure this matches the post I just put up.]
1. Inland Empire - US - David Lynch
2. Colossal Youth - Portugal - Pedro Costa
3. The Woman on the Beach - South Korea - Hong Sang-soo
4. The Science of Sleep - France - Michel Gondry
5. United 93 - US - Paul Greengrass
6. Children of Men - UK - Alfonso Cauron
7. Honor de Cavelaria - Spain - Albert Serra
8. The Wind that Shakes the Barley - UK - Ken Loach
9. A Scanner Darkly - US - Richard Linklater
10. Belle Toujours - Portugal/France - Manoel de Oliveira

2005:
1. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu - Romania - Christi Puiu
2. The Squid and the Whale - USA - Noah Baumbach
3. Regular Lovers - France - Philippe Garrel
4. Three Times - Taiwan - Hou Hsiao Hsien
5. Grizzly Man - US - Werner Herzog
6. L'Enfant - Belgium - Luc & Jean Pierre Dardennes
7. Cache - France/Austria - Michael Haneke
8. The President's Last Bang - South Korea - Im Sang-soo
9. Mutual Appreciation - US - Andrew Bujalski
10. Sympathy for Lady Vengeance - South Korea - Park Chan-ho
[And as we go to press, I am a day away from seeing Into Great Silence, Philip Groning's documentary about the Chartreuse monastary - I have not completely thought it through - but it is an extraordinary film: one that might turn up on this list if I waited a few days to post it.]

2004:
1. Kings and Queen - France - Arnaud Desplechins
2. 2046 - China - Wong Kar-wei
3. L'Intrus - France - Claire Denis
4. The House of Flying Daggers - China - Zhang Yimou
5. The World - China - Jia Jiang-ke
6. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - US - Michel Gondry
7. Nobody Knows - Japan - Kore-eda Hirokazu
8. Innocence - France - Lucille Hadzihalilovic
9. The Holy Girl - Argentina - Lucrecia Martel
10. Clean - France - Olivier Assayas

2003:
1. Goodbye Dragon Inn Taiwan - Tsai Ming-liang
2. Los Angeles Plays Itself - USA - Thom Anderson
3. Memories of Murder - South Korea - Bong Joon-ho
4. Dracula, Pages from a Virgin's Diary - Canada - Guy Maddin
5. Elephant - USA - Gus Van Sant
6. Doppelganger - Japan - Kiyoshi Kurosawa
7. Cafe Lumiere - Taiwan - Hou Hsiao Hsien
8. Gerry - USA - Gus Van Sant
9. Blind Shaft - China - Li Yang
10. Crimson Gold - Iran - Jafar Panahi

2002:
1. The Son - Belgium - Luc & Jean Pierre Dardennes
2. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance - South Korea - Park Chan wook
3. Man Without a Past - Finland - Aki Kaurismaki
4. The Pianist - USA - Roman Polanski
5. Unknown Pleasures - China - Jia Jiang Ke
6. Springtime in a Small Town - China - Tian Zhuang Zhuang
7. Millenium Mambo - Taiwan - Hou Hsiao Hsien
8. Devils on the Doorstep - China - Jiang Wen
9. Talk to Her - Spain - Almodovar
10. Dolls - Japan - Takeshi Kitano

2001:
1. Mulholland Drive - USA - David Lynch
2. Ichi the Killer - Japan - Takashi Miike
3. Donnie Darko - USA - Richard Kelly
4. Va Savoir - France - Jacques Rivette
5. The Royal Tenenbaums - USA - Wes Anderson
6. Distance - Japan - Hirokazu Kore-eda
7. Pistol Opera - Japan - Seijun Suzuki
8. Waking Life - USA - Richard Linklater
9. Khandahar - Iran - Mohsen Makhmalbaf
10. Pulse - Japan - Kiyoshi Kurosawa

2000:
1. Yi Yi - Taiwan - Edward Yang
2. Platform - China - Jia Jiang Ke
3. Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors - South Korea - Hong Sang-soo
4. O Brother Where Art Thou - USA - Joel and Ethan Coen
5. Songs from the Second Floor - Sweden - Roy Andersson
6. The Circle - Iran - Jafar Panahi
7. Eureka - Japan - Shinji Aoyama
8. The Gleaners and I - France - Agnes Varda
9. In the Mood for Love - China - Wong Kar-wei
10. George Washington - USA - David Gordon Green

That's that, until next year.

Past the Quarterpost, We Turn back the clock...

It takes a while for the best films of a year to shake out - for everything you need to see to turn up, at least a strong sample. Even now, this is probably sketchy - it will be the middle or end of this year before I get a reliable read on last year. (There are a few films out there - Jia Jiang-ke's, say - that I fully expect to crack this list when I actually get to see them.) That is one of the reasons this is just the first of three posts: it's a good time to look back at 2005 and before, as well. I have been wanting to post some lists - starting, as here, with the best of the year - adding to this, top tens for each year of the 00s (for now) (I did that last year), and then by decade. I used to be more of a list keeper, obsessing over the order, things like that. These days, it's more relaxed. Kind of a snapshot of what kinds of films I'm valuing right now. I think it would be neat to post these things about once a year. Watch what changes, etc.

This list, then, is for 2006: films made or internationally debuted in 2006 - it does not matter where I saw them or when. Only that they are listed as 2006 in the record books... I'll go 25 deep, because - it's the last time I'll make that big a list for the year... it's in order, but probably only reliable (even as a record of what I liked) through the first 10-15.

1. Inland Empire - US - David Lynch
2. Colossal Youth - Portugal - Pedro Costa
3. The Woman on the Beach - South Korea - Hong Sang-soo
4. The Science of Sleep - France - Michel Gondry
5. United 93 - US - Paul Greengrass
6. Children of Men - UK - Alfonso Cauron
7. Honor de Cavelaria - Spain - Albert Serra
8. The Wind that Shakes the Barley - UK - Ken Loach
9. A Scanner Darkly - US - Richard Linklater
10. Belle Toujours - Portugal/France - Manoel de Oliveira
11. Lights in the Dusk - Finland - Aki Kaurismaki
12. The Host - South Korea - Bong Joon-ho
13. Old Joy - US - Kelly Reichardt
14. Climates - Turkey - Nuri Blige Ceylan
15. Volver - Spain - Pedro Almodovar
16. The Scream of the Ants - Iran - Mohsen Makhmalbaf
17. Pan's Labyrinth - Mexico - Guillermo Del Toro
18. Lives of Others - Florian Donnersmarck
19. Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Khazakhstan - US/UK - Larry Charles
20. Half Nelson - US - Ryan Fleck
21. Prairie Home Companion - US - Robert Altman
22.Little Miss Sunshine - US - Jonathon Dayton and Valerie Feris
23. Fast Food Nation - US - Richard Linklater
24. Bubble - US - Steven Soderburgh
25. Talledega Nights - US - Adam McKay

Baseball Post

The baseball season starts tomorrow. It's been an odd winter - maybe it's the Celtics' misfortunes, maybe something else, but I've been very indifferent to sports lately. Even to the NCAA tourney, usually one of the high points of the year. Strange. Even baseball. Though indifference to baseball is a relative term. Reading just one baseball book (the indispensible Baseball Prospectus), only spending one or two lunch hours a week working out predictions and projections, that sort of thing. I forgot that I did do this last year - AL and NL: didn't take any risks, didn't say anything stupid. Sadly, for those of you expecting me to pick the Royals to win it all, I imagine this year's predictions will be equally bland, with plenty of hedging and caveats.

AL East:
1) Boston - I'm sorry, but I'm obligated. The Yankees can't win it forever. The Sox last year would have won the division except half the team went on the DL - especially when Wakefield, Tek and Nixon all went down at the same time - they were done. That could hapen again - or they could stay healthy - in which case they have a very strong rotation, a great closer and a bunch of serviceable relievers (all of whom could collapse of course, but that's relief pitching for you!), piles of offense, decent depth, solid defense (not great not terrible) - sounds good to me.
2) Yankees - they probably helped themselves in the long term by shedding some of the old timers, but in the short term, they aren't as deep - Carl Pavano is the opening day starter! the bullpen is getting old, a lot of the players are getting old - they should hammer the ball, win in the 90s, weather injuries better than the red sox, and go nowhere in the post-season if they get there - which is iffier than it has been in a decade.
3) Toronto - nice line up, strong at the top of the pitching staff, weaker as you go down - but like last year, should be solid, and have the potential to take the division if the other teams falter. If everything clicks, they'll be in the post-season hunt.
4) Tampa Bay - I think I'll keep picking them to finish 4th until they do. Still don't have any pitching - look at their bullpen sometime... but should score runs, might even catch the ball - sooner or later it's going to get better.
5) Baltimore - like King Kaufman at Salon said - it's too bad the O's and Rays couldn't combine forces. Baltimore's pitching is young and old, with Bedard, Cabrera and Loewen teamed with Jaret Wright and Steve Trachsel, but could be pretty good - some talent in the pen as well, behind Chris Ray... the offense is a different matter, though Tejada and Roberts, Markakis, Petterson, Mora are - nice. There's room for some success, though I'm afraid success means, winning 76 games. Their infield and Tampa's outfield, their pitchers plus Kazmir would make a very nice team.

AL Central:
1) Detroit - They have a strong rotation, they have depth on the staff, they could even get better, since Verlander and Bonderman and company are young and improving. They have hitters at every position, a few guys in reserve - if most of the gang stays healthy, they could repeat and build on last year's success.
2) Cleveland - because I want them to finish second. But I do think Cliff Lee will come back a bit, ditto Jhonny Peralta, while Sabathia, Hafner, Sizemore, Martinez remain strong - they need to find someone to pitch out of the pen, but that's a crap shoot for almost everyone.
3) Minnesota - plenty of offense. No pitching. But they catch the ball and playt he game right so they will hang around. Wait - didn't I say that last year? Actually - they have a lot of pitching - it's just that, after Santana, it's mostly in the pen. If their kids develop in the rotation, they could be back on top.
4) Chicago - in fact, they are perfectly capable of winning the division, and more. They are getting old though - the pitching is getting old - there's a lot that can go wrong, and they have less in reserve than Boston and New York - but healthy, they are still very dangerous.
5) You know, Kansas City might not suck forever. Alex Gordon? Brett Butler? Mark Teahan? young pitchers? Another year or so, they could be interesting.

AL West:
1) Oakland - really? yeah, why not? probably sink or swim on Rich Harden's health. As usual, a rather thin offense, but it has its merits. No reason Piazza can't muster one last fling, no reason Chavez can't bounce back a bit.
2) Angels - though if they get their pitchers on the field, they're going to be hard to beat. They need to keep their players on the field too - though they have plenty of options, and some nice youngsters who could emerge...
3) Rangers - if I were picking a dark horse for all this, I might go with the Rangers. The pitching, as usual, is not inspiring - but I think Brendan McCarthy could turn into something - if they get some kind of bounceback from Blalock and Wilkerson and even Slammin' Sammy, well - there's hope, I think.
4) Seattle - probably not exactly hideous. But not very good.

NL East:
1) Atlanta - do I have any justification for this? well - yeah - they have a better, deeper, bullpen than they've had in a while; the rotation falls off fast, but could be solid if Tim Hudson comes back; they have some fine hitters - Jonesx2, McCann, Francoeur, nothing wrong with the rest of the lineup, really. Plenty of room for failure, but a nice chance to come back.
2) Mets - they'll hit the hell out of the ball - they should be able to win close ones, with a decent bullpen - but that rotation - El Duque, member of the 1904 Cuban Olympic Champion squad, is their #2 starter. If Pedro were around, they'd be the favorites, easy. Without him - they'll hang around, might even win, but it's gonna take some breaks.
3) Philadelphia - plenty of pop, some nice young pitchers, but Adam Eaton?
4) Florida - if their nice young pitchers are healthy, and their young players build on last year and a couple more turn up - Jeffrey Loria will have to trade Willis and Cabrera by June to keep them out of contention. Which is a possibility.
5) Washington - kind of hurts to look at this team. 5 years, Ryan. Probably three, since arbitration will get them nervous...

NL Central:
1) St. Louis - there's some crap on this team, but there's a lot of crap in this division. I suspect they were probably closer to their post-season level than their regular season level last year - lots of guys missed time, but were around in the post-season... they lost a few guys since then, but of the Jeff Suppan variety, which is not going to hurt matters.
2) Houston - they should hit, they probably will end up with a pretty good bullpen, and they have as good a chance as anyone to bring in a ringer in June. Just stay close, and give Rog a chance to save the day...
3) Milwaukee - Ben Sheets healthy, and they could contend. Otherwise probably not. A fashionable pick, for good reasons. Sheets healthy, in front of Capuano, with Bush and Suppan to fill innings effectively - not bad.
4) Cincinati - Harang and Arroyo and Oh My God, No! The offense, on the other hand, isn't bad at all, and could be pretty good.
5) Chicago - they spent money at a tremendous rate over the winter, but - you know.... Ted Lilly? Jason Marquis? things could click though, and they could end up pretty good. The truth is, any of these teams could win the division - any of them could finish last. That is true of a good deal of the National League - probably not the Mets, Braves and Phillies, who should all get into the 80s in wins, and Washington, who won't, and maybe
6) Pittsburgh, who won't get past 75 - unless they do. And if Snell and Duke and Gorzelany are the real thing, well - still...

NL West:
1) San Diego - they have about the same gang they had last year, with some odds of incremental improvement, and some chance - maybe slim, but not 0 - of a couple guys taking major steps forward (Khalil Greene? Kouzmanoff?) - I don't see much chance of collapse here - they are the NL's version of the Twins, right down to having the best pitcher in the league - well - at least the best strikeout pitcher in the league. Though I imagine most years, Peavy is going to be around the top. Less dominant and consistent than Santana, less consistent than Carpenter and Oswalt in the NL, but still up there.
2) Los Angeles - they're a high risk reward type team - the pitchers stay heallthy, they could shine - they don't - they won't. Lots of guys who could disappear in a hurry.
3) Arizona - another fashionable pick, with a host of emerging prospects, and some useful veterans. Especially if Randy Johnson bounces back - not that he was all that bad last year: by his standards, yes - and the ERA was hideous - but his other numbers were still in the upper side of the league...
4) San Francisco - though again - what if Cain improves? what if Lowry delivers on his promise? What if Barry gets into a "teammates'" "vitamin" supply? Or - not.
5) Colorado - they're starting to produce some nice young players again, but I don't see them winning a whole lot.

Results:
AL: Boston - Detroit - Oakland + NY (alas) - dark horse? Texas
NL: Atlanta - St. Louis - San Diego + NY - dark horse? Florida

MVP
AL: if Boston wins the division, David Ortiz will get his due. Though at this point - last year's result utterly discredits the writers - Justin Morneau? he's a first baseman who hit 20 fewer home runs than Ortiz! I can see a case for Jeter or Mauer, or Santana - but not Morneau. Unlike Jeter and Mauer, he was not playing a skill position - he's a first baseman! he's a hitter! and Ortiz out hit him by - 20 home runs! Anyway, I imagine the same general candidates are in the running again - Ortiz, Manny, Jeter and A Rod, Vernon Wells, Hafner, Mauer, Vlad, Texeira, and a few pitchers - Santana, K Rod, Nathan, Ryan, Papelbon, Rivera - to complicate things.
NL: It's Albert Pujols' to lose for the next 6-8 years, I imagine. There are a few guys around ready to take it if Albert misses a month, like last year, but that's not likely to happen.
Rookies: Alex Gordon is supposed to be the man. NL? probably a Diamondback or another Marlin.