100 Films

One thing I'll say for the AFI's big list hoopla - suddenly, everybody's doing it. Maybe it's coincidence in some cases - like this monster list from the Guardian, 1000 Films to see before you die (which with 1000 films to play with manages to leave out City Lights, All Quiet on the Western Front, Fires on the Plain, any Hou Hsiao Hsien, so far... right. Edward Yang made it though! hooray! And Amelie... and, oh yeah - no Blessed Event and Bombshell - any list with 1000 films and no Lee Tracy, ain't worth shit. Maybe Night Mayor will sneak in.) Meanwhile, lists directly inspired by the AFI list, like this one from the Alliance of Women Film Journalists, are turning up, and journalists and bloggers are joining in the fun with a gusto - Anne Thompson at Variety; Edward Copeland (top 100); The Shamus (top 100 not on the AFI list); the Self Styled Siren (top 100 not on the AFI 400 nominees); Thrilling Days of Yesteryear (top 100) - with more lists promised, say, by Damien at Windmills of my Mind. I dropped hints myself the other day, and tonight, my friends, you will see the result.

This is what happened ten years ago - people went round and round for weeks about what should be on the list, what shouldn't - and posted, some of them, their own lists. And not to quote myself again - but composite lists "iron out all the oddball films, the marginal films, the individual tastes" - they may help sketch in what is important, but the conversation always gets more interesting when you see what all us various film geeks like.

And so - here goes. 100 films; all American (I may supplement this with a world wide list in the future); in order, more or less, though it's hard to say how far that should be taken. Art isn't really a competition, so orders of merit are more for fun and as a kind of gauge of - something, a sign of what we value in art, more than a measure of the value of the art. But I do love lists. So here you go.

1) It's a Wonderful Life - 1946 - Frank Capra
2) Mr. Smith Goes to Washington - 1939 - Frank Capra
3) McCabe and Mrs Miller - 1971 - Robert Altman
4) The General - 1925 - Buster Keaton & Clyde Bruckman
5) Vertigo - 1958 - Alfred Hitchcock
6) Maltese Falcon - 1940 - John Huston
7) Duck Soup - 1933 - Leo McCarey
8) His Girl Friday - 1940 - Howard Hawks
9) Blue Velvet - 1986 - David Lynch
10) Woman Under the Influence - 1974 - John Cassavetes.
11) Nashville - 1975 - Robert Altman
12) Touch of Evil - 1958 - Orson Welles
13) Rear Window - 1954 - Alfred Hitchcock
14) Searchers - 1956 - John Ford
15) Rushmore - 1998 - Wes Anderson
16) Big Sleep - 1946 - Howard Hawks
17) Bride of Frankenstein - 1935 - James Whale
18) Sweet Smell of Success - 1959 - Alexander McKendrick
19) Citizen Kane - 1940 - Orson Welles
20) The Gold Rush - 1925 - Charlie Chaplin
21) Killer of Sheep - 1977 - Charles Burnett
22) Fort Apache - 1948 - John Ford
23) Elephant Man - 1980 - David Lynch
24) Night of the Hunter - 1955 - Charles Laughton
25) Rebel without a Cause - 1955 - Nicholas Ray
26) Imitation of Life - 1959 - Douglas Sirk
27) Killing of a Chinese Bookie - 1976 - John Cassavetes
28) The Long Goodbye - 1973 - Robert Altman
29) Inland Empire - 2006 - David Lynch
30) Love Me Tonight - 1932 - Rouben Mamoulian
31) Night at the Opera - 1935 - Sam Wood
32) Doctor Strangelove - 1963 - Stanley Kubrick
33) Trouble in Paradise - 1932 - Ernst Lubitsch
34) Frankenstein - 1931 - James Whale
35) Bringing Up Baby - 1938 - Howard Hawks
36) The Conversation - 1974 - Francis Ford Coppola
37) Some Like it Hot - 1959 - Billy Wilder
38) Saint Jack - 1979 - Peter Bogdanovich
39) Platinum Blonde - 1931 - Frank Capra
40) Top Hat - 1935 - Mark Sandrich
41) The Awful Truth - 1937 - Leo McCarey
42) The Asphalt Jungle - 1950 - John Huston
43) Written on the Wind - 1956 - Douglas Sirk
44) Birth of a Nation - 1915 - DW Griffith
45) Do the Right thing - 1989 - Spike Lee
46) Eraserhead - 1977 - David Lynch
47) Our Hospitality - 1923 - Buster Keaton
48) Broken Blossoms - 1919 - DW Griffith
49) Chelsea Girls - 1966 - Andy Warhol
50) Mean Streets - 1973 - Martin Scorsese
51) Sherlock Jr. - 1924 - Buster Keaton
52) Brazil - 1985 - Terry Gilliam
53) The Lady Eve - 1941 - Preston Sturges
54) Greed - 1925 - Erich von Stroheim
55) Trash - 1970 - Paul Morrissey
56) Treasure of the Sierra Madre - 1948 - John Huston
57) All Quiet on the Western Front - 1930 - Lewis Milestone
58) Big Red One (Restored) - 1982/2004 - Sam Fuller
59) Blessed Event - 1932 - Roy Del Ruth
60) Charlie Verrick - 1973 - Don Siegel
61) Gay Divorcee - 1934 - Mark Sandrich
62) Blade Runner - 1981 - Ridley Scott
63) Dead Man - 1996 - Jim Jarmusch
64) The Godfather - 1972 - Francis Ford Coppola
65) Wizard of Oz - 1939 - Victor Fleming
66) The Killing - 1955 - Stanley Kubrick
67) Tabu - 1931 - FW Murnau & Robert Flaherty
68) African Queen - 1951 - John Huston
69) The Freshman - 1925 - Fred Newmeyer & Sam Taylor
70) Golddiggers of 1933 - 1933 - Mervyn LeRoy
71) Mulholland Drive - 2001 - David Lynch
72) Horsefeathers - 1932 - Norman McLeod
73) The Shop Around the Corner - 1940 - Ernst Lubitsch
74) To Have and Have Not - 1944 - Howard Hawks
75) Palm Beach Story - 1940 - Preston Sturges
76) Chinatown - 1974 - Roman Polanski
77) Dracula - 1931 - Todd Browning
78) Psycho - 1960 - Alfred Hitchcock
79) Lolita - 1962 - Stanley Kubrick
80) Othello - 1955 - Orson Welles
81) Twentieth Century - 1934 - Howard Hawks
82) Sunrise - 1927 - FW Murnau
83) Raiders of the Lost Ark - 1981 - Steven Spielberg
84) The Producers - 1968 - Mel Brooks
85) It Happened One Night - 1934 - Frank Capra
86) Full Metal Jacket - 1987 - Stanley Kubrick
87) Badlands - 1973 - Terrence Malick
88) Notorious - 1944 - Alfred Hitchcock
89) King Kong - 1933 - Merian C Cooper
90) Steamboat Bill Jr. - 1928 - Buster Keaton
91) This is Spinal Tap - 1984 - Rob Reiner
92) Stagecoach - 1939 - John Ford
93) Sunset Boulevard - 1950 - Billy Wilder
94) Taxi Driver - 1976 - Martin Scorsese
95) Pulp Fiction - 1994 - Quentin Tarantino
96) Morocco - 1930 - Josef von Sternberg
97) Bombshell - 1933 - Victor Fleming
98) Groundhog Day - 1993 - Ivan Reitman
99) Letter from an Unknown Woman - 1948 - Max Ophuls
100) Faces - 1968 - John Cassavetes

Weekend Randomosity

The usual mix of sloth and distraction has kept me from a music post... so mix it with some pointers, and -

Two blogathons going strong: Film Music at Windmills of my Mind - and Ambitious Failure, at This Savage Art. Plenty to read at both of them.

Lots of posts about the AFI's revised 100 years, 100 movies list. A partial list: New Critics (Chuck Tryon) and New Critics again (M. A. Peel); Edward Copeland; Adam Ross at DVD Panache; The Self Styled Siren; Roger Ebert and Jim Emerson.... etc. I remember when the first one came out, a good deal of back and forth in the corners of the net I haunted then - though I never quite cared, thinking it was a bland, homogenized list, that might prove entertaining to argue about. In fact I have the words at hand: "Composite lists like this are never as interesting as individual lists. By their nature, they iron out all the oddball films, the marginal films, the individual tastes. This is a nice celebration, and makes a good starting point for other debates." So - I'm tempted to offer my own alternative. I should post more lists....

And we shall! let us, indeed, turn directly to the task at hand, and put up some music. Just loaded the new White Stripes into iTunes - interesting stuff! Let's see what comes out of the digital jukebox, shall we?

1. The Allman Brothers - In Memory of Elizabeth Reed (live) *** - an auspicious start, though I am merely a casual Allman Brothers fan
2. Ghost - Soma - I never noticed this before, but iTunes lists Ghost's genre as "reggae" - now that is strange.
3. SunnO))) - Bathory Erzsebet - happy ditty about the serial killing countess
4. Merle Haggard - I Think I'll Just Stay here and Drink - always nice for Merle Haggard to come up on the iPod
5. Radiohead - Just ***
6. Bing Crosby - I'll Be Home for Christmas - 6 months early, but der Bingle is always welcome
7. Theoretical Girls - Contrary Motion - Glenn Branca and company
8. Modest Mouse - Breakthrough - fairly early, though sounding more like their more recent records than some of their early stuff
9. Minutemen - Beacon Sighted Through Fog - from What Makes a Man Start Fires, one of the great records of the 80; at 1:43, their epic, to that date...
10. Leo Kottke - Learning the Game - a nice ending...

Video - can't find the song up above, but plenty of Merle on YouTube - here's the "Legend of Bonnie and Clyde":



And because I can't resist: Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash, doing "Sing Me Back Home":

Blogging and Thinking

The Thinking Blogger Award meme has been going round the blogs I read like the flu around a daycare center. I am pleased and flattered to have been coughed on by my old pal Moviezzz. (I am probably even more pleased to see another of his nominations - another of our old pals, Evan Waters - interviewed in this week's Friday Screen Test at DVD Panache. Very cool.) It's been fun watching the praise flow around the film corner of the blogosphere, because by god there are a lot of blogs that have earned it - and this is another way to find another dozen blogs I ought to be reading every day.

So then: Three rules has the thinking blogger award meme:

1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think,
2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme,
3. Optional: Proudly display the 'Thinking Blogger Award' with a link to the post that you wrote.

Three rules, and five blogs that make you think. Lots of blogs make me think - narrowing down, even trying to avoid blogs already named (in this meme outbreak), ain't easy. These are all blogs I find informative and inspirational (that's foreshadowing, by the way), that (with one rather huge exception) I don't see linked to nearly as much as I think they deserve.

1. Roslindale Monogatari - Michael Kerpan has been a regular (perhaps the leading) poster on the Ozu yahoo group since I started reading it, and now he has a blog. He posts weekly roundups of films seen, mostly Asian, especially classic Japanese films - with summaries and screen shots, lots and lots of screen shots. His blog is a constant reminder of the depth - the unexplored depths, even to as much of a Japanophile as myself - of Japanese cinema, and he is (at the blog and elsewhere) a great source of information about those films.

2. Strange Culture - RC left a couple comments here a month or so back and I started reading his blog and it has quickly become a favorite. He writes about films, religion, culture, their intersections - posts like his recent pair on information and inspiration are pretty darned near the definition of "blogs that make you think." Good stuff.

3. Quiet Bubble - Walter at Quiet Bubble is another polymath -writing about film, comics, literature, music, roadside attractions, sometimes all at once - always elegantly and engagingly. I don't have much more to say - click the links, and it should be obvious what I mean.

4. Talk to me Harry Winston - Tram writes about movies, plus politics, culture, art, etc., all with wit and insight. And her blog is where I found the links to Todd Haynes' Superstar! (Still available, by the way.) Another fine site.

5. And finally, engaging in a bit of unabashed hero worship - even though he's probably been named as a "thinking blogger" about 50 times already.... The inventor of the blog-a-thon, and, as far as I'm concerned, the center of the film blogging universe (the best comment section there is) - Girish Shambu.

And that's it - thanks again to Moviezzz for pointing to me, and it makes me happy to be able to recognize some of the other blogs I have enjoyed and learned from. Thanks to all!

Monday Roundup

Let's try this again - that last outpouring of musical opinion rather overwhelmed the rest of this post: but some of it I want to get said...

Mainly - I wanted to commemorate the passing of three giant figures of arts and culture: Richard Rorty, Ousmane Sembene and Rudolf Arnheim.

It was rather startling to learn that Arnheim was still alive - I know of him mostly as one of the very early generation of film theorists: that was a long time ago. He was 102 years old, that helps. Anyway, I have read about him, but not read him, but the Bordwell tribute linked to above makes me very interested in doing so.

I have read Rorty - Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, even - I don't know how much I understood, but I was impressed. I mean, by the time I finished I'd probably learned enough to understand it if I reread it. It was inspiring - I have no doubt I will return to his work in the future - I am partial to many of his ideas. Argument as re-description; the value of constantly expanding what we know; the dangers of final vocabularies. AS far as I grasp it, it makes sense to me.

And Sembene - I've only seen three of his films, though I have seen Ceddo several times, and I heard him speak. He made superb use of his resources - his films seem simple, even crude - but he makes optimum use of what he has. Ritual, symbolism, allegory, political themes, words and images - he uses what he can control like a master.

And - beyond that? I'll point, without (much) comment for the moment: Moviezzz comments on EW's 25 best action films - a discussion with overtones of the philosophy of vagueness - when does a film with violence turn into an "action movie"? ZZZ's also got footage from the new PT Anderson film.

And oh - another Blogathon! July 15-21, at the Projection Booth: "Movies I've Borrowed for an Unreasonably Long Time" Blog-a-Thon. The way my viewing habits run hot and cold - very hot: right now I am in the midst of watching Deadwood start to finish (that Journey post previous I wrote hearing it read in the voice of E. B. Farnum), A Deadwood disk a day, more or less... at other times... I do have one film I've had for three months. Child's play. Somewhere in the house I have a Chaplin disk I lost back in 2001. Anyway - another blogathon to look forward to.

And speaking of which - later this week, Film Music blogathon at Windmills of my Mind.

Who reminds us, by the way, that today is Roger Ebert's birthday - the great man is back in action, here reviewing La Vie En Rose, a pretty fine use of film music itself. And that - or rather, this - Piaf doing what she did - is where I shall leave you. Bon soir!

A Musical Rant

I have been working up a kind of round up post, which may or may not appear, when all is said and done. This started life as an item on that post, but has started to grow beyond the bonds of decency, and needs its own post...

Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon wonders if Journey is due for a revival - thanks to the Sopranos, and - she implies - because hipsters have jumped the shark. Well - I don't want to get into what the hipsters think: trying to parse out those questions will cause the brain to shrink and pull away from the cave of the skull. But I have too many opinions on music not to take a few shots at Journey, and maybe poke around the question, Which Bands Should Be Revived?. I don't know from hipsters, but I do know that my neighbors - most assuredly not hipsters, judging from their musical tastes - love their Journey. I could hear one of them yesterday declaring (outside over beer and burgers) that "Don't Stop Believing" was the best Journey song ever. God knows they've played the goddamned thing enough. Now the question strikes me as being a bit like arguing about the best item on the Taco Bell menu. But it is also wrong on the merits. Nice enough schlock-rock it may be (and perhaps ideally suited for its pride of place at the end of the Sopranos' run), but it hardly matches up to "Wheel in the Sky" or "Lights" - both halfway decent pop songs, with a decidedly less schlocky sound.

But as a general thing: christ I pray Journey doesn't make more of a comeback than they have already. I would suggest they have never gone away as fodder for the average schmoe - but god forbid this sort of thing spreads and people (who aren't just looking to get drunk and bleat out lyrics they can remember from junior high) start trying to claim they're underrated. I will be calm. I will philosophize: it strikes me there are three types of bands that get revived or re-evaluated.

1) Bands that were unfairly neglected or denigrated in the first place - that on rediscovery, recontextualization, what have you, are seen for what they were - damned good. Some names that come to mind - The Bee Gees; Queen; George Michael - all have suffered periods of abuse; all are superb.

2) Bands that were neglected or denigrated for relatively legitimate reasons - but should be appreciated for other, no less important reasons. The first name to come to mind is The Carpenters: they had great songs; Karen had one hell of a voice. But their sound, production, etc. was hideous (most of the time) - the worst faults of 70s soft-rock. This category contains a number of bands that started well but turned to shit - Chicago comes to mind, or Heart. Or acts who come in and out of focus - Neil Diamond, I'd say.

3) Bands that can be appreciated at a very simple level - or ironically - but should not be taken as more than that. And I will happily put Journey in this category. And a great many others of all kinds.

Meanwhile: there are two other types of bands that sometimes get revived. First - bands that have no excuse needing to be revived. Bands, that is, that anyone with half a clue should like as soon as they hear them. Think Johnny Cash - who may have had a stretch out of the public eye, but anyone hearing Folsom Prison Blues or San Quentin should have immediately wigged to his true value. Marcotte lists Motorhead, Led Zeppelin, Fleetwood Mac as being revived (along with Cash) - again - amongst the hipsters? maybe. But that condemns the hipsters, in most instances. (Though with the Zep, and Sabbath, and bands of that ilk - they did require rescuing from themselves: it was easy, in the 70s, to lose the sounds of those bands in the blur of their godawful behavior and clothes, and the general atmosphere of bloat and self-indulgence. I did: it took a belated exposure to punk (and rap) to make me hear them again.)... The second type - bands that nothing can save. I dread with a terrible dread the days coming, 5-10 years from now, when the 90s get revived: when hipsters drag Creed and Limp Bizkit from their moldering graves and declare them cool, after all. I get some inkling of this baneful day in the attempts to prop up the ghastly remains of Def Leppard and many of their fellow 80s hair metals bands. Ugh. And I am so very very glad that I have never come across any signs of an Air Supply revival. The thought appalls....

But going back: the categories are a bit fuzzy. Most of these bands fall into disfavor in the first place because of shifting fashions: so why would the fashions that drop the Bee Gees into disrepute be different from the fashions that bring the Carpenters low? or turned Heart from a fine, if unspectacular, band into schlock? Well - I'd say, because quite frankly - the Bee Gees were still writing great songs as a disco band - and disco itself, seen for what it is, isn't half bad. The Carpenters had great songs - but the sound - there was no excuse for sounding like that. Elton John did soft rock and he never sounded like that. Not mush. And Heart? well - that's a different problem - they not only fell into the putrid pit of 80s production styles, they stopped writing decent songs. Ditto Chicago. Ditto Journey, though they didn't have as far to fall, and, in their defense, didn't fall as far. But 80s pop-rock galls me anyway - bands like Bon Jovi, who did write fine songs in their day, sounded like crap.

And so - I have to stop. I fear, behind all of this, is a pet peeve. The idea that Journey might be making a comeback annoys the bejesus out of me. For one reason - because if you have to bring back middle of the road, mediocre, 70s arena rock mewlers turned 80s superstar overproduced mewlers, at least can't you bring back a band that could write songs? If anyone's gonna get a revival, why can't it be Reo Speedwagon? They did write good songs: even in the 80s, at least on Hi Infidelity - terrible production, but still some very nice material, that holds up - unironically (and ironically, I can't deny it) - better than anything Journey did.

Musical Interlude

And again, a weekend, and time for some music. Fire up iTunes and see what comes out...

1. The Velvet Underground - Some Kinda Love **** - as a song, as good as it gets - as a performance (this is straight off Velvet Underground), also superb, but there are various live versions that are better: since stars are for sorting... I feel like I need to explain why I would list a song like this at less than the highest possible level
2. Warlocks - Bleed With Out You Babe - Lou's legacy lives on
3. Marvin Gaye - Ain't that Peculiar
4. Beastie Boys - High Plains Drifter ***
5. Kevin Drumm - Samson's Cold Minotaurs -
6. Pere Ubu - Humor Me **** - see remarks re Some Kinda Love...
7. Sonic Youth - Unmade Bed
8. Richard Thompson - I'll Never Give Up - from his new record; I suspect a political meaning, though I have not parsed the lyrics yet.
9. Pere Ubu - Life of Riley (Live, from Apocalypse Now) ****
10. Edith Piaf - Polichinelle

Video: none of the songs above, but here are a couple of the acts, performing on David Sanborn's Nightmusic show. Richard Thompson, trading leads with Hiram Bullock:



and Cloudland era Pere Ubu:

Brigitte Lin's Eyes

The happy day is here at last: the Action Heroine Blog-a-thon, at Film Experience. Here on this humble blog, let us pay tribute to the possessor of the best stare on the planet: Ms. Brigitte Lin.



Brigitte Lin is a classic movie star. She has the kind of screen presence women had in the 30s - she's more Barbara Stanwyck or Marlene Dietrich than anyone in this day and age. She's almost a silent film star - doing almost everything with her eyes, the tilt of her head, a gesture. It's a quality filmmakers have recognized and used: it's hard to think of any recent star who has provided more iconic images that Lin: in Peking Opera Blues, in The Bride with White Hair, in Chungking Express and Ashes of Time - and especially, in the second and third installation of the Swordsman series, where she plays one of the screen's great monsters, Asia the Invincible.

Asia the Invincible starts life as the brother of one Wu, head of a highlander group called the Sun Moon Sect. The first Swordsman film is about the machinations of a host of heroes looking for the Sacred Scroll, which offers unlimited powers to whoever uses it. At the end of this, Jacky Cheung, playing (in grand style) a completely faithless sniveling courtier, seems to get away with the scroll - whether he is supposed to be Asia or not, it's Asia who has the scroll and who reads it and follows its formula for unlimited power. This requires a certain sacrifice - though since the sacrifice turns him into Brigitte Lin, it has its mitigations.

The third film of the series, The East is Red, is (almost) all Asia's, and all Lin's. But the second film, Swordsman II, gives us Asia in transition - and that gives Lin a chance to use all her skills. Swordsman II is still, really, about the swordsman - played here by Jet Li - trying to retire from martial arts but constantly dragged back in by the complications of the troubled world. Asia is the ultimate villain in the story. But one of the complications Ling (the swordsman) faces is a strange, beautiful, silent woman who shares his taste for wine - none other than Asia the Invincible, mid-transformation, her voice still a man's, her face and body, Brigitte Lin.

Silence is no impediment for Brigitte Lin. She has the presence of a silent film star - she has the eyes of a silent film star. She controls the screen with her eyes, her gestures, the way she stands. The premise of Swordsman II, Asia mid-transformation, moving back and forth between appearing as a man and a woman, with her voice separate from her body, lets her play across her range. Dressed as a man, she bullies her underlings and enemies, caresses her concubines and her weapons, all the while smirking at what she knows and they don't....



Dressed as a woman, she flirts with Jet Li, let's him seduce her and protect her, but never without maintaining complete control.



It's all in the eyes: if the crux of feminist theory (grossly simplified) is that women are made the object of the male gaze, then Lin - like Barbara Stanwyck and her peers - resists that misogyny in the most obvious way: she never relinquishes her gaze. There is no doubt about the power of Brigitte Lin's eyes - filmmakers know, and the good ones exploit it - even when they hide her eyes, they know, there is no escape - she is never just an object to be looked at, she is always the one doing the looking.



And she is in control, of herself, if nothing else. She conveys, in Swordsman II (and indeed, in most of her greatest films), a strong sense of her awareness - she conveys curiosity, her sense of the strangeness of her situation. A man becoming a woman, and a person gaining unlimited power, at the same time - she toys with herself, what her body is doing these days, what her will can do, how people react to her, she tests herself and others, and takes palpable delight in it all. Awareness, consciousness, thought, in films, is often shown as a function of a character looking - Lin looks at the world, at other people in it, and she judges them, with those eyes.

And - I haven't forgotten that this is an action heroine blogathon - and we can't forget that Asia the Invincible is, after all, a supervillain. If you go against her, she will kill you with a flick of the wrist (and that glare):



There's a lot more of that in the next film - Asia wreaking havoc. Here, she only rarely has to muster much of the power of the Sacred Scroll - more often, she just keeps doing her needlework -



- until Jet Li starts trying - then, well, she becomes wrathy....



...I suppose the rest would be a spoiler - even knowing there's another Asia the Invincible film doesn't really tell you how this one ends. But I'll risk it far enough to say that the the ending of this film, and much of the premise of the next, depends on the kind of ambivalence and curiosity (for lack of a better word) Lin gives the character. She becomes a judge of sorts - testing the world, usually, though not always, finding it lacking. (That's quite explicit in The East is Red.) When you are, in fact, invincible, you can sometimes afford to let the good guys off the hook - you can even look away for a moment (maybe the only moment of the film she isn't staring something down).... Asia is a great character: Lin, a great actress, who makes the most of it.

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.