Robert Altman Remembered

Now that I'm back home, with my regular computer and all my notes, I have to write something more sustantial about Robert Altman. I'm not sure what I should say. His death does not have the emotional punch that the death of Johnny Cash or Charles Schulz had (2 artists who were, like Altman, icons, who I bloody well worshipped - all my life, really, especially Schulz), but culturally, it is similar. He was not my favorite director, or the one who most defined what I thought films should be (those would be Capra and Ozu, with Godard near at hand) - but he was possibly the most important filmmaker in my life. I said a great deal in my "Altman and Me" post during last year's blogathon - it is hard to overstate how important Robert Altman's films were in forming my interest in film. It's hard to talk or think about Altman without talking and thinking about myself - he was an absolutely crucial part of my intellectual autobiography. Like reading Nietzsche, or The Confidence Man, or listening to the Velvet Underground, or Louis Armstrong - his films were a catalyst, they changed how I thought about films.

His impact on me was certainly more intellectual than emotional. That is partly a function of Altman's films, I think - they can be profoundly moving, but they are also, usually, distancing - you don’t quite emotionally enter them, the way you can with Capra or Ozu, for instance. This makes him like Godard - he makes sure you keep a distance. I think he did that quite deliberately - the way his style keeps you outside the story, keeps you from sharing the experience of the main characters. All those overlapping voices and sounds, the way the films look, the long lenses and incessant zooms - you start outside the space and don't exactly enter it as you are brought closer to it. The spaces in his films - the mirrors and windows and doors and stairways, always keeping you away from the story, the characters, etc. It is always a cold place. You watch emotions, you don’t identify with them.

It always drove me crazy when people talked about him as if all he did was let a bunch of good actors act, and let the shooting take care of itself. That is so wrong! His style, especially in those great 70s films, is as recognizable and controlled as anything in Scorsese and Kubrick - the telephoto lenses, the zooms, the mirrors and doors and windows, the overlapping dialogue and sound design, the cluttered sets, the staging, deemphasizing individuals (except when it counted). Not to mention symbolism (take the circles and spires of McCabe and Mrs. Miller, or the role of water and fire, wind, earth, or the blue and red light, their various associations with men and women - which recur: what about the pools, fishtanks, desert in Three Women?); or structural tricks, symmetries (scenes, or whole films, like Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean Jimmy Dean, with its sets of 5s and 10s, its mirrored mirrors, etc.), self-quotations.... Sometimes the style verges on self-parody: you notice it in his bad films, Quintet or Pret A Porter or what have you - when the story fails, the style can be overwhelming.

Though even at his worst, what gets put on the screen is gorgeous: even Quintet, as bad a film as anyone is likely to find, is stunning looking.

And so... Let us say goodbye. And note the possibility - not out of the question - that Prairie Home Companion might win an Oscar. I suppose it would be a nasty irony - but it would still be a nice touch. And frankly, there are not likely to be any other films in contention that deserve it more. It may not be his best, or even in the top 15 or so, but it's a pretty damned good film, and god knows Oscars aren't about picking the best films. So why not? He's the best American filmmaker this side of Frank Capra and Howard Hawks, so he ought to have an award or two, even if only posthumously.

Robert Altman

Robert Altman has died. I saw the news on TV - an odd experience, for a geek like me, seeing news like that on TV, hearing some newsreader running through his career, his films. Strange. I am, as might be apparent, a fan. And though there might be a director or two, still alive, whose work I like more (given that one - Shohei Imamura - died earlier this year, Jean Luc Godard better be careful), I don't think any of them were as important to me. (Check that "fan" link.) It is a sad day. I have a post in the pipeline that touches on Altman - it will be hard, around the holidays, to get to the net to write more, but I will try. He was one of my heroes - like Johnny Cash and Charles Schulz, his death is oging to hit me hard...

New Movies, Quickly

Movie reviews. A habit I have to get back into. You know, every week. New, at least. And so -

Fast Food Nation: kind of a miracle I saw it, actually. The newspaper (or the paper's web site) listed the time as 12 noon - the sign outside the theater, however, said 11:40 - and the ticket said 11:45. As it turned out, the lights went down at 11:45, 15 minutes of previews followed (all of them but Reno 911 mercifully blanked from my mind), then the movie. Good thing I turned up early, I was thinking at the time, though the truth is, there were only a dozen people, if that, int he theater, so heck....

Where was I? Richard Linklater's second film of the year - a fictionalization of a muckraking book about the evils of fast food. Structured like Traffic or Babel - following three or four narrative threads (a group of illegal immigrants, a smart girl working at Mickey's (a fast food joint modelled on you know who, though not you know who), and an executive at Mickey's investigating their bad meat. These are more logically related than the stories in Babel, since they are all set around a meat packing plant in Colorado (thus more like Traffic); and Linklater has a looser, less insistent style than Inarittu or Soderburgh, sliding between stories without the attempts to link them with sounds and images and angles the way Inarittu does. Unfortunately, like Babel (and Traffic, I guess), the stories are just sketches - there are nice moments in each of them, but they all come off thin. It's too bad I guess - the performances are worthwhile - Kinnear is his usual likable everyman/audience surrogate, but doesn't really get to follow through, there are some neat cameos, and the kids playing the Mexicans and American fast food workers are pretty good... But the stories are predictable and not that interesting anyway, so... what can you do. This brings us to another thing it has in common with Babel - whatever faults I can find with it, it feels like an absolutely necessary film to see, because of the director. I find, at this point, that Richard Linklater is someone I want to pay attention to - somewhere along the line, I might take some time to think about some of the things he does as a filmmaker: it's interesting because his style is not really obvious, the main link between his films seems to be his sensibility and storytelling... but there are some things... I found myself noticing spaces in this film - the way he shot things to always kind of let your eye leave the scene. There are "openings" in what he shoots - doors and windows and blank spaces and holes that open the space. It looks casual, almost accidental, but I don't know if it is. It's not something I notice in every film I see. So - that might be worth thinking about somewhere down the line.

For Your Consideration: Christopher Guest and company take on Hollywood. Catherine O'Hara, Harry Shearer and Parker Posey are the leads, perhaps - they are at least the characters imagining themselves up for Oscar consideration. The usual gang supports them - Fred Willard, Jane Lynch, Jennifer Coolidge, Ed Begley Jr., Guest and Michael McLean, Larry Miller, Bob Balaban, Michael Hitchcock, Don Lake - and more! with Ricky Gervais turning up in a few scenes, and plenty more... It's a straight movie this time - there's no pretense at making a documentary - though things like the EPK and a bunch of TV shows give plenty of opportunity for the kind of interview format Guest loves... Okay. It's funny, it's nice - but it's probably the least of Guest's films - it's amusing, but not as funny as the first two, and less poignant than A Mighty Wind (the Mitch and Mickey parts, anyway). Still good, just not up to his rather high standards.

Friday Music Stuff

Another simple one, 10 random....

1. Blondie - Heart of Glass (***)
2. Pearl Jam - Oceans (almost forgot I had this record on here...)
3. Elvis Costello - Chemistry Class
4. Cibe Matto - La Pain Perdu
5. X-Ray Specs - I Can't Do Anything
6. Elvis Costello - Little Triggers
7. The Decembrists - Summersong
8. Built to Spill - Stop the Show (***)
9. Eels - Novocaine for the Soul (****)
10. Rolling Stones - Let's Spend the Night together

A nice collection, if nothing quite essential....

And video? Best song of the week?The Eels, live - tres cool!

Two Films

There's hope, suddenly - assuming I get this post up here in a reasonable amount of time. (I don't know if watching the Celtics is helping or hurting. What a depressing spectacle. Again, they're teasing - showing signs - like a nice little run, a couple shots by Wally, a couple nice defensive stands - but wait a few minutes....) Movies! back to movies!

Stranger than Fiction: Will Farrell, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Emma Thompson and Dustin Hoffman in a likable metafiction that fails for various reasons - Gyllenhaal's character is a blank and hardly worth caring about; Thompson, on the other hand, is spectacular, but given nothing important to do; Queen Latifah is in the cast but does she play a character? I don't know.... the story itself is awkward and half done - it plays like a short story idea, stretched out with a bunch of fake Charlie Kaufman stuff to look like it matters. It's too bad - Thompson is so good, and Farrell is very good at this sort of thing - everything he does is so understated and guileless, and he plays everything so close to straight, even in his wilder roles. His "straight" performances never feel strained like Jim Carrey or Robin Williams do when they essay drama. A lot of opportunity is wasted, but it is wasted.

Scream of the Ants: so new (or obscure) it doesn't even have an IMDB entry! New film by Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and a very strange one. Two Iranians (man and woman) travelling in India, looking for a guru, the Complete Man, or, The Perfect Man. Along the way they find a chatty journalist; a cripple who is forced to act as a holy man, stopping trains; they talk about sex, and the man goes to a prostitute leaving the woman alone; they have an encounter in a taxi cab, then finally find the perfect man - who proves to be a Buddhist, basically - they are god, god exists when you believe in him - and you can travel the world and find god in a drop of dew; he's not enough so they then go on, and meet an old woman who wants to die in Banares and a German who has become an ascetic. They go to the Ganges - there is more footage - then the woman bathes (with a host of naked men), and the man attends a class - don't listen, smell.... then it ends.

Strange as it is, it's pretty consistent with Makhmalbaf's work. He's always had a surrealist streak, combined with his neo-realist streak, a combination fairly common in Iranian cinema (going back, say, to The Cow.) Here, it's as if Makhmalbaf has split himself in half, and stages a dialogue between his political, skeptical, secular side (the man), and his mystical, religious, humanist side (the woman). For all that, all the philosophical and political seriousness, it's surprisingly funny, contains moments of breathtaking grace (like the opening sequence - a couple kids tracing a shadow with rocks), as well as a good deal of political edge, and a certain amount of mystical nonsense - which is, in keeping with the dialectic structure of the film, treated like both mystical nonsense and a beautiful lie... And - full frontal male nudity, and almost full frontal female nudity - from the first shot, a woman's hair, it violates Iranian standards - and keeps escalating, eventually showing both a prostitute and the lead actress nude, and later, several Indian women. Given Iranian laws - very transgressive. That and its ecumenical approach to religion - which is both respectful and mocking - make it very radical for an Iranian film.

(Celtics, by the way, made it close, but gave it away in the last couple minutes. I could have written that an hour ago with complete confidence.)

Music on a Friday

Had a bit of a scare this morning - opened up iTunes, got an error message - and discovered that all my music files, between Deerhoof and George Harrison, had disappeared. Terrifying! But sa short lived terror - for I remembered the first rule of computer support: When in doubt, Restart!

Back to normal! so here we go (if rated, I'm including that)...

1. Cream - Deserted Cities of the Heart
2. Stereolab - Metronomic Underground (***)
3. James Blood Ulmer - Nothing to Say
4. Jimi Hendrix - Third Stone from the Sun (***)
5. Rocket from the Tombs - Life Stinks (***)
6. Rolling Stones - Connection
7. Outkast - N2U
8. Culture Club - I'll Tumble 4 Ya [good lord - should I admit it? but it is a pretty great song, really]
9. Rage Against the Machine - Settle for Nothing
10. Don Byron - Frailach Jamboree [from his Mickey Katz record]

And today's video treat is a bonus, song 11 - the iPod version was from the long version of Live at Leeds, but this is pretty close:



And a bonus bonus, the original music, synched to the film:

Speaking of the Future...

Meanwhile, totally unrelated to that last post, and yesterday's rather wonderful election results - looks like some kind of blogger upgrade in the works. I do not pay much attention to the technical features of this blog - I take what blogger gives me, dress it up with an occasional cat



or cowboy



and go from there. Still - google has upgraded things, so we shall see what thet brings us. A brave new world of something!

A Brighter Future

Two years ago, I was down. Today, however, things are better off. We have had two years of continued Republican incompetence and villainy - I could not guess, back then, whether villainy or incompetence would rule the day - in the event, it looks like both struggled for supremacy for 2 years. Now, with congress back in the hands of the democrats, we see the administration starting to toss the sluggards overboard: Rumsfeld is on the pavement. More are likely to follow, as some take the opportunity to get while the gitting's good, and Bush/Rove/Cheney scramble to keep up a steady stream of sacrifices to keep themselves out of the dock. It will be something to watch them turn on one another.

This Week's Art Films

Jagshemash!

I need to get something up here - weeks have passed, months, and nothing! no movie comments - nothing! alas! This despite a pretty nice run of films lately, especially in the rep houses - Kieslowski, John Huston, Cocteau, Dreyer, Mizoguchi all turning up... One of these days I have to say something about those films - but for now, let's turn to the weekend just passed, which featured 2 very much anticipated releases. I bring you - Borat and Babel!

Borat: Cultural Learnings to Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Khazakhstan - the title is, in fact, almost longer than the film. This has been much hyped, especially on the web, and there was, I suppose, a good deal of potential for disappointment. High concept acts like Borat don't always translate well to longer forms - it's hard to sustain the act, it's harder to put it together into anything coherent. And I suppose this is somewhat true of the film - the plotline is old hat (Borat comes to America to make a documentary, sees Pamela Anderson on TV and heads off to California to make her his wife), and just an excuse to string together a bunch of typical Borat sequences.... still, it works. This is partly because the scenes with the plot are almost as funny as the other bits (the plot gives us Borat and his producer Azamat driving across the country in an ice cream truck with a watch bear, wrestling nude in a hotel room, then chasing each other through the hallways and elevators and into a conference, and a wonderful sick sight gag at the end) - the whole thing keeps moving and stays funny, damned funny.

Borat's act is certainly a provocative one - he's a caricature of old world/third world grotesquery, with his misogyny and racism and virulent (and ridiculous) anti-semitism - he takes this persona into situations and sees what he can provoke. A lot of it is set up as a TV crew shooting a documentary - sitting down to interview someone, taking a camera crew into a bar or store or TV station, maybe a dinner party or a revival meeting. Borat starts by acting ingratiating, then starts making offensive comments, pulling bizarre stunts - drawing reactions from people. Sometimes getting them to go along with his offensiveness, as in the famous "Throw the Jew Down the Well" song - sometimes pissing them off, like the equally famous rodeo stunt. A lot of what he gets out of people comes from their desire not to offend him: watch this segment (reworked for the film - reshot, I think), of Borat with an etiquette coach, and at a dinner - everyone tries to remain nice, as he behaves like a spoiled child... It's tempting to freight it with significance, to think he's revealing something about the fundamental depravity of the people in these segments, but I don't think that is quite right. Especially since the bits are put together after the fact - the editing can hide the extent to which the audience is on the joke, exaggerate the reactions he wants to emphasize and so on. It's tempting, too, to wonder what's "real" and what's fiction - but the point is that what we see is all fiction. Baron Cohen is staging everything - the character, the cameras, the situations he creates are all fictional before they start. His act is more about the role of the media, of media as a function in everyday life - the presence of cameras, our learned expectations about how to act on TV, about media as a cultural force - than about the underlying prejudices of people. And his act doesn't so much use reality to make fiction as point out how reality itself is fiction - normal, everyday life is a kind of collaborative improvisation, shot through with political and cultural ideas and images, a culture than speaks us. Stephanie Zacharek's excellent review in Salon notes, for example, the way Borat's character, his morality, comes straight out of folklore, with its shape-changing Jews and Gypsy tears. Borat's point, I think, is that all behavior, all morality, is rooted in things beyond us - in culture, in stories, images, ways of thinking. He turns TV into a kind of folklore... (I also think that Zacharek's comment helps explain why Borat is so appealing, despite his bad behavior (and Baron Cohen's bad behavior as well - jerking people around like that, sometimes with real consqeuences, isn't exactly admirable) - he's a figure out of a folk tale, a trickster, and tricksters are always the good guys, no matter how bad they act.)

Babel - if I were feeling perverse, I would note how much Borat has in common with films by, say, Abbas Kiarostami, or Mohsen Makhmalbaf - the mix of reality and fiction, documentary, improv, and scripted bits... I say that to segue into a more conventional art film, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarittu and Guillerma Arriega's latest, Babel. Which comes from a different strand of art film - actually comes pretty much uncut from Kieslowski. Babel, like their previous films, comes off a bit like 3 or 4 of the Dekalog films crammed into one film - 4 interconnected stories, told in something less than exact sequence, edited to echo one another... parents and children, lovers and strangers, those who rise to the moral challenges put to them and those who don't. It all works because Inarittu is one of the most inventive and skillful of directors - but it still feels contrived and hysterical and a bit pointless. There is no discernable reason why the stories are told out of order, except as an exercise. The situations are distressingly close to cliches. The politics is obvious and lazy - white Americans act like bastards, unless they are movie stars, and then only when one of them gets shot. Everybody else is just trying the best they can.... And there's way too much Brad Pitt and nowhere near enough Koji Yakusho.

Music Again

Another simple list here. Stars and comments, when the spirit moves. Random Friday post:

1. Johnny Cash - Folsom Prison Blues [One of the All Time Greats. On whatever short list I would be inclined to make, my friends.] *****
2. Bikini Kill - Tell me So [they can be sometimes a mixed bag, but this one really kicks]
3. Artist - Track 01... or, put another way: Cline/Shoup/Corsano - Lake of Fire Memoires [don't know where I downloaded this, but hey - not bad. Nice early morning eye opener, and today I needed one. Lots of squawking...]
4. Johnette Napolitano and Marc Moreland - Hurting Each Other [Carpenters tribute record, a nice cover in the usual style - feedback drone and someone singing it fairly straight]
5. The Kinks - Apeman ****
6. Carter Family - Where We'll Never Grow Old
7. The Clash - Spanish Bombs
8. Acid Mother's Temple - Hello Good Child
9. Isley Brothers - Footsteps in the Dark
10. Pere Ubu - Montana

I guess there's no real question what video to put up: Cash, from 59...

...the red haze of blood blood blood...

Happy Hallooween! I suppose I've got the wrong holiday - I think the record is really about Walpurgisnacht - but hey: who can resist witches on Halloween? Liars, baby - broken witch live:

Horror Films, Best of

Joseph B. has a horror film meme started: probably not the only one. List of the best 15.

This is harder than it seems. Listing the best films in a genre raises the difficulty - do I rank them as films (that happen to all be horror films), or do I rank them for how good they are at being horror films? If I do the latter - don't I have to define the genre? What makes a horror film? Any kind of break down - "scariest", "most disturbing", "the films that scarred me for life" (using Joseph's criteria) - is basically a variation on the same problem. How shall I answer this difficulty? damned if I know. Probably in the most roundabout and inconsistent way I can.

1. Nosferatu - well this, at least, is easy, for this is the best of the bunch by any criteria. It's a great film, period - beautiful and perfectly put together; it'll give you shivers; and it's definitively a "horror film". It seems to me - the horror genre depends on the notion of the monster. (There's more to it - the sense of fear, say - but I'll try to work that in...) It depends on monster that play fairly specific roles. The monster in a horror film is either our Other - a thing we fear from outside ourselves; or our Double - something we fear about ourselves. Or - more commonly - they are both. The monster is a projection of our fears - it is a foreign thing that invades us, but is, in fact, a projection of ourselves. It is, very often, a projection of our fears and desires blended into one being. And the emotional effect of horror is, partly, the recognition of this - horror films evoke the Other, then show that it is in fact our Double - that the fear we seek to control is part of us.... In the movies, Dracula and Frankenstein are the definitive monsters. Dracula the seducer, our sexuality made into murder; Frankenstein's monster, perhaps, our fear of death, of helplessness, abandonment, of all the desires we can't rationalize. As the genre develops, they also evolve into a distinct approaches to language - Dracula is the articulate seducer, the talker, the whispering voice, beautiful (at least for the moment), self-aware, knowing what he wants and how to get it. Frankenstein is the silent, inarticulate threat, deformed and horrible, exuding raw anger and fear, cut off from love, from community, from humanity. Nosferatu dates from before this split became commonplace - Murnau's vampire is horrible, though still seductive - he is a force of power and desire, but he is unable to speak, to express his desire in anything but murder. This makes him more like the later Frankenstein model - and more like Mary Shelley's version of the monster, a character who covers the full range of possibilities, from silent, inarticulate, helpless, to an educated, sophisticated talker.

2. Ugetsu - this is more like a romance than a horror film. The woman is less monster than a temptress, in either case, not implicated in Genjuro's psyche quite the same. So despite being a ghost story, I'm not sure I'd call it a horror film. So it can't be number 2.

2. Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein - I will treat them as one, because magnificent as either one is, they are even better together. The better question is, why should they be second to anything? They aren't, as horror films - as films? They're still magnificent, but Nosferatu is - more than that, even.... They are the perfect horror films, especially taken together, and from a structural point of view. The monster in these films is set up to function both as a horrible thing for the audience to fear and loathe - and quite explicitly as an object of pity, to be identified with. The play between the monster as Other and monster as our Double is very clear in these films. Add to that the way they work together as a bildungsroman - the story of a boy becoming a man - matching the anxieties expressed through the monster with the experience of growing up. It's truly great stuff.

3. Dracula - and here's the other side. It's an odd film - lots of it is very stagy and awkwardly put toegther - but it looks absolutely gorgeous, cheap sets and all (thanks to Karl Freund, mostly), and Lugosi is spectacular.

4. Dead of Night - As a film, the structure, the slow steady buildup of fear, to the magnificent dummy sequence, and the general creepiness of the frame story, makes it a joy to watch. And I don't think I have to explain how ventriloquist and dummy stories fit my thoery of doubles and others.

5. Eraserhead - again, definitively - the monster baby, that is other and double, our child.... Children - the fear of parenting or the memory of the fears we felt as children - are also central to horror as a genre. (I won't be the first to suggest that the Frankenstein model revolves around children - fathers and sons, the monster, especially the inarticulate monster, as a child, etc.)

6. The Mummy - this is Karloff's chance to play the articulate monster. And he is more than equal to the task. He might even be better - he gets a lot more of the sadness of the character than Lugosi did (Shrek did to some extent, and Kinski nails it in Herzog's remake of Nosferatu.) The film overall, though, is marred by a really silly story and some flat direction and editing - though it looks beautiful, frame after frame - those Germans knew how to photograph things.

7. Don't Look Now - we revisit the role of children in horror - here, the loss of a child. The links between sex and death. The externalization of our fears.

8. Vampyr - another vampire film, this one animated by a very powerful dream logic, characters and objects and plots moving with a kind of symbolic association. Includes the quintessential expression of the fear of death - a character dreaming his own death, and POV shots from inside the coffin.

9. Nosferatu, Phantom of the Night - Herzog's remake of the Murnau film with Klaus Kinski as Orlock and Bruno Ganz as Jonathon Harker. Haunting and wonderful - those shots of the city, Isabelle Adjani moving through the empty streets.

10.Kingdom/Kingdom II - Lars van Trier taking on american television, ghost stories, soap opera, surrealism... with monstrous babies (who better to play a monster baby than Udo Kier?) and all the rest...

11. Bride of the Monster - wait: this isn't really a horror film. It's perhaps inexcusable to put an Ed Wood film in such an exalted position - I understand that, though the fact is, this film is this enjoyable. I suppose this is where the pure pleasure of watching a film overcomes a strictly dispassionate assessment of it - and yes, some of the pleasure is in the badness of it. On the other hand, you have Lugosi's performance - hunkering down for one last bit of acting. Martin Landau might have won the oscar, but he did it in part by imitating Lugosi, who is wonderful and damned near oscar worthy himselve - "home? I have no home".... But all that said - this really isn't a horror film. It's science fiction. So I have to pretend I didn't actually list it.

11. Evil Dead II - I suppose I could combine it with Evil Dead I like I did the others, but whatever. Modern horror films like this do tend to take away the sense of the monsters coming from inside us - well - this one does. Who cares? This is funny and thrilling and gory and perfect. Though all this talk about monsters - I don't know. There is nothing really horrifying about it. I am very tempted to rule it something else - a disguised adventure story (like Army of Darkness) - a Romance, in the old fashioned sense. I should, because that would let me put Reanimator on in its place. Reanimator has the same tone - the jokiness, the gore - but fits a lot better into the horror film scheme I have outlined. Sex and death - desires and fears - blended together, made explicit. It's a great film. And it's almost as funny as the Evil Dead ("who's laughing now?" vs. "more passion!") Parse this as you choose.

12. Night of the Living Dead - I'm not going to write a book on all these films. I've kind of made my point. This is less psychological than social though, which is an interesting twist that I plan mostly to ignore.

13. Suspiria - gorgeous film, creepy and cool...

14. Black Sabbath - beautiful movie, Bava's experience as a DP showing. Nicely covers the possibilities of Italian horror - an old fashioned ghost story, a giallo, and that magnificent Karloff vampire story.

15. Funny Games - Stunning post-modern horror film, the monsters infiltrating everyday life (the classic family—father, mother, son) and wreaking havoc. These monsters come from the TV. They also destroy everything. A very complicated film, really, though on the surface it is simply one of the most unsettling horror films I have seen in ages. This is one (and there aren't many) that gave me bad dreams - I dreamed it, a night or two after I saw it. Not to be recommended. In terms of sheer disturbing power, this might be the winner of the whole freaking poll.

Le Temps Perdu?

Via Crooked Timber comes a time waster pur les ages - French mini games (Jeux Chiants.) As noted in the post, this - "Double Jeu" - is particularly cruel and addictive. Kind of like pong on a see saw. With insults.

Random Friday Music Post

Hooray hooray! Today's hits are:

1. PJ Harvey - Rid of Me [for all those cool new bands who seem to basically keep reworking this song over and over - The Kills, Yeah Yeah Yeahs - why not stick to Polly Jean?] (****)
2. Come - Orbit [though I wonder how much connection there was between 90s women post-sorta-punkers and Thalia Zadek?]
3. Johnny Cash - the Man Who Couldn't Cry [Loudon Wainwright song given the definitive Cash treatment.] (wasn't rated, but that was an oversight: ****)
4. Madonna - Rescue Me [surprisingly catchy Madonna tune, that outstays its welcome]
5. Sleater Kinney - Hubcap [there's that moment in this one that kicks in the whole band, singling, playing, hard - build and release at its finest!] (***)
6. Feelies - Slipping into Something [there aren't enough stars. That bit after the second verse, when the drums do a double take and the song accelerates - gives me shivers. Live, with the first part already going double time, it was heaven. I was addicted to the Feelies in the 80s, saw them every time they came to town, basically... And then there's the way Jonathon Demme uses it, uses that same moment in the song, to signal the tone shift in the middle of Something Wild - a movie that, these days, I don't hear much about - but should, for it is a masterpiece, and not just for the Feelies footage.] (*****)
7. Fairport Convention - Come All Ye (***)
8. Lone Justice - Working Late
9. Strokes - Electricityscape
10. Spiritualized - Electricity (***)

And, video? I can't find Slipping (into Something), and I posted that late 70s Crazy Rhythms video ages ago - but it's clearly a Feelies week: let's see - how about:



(Jonathon Demme directed I believe). And here's a live clip of Deep Fascination, with Bill Million churning away and Mercer doing some Lou Reed-ish wanking at the end...



But that said - I have to finish where we started: Polly Jean?

Poll Results

Good lord! It's been a week since Andy Horbal's poll (best American fiction films of the last 25 years) ended - he's had the results posted for a week. I have been hopelessly remiss.

I shall rather arbitrarily quote the top vote getters: it's roughly a top 10....

8 Votes:

Goodfellas (1990, Martin Scorsese)

7 Votes:

Pulp Fiction (1994, Quentin Tarantino)

6 Votes:

Miller's Crossing (1990, Coen bros.)
Unforgiven (1992, Clint Eastwood)

5 Votes:

Blue Velvet (1986, David Lynch)
Dead Man (1995, Jim Jarmusch)
Fargo (1996, Coen bros.)
Groundhog Day (1993, Harold Ramis)
Mulholland Dr. (2001, David Lynch)

4 Votes:

Schindler's List (1993, Steven Spielberg)
Do The Right Thing (1989, Spike Lee)

My top ten (listed here, the first time) was:

1. Blue Velvet
2. Rushmore
3. Do the Right Thing
4. Brazil (is that considered American? maybe not.)
5. Full Metal Jacket
6. To Sleep With Anger
7. Mulholland Drive
8. This is Spinal Tap
9. Dead Man
10. Donnie Darko

Meanwhile, speaking of polls, and in keeping with the season, Joseph B. at it's a madmadblog is looking for horror movie lists: top 15, to be posted and discussed on or around all saint's eve.

Music on Friday

Let's try something different - the usual method, iPod, randomly shuffling, 10 songs - but this time, from the "New Adds" playlist. So - new stuff, plus whatever I finally got around to putting on the computer in the last month. What does that yield?

1. Bad Brains - The Big Takeover
2. Velvet Underground - Rock and Roll [from the Quine tapes, which I finally copied to iTunes]
3. Jeremy Enigk - Dare a Smile [from the new record]
4. Heroin - Head Cold [like the Bad Brains, it's been sitting around the shelves for a couple years, but seeing American Hardcore made me pull it down and put it on the computer]
5. Velvets - Sister Ray/Foggy Notion - 28:42 of it.
6. Outkast - Hollywood Divorce [Idlewild soundtrack, a nice piece of work]
7. George Harrison - What is Life [I've had this for years too, All Things Must Pass, but never bothered to put it on the computer. Or rather - I put a couple songs on the computer, and never even listened to the rest of it. That's a hell of a record.]
8. My Bloody Valentine - I can see It (but I can't feel it) [that first record, which has been around for some time....]
9. High Rise - Cotton Top [had the live record on the computer; decided to put High Rise II on as well; serve your guitar wanking needs]
10. A Hawk and a Hacksaw - There is a River in Galisteo [another new record]

And video? Can't beat the Bad Brains.

World Series

I hesitate to post this. I remain perfect in the post-season, getting every single series wrong - though I said coming in it was the most unpredictable post-season in ages. The only series I actually thought I could call was the Yankees over Tigers, and even that was based on the assumption that the reason the tigers had been losing for the last month was that their pitchers were all worn out. Wrong!

The World Series, though, is not like that. The world series looks extremely easy to call. This poses a dilemma - when you're 0-6, you worry - is that a trend? I mean, even flipping a coin, wouldn't you come up with 2-3 wins? So if I call this one - is my luck going to hold? This is a dilemma because this si the first series since the Tigers-Yankees where I felt a strong rooting interest in one fo the teams - and the first anywhere that seems like a no-brainer. I'm tempted to call the upset, just to preserve the 0-7, but I don't think that would fool anyone.

So - the point of all this is that if these teams play to their abilities, this will be the third 4-0 AL sweep in 3 years. Yeah, maybe Carpenter can win a game or two - not much else is likely to get past the Tigers. Unless they're bored again. They have too much going for them - a deep starting rotation, deep bullpen, plenty of rest, fine offense that is playing well up and down the lineup, and both Tony LaRussa and Jim Leyland. The Cards have Carpenter and Pujols and seem to have forgotten most of the season - it's almost like they went into hibernation in May (like the Tigers did in September). But I don't think that can last. They almost lost to the Mets, who started Oliver Perez TWICE. So - I have to take the cats. They look as fat and hungry as this beast:

Friday Music Post

I have to figure out a more interesting music meme to follow than this one, but I am headed out the door to a Kieslowski double feature, so I will stick to the tried and true. Maybe add a link - Andy Horbal takes on a Slate piece about 21st century fiction, wherein someone says movies have had no luck showing contemporary technological life, living on the net as it were. Andy doesn't agree. Discussion follows. And I suppose this ties back to music, because technology has always had a huge impact on how people experience music. How I experience it. I have noted, possibly on this blog, though I would have to dig and I am not going to dig for it, that the iPod has made me think of music in terms of songs - which, for me, is like going back to the 70s, before I got my own record player, and got all my music off the radio. All in terms of songs.

Speaking of which, here are 10 songs currently on my hard drive! When rated - I will include that - there's a variation for you.

1. Public Image - Flowers of Romance
2. Wire - Sand in my Joints [featuring one of the great guitar solos of all time - my tastes in guitar solos is very broad.] (****)
3. Television - See No Evil (live) [off one of those Mojo CDs; that reminds me - I saw 3 copies of Mojo in a news stand today, all of them with the CD gone. For $9, I want my CD!] [Anyway, this has a nice little guitar solo in it - but a great great song, I should say, before moving on. (*****!)]
4. Boredoms - Super Good [this is what I mean by becoming song oriented - Boredoms mutated, about the tijme of this record (Super Ae) from a song oriented noise band into an album oriented band - I love their records (this, Vision Creation Newsun and Sea Drum/House of Sun), but it is almost impossible to rate their songs - and somewhat unsatisfying to listen to their songs, the way iTunes brings them up. You need to listen to the whole record. A problem!]
5. Ramones - We're a Happy Family (***) [I am going to have to explain the ratings eventually, I think. Right now, Camera Buff is waiting so I better stop writing letters for every song.]
6. Yes - Perpetual Change [the guilt! the horror! there must be a mistake somewhere - this can't be mine can it?]
7. Hall and Oates - She's Gone (***) [That rating looks a little low, for primo Hall and Oates.] [I should rate the guilt factor associated with some of these songs, while we're at it.]
8. Ohio Players - Love Rollercoaster [That's better] (****)
9. Shonen Knife - Burning Farm (***)
10. Elvis Costello - What's So Funny About Peace Lve and Understanding? (***)

And video - the top rated song of the week!

More Baseball

While the NL series are still going, the odds are getting to be very good that I am going to go 0-4 in predicting the division series'. I can't say I'm disappointed. I did go on record saying I had no idea who was going to win - but better - seeing the Tigers win makes it all worthwhile. I am not surprised by the Yankees losing - they did look like last year's red sox, and met the Red Sox' end - though I thought it would come in the next series. But the Yankees are old and flat and aren't going to win again with this crew of players - once they started buying free agents instead of developing players, the end was at hand, and their regular season success has been a mirage for 4-5 years now.

The Tigers, on the other hand, aren't the first team to abuse the league all summer, fade at the end, then pick it up in the post-season. That's exactly what the White Sox did last year. The A's, meanwhile, might have knocked out the team I picked to win it all, but I can still half claim them - they seemed to me a coin flip, and they came up heads. The next series should be a pretty good one.

The NL is still going, though the Padres and Dodgers are on the brink. Pads showed some life I see. Dodgers, who knows. As for rooting interests here out - since the only one I really cared about was seeing the Yankees lose - I have to just go with the American League. Better teams. And I suppose I can stick with tradition and root against the Mets. I haven't got the heart for it really - too many guys on the team I like (Pedro, Glavine, Billy Wagner, Beltran and Reyes and even Cliffy Floyd), and nothing really to resent them for. Overpaying Pedro maybe, but on the other hand, now he's NY's problem, not Boston's. I wish he was around for this - if he were playing I would probably cheer for the Mets. That would have been unthinkable until 2 years ago. But now, I have forgiven them. In fact, I might be able to go back to one of my longest running traditions, cheering against the Dodgers - except they have Nomar and Derek Lowe and Greg Maddux.... I don't hate anyone in the post-season anymore!

Update: I see the A-Rod haters are having a field day. It is gratifying to see Yankees suffer, and particularly gratifying to see slappy suffer - but if old George decides to clean house - they can still get Manny for him! Hell yeah.

Friday Random Ten

Once again:

1. Meat Puppets - Quit It
2. Brian Jonestown Massacre - Take it From the Man
3. Jay Farrar - Feel Free
4. Meat Puppets - Liquified (9000 songs,a nd 2 from the same record; as long as it's the Meat Puppets, can't complain)
5. Warlocks - We Need Starpower
6. The Who -Time is Passing (from the extended CD of Who's Next)
7. Bay City Rollers - Yesterday's Hero (nice to see perhaps the greatest family in rock represented on the list; might, given the choice, have taken the younger Youngs over George though)
8. John Lennon - Love (from the Acoustic record)
9. Big Star - In the Street
10. Guru Guru - Girl Call (a little krautrock always rounds out the day nicely)

And video? Can't find the two above, but here's a later Meat Puppets performance on Jon Stewart's show, in fine form: