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Sunday, November 15th, 2009
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11:52 pm - Hotbox!
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I had assumed that I knew a fair amount of people excited to see Fantastic Mr. Fox because of the magic combination of Roald Dahl and Wes Anderson (I assumed the Noah Baumbach component was pretty much just an enticement to me, at least statistically speaking). But after Marisa and I went to see the movie with Chris & Shannon (in town from Boston), Maggie & Kyle (on their way out of town I guess for the Boston exchange program), and Marie, we found out that only three of the seven of us had read it. So I guess the draw was the magical combination of Wes Anderson and stop-motion animation, or maybe just Wes Anderson and celluloid? I'm pretty easy as far as Wes Anderson goes. I'd actually go so far as to call Fantastic Mr. Fox the least outright hilarious of his movies; that thing that some people say he does, where his movies aren't really laugh-out-loud funny but rather dry-and-droll funny, I don't usually subscribe to that, but here it's kind of true. Anderson has a rep in some corners as a glassed-in, airless filmmaker who stifles spontaneity with his immaculate compositions, but this take underestimates what the actors can bring to his roles, even if it's subtle -- how delivery and reactions can really enhance his comedy. In Fantastic Mr. Fox, taking out the onscreen actors makes everything seem even more deadpan and bizarre. Did I mention delightful? It's also delightful. The movie is a joy to look at, and if it's not as hilarious -- or moving, really -- as Royal Tenenbaums or Life Aquatic, it has the extra zip of retro but gorgeously crafted stop-motion animation. Anderson and Baumbach alter the Dahl story more through addition, but it gets the spirit of the story right while filtering it through Anderson's sensibility. The movie's tension between civilization and wildness would make this an amusing and thematically fitting dessert following Where the Wild Things Are.
On Saturday, we split off with Chris and Shannon; they went to a museum and BAM while we had a brunch with a bunch of Wes '03 kids, saw the barely-released new Joseph Gordon-Levitt drama Uncertainty at IFC in our downtime (review here), and then met up with Nathaniel and Katie for 2012. I think it's safe to say that there are few people on this earth who were more excited for 2012 than Katie, not even the dude at my office whose favorite movie is Independence Day. So not only was I excited for 2012 because of how much I like movies where stuff gets destroyed, I was excited for how excited Katie was to see 2012. And on those levels, it did not disappoint, and on all other possible levels, what am I, stupid? Of course they do a lousy job of characterizing a cross-section of humanity, of course there are cornball jokes and a scene where thank god a fucking dog survives the fucking global apocalypse, and there's always a mean government operative and a scientist who warned us all. Of course Roland Emmerich is a giant hack. But even when he shoots his movie digitally and it kinda looks video-y in between the mostly fantastic (and occasionally greenscreeny) scenes of mass destruction, he does a pretty good of delivering the cornball/secretly horribly cynical goods. Sometimes, anyway. He did do that Godzilla movie where no one died on screen. But he makes up for it here, even if the actual body carnage is limited by the PG-13 rating.
I do have a beef with the way Emmerich can't help but reduce his collateral damage by the end of the movie. Even when he parcels out the sweet, sweet mayhem, as he does to some degree in this movie, he always winds up with some low-grade climax involving people like, swimming underwater or getting chased by the wind or something. If your movie has a scene where people fly an airplane out of Las Vegas while the entire city falls into the fiery bowels of the earth around them, including an entire train plummeting to, essentially, hell, then it should not end with people trying to fix the doors on a boat. Also, I was promised spaceships. Granted, I was the one who made that promise by willfully misunderstanding the trailer for this movie, but still, I want to see some fucking spaceships filled with giraffes, and speaking of wild animals, I want to see them running rampant through the fiery ruins of humanity, but Fantastic Mr. Fox comes a lot closer in that department. See what this movie does to people?
Today we had brunch with Chris and Shannon at River Barrel, and while it's not quite Brooklyn Label level quality, it's a lot easier to get a table, and they had a special where you get a waffle *and* a pancake *and* a scrambled egg. That is a menu Roland Emmerich could be proud of. Wait, are we still talking about 2012? I liked when they drove the car through the building, that was fucking awesome.
Have I mentioned how poorly I ate this weekend? Cheeseburger, pizza, brownies, waffle+pancake. I need to get back to yogurt this week.
This afternoon Tim called me because he was down the street at his friend Nicole's place. I went over and played Scrabble and got fucking trounced. Actually, the whole game was one of those Scrabble clusterfucks where for the first half of the game we couldn't get out of the lower left-hand corner of the board, so Tim kept pulling out stuff where he'd put down two letters, make four words, and get thirty points, and the rest of us were left scrapping to stay out of last place for most of the game. Also, I had all vowels. For several turns, I literally had all vowels.
I didn't take any pictures this weekend even though I saw an amazing variety of friends. However, when I saw Marie on Friday she confessed that she was hoping I'd bring my camera and take pictures because she hasn't figured into my Facebook albums where it tallies up who's in how many pictures. I found that pretty endearing and let's say I neglected to take any pictures on Saturday or Sunday out of respect.
I'm going to bed now and try really hard not to eat any more leftover Twizzlers. Did I mention I also had Twizzlers? It's OK, the world is ending in 2012.
current music: The Mountain Goats - From TG&Y
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| Friday, November 13th, 2009
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8:31 am - Boxed
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Generally, I have to say, I'm pretty good about shopping, which should maybe not be considered so much of an accomplishment for a 29-year-old boy. So let me rephrase: I am pretty good about not buying useless crap. I spend a fair amount of money on movie tickets and concert tickets, but I don't count that as useless crap, not even when I see Saw VI, and between press screenings, frequent moviegoer cards, and sneaking, I see a fair number of movies for free, too. Marisa and I don't eat at a lot of expensive restaurants (or even at any restaurants during the week) and obviously I don't spend much of anything at bars unless I'm buying my lady a drink (and even then, her tastes are not posh). I keep the typical nerd indulgences in useless crap, namely toys and comic books, in check by rarely buying toys that cost over five bucks and loving many comic books that come out infrequently or erratically (though, admittedly, the most efficient way to save money on comics is to only buy trades from Amazon).
Even with the stuff I do accumulate, I try to be thrifty. If I'm not buying an album right when it comes out, I'm probably getting it used (cheaper than iTunes!), and I don't usually buy a DVD unless it's under ten dollars for some reason. However: there are a few instances where my pricing standards backfire on me and wind up with me actually kinda sorta almost buying my version of useless crap. Most of them involve DVD box sets. Not just whatever box set, mind you, because there are tons of box sets (boxed sets? I don't know which usage is correct) involving just about any combination of movies and TV shows, logical and not, complete or not, available to the foolish consumer. Generally, I am fine with buying movies one at a time for very little money. But Amazon, cruel cruel Amazon, sometimes has really awesome deals, such as every James Bond movie for like ninety dollars.
I did not, in fact, go through with buying every James Bond movie for ninety dollars (even though that's less than five dollars per movie!) because when that deal was going on, it was almost Christmas, and how many times would I watch a James Bond movie, anyway? I'm pretty sure the only one I've seen twice straight through was, yes, You Only Live Twice, because who am I to contradict the title? (Also, Roald Dahl wrote the screenplay. True!) But if someone points out a really (technically) good deal on Amazon, like, say, a box set of fourteen Alfred Hitchcock movies for what works out to a mere four dollars per movie, sometimes I will bite.
And bite I did; the "Alfred Hitchock Masterpiece Collection" is now on our DVD shelf, where Marisa moved it after I placed it on our mantle (it's very classy-looking, probably moreso than other box sets we own such as the "Alien Quadrilogy" set prominently featuring a made-up word; it's also classier-looking than any number of box sets I may buy in the future if the price is right, or just assemble from DVDs I already have individually, such as the "Anna Faris Masterpiece Collection" or the "Jason Statham Fucking Awesomeness Collection"). I have not seen all of the movies in this set, though I have seen most of the ones that are actually considered masterpieces or even very good movies: Psycho, Vertigo, Shadow of a Doubt, The Man Who Knew Too Much (J-Stew version, natch), The Birds, and Rear Window. Plus also Saboteur and Rope which I doubt anyone considers masterpieces are both pretty cool. The set also includes a bunch of late-period Hitchcock movies like Frenzy and Topaz that I've long assumed are more like Brian De Palma movies, with some amazing set pieces that don't really hold together. The unseen movies are actually one of the most attractive things about this set; it's like buying a season set of an awesome TV show that somehow includes lost episodes, even though these movies aren't lost by any stretch of the imagination.
If you're a fan of meaningless statistics, maybe you'll be interested in the one that this purchase created: in one silly Amazon purchase, Alfred Hitchcock went from being one of many directors with zero representation on our DVD shelf to the one with the absolute most. He stole the title from Martin Scorsese, who was in turn holding it primarily because my last impulsive DVD box set purchase was a set of five Warner Brothers Scorsese movies for the retail price of the Goodfellas special edition included therein (you see what I mean, about death by a thousand good deals that nonetheless still cost money?).
This led to a quick analysis of what directors are best-represented on the Jesse-Marisa DVD alliance shelves:
1. Alfred Hitchcock: 14
2. Martin Scorsese: 10
3. Steven Spielberg: 9
4. Quentin Tarantino: 6
5. Tim Burton: 5.5
6. Wes Anderson: 5
7. Robert Rodriguez: 5
8. George Lucas: 4
And then there's a four-way tie between Steven Soderbergh, the Coen Brothers, and Christopher Nolan, also with four apiece.
Burton gets the point-five because he didn't actually direct Nightmare Before Christmas but come on; and Anderson goes above Rodriguez because that five represents 100% of his movies except that one coming out on Friday and because we have two copies of The Royal Tenenbaums. Lucas squeaks ahead of the other four-timers because Empire and Jedi may not have been directed by him but, again, come on. I couldn't think of suitable tiebreakers after that.
Perhaps the weirdest thing about this inventory is what it doesn't include. For example, Spielberg movies I don't have include Jaws, E.T., Close Encounters, and Jurassic Park (in a telling peek into my psychology, the one I've come closest to buying is Jurassic Park because you can get all three Jurassic Park movies together for like fifteen bucks sometimes). I have a bunch of Robert Rodriguez movies but not Desperado. Regarding Tim Burton, somehow neither Marisa nor I own Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, or Ed Wood. Given my love of Soderbergh semi-ephemera, it's not surprising that I don't have Traffic or even Ocean's 11, but maybe a little weird that I didn't find a three-dollar copy of Full Frontal at some point (or rather, two copies: one for me, one for Rob, unless he already owns it, which he might).
But then it kind of makes sense, because if went out and bought all of those movies, it would probably be several years, if not more, before we actually sat down and rewatched them again. So the point turns out to be, Marisa and I are suspending our Netflix account after we watch The Stepfather (the original starring Locke from Lost, not the Gossip Boy remake out in theaters right now). And, also: come over and watch Hitchcock and Scorsese movies anytime.
In current-release news, I saw Women in Trouble, a sort of faux-Almodovar movie, as well as Broken Embraces, a genuine Almodovar movie. I was OK with both of them. My review of Women in Trouble is online at the L Magazine website; I still have to figure out how to write my Broken Embraces review for next Friday given that I neither know very much nor, honestly, care very much about Almodovar (though I did mostly enjoy this movie, which I've since read is considered sort of treading-water disappointment for him).
Next week's project is to go to bed before 12:30AM every single night from Sunday through Thursday.
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| Tuesday, November 10th, 2009
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6:29 pm - You wanted arts and crafts; how's this for arts and crafts?
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Every time Weezer releases an album, I find myself not just listening to it, but reading a lot about it. Not because they require a lot of Radiohead-style musical dissection or Hold Steady-style lyrical studies, but because Weezer, for a mainstream power-pop band, sure pisses a lot of people off. When they returned to making records in 2001 following a five-year break, elation among older fans seemed to turn to malaise which later curdled into outright hostility -- not just among the usual internet nerds who hate just about everything, but (at least in my experience) more rational fans dealing with honest disappointment, and even some rock critics. Hence, when Pitchfork awarded their self-titled 2001 album a 4.0 upon its release, it seemed vaguely sour and cranky (and also fanboyish, as the review was for some reason written by a seventeen-year-old), while their recent 4.5 for Raditude seemed downright even-handed and charitable. In 2009, you could find plenty of people (just check the AV Club comment boards) who would consider that entirely too gracious.
Hardcore fans of anything -- movies, bands, writers, whatever -- can be some of the worst people in the world, at least from a critical thought perspective. Hardcore fans forged in youth can be even worse, because they are the embittered internet nerds of tomorrow. Weezer is an especially pure case study in the power of love, expectations, and disappointment because their music, at its best, worst, and even most bizarre, is usually also pretty simple. When Rob Sheffield reviewed Raditude in Rolling Stone, he made a fascinating point that while for a certain section of Weezer fans, everything they've released in the past decade or so has been a horrible betrayal of everything "El Scorcho" stood for ("which was what again?" he asks, completely reasonably) even though, for the casual listener, most Weezer records will in fact sound more or less the same. Of course, Sheffield, a fine writer, seems to nonetheless love pretty much everything (it was weird and off-putting reading him twist his words around a few weeks back, trying to find a new and original way to call Glee interesting and worthwhile), especially any kind of music, and a three-and-a-half star review from Rolling Stone is pretty meaningless.
But: yes, it's a good point, and that (as well as Raditude itself), and all of these reviews and comments, and my wealth of personal experience with this band, made me want to go and listen to all of the Weezer albums in a row, in order. So I loaded up my ipod and did this. Their wealth of half-hour albums (at least three of their seven albums clock in under 35 minutes) made it especially easy.
The Blue Album is often cited as a record that sounded especially refreshing and immediate because it came out in the midst of grunge; Kurt Cobain had just died, and alterna-rock bands trying their damndest to imitate Nirvana and Pearl Jam were legion. The Blue Album has a fuzzy-guitar grunge edge to it, but its unabashed power-poppiness, the theory goes, set it apart. Some despairing reviewers and/or fans, wallowing in their disappointment with post-nineties Weezer, or sometimes even defending the band in a roundabout sort of way, have further theorized that maybe the album just sounded especially good in the context of its time, and wasn't all that great to begin with.
But having re-listened again recently (and, indeed, having stopped my constant shuffle-skipping for any number of Blue Album songs on my ipod over the past few weeks), I can say that this record does hold up. Strangely, it's not because every single song on it is a straight perfect classic: I like "No One Else" and "Surf Wax America" because they're on the Blue Album more than I like the Blue Album because they're there. Rather, the record works because the band seems to know exactly what they want and accomplish it with so much fun yet not too much fuss.
It's such a concise musical statement that even an attempt to rephrase and re-polish it with the even-shorter Green Album when returning from a long break in 2001 didn't really come off (though Green has its own merits, which I'll get into shortly). I think a lot of people would say part of the problem is that Rivers Cuomo got (or willed himself to get) a lot suckier at writing lyrics, and while that may be true, the supposed quality of lyrics to Weezer songs seem subject to the moods of the listeners. The Blue Album puts people in a warm, nostalgic mood, and so the lyrics are fine. Raditude makes people roll their eyes, so the lyrics are stupid. (That said, there are terrible lyrics all over Make Believe.) Discussion of Weezer lyrics will, more often than not, miss the point to some degree.
What sets the Blue Album apart is less then lyrics the quiet-loud dynamic. Their post-nineties albums, including Green, would focus more on the loud part, without, say, the tiny riff on which "Say It Ain't So" layers a couple of iconically chunky guitar kick-ins. The closest they get to sweet quiet-loud on Green is the chugging verse riff to "Hash Pipe" that goes all-out for the chorus, or the bigger guitars on the bridge of "Island in the Sun." The Blue Album, though, scarcely misses an opportunity -- "Undone," "Say It Ain't So," "Surf Wax America," "Holiday," that fantastic intro to "My Name is Jonas" -- to go super-quiet and then slam into a big, big chorus. Again, this is done simply, in the customary post-Pixies style, but with maximum effectiveness.
There's quiet-loud dynamics on Pinkerton, too, but they come off more like mood swings, as Cuomo sometimes sounds like he's coming apart. In the context of the other records, it's much more ragged and sloppy-sounding, in a great way. While it's true that Weezer's basic sound has largely stayed constant over the years, little they're recorded before or since has the rawness of, say, the screams on "Tired of Sex," "No Other One," or "Why Bother?"
This singularity has been pointed out countless times as Pinkerton, a flop upon its initial release, has become the gold standard for Weezer records: catchy, but also moodier and more personal than Blue. Though I became more familiar with the front-to-back workings of Pinkerton before Blue, it's easy to see how if you were a nerdy thirteen or fourteen when you heard the first album, Pinkerton would be the absolutely perfect thing to hear a couple of years later, when you're a little older but not necessarily much more mature or happier yet. Appropriately enough, I listened to this record endlessly on cassette while riding the bus to eleventh grade (I don't know if I realized it at the time, but Jeff giving me a ride to school senior year probably cut down my Pinkerton listening by about sixty percent -- and that's riding with a fellow Weezer fan).
Supposedly the reaction to this record, and his subsequent sometime-embarrassment, led Cuomo to shy away from more personal statements on later work. I'm not in a camp that wants them to find a way to make a new Pinkerton, though, because forcing this kind of song to come out can sound affected at best, completely obnoxious at worst. It follows, then, that punishing Cuomo for not being in the headspace that would result in another Pinkerton seems perverse at best, and stupidly, regressively dedicated to the idea of the tortured artist at worst. It's funny that Pinkerton supposedly inspired a generation of awful emo and mall-punk bands; I certainly understand how the sexual frustrations and heart-on-sleeve moments were so influential, but the actual sound -- pounded guitars, some slightly mumbled lyrics, and Cuomo's more declarative, not especially whiny voice -- doesn't much resemble any of those shite bands that popped up in the early-to-mid-aughts. There's none of that processed sheen to the guitars or those ultra-nasal vocals; I guess we can blame Blink-182 for those.
Also, further to the lyrics thing, if Rivers wrote a song like "The Good Life" today, the lyrics, with their references to "shaking booty and makin' sweet love all the night" would be called terrible and embarrassing. I'm pretty sure a 2009 "Pink Triangle" would get some of the same reactions. For whatever reason, the passage of time has made me a little cooler toward "Pink Triangle" but warmer to "The Good Life." It's a measure of the album's strength, though, that I don't feel grown out of it even though no longer particularly identify with the lovelorn, dysfunctional sentiment expressed throughout. It's a more flexible and durable record than "perfect for nerdy, angsty teenagers" might describe.
Some fans would tell you that the difference between Weezer then and now doesn't lie with their own age or point-of-view, but Matt Sharp's departure from the band; Pinkerton would be his last record with the band. Sharp is certainly a decent songwriter and musician in his own right, and perhaps the band did lose something when he left during those tumultuous post-Pinkerton years. But I can't give much credence to the theory that it was all downhill post-Sharp (not least because Cuomo has written some excellent songs since then). I just can't hear that much Sharp in the earlier stuff. The songs on Pinkerton are, as so often pointed out, ridiculously personal, and rarely betray the kind of sound Sharp developed on his own with the Rentals (though I guess the best parts of the Rentals album Seven More Minutes have an early Weezer-ish sound). That's not to say Sharp's songwriting or aesthetic input would be impossible, or that collaborations have never resulted in personal music; just that the Sharp Theory seems entirely too easy and reductive.
Regardless, it's a hell of a transition from the acoustic lament of "Butterfly" at the end of Pinkerton to the opening blast of "Don't Let Go" on the Green Album -- but that's five years of time travel for you. I remember very clearly going down to the record store in Middletown, CT, to buy the Green Album along with R.E.M.'s Reveal and yeah, at the time, it was a little disappointing. I liked it, but I didn't like how it starts with "Don't Let Go," a song I adore, and then basically each song on the record is slightly worse than the one before it, until it bottoms out with the negligible "O Girlfriend" (this slide would've been reversed if overseas bonus track "I Do" had made it to the domestic version of the record; Erin, pal that she is, brought me the version with "I Do" back from the U.K.).
If anything, though, my appreciation of the Green Album has only grown, not just because the best songs hold up well nor because they went on to release far worse albums (though both of those statements are true), but because just as I associate Pinkerton with my cassette walkman on the bus to high school, I associate the Green Album with end of my junior year of college, and hanging out with Marisa, and that whole summer between junior and senior year. That is to say, an album doesn't have to have come out while I was in high school to benefit from the sheen of nostalgia. So maybe all of the people who hate the Green Album just have crummy lives.
I'm sort of kidding, but I do think it's fair to say that a lot of people heard the first two Weezer records at a time of great emotional intensity, and were primed for catharsis when the Green Album finally came along. It's not a cathartic record, but it is a pretty suitable summer record. Also, I feel like even the staunchest anti-aughts-Weezer partisans admit that "Island in the Sun" is pretty great. Again, I'm not sure if this is because it holds up really well or because they went on to release some truly awful songs that made "Island" look even better, but I wonder if all of their post-nineties singles are just working on a slight time-delay, better heard when they can remind the listener of something.
Like the Green Album, the year-later Maladroit (and one of only two Weezer albums with more than ten songs!) starts stronger than it finishes; unlike Green, I've had a hard time understanding the sense of disappointment surrounding it, then and now. I guess it comes off as a little mindless and pop-metal, but the big riffs are pretty irresistible; "Dope Nose" and "Keep Fishin" might both make my top ten Weezer songs ever list. In fact, Maladroit has just about everything anyone has ever asked for in a Weezer record: upbeat pop songs ("Keep Fishin'"), yearning ("Slave"), catchy rock ("Dope Nose"), self-loathing ("Slob"), fast-paced power-pop ("Possibilities), and a down-tempo closer ("December"). It just doesn't have any of this stuff in as massive quantities as Blue or Pinkerton. It has two great songs, three or four very good songs, and no terrible songs. Last I checked, this qualifies an album as good. Maladroit, to me, is a clear example of how undervalued an artist can become for making something that's "only" good.
Another favorite hobby of Weezer fans and enthusiasts, professional and non, has been psychoanalyzing Rivers Cuomo and his creative decisions: this album was made as a response to the reaction of this or the failure of that or when the fans did this. I try not to think too much about that stuff, because you're never going to come to a firm conclusion, short of Rivers writing a detailed autodiscography, and even then, I'm not sure if I'd believe him (though I like to believe him when he says, or rather tweets: "FYI, Weezer doesn't do anything with the purpose of pissing off its audience. That would be stupid.").
But I do wonder what happened to derail Weezer's post-comeback plans to churn out album after album. Maladroit came in May 2002, just a year after Green, and at the time they were discussing tentative plans to have another record ready for February 2003. But months turned into years, and Make Believe didn't show up until 2005. By that point, it was described by the band as hard-won, almost a labor of love. Given all of that, Make Believe invites primarily questioning about what they tinkered with on and off for those three years, and, as has been the case for Weezer fans more or less since a Pinkerton follow-up failed to materialize, wondering if superior discarded songs were piling up somewhere in Cuomo's proverbial basement. Regardless, Make Believe is a lesson in true disappointment; if your let-down over Green or Maladroit felt like a betrayal, this record serves as a reminder that hey, maybe you were being kinda silly. Of course, a lot of fans don't read it that way; instead, it's considered a nadir (for some, temporary, as other albums were to follow) of a fallow period. But truly, this is another league from the first two aughts Weezer records -- a league of low, low quality.
The crappiness of Make Believe actually sort of sneaks up on you, or at least it did on me. Even years later, if listen to the first minute or so of "Perfect Situation," it sounds like it's revving up into a classic Weezer song. Then it launches into a series of vague and really dopily rhymed lyrics, and gives up for a wordless chorus -- and this is still one of the better tracks on the record. Apart from the tolerability of "Perfect Situation," the two Make Believe tracks I like most are "This is Such a Pity," a Cars-y bit with Rentals-esque lady backing vocals, and "Freak Me Out," a gentle song (apparently) about Cuomo being scared of a spider. I find that endearing.
The most striking aspect of Make Believe, after hearing it all the way through for the first time in years and readjusting to its failure, is how dull it is. Even if you tune out the simple-minded words, most of the music is just incredibly drab and forgettable, the worst kind of rock-musician proficiency. Though the Green Album has a certain mechanical and formulaic sound to it, the ostensibly more dynamic Make Believe (different solos, more varied instrumentation) sounds even more like it was written with a Weezer song generator with a limited vocabulary output and the "catchy single" setting turned off. They really polished up their laziness here.
The critical reaction to Make Believe wasn't particularly negative, in the sense that the critical reaction to most name-brand rock albums isn't particularly negative at the time of release, though it did take a substantial (and understandable) Metacritic dive from Green and Maladroit. But as often happens in the ultra-delayed world of music crit, the lousiness of Make Believe wrote rock critics a permission slip to trash Weezer at a later date, which is the only way I can explain any review calling the Red Album or Raditude the band's worst record ever. Please, listen to Make Believe again. Can you, even?
While the Red Album is, granted, easily the weakest and most ramshackle of their self-titled "color" records (which had previously been a pretty clear sign of stylistic uniformity), it does have some strengths that went semi-unrecognized at the time of its release. Another three years had passed, and I wonder if that exacerbated the crappiness of Make Believe, because it gave fans plenty of time to realize they were not only not listening to it very much, but outright avoiding it if they reached for a Weezer record (Make Believe: vastly increasing my listening of Maladroit for half a decade now!).
What I like about Red -- indeed, what I cling to when I remember how bad some of the songs are -- is how weird and experimental it is. It has three songs that run over five minutes, easily a Weezer album record; it has three songs written by non-Cuomo members of the band for the first time ever; it veers from syrupy but personal ballads ("Heart Songs") to classic Weezer power-pop apparently added at the last minute ("Pork and Beans") to Queen-like multi-part epics ("The Greatest Man That Ever Lived").
Cuomo is still stuck on some terrible rhyme schemes, but the sound of Weezer trying on longer-form, less formulaic structure is surprisingly thrilling for a band whose longtime strength has been mastery of the three-point-five-minute pop-rock gem. I mean no offense to the other members of the band, but if not for the truly awful "Thought I Knew" and "Cold Dark World," the Red Album might've signaled an interesting new direction for the band, rather than three or four terrible new directions and one or two intriguing directions. It's in no danger of becoming great, mind you: "Everybody Get Dangerous" is all Rivers (though if you listen to the lyrics, there are several pretty funny lines buried by the dopey melody and cries of "boo-ya"). As is, it's a true grab bag, especially with those non-Cuomo songs clustered together towards the end of the record. I'd love to see a Weezer record that fully explores the more sprawling (but not bloated) sound of "Greatest Man" and "Dreamin'" but then, I'd love to hear a final version of that space rock opera Cuomo was writing after Blue came out, too (sketches are available on his series of Alone demo records).
The Red Album also seems to have introduced the pattern of a "deluxe edition" album with additional songs to the Weezer way of doing things, as this was imitated for the recent release of Raditude. This has been common practice for bands since the advent of iTunes; essentially, it offers B-sides up in advance, with the album, rather than gradually released with singles and imports. The Weezer bonus tracks have revealed an appropriate kinship between Weezer and fellow nineties mainstays Oasis, in that you listen to them in conjunction with the album and wonder how on earth some of the album tracks made the final cut while, say, "Miss Sweeney," the best of the Red bonus tracks, languishes in the margins, and further wonder if the band is just tracklisting songs in the order they write them without any more thought than that. "Miss Sweeney" is, in fact, one of the better Weezer songs of the past ten years, with weird, slightly affected character-song verses sliding into an anthemic classic-Weezer chorus. Of course, as with Oasis, brilliant B-sides are accompanied by lousy ones, mixed just as indiscriminately as the albums themselves.
Take the four bonus tracks on the deluxe CD version of Raditude: there's a full-band version of the much-loved bootleg/demo "The Prettiest Girl in the Whole Wide World" that would've made a perfect addition to the youthful exuberance of the actual album, and an interesting, vaguely old-timey-sounding experiment called "Run Over by a Truck." There's also a truly awful, almost mookish cut called "Get Me Some" that brings to life the nightmares people probably had when they saw this album's song titles; and a terribly sentimental on-the-nose-yet-punishingly-vague drum-machine-y ballad "The Underdogs."
Perhaps surprisingly, the album itself is not nearly so uneven, and its almost immediate rep as Weezer "doing" teenpop is overstated. It's definitely pop but, again, when has Weezer ever really been outside of that realm? The difference here is only the extra polish, and this stuff doesn't sound much slicker than any number of their past songs. There's admittedly less emotion in the crunchy pop of "The Girl Got Hot" or "I'm Your Daddy" and maybe I wouldn't be so forgiving of these songs' silliness if I didn't know the source, but they're a lot of fun, and I'm pretty sure that regardless of source, "(If You're Wondering If I Want You To) I Want You To" would be one of my favorite singles of the year. The worst thing I've read about this song is some writer saying it sounds like the Jonas Brothers. I've only heard a few Jonas Brothers songs, mostly in the backgrounds of stuff, but I can think of a lot of stuff "Want You To" sounds like, namely Cheap Trick and the Jam. Maybe it sounds like Weezer is ripping off a lot of the same stuff that the Jonas boys rip off, but saying it "sounds like" the Jonas Brothers "sounds like" needless snark and/or provocation to me.
Those first three tracks -- "Want," "Daddy," and "Girl" -- are the most immediate, and though much of the rest of the record continues in a catchy/fun mode, it does play a bit like a more polished version of the grab-baggy Red Album. There's some experimentation with a synth-y take on "Can't Stop Partying" (available as an acoustic demo on Alone II) which itself is a melancholy, minor-key take on what, lyrically speaking, could be a dopey celebration of excess. The song is a bit too droning and thin to really work as well as you might hope, but it's an interesting and sincere try, not the cash grab or joke you might assume -- essentially, Rivers has pre-emptively made the dorky-white-guy cover of this song before the original version had a chance to exist, which, again, sounds like something I would hate, but it's an earnest experiment.
Elsewhere, some angst, albeit lighter than some fans probably need, creeps into "Put Me Back Together" and "Trippin' Down the Freeway" (which sounded so much like a sequel to "Everybody Get Dangerous" that I pretty much wrote it off before I heard it). The cries of "I'm not getting better!" on "Put Me Back Together" wouldn't sound out of place on an early Weezer record, and "Trippin' Down the Freeway" turns out to be a power-pop refusal-to-break-up tune; it sounds almost kindasorta like Weezer writing a Mountain Goats song (that's probably giving it too much credit, but I like it a lot).
As with the Red Album, the album's peaks are pretty much done once you read the two-thirds mark, which kicks off with the fairly ridiculous Eastern-tinged "Love is the Answer." More shades of Oasis: I don't know what it is about more traditionally-minded rock bands that they feel like they can cure writer's block or whatever by writing stupid, quasi-universal shit about how we all have to learn to love each other. From there, it's pretty much a reversion to the Red anti-style, albeit with somewhat better craft: the stupid "Let It All Hang Out" is at least occasionally funny (as when Rivers boasts about drinking "180-proof vitamin water, energy flavor" -- come on, dude does the dorky-white-hangout thing pretty well); the dopey "In the Mall," the sole non-Cuomo contribution, is better than almost every other-band-member track on Red (save maybe "Automatic," also not very good but, like "In the Mall," written by drummer Pat Wilson, who is at least a bit more of a practiced hand at songwriting); and the return of the some kind of drum programming with the okay, forgettable "I Don't Want to Let You Go." The patchiness, jokiness, and catchiness recalls Fountains of Wayne on their last, uneven album; this power-pop stuff is, I think, a lot more difficult than it sounds at its best.
Raditude comes just sixteen months after the Red Album, which is promising even if it doesn't represent their best work, or even their best work of this decade. Cuomo is, by all accounts, a prodigious songwriter, and some of these horrible failed experiments would feel like much less of a waste if he actually had an album output to match that productivity. As I've mentioned before, I forgive a lot more when famous artists can beat the industry-standard every-three-years record release.
Still, an album as good as the Red Album every year wouldn't be much to reclaim former glory, and as much as I enjoy Raditude, there's a reason there's only half an hour of it. The boys could use a little direction before they embark on album eight. As it happens, I bought Jemina Pearl's solo record Break It Up on the same day as Raditude, and noticed that it was produced by John Agnello, the guy who produced Boys and Girls in America and Stay Positive for the Hold Steady. Weezer should seek him out. His producing/mastering resume leans heavily on the classic-rock and grunge sides of indie, which is approximately where you could classify Weezer, in a broad sense.
Agnello wouldn't necessarily have the say to nix lyrics when Cuomo turns in something half-assed, but he could make a great-sounding and accessible record with a little bit less of the gloss that they shellac onto their weaker recent songs lately. Cuomo seems to be in a collaborative mood, with shared songwriting on many of Raditude's songs, and other projects teaming him with Adam Lambert or Katy Perry. I honestly don't think there's any problem with him working with Top 40-style artists, even those I think totally suck, on his records or theirs. It's always been a little puzzling to me that the indie crowd covers and then gets disgusted with Weezer, as if they were ever an indie band. Dudes have been at Geffen and played on mainstream radio since Album One.
In fact, if Weezer was an indie band in 1994, many of their most disgruntled fans wouldn't've discovered them until 1998 or so, at which point they would've been permanently broken up and moved on to inferior bands. In a perverse way, I think a lot of Weezer-watchers would've preferred that entire narrative. But I like that there's a long-standing mainstream rock band I'm interested in besides just Green Day and sometimes Pearl Jam. This whole "jump the shark" idea that things get fucked up and can never be as good ever again and that's that and it sucks but it is what it is or whatever the fuck... it's pretty much counter to how we live our lives, isn't it? Or at least how we try to.
Anyway, I support Cuomo trying stuff out with other songwriting peers; the only problem is that not many of them will have much in the way of long-haul, album-making, career-sustaining strategies. I feel like Angello would bring out their strengths if they want to go in a more rock-and-roll direction at some point.
So that's my ridiculously long shpiel on a band too complicated to be called one of my favorites anymore. For sake of clarity, I would grade the albums thus: Blue and Pinkerton are clear A's; Green and Maladroit are in the B/B+ range; Make Believe is a solid D+; Red is more of a C+, and Raditude rates roughly a B-. It should only really, truly sadden you if you're disappointed to learn that 2009 is not 1994.
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| Sunday, November 8th, 2009
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9:47 pm - We are duly-appointed federal marshals
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I had an inkling that maybe Precious was making some limited-release bank when I went to buy tickets to that and The Men Who Stare at Goats after work on Friday, and before 6PM the former was sold out until midnight at Union Square. So Sara and Marisa and I settled for just Goats, an entertaining mess of a movie starring George Clooney as a "psychic spy," based on a crazy true story, etc. Clooney is quite good, as are, to some degree, his famous co-stars: Ewan McGregor, Kevin Spacey, Jeff Bridges, though none of them are really given enough to do. The problem is that Grant Heslov, a longtime Clooney collaborator, does half-hearted imitations of Clooney's favorite directors (the Coens, Steven Soderbergh) rather than merging those sensibilities into some kind of unique vision. The Men Who Stare at Goats is often amusing for its easy ridiculousness, but it tells its story without shaping it beyond a potentially interesting flashback structure. With all of the narration and the total lack of built-up tension (comedic, dramatic, or otherwise), it's more like a series of anecdotes, which seems kind of lazy when you have four extremely talented actors and capable filmmakers. It's like they had a list of scenes to do, but not much more. The experience of watching it is enjoyable but ultimately unsatisfying.
Salvaging our double-feature plans, Marisa and I ducked into The Fourth Kind, which also mixes two familiar styles without a lot of success: slick Milla Jovovich exploitation movie and convincing starless exploitation movie a la Blair Witch, Paranormal Activity, etc. The movie's conceit is that it has real footage of and interviews with victims of alien abductions, and that they've also created dramatizations starring Jovovich and crew to accompany it. The "real" footage is fake too, of course, and though they do a halfway convincing technical job of making it look realistically freaky, I'm not sure what they wanted to accomplish by mixing the two versions of the story. It's novel, but not that effective. There are a few solid scares and Jovovich is really a pretty decent genre actress by now, but it isn't really worth a feature film.
The next day, Marisa and Sara and I went back to actually see Precious, which can go on a list of all-time least appropriate movies I've seen/heard New Yorkers bring their babies to see. This is probably the champ of the non-horror division in that respect. Actually, Precious has other elements of horror beyond bad parenting in the audience: there's all that awful parenting on-screen, embodied by Mo'nique as a vivid movie monster (like a lot of notable movie monsters, she eventually elicits some pity along with all of the disgust and hatred). I usually don't respond well to movies that I perceive as exercises in miserablism, but the unrelenting crumminess of life in Precious actually worked for me moreso than in something like Babel or 21 Grams, because the circumstances of the characters' lives did feel like circumstances rather than screenwriterly machinations. And there's some humor in it, mainly from the classmates Precious meets when she gets transferred to an alternative school. Still, despite good performances, especially from awards-worthy Gabourey Sidibe as Precious, and a gripping slice-of-awful-life type of story with strong emotion, this wouldn't be on my shortlist for best movies of the year -- it's a little too overdirected and occasionally a touch hammy. But I can see Lee Daniels, the director, doing well on Miss Saigon, which he's supposedly tackling next.
Then Marisa and I went way downtown to meet up with Maggie, Kyle, Katie, and Jeremy for The Box, the newest Richard Kelly flop. I say that affectionately: it's kind of adorable that someone thought Richard Kelly could make a movie suitable for release on 2,500 screens. Don't get me wrong: of the four movies I saw this weekend, I easily enjoyed The Box the most, and my review will be up on PopMatters later this week (EDIT: here we go). One of the things I like best about it is how Kelly takes a simple (if speculative) premise -- a couple given the opportunity to push a button that will kill a single stranger, for which they will be paid one million dollars -- and elaborates on that until it's one of his nigh-apocalyptic, semi-comprehensible sci-fi weird-outs. It actually has some of his most cogent storytelling, although there's still plenty of WTF to go over afterwards, so I'm glad to have seen it with people who had lots of good questions and theories. And can recite the various Shutter Island trailers even when the picture is blocked out.
After the movie, Marisa and I covered a solid 150+ blocks, riding the subway from Battery Park up to Harlem to watch SNL with the boys. I should try walking that sometime. It can fill in for my unrealized idea to walk all the way across Saratoga some day in the summer when I was in high school.
Now then: Is everyone set for the end of the world via 2012 this weekend? (A great reason to see Fantastic Mr. Fox first.)
current music: The Sinister Turns - The Last Time
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| Monday, November 2nd, 2009
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7:01 pm - My children need wine
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As Marisa mentioned, we got a lot of embarrassed looks when we mentioned that we were going to Disneyland Paris, and I do understand, it seems like going to France and then eating at McDonald's. However, it is not actually like this for several reasons:
1. McDonald's is everywhere. While Disney might generally be everywhere, there are only four Disney amusement parks. IN THE WORLD.
2. While it might seem like a waste of time to go to Disneyland while you have Paris at your disposal, think about it the other way: would it be better to go to the place that is by most accounts a horrible wasteland populated only by amusement parks for the sole purpose of going to said amusement parks? Or to go to the amusement park located a 40-minute train ride away from one of the best and most attractive cities in the world?
3. Of course, that last one only makes sense if you accept the thesis that amusement parks are awesome. And I do. Obviously there's something a little antiseptic about the Disney experience, but if you've ever been to a Six Flags, you should probably be downright eager for something a little more antiseptic.
4. When we talked about engagement rings in the past, Marisa would be like "don't get a ring, take me to Disney World." Girl really loves Disney World. I thought some unfamiliarity would make a fun variation on that request, so I took her to Paris+Disneyland. Which is even better than taking a kid to Disney World, because she's far less fussy.
So: last Sunday we took the train out to Disneyland Paris (formerly EuroDisney). Because of EuroDisney's reputation as a mid-nineties boondoggle (I still cherish the Simpsons gag: "Euro Itchy and Scratchy Land, open for business! Come on, my last paycheck bounced! My children need wine!"), I sort of assumed it wouldn't be particularly crowded on a Sunday in October, even though I knew that the park has rebounded and is actually a huge tourist destination now.
I was wrong. It was crowded. People were everywhere. Parents, children, surly French teenagers. Few rides had wait times less than half an hour. We hightailed it from the main Disneyland Park to the secondary Walt Disney Studios park, hoping more of the families would be chilling at the one with more kid rides, but there were crowds everywhere. Still, the only thing we really wanted to do that we had to skip was the Finding Nemo coaster, which didn't seem to dip below a 90-minute wait. Otherwise, we hit pretty much everything else in our twelve hours.
Here are the actual rides we went on:
Pinocchio: A classic kid-friendly Disney ride in the tradition of the Snow White and Peter Pan and Mr. Toad type rides, though I have to say, the Pinocchio characters look particularly cool as 3-D animatronics.
Aerosmith Coaster: I have little love for Aerosmith and had low expectations for their rollercoaster, especially after hearing the stuck-in-early-aughts rock pumping through the queue PA (remember "Butterfly" by Crazy Town? Eh? Eh?), but it turned out to be one of the day's highlights. I'm sure hardcore rollercoaster enthusiasts prefer the outdoor, huge-drop-from-fantastic-heights ride model, but I have to say, I'm a big fan of the Disney dark-indoor version; it eliminates pretty much any aspect of fear and amplifies what I like best, which is going fast and upside down.
Twilight Zone Tower of Terror: This ride did not exist when I went to Florida Disney in '93, so it was my first experience with something I knew Marisa really loved. It was lots of fun, although the Twilight Zone connection is tenuous at best; the aesthetic is more haunted gothic mansion, and from what I've seen of the show, it traffics in a drier, more cerebral sort of creepiness. This was one of two rides where we used the "Fast Pass" system. I had always assumed this was a thing where you pay extra and get to cut the line, which sounded horrible and classist to me. But it's actually more like a reservation, where you go and swipe your ticket at a ride, and you get a ticket with a half-hour time range several hours later. When you return at that time and give them that ticket, you get to basically cut the line (or at least go into the much shorter Fast Pass line). This is a cool idea except for a few kinks: (1.) the lag times being like two to four hours; (2.) some rides not having Fast Pass; (3.) not being able to get more than one Fast Pass ticket at a time, which makes sense but means that the time-saving is somewhat negated by other rides also having long lines. Basically, this system would work really well if there were three or four rides with substantial lines, and there are more than that.
Star Tours: Back in '93, I had only seen the Star Wars movies maybe twice apiece at best (more likely, once all the way through and other times in bits and pieces), so I mainly remember this ride not being as exciting or effective as the Back to the Future version over at Universal Studios (though it was, at least, better than Body Wars -- hold on, we're about to crash into something extremely soft!). This is probably just hazy recollection, but the Paris version seemed smaller, in a good way -- the car seemed more mobile and convincing, though I bet it's actually exactly the same as its U.S. counterpart. Also, as a twelve-year-old with only basic knowledge of Star Wars, I failed to appreciate how funny the conceit of this ride is, that you're going on a rickety tourist excursion out to Endor or Hoth or Dagobah, and the ill-equipped droid driver gets you caught up into the Death Star run for A New Hope. So despite the fact that the ride itself is now a little worn and rickety, it was also delayed-reaction fun. Even though the wait was way too long for something that's probably been here since the park opened, at least we got to see droids and Admiral Ackbar, though they missed all kinds of opportunities for him to yell IT'S A TRAP.
The Pirates of the Caribbean: On the other hand, this seemed much bigger -- higher ceilings, more elaborate sets -- than I remembered from my Florida go-round, and once again I'm not sure if that's just faulty memory or slight tweaks to the Paris version. Though I've heard that Jack Sparrow and Captain Barbosa and Davey Jones have all been added to the U.S. parks, they made no appearance that I could see here, just a faux Sparrow announcement on the queue. What they do have is a Pirates of the Caribbean restaurant inside the ride (well, sort of -- you can see the boats taking off from the tables, and the line people can see you, but you're not like, actually inside the sets. Still, it seems pretty cool, probably moreso than where we wound up having dinner).
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Peril: I assume this is meant to be a ride based on the feature motion picture Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom because the title sounds too close not to be a European version of that movie, and because the coaster looks vaguely like the runaway mine cars from the Temple of Doom climax (or rather, from one part of Temple of Doom's forty-minute mega-climax). But it's hard to say for sure, because the ride offers no kind of story or even much Indiana Jones-related mis en scene. Not every rollercoaster needs a hokey backstory (Aerosmith, for example), but if you're going to base something on a particular movie, it's a little more fun if you give us something that has to do with said movie. The coaster itself is plenty fun, but a little generic and Six Flags-y for Disney.
Phantom Manor: Or, the Haunted Mansion. The Phantom Manor wasn't my favorite thing at Florida Disney, and the Paris version was, to my recollection, more or less the same. They didn't even make any Nightmare Before Christmas additions for Halloween, apart from a French version of the soundtrack playing outside the Manor.
Snow White: Another one that more or less matched my memories from thirteen years ago. One weird thing about this is that while it retells the story of the Snow White and the Seven Dwarves movie in ride form, Prince Charming is only peripherally involved, even for a dude actually called Prince Charming. There's no real explanation of who he is or what he does, which is weird because he only does like one thing. Also, when Prince Charming does turn up at the end, only Dopey, Happy, and Doc are there with the happy couple. Marisa was like, "the rest of the dwarves didn't survive."
Space Mountain: Mission 2: Going on Space Mountain in Florida with my dad and brother was actually my first rollercoaster experience, and if I recall it happened sort of by accident, in that my dad just assumed we wanted to go on, so I just sort of went on even though left to my own devices I probably would've hesitated a bit (assumptions really get a bad rap sometimes; this one got me over rollercoaster fear, and a few months earlier another one led me to seeing Sneakers. I remember showing my mom a print ad for Sneakers because I thought the tagline was funny; she assumed that I really wanted to see it, so she told my dad to take me to see it, and we went, and it was totally awesome and remains one of my favorite movies ever). Anyway, I didn't see much of the ride because I had my eyes closed for most of it. Now my vision has degraded to the point where I still didn't see much of the ride because my glasses were off, but what I could see looked super cool and this was pretty much the most fun ride of the day.
Buzz Lightyear Laser Blast: This is a hybrid ride/game (though without any prizes -- they should really have token little-green-alien prizes at the end): you take a slow ride through several brightly colored Buzz Lightyear environments and try to shoot a bunch of Emperor Zurg targets, laser-tag-style. Design-wise, it seems to be based more on the Toy Story-derived Buzz Lightyear Saturday morning cartoon, and I have mixed feelings about that; far be it from me to begrudge some little kids the opportunity to enjoy Buzz Lightyear outside of his toy role, but the Buzz character is such a well-conceived spoof of cheesy Saturday morning Star Wars knockoffs that it's kind of a shame to see that material treated seriously. Then again: I do love Emperor Zurg. We did this last, as this was another Pixar attraction with waits well upwards of an hour until about an hour before the park closed and the littlest kids were probably on their way home, and almost didn't get to ride as we got to the front of the line only to watch the ride malfunction for about ten minutes.
Between Snow White and Space Mountain, we went to claim our dinner reservations. Marisa asked if I would take her to the Cinderella-themed restaurant even though it was a bit more sit-down-y than you'd usually associate with eating at an amusement park, because it was the only one marked as "romantic" on the Disney web site. I said, sure, if that's what you want, let's go to the quasi-fancy Disney dinner. We stopped by on our way into the park, made reservations, and came back at 7:15. Before sitting down, we had the opportunity or, as Marisa would tell it, the obligation to have this photo taken.
When we got inside the actual restaurant, something was amiss. It was nice enough, but there were tons of kids around. Not unusual for Disneyland, but not particularly romantic either. Then, shortly after we sat down, theme music blared and someone announced the arrival of Sleeping Beauty and whatever the prince from Sleeping Beauty is named.
This was not a fancy dinner. This was a character meal. I know what a character meal looks like. I had breakfast with Minnie. (That makes me sound like so much more of a player than I was when I was twelve-and-a-half.) I think they need some clarification on this being the "romantic" restaurant in the park. If you are a five-year-old girl with a crush on Belle or Cinderella, then yes, it is deeply romantic. If you are relatively grown-ass adults, even able to summon a childlike sense of wonder, you will probably feel a little bit embarrassed or awkward chatting with Disney princesses while waiting for your veal (I feel a little bad about eating veal, but at least it provided a second Itchy and Scratchy Land reference for the day: "I'll have the baby guts"). That said, it was certainly a unique experience, and Marisa seemed pretty delighted to take pictures of me with the girl mouse from Cinderella (since she's more of a servant than a princess, I have to assume she prepared our dinner, too).
So that was Disneyland Paris. I can't wait for TokyoDisney, where I'm assuming the rides will be beamed directly into our brains with a three-inch laser.
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| Sunday, November 1st, 2009
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5:42 pm - Funny how it all falls away
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I had a pretty dingy moviegoing weekend, the kind of disappointment that more typically occurs when I try to see three movies in a February or March weekend. Hopefully this is just a palate-cleanser for the November movies, which aren't as promising as some years past, but could well have three or four really worthwhile titles.
But before awards-baiting really kicks off in earnest, on Friday night Marisa and Nathaniel and I went to see the barely-promoted new Jared Hess movie Gentlemen Broncos. Though it's a textbook case of the hype-phenom-overexposure-backlash cycle of the modern indie crossover, I still adore Hess's Napoleon Dyanmite, but I'm starting to wonder if his talents might be a bit more limited than some of his contemporaries. I've never thought of Hess as deriding his characters, at least not his leads, but he does have a tendency to collect freakish characters at the expense of the story he's actually supposed to be telling. In Gentlemen Broncos, he has this perfectly promising story about an awkward, home-schooled teenager (Michael Angarano) who has his bizarre sci-fi novella stolen by an established and pompous writer (Jemaine Clement) and also produced into a low-budge movie by an ambitious fellow writer (Halley Feiffer). All three of these characters are interesting and all three actors given fine performances -- especially Clement, who is completely fucking hilarious as the jackass sci-fi guru who's such a bizarre caricature that he becomes weirdly original, bearing no resemblance to any kind of real-world writer. Feiffer, too, who I know almost entirely from Noah Baumbach's recent movies, takes some bizarre gestures and comes up with a vivid, funny character. I would've been happy to watch these three characters interact for ninety minutes.
But Hess keeps proceeding with that Napoleon-style blackout-sketch rhythm, introducing weird characters without much actual character, refusing to resolve anything or have scenes really follow in a logical procession, and indulging in a lot of simple-minded gags. This worked for his earlier movie and even for stretches of Nacho Libre; it doesn't work here, at least not to the huge extent that he does it. So there are some really funny scenes and performances, but they're frustratingly adrift.
Then we traded a Nathaniel for a Sara and went into New York, I Love You. I just submitted a review for PopMatters; I'll link when it's up. For now, I will say, that I really enjoyed Paris, je t'aime, and I damn near hated the New York version, and I really didn't want to. But except for a few segments involving Natalie Portman (seriously -- she stars in one and directs another, and they're two of the better moments), it's pretty much awful. You can make a fun game out of suggesting directors, New Yorky and not, obvious and obscure, who might've contributed better work to an anthology than the mostly pedestrian-at-best crew they went with.
On Halloween, Marisa and I made our annual trip to see a Saw movie with Dave, in this case Saw VI, after a very sad Saw V for which Dave was in Hong Kong. The sheer existence of this many Saw movies undermines my ability to evaluate them, but this was definitely not the pits of the series. For me, the first three are more or less interchangeable (the first has an edge because it's simpler and actually has sort of a cool twist), and then the fourth and fifth ones go off in this more boring legacy-of-Jigsaw direction, which the new one is forced to deal with, but they do a better job of steering it away from the tediousness of the last couple. Which is not to say this is a good movie, or that any of these Saw movies would really qualify as good, but Saw VI at least distinguishes itself in some enjoyable ways. For example: it gets political, which I found weirdly satisfying. Jigsaw supports the public option!
What I don't get is why they created this semi-interesting slasher villain, Jigsaw, then killed him off in the third one, forcing the series to rely on flashbacks (which VI has in spades, which is good because this means more Tobin Bell, who plays easily the most thoughtful pure slasher of all time) and Jigsaw surrogates, mainly this horrible cop character Hoffman (Costas Mandylor), who has been kicking around the franchise since Saw III and got an undeserved promotion circa Saw IV. In terms of screen time, Hoffman has been Jigsawing for just about as long as Actual Jigsaw, and Costas Mandylor, I'm sorry to say, is one of the most charisma-free actors I've ever seen in the lead of a major motion picture, much less in a franchise for three movies in a row.
Despite the major box-office downturn, I'm pretty sure Saw VII in 3-D will be out around this time next year, and I bet they'll squeak out a Saw VIII in 2011. After that, maybe they'll leave it to rest and/or DVD. Even though I keep going to these movies mainly because they are fun to watch with Dave and Marisa, I'm sort of pulling for them to make it to Saw X on the big-screen, in what would be way less time than it took for Friday the 13th to get to Jason X. None of this reboot bullshit. More Roman numerals!
Also on Halloween, we had people over for candy and scary movies, only we didn't watch any scary movies, and Ben & Lorraina brought pie and Amanda and Nathaniel bought pumpkin cakes and Kyla brought cookies and Rayme brought cheesecake, so basically we all sat around going into sugar shock. It felt a little lazy to do this without the work of trick-or-treating first, and I definitely had a sugar hangover this morning, but it was still pretty great.
Speaking of Halloween, though, as well as anthology movies, we watched the unreleased-until-DVD horror anthology Trick 'r Treat with Nathaniel and I reviewed it.
I'm still working on a Disney post. I've had some setbacks. Maybe by the time I finsih it, my film will be developed.
current music: The Fiery Furnaces - Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)
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| Wednesday, October 28th, 2009
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1:40 pm - Five days in Paris
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I thought about doing this in multiple posts but I think I'm going to try to hit it all together, since I need to get back to actual life soon and if I'm spending time thinking in detail about Paris for the next three or four days, I might find myself reluctant to leave the apartment.
So I covered part of the first day when I wrote about the Lily Allen show. Before that, we went to the Louvre, Jardin des Tuileries, Champs-Elysees, and the Arc de Triomphe. That was all before checking in to the hotel, and mostly on foot (we walked from the hotel in the Opera area, where we left our bags, and then Metro'd back when we got to the Arc). This stuff was all pretty much gorgeous (OK, the Arc de Triomphe is a little silly -- it's very impressive, but it's basically in a giant traffic circle). Objectively and aesthetically, Paris is probably the most beautiful city I have ever seen. I love New York City, of course, now and always, but I got the impression that something like Penn Station or the Met Life building would not fly in Paris. Maybe I just missed the parts of the city that has ugly stuff. But pretty much everything was gorgeous, except maybe how their parks have a weird keep-off-the-grass mentality. I guess that keeps said grass looking really manicured and nice, but it means sometimes you're walking through dirt and looking at grass from behind mini-fences. Which is weird.
For a lot of the historical stuff we saw, I don't have that much to add about how beautiful and neat it was. There are some pictures below, and more at the click, and even more coming when I develop my film. For the trip I brought my SLR digital camera, plus my new-ish Black Slim Devil toy camera, no flash. I have no idea how those film pictures will turn out, since I was only sometimes using it as directed: taking pictures outside on a sunny day. It was hard to be consistent about that because at this time of year Paris doesn't seem to really have "sunny" days, per se. The fall weather all sort of blended together: sun, clouds, a little rain, a chill, warm spells. Also, I took some pictures of Lily Allen with it because I figured with all of her bright lights, the photos couldn't turn out any worse than these.
You know what was pretty solidly touristy but nonetheless completely worth doing? The Eiffel Tower. The dozen or so pictures on my Flickr stream in no way reflect the probably sixty or seventy pictures I took before running them through several quality filters that resulted in my 160 or so digital pictures of Paris rather than 400.
Regarding museums: I'm glad we went to the Louvre even though several people told us it would be kind of a crowded mess, and I'm also glad that we were only there for an hour or two, because yeah, it was a little bit of a crowded mess. But no lines, just tons of people. Winged Victory is awesome. The coolest stuff we saw was at Musee d'Orsay, and not just the impressionists. In fact, one of the coolest exhibits was about a guy who apparently thought the impressionists were jerks. Like a good nerd, I knew about James Ensor from the TMBG song and it turns out he is pretty amazing (that MoMA link is what we saw; it traveled to Paris shortly before we did). Pompidou Centre, eh, I am usually all about modern art museums; the Tate Modern is my favorite one in London. But I liked the inside-out building more than most of the art at Pompidou. And not just because waiting on a 25-minute bag check line was required (seriously, if the Louvre doesn't make you check your backpack, what business does anyone else have?).
Regarding food: I had so much ham. I seriously had ham at least six times. I'm also a big fan of being served bread with any and every meal. Even if you order a sandwich, boom, side of bread. We didn't do a lot of fancy eating -- actually, for the first two days solid, we were pretty much just eating on the go, getting sandwiches to go (or from grocery stores) and sitting in parks and having makeshift picnics. On Friday night, we met up with Sophie, a friend of mine from early in my Wesleyan days (she transferred to Brown pretty early on), and she showed us around Le Marais, and we got gelato and Lebanese wraps and she answered my questions about what living in Paris is like (and also what she had been up to in the ten years or so since we last saw each other). Eventually, though, we slowed down and did some sit-down meals, still more cafe-ish than fancy. Actually, the most purely nice restaurant we went to was probably an Italian place that was almost completely empty, because we made the mistake of really needing to have dinner around 6PM, which seems to fall in a zone where French people do not expect to eat dinner. Maybe the assumption that we'd be able to eat any time, anywhere is more of an America-by-way-of-NYC thing. Also, whenever I did see menus that were more traditionally French, I'd get a little confused about what typical French food actually is. A lot of it seemed to be steak. And, as mentioned, ham and cheese. So I kept wondering if I was missing something super French by eating a lot of ham and cheese and crepes, which I've come around a bit on, by the way. As Marisa put it, I'd been looking at them as an unacceptable substitute for pancakes, rather than their own thing. Anyway, eventually I stopped worrying about whether I was eating the right stuff in terms of culture, and enjoyed the fact that I was most certainly not eating the right stuff in terms of health. We did walk a lot, though, I'd estimate at least four miles per day, so maybe that undid some of the delicious damage.
Regarding movies: Before I left, I was talking with Yuka about the trip and she was like, when I'm away on vacation I like to go out and do the same things I do at home, and Yuka is smart and sardonic so it sounded like she was maybe being a bit sarcastic, but she wasn't, I don't think, because we were talking about how sometimes seeing what that stuff is like in another country or whatever is actually really interesting. Also, I feel like people do not bat an eye about going to bars in foreign countries the way they might about, say, going to the movies in foreign countries. Which obviously Marisa and I did while we were in Paris.
We'd heard legends from Maggie of showtimes in parentheses forty-five minutes before actual showtime indicating the start time of trailers, which sounded amazingly close to my ideal, rarely realized, of ten trailers before a movie. We never saw the parenthetical showtime only because I never found movie listings in any actual French publication -- we bought a newspaper one night to see if we could just scan the listings for the area, and it turned out not to have any (and it was the weekend edition!). So we wound up checking showtimes on Google on my netbook, also convenient for clear indications of VO (version originale) and VF (version Francais). I had no idea when I booked the hotel that it was within a half-mile of at least four movie theaters, but maybe that's just Paris, because the Google listings showed a hell of a lot of theaters in the area and guide books boasted about 300 different movies playing at any given time. I'm not sure that's strictly true, but I did see that multiple theaters appeared to be hosting revivals of Beetlejuice, among others, and that Saturday sneak previews of movies scheduled to open on the following Wednesday seem to be pretty common.
The nights we went to the movies were usually nights where we just wanted to relax and hang out, so we didn't go very far afield, opting for two of the Gaumont theaters located across the street from each other in the Opera district, showing mostly English-language movies with French subtitles. The new Jeunet movie was actually about to open and appeared to be sneaking on Saturday night, but it being originally French, there wouldn't be any way in for us English-speakers. But: we did see some stuff that isn't out here yet. On Saturday night we checked out The Descent: Part II, continuing my pattern of taking Marisa to see sequels to movies she hasn't seen. I'll probably try to write a full review for someone whenever Descent II comes out in the U.S., but it's basically a serviceable imitation of the pretty decent original that seems to think it's more of a continuation. But there's only enough story for about thirty minutes worth of actual time with the previous movie's characters, so a lot of it is stylish retread.
Then on our last night, we pulled an animation double feature with the Australian stop-motion cartoon Mary and Max, which I guess is available on demand via some cable systems now, and may get a cursory U.S. theatrical release down the road. It's too bad that it's not getting wider theatrical exposure, since the similarly adult-themed $9.99 played for at least a little while over the summer. Mary and Max is about a pen-pal relationship between an overweight New Yorker with Asperger's Syndrome and a homely little Australian girl. Philip Seymour Hoffman does excellent voiceover work as Max; Toni Collette voices the adult version of Mary, but it's really the kid version who has more screentime. Sometimes there's a bit too much Australian grotesquerie going on (is that racist, that I associate a kind of cheerful grossness with the filmmakers being Australian?), and the storytelling device (almost all of the scenes are narrated, either by the characters or an actual narrator) wears a little thin over a feature length, but it's a very sweet and touching, visually distinct little movie. The second half of our double feature was a catch-up with the U.S. release Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, and I have to say, it was much funnier and more delightful than it looked from the trailers. It looked too cranked-up and antic, and it was those things, and like it grafted a generic backstory and faux-emotional father-son stuff onto an essentially plotless book, and it did that too, but it uses its fast pace to accomodate a lot of silly throwaway gags and moments that I loved. It's an unabashed cartoon, unlike the perfectly crafted Pixar movies but also looser and less fully marketed than a DreamWorks production. I laughed out loud a bunch of times.
Regarding those trailers: we didn't get quite forty-five minutes' worth, but the French model does hew closer to my ten-trailer ideal. In fact, we got at least ten at least once, maybe every single time -- their trailer lengths also vary a bit more while advertising movies that are coming out a lot sooner (nothing was coming sooner than December and most stuff we saw was for the next few weeks). Unfortunately, they mix pre-show ads and trailers together, and also seem to show a lot of the same trailers in front of everything, regardless of content, so we caught a French Alvin and the Chipmunks Part Deux teaser (the poor French are denied their own version of the word "squeakquel"!) and the This It It trailer three times each. Also, in the nineties it was kind of common for U.S. remakes of French comedies to be terrible. I wonder if maybe it's because those original comedies were also terrible. It's not really clear from that IMDB entry, but it's a new French comedy called Tresor about a wacky dog. We saw the trailer twice. I think I'd rather watch Marley & Me. Which I plan on never seeing in my life.
Oh, and because I'll forget to mention it otherwise because I've already half-forgotten that this happened, right before I left I went to a screening of Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant for review and yikes.
We also went to Disneyland Paris. That totally happened. This actually makes more sense in a lot of ways than going to Disney in the U.S., because who the f wants to go to Orlando (unless you want to go amusement parks) (which, granted, I do)? But I'm thinking I'm going to take a break and post about that separately. Because despite some of the embarrassed looks we got when we mentioned that we'd be going to Disneyland Paris, I feel like I know a lot of people who actually want to know about that stuff.
Anyway, meantime, pictures of beautiful stuff:
current music: various Lily Allen covers
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| Thursday, October 22nd, 2009
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6:21 pm - I've never been this far away from home
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I'm fairly certain tonight marks the rock show I attended with the least sleep in the preceding twenty four hours. I got on a plane to Paris around 5PM on Wednesday evening, arrived before sunset Paris time, and got right into Paris stuff (not least because we were many hours away from hotel check-in time), and the only sleep I got in the meantime was when Paul Blart: Mall Cop came on as the in-flight movie. So give or take thirty minutes, I basically got one Blart's worth of sleep.
But we had tickets to see Lily Allen tonight at the Zenith, not because I adore Lily Allen beyond all reason, or because she's difficult to see back home (I think she played NYC at least once this year and I didn't bother to go), but mainly because the idea of going to a show while in Paris greatly appealed to me as I've never been to a rock show in another country, and Lily was by far the best option, and I do like her even though both of her albums are hit-and-miss.
The show was at the Zenith, which I think I just assumed was some garden variety large nightclub/theater type of place in downtown Paris, but is actually in the middle of this awesome part more on the outskirts of the city. The park is Parc de la Villette, it is awesome, I recommend it highly. The Zenith itself is apparently made of polyester, as it is this massive permanent tent (with climate control and restrooms and a stage and all that), in the middle of what looks sort of like Frank Gehry designing a college campus with Legoes. Sort of.
This is only based on the one experience, mind, but Paris concertgoing seems a bit more laid back on the administration side. I bought "Categorie 2" tickets for Lily Allen, which were the middle tier of pricing. It was hard to tell, but I was pretty sure it was all GA, but Categorie 1 was the closest, Categorie 2 maybe some kind of raised seating area, and Categorie 3 even further back.
I was mostly right about that, except it mattering about which type of ticket to get, because no one made us go to the Categorie 2 seating in the back so we walked up to the front and rocked it in the sixth row or so for the duration. Also, I'm pretty sure they were letting people bring in their own food. The Zenith is awesome.
The show was pretty fun. It was kind of a spectacle, a much bigger show (6,000 capacity) than I typically spring for, but after the wow factor of lights and a big stepcase, it wasn't really much more than Lily in a semi-skimpy outfit parading around with session-musician type backing band sequestered in other parts of the stage. But it sort of makes up for me not getting out to see Beyonce. Sort of.
I'm certain I don't have the order right but I think I got every song:
Everyone's At It
LDN
Back to the Start
Him
22
Chinese
Who'd Have Known
Oh My God (Kaiser Chiefs cover!)
Everything's Just Wonderful
Car Bullshit
I Could Say
Naive (Kooks cover)
He Wasn't There
Littlest Things
Smile
The Fear
---
Not Fair
Womanizer (Britney cover)
Fuck You
A decent-sized set for someone who only has two albums; I'm impressed that she played every single song off of It's Not You, It's Me, although this means she played a lot of her worst songs in addition to her best. That said, "Fuck You" is a bit more fun as a concert-closer than it is on the record. And she played pretty much all of her really good songs and covered an awesome Kaiser Chiefs song to boot.
The opening band was this act that was apparently on the CD game last year called Just Jack. I didn't remember their CD game track and I assumed they would be some kind of ironic gay-friendly band. They are in fact a sort of grime-funk band that sounds sort of like a bad Streets song or perhaps a British Asher Roth in their verses and then sort of lamely anthemic in the choruses. I'm pretty sure this makes them the 311 of the U.K. They also had a backup singer/dancing lady who danced sort of like Steve Buscemi's "Solid as a Rock"-loving lady friend in Ghost World. So, all in all, enthuiastically bad. But: the French girls go crazy for this shit. That was another big difference for this French concert: lots of screaming. Not just woooing a good song at the beginning or the end, but just like, screaming like girls screamed at the Beatles. This was actually better with Just Jack, because it was the most amusing part of their set; less so with Lily Allen, although there was a surprising lack of girls wearing Lily Allen dresses, so maybe that's more of a U.S. indie rock thing.
Anyway, I'm going to go the hell to bed now and sleep for like ever.
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| Sunday, October 18th, 2009
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10:50 pm - Blazin
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While I was watching Where the Wild Things Are with a bunch of people in IMAX (hey nerds: Marisa, Amanda, Rayme, Craig, Nathaniel, Sara Katie, Kate, and Jon!), I wasn't thinking much about when my mom used to read me the book (I have more vivid memories of In the Night Kitchen, which is in some ways much scarier, and, for that matter, Millions of Cats and Caps for Sale), but more about memories of what it's actually like to be a kid. I was a pretty mild-mannered little kid, and so was my younger brother, and neither of us ever stood on the counter and threatened to eat anyone up (I don't think my sister did either, but I wouldn't swear to it) but the movie vividly evokes a lot of feelings I recognized from myself or my brother or other kids I've known. I even recognized some of Max's toys, which I suspect Spike Jonze may have set-dressed into the frame based more on his own childhood room moreso than a typical ten-year-old of today, although I guess it's possible that Max could've gotten someone else's old Legos with the original space uniform.
Once Max sails away to the land of the wild things, the movie becomes even more beautiful and funny, but no less attuned to child psychology. The monsters are sad, confused, excitable, fierce, and heartbreaking, reflecting aspects of Max's life without on-the-nose analysis. I see the Wizard of Oz comparisons now, mainly due to the way Jonze and co-writer Dave Eggers (respect; between this and Away We Go, I have to say he's a pretty decent screenwriter) make an imaginary world meaningful, never reducing it to "it was all a dream." So the stuff about it being wandering or depressing or lacking adventure or whatever is pretty much besides the point. The movie runs for 100 minutes and not a whole lot happens in terms of A-B-C plot, but for me it flew by; if someone told me it was twenty minutes shorter than it actually was, I would've believed it. It's a wonderful little movie.
On Saturday afternoon, Marisa and I finally caught up with Capitalism: A Love Story. Usually with Michael Moore, I tend to forgive him the more blatant manipulation of images and/or facts because he's really funny and entertaining. Capitalism is certainly entertaining in the sense that it held and engaged my attention, but it's certainly his least funny movie -- not just because of its many serious passages, but because a lot of his attempts at comedy fall sort of flat, the dopey sarcastic use of old-timey footage and the poor man's Fun with Real Audio bits. Indeed, I'm guessing this stuff feels halfhearted because Moore is just plain angrier than ever, and that anger leads to some fascinating, sometimes infuriating anecdotes and sorta-factoids from his usual grab bag. The idea that capitalism should be replaced not with communism but democracy is an interesting and worthwhile notion. The movie is worth seeing not just for these ideas but for the way Moore seems to almost reach the end of his rope, unsure of what more he can say with his movies.
Katie had her birthday party on Saturday night, so we went out and hung with those good people. I feel like I'm seeing a bunch of people before taking off on vacation for a week; I saw other Katie, Saratoga Katie, twice during the week, which might just about put us over our 2008 levels of face-time despite working about five blocks apart. Anyway, topics at Katie's bar party included: merits of Dollhouse; whether any bands really deserve to put out two-disc greatest hits packages (Jeremy says Thin Lizzy makes it work); what to do with extra fingers (fake mini-tail, or hold out for mandibles?); hey The Brothers Bloom was really great; profiling Cristin's boyfriends; how couples split the holidays especially with divorced parents all over. Oh, also, at the post-Wild Things dinner, I stumbled upon a second title for my second as-yet-unwritten-or-even-outlined YA novel. Watch out for that.
EDIT: On Saturday night between a trip to Westchester and Katie's birthday party, I also saw Jason S. Forman plus his true love Shelly. I met him in Williamsburg at Surf Bar, which seemed pretty awesome. We were full of catering sample food so Marisa and I just had some sweet potato fries, but I want to go back and try some actual seafood there. Also, they have several inches of sand on the floor. When we came in, Jason was attempting to analyze Shelly's love life. It was delightful to see Jason and I was sad that we were late and then had to separate. I feel dumb that I didn't mention this earlier, because when I first had my thought about seeing a ton of people, what really put it over the top was Jason, who I do not see very often.
Today we slept really late, did some cleaning, and then we drove with Nathaniel up to Croton-on-Hudson for the Pumpkin Blaze. I could explain what this is or you could probably click around and figure it out:
I'm still not sure if I'm taking all of Wednesday off yet. I think I also need to do some mapping. And the dishes. It's all closing in!
current music: Bruce Springsteen - Radio Nowhere
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| Friday, October 16th, 2009
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12:42 pm - Lunch break
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So, Marisa and I are going to Paris soon. Did I mention that? I have no concept of how many of my friends have been to Paris or most places in Europe. If you didn't spend a semester abroad, in which case I assume you've been everywhere, or if you didn't go to Spain and then promise to write about it on your now-defunct LJ for several months (years?), in which case I only vaguely believe you've been to Spain even after you write about it, then I pretty much don't know where you've been. If you've been to Paris, and have recommendations about stuff we should check out and/or should blow off, let me know. I don't know if we'll actually have time to follow all said suggestions but I like to hear about that kind of thing. Especially: awesome places to eat that are near other cool things.
Movie review stuff: Marisa and I saw the very funny Black Dynamite, opening this weekend in NYC and some other markets, and I reviewed it here. My unintentional series of home-video reviews of somewhat underrated movies from the first half of the year continues with my take on The Girlfriend Experience, and I can't believe that in a year with two Soderbergh movies, I haven't had people over yet for a Solaris/The Limey double feature! I have, however, seen all five Planet of the Apes movies now. We're going to watch the Tim Burton remake again to complete the experience; I haven't seen it since it came out in summer '01 and was the subject of both personal and creative disappointment slash WTF.
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| Sunday, October 11th, 2009
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10:54 pm - Got your tape and it changed my mind
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It dawned on me on Friday, after seeing Paranormal Activity, that we're having a pretty strong year for horror movies: Drag Me to Hell, Thirst, Jennifer's Body, Zombieland, and now this Blair Witch-y shoestring haunted-house movie, easily the flat-out scariest of the lot, and one of the scariest movies I've seen in years. It's not quite as good at Blair Witch Project, a movie I still admire greatly and cannot understand the widespread antipathy towards (except going by the theory of: nobody much likes anything), because it's fairly derivative of that movie's techniques without summoning quite that same level of mysterious dread. But watching this movie, even in a Times Square theater full of idiots who go to horror movies for the rowdy, in-quotes experience of going to horror movies and listening to themselves fake-react to stuff (well, say quarter-full of those people, because not everyone else in the theater was a complete idiot, I don't think), rather than, you know, shutting up and watching a scary movie and having genuine reactions, I actually had a physical reaction not unlike how I actually feel if I hear a strange noise in the middle of the night. Which is basically what the movie is about: strange noises in the middle of the night. I suppose it's a bit of an exercise, a chill-delivery system, but that's fine and it's a perfectly effective one.
More scares: Marisa and I dedicated Saturday afternoon to assembling our "new" bed. If you've been to our apartment at any point in the past eight months or so, you've probably seen giant boxes in our front room and asked what they are and, with a sheepishness varying depending on when this question came up, one or both of us would explain that it's the bed we bought but didn't assemble. Those boxes aren't there anymore! Well, they are, and so is a box spring, but they're on their way out. And our bed is assembled. This is thanks in large part to Nathaniel, who offered to help us and is far, far better than I am at converting furniture-assembly directions into actual furniture assembly. It actually only took about three hours, and only took that long because our bed has drawers! Drawers! These things have already improved our lives immensely. I haven't really thought much about beds with drawers since we decided to buy one, because my new-bed feelings since then have been dominated by not wanting to have to assemble a bed, least of all one with six drawers, so it was like a nice surprise when we put it together (correctly!) and realized we could store things in them. For example: cassette tapes.
I didn't get a CD player until I was in eleventh grade and I didn't get a portable CD player until after I graduated from college (the last one still works, by the way; kudos, Sony). This means a great number of cassettes, actual store-bought albums as well as mix tapes, have been circulating through my possession for many years. I eventually cut down the real-album cassettes to almost nil, just a few dollar-bin finds that I wouldn't ever think to replace with a CD and some sentimental favorites that I've replaced with CDs long ago but so what (and actually that I should pass on to my sister, as her new car has BOTH A CD AND CASSETTE PLAYER and she doesn't particularly think this is awesome, and that in turn offends me). But Marisa and I both have a lot of mix tapes, and I have a bunch of radio show tapes, that we're not ready to abandon. Convenient cassette storage options are not easy to come by, but you know what works really well for almost the exact number of cassettes we have? Under-bed drawers. Behold:
Even better, cassettes are one thing we are unlikely to accumulate more of, so there's not the CD/DVD storage problem, where if you have something that perfectly holds all of your DVDs, you're one 5-for-$20 sale away from not having enough space. This is our cassete archive, it is finished, at least until Rob or I unearth more Bonus Army tapes someday, in which case maybe I'll think about getting rid of the mixes I made during freshman year of college, but probably not.
After bed assembly and dinner, Marisa and I went out to see Couples Retreat. I realize that seeing this on the heels of Four Christmases last year could imply that I am just not very realistic or bright, but look, I'm not saying I had high expectations for Couples Retreat, but Vince Vaughn is funny, Jon Favreau is funny especially when paired with Vaughn, they each did a draft on the screenplay, and some draft must've been OK enough to get Jason Bateman and Kristen Bell and a bunch of talented comedy support involved. Or: everyone just assumed everyone else would be upping everyone's game, because Couples Retreat is pretty much awful. It's not as broad or crass as Four Christmases; it actually finds a far more frustrating and bizarre way to fail. The director, Peter Billingsley, played Ralphie in A Christmas Story and is apparently pals with Favreau and Vaughn; I'm sure he's a good guy, but he needs some more practice before he gets behind a camera again. With these actors and a totally reasonable, trailer-friendly premise (couples go on group-counseling vacation that turns into a mess), you really just need to bring the rudimentary stuff to make at least a passably entertaining movie, and Couples Retreat can't hack it. The set-up is interminably paced; the cross-cutting between subplots once they get to the island is clunky; the laugh lines are so stilted and stepped-on that they play not only unfunny, but as bad dialogue. In fact, the whole movie has a peculiar way of giving characters one note that isn't even particularly comic, and having them repeat it like it's a running gag, but instead everyone is just really, really boring and tedious. Jason Bateman, for example, can do deadpan-uptight as well as anyone. Watch Arrested Development or even Hancock; he's brilliant at it. Here, he's supposed to be doing something similar and instead just comes off as... kind of a boring asshole. Even weirder is Jean Reno, who plays the couple-therapy guru running this resort, because there is absolutely no comic idea behind his character, not even a simplistic one. The obvious tactic would be to make him kind of a ridiculous nonsense-spewing figure of meaningless gravity, like, say, the Sphinx in Mystery Men. But that doesn't happen. He's just kind of there, not funny and certainly not interesting. Vaughn gets off some good rants, like he does, but the movie isn't even savvy enough to give him much face-time with Favreau or any sense of friendship or history, which is pretty amazing incompetence considering that they are actually friends with a long history together. It's sad when you pack a movie full of good comic actors, and the one who gets the most laughs is unknown Kali Hawk, playing the twenty-year-old girlfriend of Faizon Love, because at least she finds her character and knows what's funny about her. I mean, good for her, but sad for everyone else in the movie. I have no idea what anyone was thinking here. Maybe it was supposed to have a grounding, realistic effect? But it just comes off as lazy to the point of negligent.
The movie was free because I had some Clearview passes, but all in all, our night would've been so much better served if we just skipped the movie and went straight up to Harlem and showed up way early for SNL with the boys. How often would I ever say that about a movie starring Kristen Bell?! Damn you, Couples Retreat! Damn you!
Today we got back on the good-movie train to see the Toy Story 3-D double feature with Team Sunset Slope. Man, are they wonderful. Especially Toy Story 2. This was the sixth time I'd seen Toy Story 2 theatrically, as when it originally came out (ten years ago, almost!), I saw it about once a week for five weeks. It is a feel-great movie.
Oh, I also saw An Education a little while ago and didn't properly review it, but I wrote a little about it here. It's good, though it being written by Nick Hornby mostly made me remind myself to get the new Nick Hornby book at some point. Which in turn will probably make me want to make mix tapes again.
current music: Lisa Loeb & Nine Stories - Snow Day
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| Tuesday, October 6th, 2009
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10:31 pm - Chart-toppers
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Hey, let's check in with this!
Top 40 Most-Played Songs on My iPod at the Moment
1. "True or False" - Bishop Allen
2. "Your Little Hoodrat Friend" - The Hold Steady
Like a lot of this list, this is actually a tie only broken by alphabetization (I think it should be broken by whatever's more recently played, but that feels too much like tinkering. In this case, though, that distinction would move "Hoodrat" to the top).
3. "Stuck Between Stations" - The Hold Steady
4. "Zero" - Yeah Yeah Yeahs
The concert gave me a much-needed periodic reminder of the rest of the songs on It's Blitz!, but while "Softshock," "Heads Will Roll," and "Hysteric" are all hovering around the next-40 list, "Zero" continues to dominate.
5. "Sequestered in Memphis" - The Hold Steady
Weird trivia: when they play this live, it never sounds quite as good, not just because there's no sax, but because the central riff always sounds weirdly muted in the mix for some reason.
6. "Hop a Plane" - Tegan + Sara
7. "The Modern Leper" - Frightened Rabbit
8. "Most People are DJs" - The Hold Steady
9. "Banging Camp" - The Hold Steady
10. "Stay Positive" - The Hold Steady
I'm glad Katie put this on her CD game mix because I wasn't sure if other people also thought this song was awesome.
11. "The Pigs That Ran Straightaway Into the Water, Triumph of" (live) - The Mountain Goats
12. "Titus Andronicus" - Titus Andronicus
13. "Dirt On Your New Shoes" - Bishop Allen
14. "Knuckles" - The Hold Steady
15. "People Got a Lotta Nerve" - Neko Case
This was so close to being one of my CD game songs, but it was a casualty of me trying not to just make a "best of the year so far" mix.
16. "Stevie Nix" - The Hold Steady
17. "My Life Would Suck Without You" - Kelly Clarkson
18. "I Could Break Your Heart Any Day of the Week" - Mandy Moore
Another technical tie between KC and Mandy (as well as several songs on either side of them), but I only buy albums from one of them. You know, thinking about it, I feel like you don't see Kelly Clarkson albums in the used racks as often as you do with most mass-appeal music. I'm also thinking about what would be the right price for a used Kelly Clarkson CD. Probably like three dollars, except not that first album, and if I recall even the one with "Since U Been Gone" has plenty of junk. I'm kind of curious about that bitter album she made against Clive Davis's wishes that no one (and by no one I mean thousands of people) bought. OK, I guess most of them are readily available for a dollar on half.com, but despite Beyonce's lack of chart placement here, that's really more her territory. I wish Beyonce was as productive as KC, though -- there are already four Kelly Clarkson records!
19. "The Sign" - The Mountain Goats
If I were a more attentive Mountain Goats fan, I would happily listen to a dozen different live versions of "The Sign" where Darnielle talks through slight variations on his usual shpiel, but I only have this one and a studio version without any storytelling, which is pretty much useless.
20. "Under the Blacklight" - Rilo Kiley
21. "Joset of Nazareth's Blues" - Titus Andronicus
The little piano crescendo in this song is just tremendous. I think I probably underrated this record when I did my best-of list last year.
22. "Fireworks" - The Tragically Hip
23. "Middle Management" - Bishop Allen
24. "South China Moon" - Bishop Allen
25. "Even in the Rain" - The Fiery Furnaces
26. "40 Bucks" - The Hold Steady
The better of the two new bonus tracks on A Positive Rage. Yeah story songs!
27. "I Support Women in Science" - The Sinister Turns
Here's what sometimes happens with CD game entries: I usually listen to them as CDs rather than ripping them, so I can better keep track of what I'm listening to. So I listen to them, like certain songs, and move on to the next one. Then I forget to rip said songs and put them on my ipod and remember six months later and listen to the Sinister Turns over and over. I even managed to do this twice with the Sinister Turns, because after I ripped this song from Cristin's CD (along with the Aly & AJ and GnR, and probably others that I can't think of right now but aren't more embarrassing than Aly & AJ), I sought out other Sinister Turns songs, which I promptly downloaded and forgot to add into my iTunes until another bunch of months went by. However, "Anatomy Assessment" and "The Last Time" are on there now, and I listen to them all the time, especially "The Last Time," and I fucking love this band; I wish I could find evidence of an album beyond an old MySpace posting that makes it sound like they have a bunch of albums. Anyway, thanks Stickles!
28. "Keep Me in the Dark" - The Fiery Furnaces
29. "Broom People" - The Mountain Goats
If you asked me for my favorite Mountain Goats songs, my mind likely wouldn't go straight to this one, but apparently it's up there. I appreciate the quieter tone ("inside voice," I believe John and/or an interviewer called it) on the new record, but there's nothing quite like Darnielle going "I am a babbling brooooooooooook" in this song.
30. "Up the Wolves" - The Mountain Goats
31. "Sheena is a Punk Rocker" - Yeah Yeah Yeahs
I would think that off of the War Child Heroes compilation, it would be the Hold Steady doing "Atlantic City" that would make it to this list, but go figure, it's the YYYs doing the Ramones, I guess maybe because I've already listened to the original "Atlantic City" so many times in the past couple of years.
32. "The Swish" - The Hold Steady
33. "Girls Like Status" - The Hold Steady
34. "Acid Tongue" - Jenny Lewis
35. "My Year in Lists" - Los Campesinos!
36. "You! Me! Dancing!" - Los Campesinos!
Some playlist shenanigans booted "We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed" off of here, but that's semi-accurate as I sort of overdosed myself on that song and have been concentrating more on "Miserabilia" and "The Sea is a Good Place to Think of the Future" lately (but not enough to overtake these two monsters).
37. "Palmcorder Yajna" - The Mountain Goats
If you asked me for my favorite Mountain Goats songs, this, in fact, is where my mind would likely go.
38. "15" - Rilo Kiley
39. "(If You're Wondering If I Want You To) I Want You To" - Weezer
I burned myself out a little on this song when I first got it, which is not to say I dislike it now -- it rules -- but I'm chilling out a little until the full record comes out. I've listened to it enough so that it pretty naturally comes into my head without much prompting.
40. "You Don't Know What Love It (You Just Do As You're Told)" - The White Stripes
I'm going to put some more White Stripes on my ipod right now.
current music: Built To Spill - Life's A Dream
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| Sunday, October 4th, 2009
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11:28 pm - Hanging on in the late twenties
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I've been working to stay on top of the fall movie situation to the tune of four consecutive two-movie Fridays, which probably doesn't sound that unusual in the scheme of how often I go to the movies, but since I'm officially old now, is probably not always a good idea. I may try to save the Toy Story double feature (oh, it's on) for Saturday afternoon and give myself a break on the next Friday. But this past Friday, it was full speed ahead, so Katie and Maggie and Kyle and Sara and Marisa and I saw Zombieland, the first horror comedy to actually produce financial success in who knows how long. It's a ridiculously fun movie, over and out in 80 minutes, and although there's some ragged stuff at the beginning with too much voiceover and a few jokes that don't really land (or at least aren't quite as funny as the screenwriters seem to think), it pretty much does exactly what it sets out to do, with great gusto. The casting helps immensely: Jesse Eisenberg does his Woody Allen Junior routine, Woody Harrelson reminds me that he used to be a weird, equally unlikely combination of movie star and impressive actor, Emma Stone does her adorable-bangs husky-voice slightly-underwritten-but-quite-funny thing. I actually think I prefer it to Shaun of the Dead, which does a better job of spoofing zombie movies with its amazing first thirty or forty minutes, but doesn't have a strong, rollicking finish like this movie, and doesn't have an awesome star cameo that I won't spoil although Michael Phillips on At the Movies did, and doesn't have Emma Stone, and just isn't as laugh-out-loud funny overall.
Then Sara and Marisa and I stuck around and met up with Jon for The Invention of Lying. Curious, after this movie and Ghost Town, how Gervais is developing a tone apart from his TV or stand-up work -- he brings a bit of wit and edge to relatively sweet-tempered movies, rather than creating or starring in dead-aim satires. There are some really smart ideas in Lying (which he co-wrote, co-directed, and leads) but they're not ignored so much as not pushed to their limits. Nothing in the movie is, though it's enjoyable on its terms. Jon pointed out, correctly I think, that because the movie's premise -- giving us a world in which lying has never been discovered, and everyone pretty much says what they think -- requires the actors to perform in sort of an intentionally awkward, stilted, deliberate manner, it also slows them and the movie down; for a high-concept, especially for one that's actually quite funny, the movie itself is surprisingly poky. It doesn't have the energy of Groundhog Day, which virtually no one can keep from mentioning in relation to this movie because it pretty much sets the speculative-comedy standard. But it's consistently amusing and has at least one sequence -- bring up some of those smart ideas I mentioned earlier -- that can stand with similar scenes from Monty Python or Woody Allen. In fact, the movie's lack of verve makes it feel a bit like something Woody Allen would contribute to an anthology of thirty-minute movies, rather than a fully polished feature (also, they totally use the Woody Allen credit font, which I've never seen anywhere else). All of this makes it sound like I didn't care for the movie, but it really is worth a look, if not urgently.
I did sort of a birthday thing on Saturday, but first, for warm-up, Marisa and Sara and I reconvened, this time with Amanda, to catch Whip It, Drew Barrymore's rollerderby-centric directorial debut. Whip It has certain qualities that are by no means indicative of a good movie: it embraces a formulaic story, and the actors look like they had a great time making it. But Barrymore is doing something right, because the formula and the good vibes work well together, and Whip It is unpretentious, sometimes infectious fun, rather than lazy or tedious or smug. It works because the relationships in it feel real; the element I most feared, Marcia Gay Harden playing a disapproving Texas mother, turns out to be really nicely acted and affecting, as is the Ellen Page character's unforced relationship with her dad (Daniel Stern, hey, totally didn't recognize you in the trailers, welcome back). Page also shows friend-chemistry with Alia Shawkat from Arrested Development, and the whole cast succeeds in creating characters who are more or less like real people, but a little funnier and cuter. This movie does not deserve to bomb! The list of female-centered movies that will have outgrossed Whip It at the end of this year will be mild depression in waiting.
Then we went down to Dojo and had dinner with a bunch of awesome people; I don't know why I still get a little surprised when a bunch of awesome people come out to dinner with me when I tend to hang out with awesome people, but I do sometimes get surprised, and it's a nice one. In related news, I have a bunch of mix CDs to listen to and a bunch of comedy DVDs to watch. Afterwards, it graciously stopped raining so a bunch of us could walk to Landmark Sunshine to catch the real event of the weekend, A Serious Man. The new Coen Brothers joint feels, in some ways, like a culmination: the weirdness and frustration of Barton Fink, the deadpan reactions of The Man Who Wasn't There, the shaggy-dog intrigue of The Big Lebowski, and, perhaps surprisingly given the seemingly smaller scale, the bleak worldview of No Country for Old Men. But even with all of this plus the usual grotesques and especially grotesques sitting behind desks, it doesn't feel like a retread; more like a sharpening to a fine, fine point. A Jewish man looks for meaning and order in his life and can't quite find it; sounds deceptively simple. But it's carried out with such a specific mix of the mundane and surreal, perfectly shot with those Roger Deakins washed-out whites that it becomes unstoppable rather than reductive or repetitive. I don't think it will rank among my favorites of theirs (Fargo, Raising Arizona, Lebowski, O Brother) if only because I guess, looking at that list, that I tend to favor some more overt and lovable comedies, but it is kind of amazing in that Coens way that I can't always articulate. Also, it is pretty hilarious.
After the movie, a contingent came back to Greenpoint to watch SNL and eat cupcakes provided by one of the Maggies (I spent a lot of time with both Maggies this weekend, as well as the other Trinity-related kids, and Sara joined a select group of people, most of whom are Marisa and Rob, who have seen three movies with me in a 24-hour period). Today I had cupcakes for breakfast and sort of met John Darnielle. So despite the cold I developed while all of this great stuff was happening, twenty-nine is feeling pretty good so far.
current music: The Mountain Goats - Deuteronomy 2: 10
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| Wednesday, September 30th, 2009
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12:59 am - Dance 'til you're dead
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After some will-we-or-won't-we-get-em muck, I was able to get a pair of tickets to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs at the Music Hall of Williamsburg, a smaller venue than they usually play. I'm fine with saying Twitter isn't necessarily useful, it's just fun as long as your friends are smart and interesting like mine are, but I will say I've made good use of it as a concert-ticket alert system.
Last time I saw the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, I managed to catch them at Webster Hall even though they were playing venues more the size of Hammerstien Ballroom. This time, I managed to catch them at the even smaller Music Hall after they played the even larger Radio City. So, next record, I guess they'll be playing Madison Square Garden and I'll see them at Mercury Lounge.
Somewhat to my surprise, Marisa came with me. She refused last time around but some of the It's Blitz! songs made her say what the hell.
Setlist approximate (EDITED to be correct later):
Shake It
Phenomena
Heads Will Roll
Black Tongue
10 x 10
Gold Lion
Machine
Skeletons
Hysteric
Softshock
Honeybear
Zero
Cheated Hearts
Date with the Night
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Maps
Down Boy
Art Star
Y Control
Tick
Our Time
So the set was extremely evenhanded, with more or less equal treatment for all three records plus a variety of EP stuff. The well-chosen new songs sounded great, especially "Heads Will Roll" which Karen O sung wearing a creepy glow-in-the-dark stitch mask, and "Softshock" with its gradual crescendo from prettiness into throbbing anthem. And "Zero" going into "Cheated Hearts" exploding into "Date with the Night," yeah, wow. Live versions of YYYs songs aren't drastically different from the album versions (I assume because the records are good at capturing their live energy), and in fact the main difference here were mostly extended, semi-minimalist intros, a trick they busted out a lot but that I never really got sick of. They're an interesting band to watch because Karen O is extremely engaging and entertaining as a performer, but seems completely awkward when she does any between-song banter -- she keeps going into her yelling voice which outside of her songs sounds vaguely like it belongs at a monster-truck rally. This sort of fits, though, because this isn't a band where I'm in love with all of their lyrics; their songs are more expressive musically than lyrically (though they do have some nice turns of phrase here and there).
The crowd at these shows is usually pretty douchey; this time it was a mix of stone-still photographers way in the front (is my retort "you can't all pretend to be press" or "you know, your blog doesn't actually count as press"?) and some fucking nuts who would not stop throwing their bangs around and smashing their arms and elbows into everyone. Girls at Yeah Yeah Yeahs show who think they share some kind of spiritual-sexual kinship with Karen O are possibly more insufferable than girls at Jenny Lewis shows who think they share some kind of spiritual-sexual, well, you get the idea. Marisa and I were pretty much on the line between those two groups, which is usually how it works out for us. But there were also plenty of totally cool-seeming people who just wanted to dance and jump around and not be awful about it.
Anyway, people can't ruin the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, it was awesome, I need to shower.
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| Monday, September 28th, 2009
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7:42 am - The big three o
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Often when I get together with Rob, talk will turn to some awesome or stupid thing we did when we were teenagers, only it will turn out, about half the time, that Rob wasn't actually there, because he wasn't always allowed to go out and do awesome and/or stupid stuff with us. It really hits home, though, when explaining this stuff to someone who wasn't there, and halfway through the story I realize Rob (who most of my post-Saratoga friends have met at some point) isn't in it.
However: since high school, I've seen Rob more than anyone from Saratoga, and going through my photo albums on Flickr or Facebook or in hard-copy form confirm this. Rob is easily the second most-photographed person in my life after Marisa (and if we stretch this all the way back to 1996, it's probably a toss-up, or possibly a decisive Rob victory). As today is the thirtieth anniversary of Rob's existence, I thought a photographic tribute might be in order. If you think these are a lot of photos, consider that my digitally accessible photos only go back about two and a half years.
Internets, I give you my buddy Rob; please wish him a happy birthday.
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| Sunday, September 27th, 2009
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10:19 pm - Dudes on stilts
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Some movies, I am not so much excited about, but get excited that other people are excited. Such was the case with the remake of Fame, which Katie and Amanda both really wanted to see, so fair enough, people certainly go with me to any number of movies that probably don't rate my excitement. On Friday night, then, Marisa and I saw Fame with Katie, Sara, Annie, and Amanda. In some respects I'm surprised we didn't have even more people.
The movie is not so good. I actually kind of like the fragmented structure, where we only get glimpses of the characters' lives throughout their four years at fame school, but rather than using those glimpses for anything evocative or unexpected, the filmmakers just slice the cliches and melodrama extra-thin. I haven't seen the original Fame so I don't know if this was just an attempt to maintain a previously established structure or what. But nothing else I know about the original corresponds to any sense of reverence in this movie apart from its status as a brand name. Apparently the original was pretty adult and sexy; this one is chaste and PG, with some of the blandest and least electrifying actors this side of a Disney movie. Apparently the original is also a musical, and this one, like many modern musicals, is too afraid to indulge in more than a handful of musical numbers. This odd lack of musicality and the trailer for Nine ahead of it just reminded me about how I was reading about Nine in Entertainment Weekly's fall preview, and the magazine stated as more or less fact that people liked the on-stage production numbers in Dreamgirls, but found the ones where characters were singing to each other (you know, like in a musical) sort of weird or laughable or something. Rob Marshall, the director of Nine and Chicago, had the gall to brag about how he found a way around this: by having the musical numbers in Nine sort of take place inside the main character's head! Wow! You may remember this completely asinine trick as being the exact same device he used in Chicago. So basically, after much careful deliberation, he decided to make Nine just as stagy and cautious as his last poorly realized musical. If you can take one thing away from that awful, awful Mamma Mia! movie, it should be that audiences do not demand some kind of excuse for singing and dancing to be taking place. If they like the movie, they'll go with the musical stuff. You don't need another reason any more than you need elaborate justification for actors being attractive, or car chases being exciting. I know that people still exist who can't make the leap with singing and dancing in movies because it's "not realistic" or "doesn't make sense," but you should not be making a musical with these people in mind. You should not be making any movies with these people in mind. These people essentially don't understand movies.
Anyway, yeah, Fame was pretty bad, although I didn't have a terrible time. After the movie and the even more enjoyable trip to Sundaes & Cones, Marisa and I went to Union Square to see Surrogates. I'll have a review up at PopMatters on Monday or Tuesday, but I'll say that it's a serviceable sci-fi movie that seems like it's probably fine with being caught on cable or an airplane someday. I mean that almost as a compliment. Or certainly not a direct insult. EDIT: Here we go!
Today Marisa and Nathaniel and I saw Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, John Krasinski's movie of the David Foster Wallace short story collection. Or I guess more accurately, of the inter-story bits of that book. I'm not really sure because I did not succeed at reading that book when it was assigned in that Experimental Fiction seminar in college. I tried and found it annoyingly overwritten, although I do remember using a technique from the interview sections in a story I wrote for that class (we were supposed to try to incorporate that kind of stuff as we went along). The eighty-minute movie version seems more streamlined and has some interesting pieces, but if anything, winds up feeling just as overwritten and monologue-y, and I say that as someone who generally likes talky movies and good monologues. The movie of Brief Interviews feels like writing, it feels like theater, it feels like all kinds of perfectly fine things that are not movies. It mirrors my gut reaction to David Foster Wallace, that everything seems more like an elaborate, academic exercise than just plain old writing. There's some good acting and all that, but it doesn't add up to much for me; it's about the ideas of its characters moreso than the characters themselves.
We put a dent in the September birthdays on Saturday: Amanda, celebrated, check. Michelle, celebrated, check. Bar hop, celebrated, check. Aging, aging, aging.
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| Sunday, September 20th, 2009
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6:38 pm - Bodies count
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From about age of twelve or so, I've been hoping for more adult and/or action oriented animated movies, and even though we get up to a dozen mainstream cartoon movies per year now, animated sci-fi continues to be a tough sell, usually aimed only slightly older than the typical Monsters vs. Aliens/Chicken Little/etc. demographic. So I was intrigued by the wide relase of 9, which I saw with Marisa, Andrew, Tom & Maggie on Friday. Shane Acker's movie, based on the short he did for The Animation Show (it sounds like the short was in Year 3; I think that review is of Year 2), goes full-on post-apocalyptic, with its alternate future seemingly bereft of humans, basically like what would've happened without a truce in Matrix Revolutions, and then if some Tim Burton-y living rag dolls crawled out from the smoking remains. It's beautifully designed, a real pleasure to look at, but unfortunately the writing pretty much stays on children's-movie level, if not lower (Up, after all, is child-accessible and remains the best movie I've seen this year): pure boilerplate, point-a-to-point-b-to-point-c-to-point-d-etc. stuff. Also, why one earth would you hire Crispin Glover to do voice acting for a movie and then give his character about three lines? Especially when Elijah Wood, rarely expressive and especially not vocally, has a ton of them. This is the kind of movie where you could just cut a lot of the dialogue entirely since most of the movie is chases and escapes anyway. It's more a piece of visual art than an emotionally engaging experience, though I enjoyed its robot creatures and plucky stitch-faced dolls.
After discussing some of the movie's metaphysics with the kids, Marisa and I went upstairs to catch our showing of Jennifer's Body. This is the kind of movie where dialogue tells the story, and not in a literal, exposition-heavy way. The bitchy, slangy, sometimes nonsensical banter Diablo Cody writes for hot popular girl turned hot popular demon Jennifer (Megan Fox) sounds what we've decided is "Diablo Cody dialogue," but in a heightened, sly, off-kilter horror comedy about a mean girl, it mostly works, and serves the story, as it did in a very different way in Juno. I love the way Jennifer's attitude-heavy talk trickles down to the nerdier, more timid "Needy," Jennifer's bff Anita (Amanda Seyfried), who can't bring herself to swear off Jennifer, or even swear, until the demon possession takes hold -- and even then, it's difficult. Jennifer's Body pulls together so much cultural riffing -- on teenage female frenemyship, on girls and boys in distress, on young sexuality -- that some of it feels a little underdeveloped, which is to say it's one of those movies where I could've enjoyed more of just about anything or anyone in it. So while it's not quite the Mean Girls/Heathers/Buffy/Teeth successor/hybrid it could've been, I wouldn't necessarily complain (see comment thread) that its direct treatment of themes make it subtext-free and therefore mostly worthless, but then, methodically analyzing subtext subtext has never been a major reason I watch movies.
As horror,Jennifer's Body not particularly scary, as many critics have pointed out, but I don't know that scares are really the point here. The mixture of funny, spoofy, gothic, and serious (in that the filmmakers and, as such, I also take their main characters seriously) has a pleasurably uneasy charge. Seyfried and Fox are both quite good, and Adam Brody is hilarious in a small part, doing a pretty obvious and spot-on parody of Brandon Flowers from the Killers (I'm surprised more people haven't pointed this out). Karyn Kusama directed it, and it's a nice-looking movie, too, with lots of nice dark/bright-color contrasts, rather than the usual horror murk. Its failure at the box office has made me consider constructing some kind of algorithm illustrating that the more interesting a horror movie is, the less likely it will make money. This is certainly true to some degree of many genres, but horror in the last five years has become dependable: if something looks completely generic and by-the-numbers, it will do extremely consistent business: open to 20, finish around 50. Even if a movie does its best to look as generic as any number of hit horror movies, if it turns out to be even slightly more enjoyable (Sorority Row!), this will somehow manage to fuck its box office. If a horror movie has any kind of originality, it probably won't ever hit more than 100 screens (May! Teeth!). And so even in mainstream horror, Jennifer's Body and Drag Me to Hell are outgrossed by the likes of The Unborn and Friday the 13th.
We did not leave Brooklyn on Saturday, we did not even leave Greenpoint, though we did manage to leave the house. We went to McCarren Park to enjoy the weather, and then to Word for a reading by Frank Portman, the dude from the Mr. T Experience who also wrote the excellent YA-ish book King Dork. Marisa and I split a copy of his new one, Andromeda Klein, and got it signed. He read from it a little, and then played some songs related to the two books. This makes two readings in a row where we got songs in addition to the reading. Good trend.
After dinner we played Scrabble with Nathaniel and watched Predator, because I barely remembered it (apart from "stick around") from half-watching it one night at Rob's house during high school and also from reading a parody of it in a MAD Magazine Super-Special a few years before that. It was far more successful than watching Miracle at St. Anna which I've had from Netflix for an embarassingly long time, and which I finally put in today, and which made me alternate bored, drowsy, and fidgety. I'm about 110 minutes into this 160 minute movie and I think it might have to just get kicked back to Netflix, not because it's unbearably awful, but because my attention span just isn't having it (and, don't get me wrong, this appears to be the kind of huge mess only Spike Lee can make, which means I probably should've just seen it theatrically), and for some reason this feels more honorable than just sending it back a few months ago unwatched, which is what I should've done.
Speaking of high school, a buddy of mine from then slash elementary school wrote a bunch of songs about Saratoga High '98 and is performing a bunch of them on Tuesday night at Europa here in Greenpoint. I am so totally going. I wish more Saratoga kids lived in NYC and would get excited with me.
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| Friday, September 18th, 2009
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1:11 am - Desperate to hear you make the sound that you found for me
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Tonight on our way home Marisa and I saw the Weakerthans at Music Hall of Williamsburg. I was all excited that they played both cat songs this time and then I read that apparently they did that last time too, the difference I guess being that I now absolutely love both of them. I see that in fact this set was really just a shorter version of the show we saw a couple of years ago, but I know more of the songs now so it was just as fun if not more so. Even though the lead guy appears a little shaky on the guitar sometimes. Actually, I enjoy that. Very punk rock.
You might roll your eyes at this:
Night Windows
Tournament of Hearts
Our Retired Explorer (Dines with Michel Foucault in Paris, 1961)
Benediction
Reconstruction Site
Aside
Relative Surplus Value
One Great City!
Sounds Familiar
Bigfoot
A Plea from a Cat Named Virtute
The Reasons
Hymn of the Medical Oddity
Left and Leaving
Civil Twilight
(Manifest)
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Utilities
Confessions of a Futon Revolutionist
Pamphleteer
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Watermark
Virtute the Cat Explains Her Departure
Earlier in the evening, we went to a free Onion-sponsored screening of The Informant! with Nathaniel, Katie, Craig, and Amanda. I'll add a little more in my L Mag weekend preview, but it's another solid Soderbergh experiment. Matt Damon is terrific as the often upbeat but mentally unbalanced whistle-blower, and Soderbergh has a whole bunch of comic actors playing straight in supporting roles -- plus Bakula! Soderbergh is great. He should keep making two movies a year for the next five to ten years. Yes yes. One for spring, one for fall. Jesus I need to go to bed.
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| Thursday, September 17th, 2009
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12:02 pm - Reunion Tour
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So you may have heard that Pavement is reuniting. And selling tickets to a Central Park gig they're playing over a year in advance. Thoughts:
1.) I feel like I should be more excited than I am. I think this is because my relationship with Pavement has been weird and oddly timed. I was only in college when one of their records came out, and then they broke up. But: in spring 1997, when I got a non-computer CD player for confirmation (all the Catholics in the house say what!), Brighten the Corners was in the first group of four CDs that I bought soon after (trivia: the other three were New Times by the Violent Femmes</i>; One Foot in the Grave by Beck; and Songs in the Key of Springfield). I distinctly remember that I already knew "Stereo" and "Shady Lane" when my friends started going nuts for them a few months later. I make a point of saying this because this very rarely happens and happened even less back then. And also that I dropped the ball on making anyone listen to those songs. If I bought an album today where the first two songs were as good as "Stereo" and "Shady Lane," I'd probably have 300 Twitter posts about them by dinner. Anyway, I dutifully filled in the Pavement back catalogue over the next bunch of years; actually, over the next decade, because I just bought a used copy of Wowee Zowee! last year (I still haven't listened to it). But I never got really really into Slanted and Enchanted the way I was supposed to, which I think is what made me really feel it when sometime earlier this year, Rob said something on Twitter about not feeling sure if he eve really got Pavement. Actually, wanting to succinctly and immediately agree is pretty much why I have a Twitter account at all.
2.) Further to not really getting Slanted the way I'm supposed to, my favorite Pavement songs are mostly on Brighten the Corners and Terror Twilight, and neither of those are albums I love all the way through. Like sometimes I wonder what I'm doing with all of these Built to Spill albums, but then I remember There's Nothing Wrong with Love. With Pavement, though I do quite enjoy many of their songs and style, having all of their albums feels more like an obligation. Not even necessarily in a bad way; just a little detached.
3.) From the description, this sounds reunion closest to the Pixies reunion in that they don't have any plans for new albums, or even more tours, setting it apart (for now) from the Pixies reunion, which has become more of a cash-infusing side project as it's been extended, on and off, for five-plus years. I'm not sure if that makes it better or worse. I don't want to be one of those people who's like, it's over, let it go, it won't be as good ever again, either in reference to reuniting at all (I was fucking ecstatic to see the Pixies, who also put out college-rock favorites while I was not in college), or in reference to making a new album, because while you don't want terrible new albums messing up the legacy, at the same time, there's something sort of sad about becoming a greatest-hits act, or about standing with your bandmates night after night but not feeling the urge to create something new with them.
4.) Also, the practical side of me says that yes, obviously, if these guys can make a bunch of money because people like me want to hear them play their songs, they should go ahead and do that. So in theory, I should have absolutely no problem with a tour-only reunion, especially if it's really just one tour and back out. I guess it's not that I have a particular problem with this reunion apart from not being as excited as I might think I'd be. But I guess the Pixies doing shows again were my this.
5.) At the core of it, I think I'm just annoyed that the Blur reunion turned out to be for like two shows in England, and now Damon is back to fucking around with world music or whatever and Graham can continue putting out solo albums that I will consider buying from the used bin but put back because they're over a dollar. Blur should be touring. Blur should be making more albums.
6.) Speaking of Blur, I wonder if the British just have a stiffer upper lip about this sort of thing, because the Smiths and the Stone Roses are like Last Mega-Bands Standing (or I guess, Refusing to Stand) on this one. Though I fully expect Oasis to be rocking the reunion tour circuit, maybe touring American casinos in 2021.
7.) Did Oasis break up? Or is this just one of those things where Noel leaves for awhile and they pretend to still be a band while he's gone?
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| Monday, September 14th, 2009
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12:23 am - Put your hands up
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You can tell it's early September when I got out for a Friday double feature like Sorority Row followed by Whiteout; it's really more of a Sunday afternoon or Monday evening sort of pair. But as far as nights of third-tier genre junk goes, Sorority Row actually made it sort of worthwhile. It's not much more than a well-made slasher movie, and even the well-made stuff goes to its head a little; for example, the movie is more than 85 minutes long. But this year I've seen slasher movies where old material was revived without absolutely no sense of fun or style (Friday the 13th), where a once-enjoyable concept was bled dry (Final Destination 4), and where a talented director nevertheless steered his well-shot movie into kind of a dead end (Halloween II). So a slightly campy, slightly self-aware bit of suitably violent and occasionally naked collegesploitation with the chick from the similarly enjoyable Step Up 2 the Streets (not to mention a delightfully non performance from a chick from The Hills) pretty much hit the spot. It's not exactly Mean Girls with gore (I'm still holding out hope that Jennifer's Body fits that bill), but I felt surprisingly OK about having spent twelve bucks on it. It provided all of the cheap thrills I was hoping to derive from the surprisingly dull Whiteout, where Kate Beckinsale solves a murder in Antarctica. The movie isn't actively awful and even has some good pulpy stretches, but the indifference it leaves in its wake is pretty stunning. Nothing goes horribly wrong so much as the movie feels listless and half-assed; the dialogue isn't the worst expository crap I've heard, but it's straight boilerplate whenever it can afford to be, and a lot of the snowscaped stuff is done with bad greenscreen. For Beckinsdalesploitation, stick with the second Underworld movie or Van Helsing. By the way, this is the second movie in so many months, after G.I. Joe, to make me think fondly of Van Helsing. If anyone wants to argue that movies are getting worse, I think I've just provided a pretty decent case.
On Saturday night, Marisa and I decided to be lazy and have a non-party, sort of a telling-people-to-come-over-and-hang-out-if-they-want situation, like the Saturday nights of yore, before we lived in eventful places. Here's what usually happens when we do this: we suggest that we might play Scrabble or other board games, or watch movies or something, and then we proceed not to do any of those things, and pretty much sit around eating snacks and drinking and chatting, in this case about babies, the Beatles, and Diablo Cody, among other things. I should mention that we have pretty awesome friends, that so many people came over on a rainy night to basically do nothing. Also, Allison is back on the east coast, hooray!
Today I hit the Brooklyn Book Festival to work Table 27 with the good people of One Story magazine. Also, I ran into: Yuka (leaving the One Story table, but still, nowhere near said table), Kyla, Bayard, Val, Allison, Katie, Kate, and a dude from work. After my shift at the table, Marisa and Kyla and Amanda and I went to the main stage to see David Cross, Jonathan Ames, and Rakesh Satyal do readings and perform self-designed risks. Jonathan Coulton also performed some songs at the beginning and end. I know people love this dude, and his songs were sort of charming, but mostly he epitomizes everything I dislike about funny and nerdy music (yay!) that cares primarily about being funny and nerdy (boo!). I hope this criticism can be distinguished from the common complain that acts like They Might Be Giants or Ben Folds care too much about being clever, because most of those arguments are put forth by self-serious rock critics who, deep down, don't think songs should really have much of a sense of humor. I do like music to have a sense of humor. This is more like actually-funny versus "Broadway funny." Jonathan Coulton's song about IKEA is sort of amusing, but not really funny enough to make it as its own joke (the "joke" is that he's singing it), and certainly not interesting or observant enough to pass muster with TMBG, who very rarely do out-and-out joke songs. Also, he did that thing where a white dude does an acoustic cover of a rap song, in this case "Baby Got Back." This has been to the aughts as punk covers were to the nineties, and I think it needs to stop, preferably several years ago via time machine, but now will do, too.
Still, it was sort of neat to see this famous internet song guy. And I really enjoyed all of the other readings, especially Jonathan Ames, who made me want to buy his essay/fiction hybrid collection which, by the way, I think is a really cool idea at least in theory. Plus, Ames and Satyal made me feel a little less lame about the one Brooklyn Book Fest event I attended being the one with the comedian I knew from TV. Afterwards, Marisa and Amanda and I got ice cream in Cobble Hill, like probably the best ice cream sundae I've had in years.
I've gotten in the habit of checking in on the MTV VMAwards yearly, even though I usually haven't seen many of the ten videos that are repeatedly nominated across the five categories they actually bother to present during the 150-minute show. Observations from tonight's show that I wouldn't even deign to twitter:
--You know, Kanye West *did* sort of echo my thoughts exactly when Taylor Swift won, although I was thinking more about how with that Beyonce song and that Kelly Clarkson song, it could've easily been the best category of the night, but at the same time it's totally sad that Kanye thinks these awards are real, and that in a universe where these awards are real, "Best Video by a Lady" or whatever that category was is apparently more important than "Video of the Year," which Beyonce did win, and which made more sense for her to win, because that was really more of a "Video of the Year" considering how ubiquitous it was (example: I pretty much know that video but I don't know if I've actually seen it all the way through). Theory: Kanye West wants to marry Beyonce and he thought this would be a chivalrous gesture.
--That Taylor Swift performance, even though there's almost no way it was live, was pretty awesome. Even the song isn't as bad as the other Taylor Swift songs I've heard, although Marisa correctly pointed out that just about everything she does has a creepy "Stand By Your Man" vibe. I loved the subway-ride idea though and between that and following Jay-Z from the car to the stage, I wish the whole night had been transportation-themed performances. They could've had Green Day play on a city bus, or Cobra Starship play on a rocket bound for the sun.
--Speaking of which, when Mr. Cobra Starship and Pete Wentz came out, Marisa was like, "if you only had one bullet..." and I didn't know what to say when I was done laughing. But maybe I could line them up one behind the other and try to shoot them both in the leg?
--Again I ask why it's supposed to be cool or interesting that Lady Gaga is basically a bad parody of Madonna?
--That "exclusive" and "extended" trailer for New Moon was in fact so exclusive that it previously had only played for a select audience of the approximately 850,000 people who saw Sorority Row this weekend. It was so extended that it pushed the total running time of those four or five trailers to nearly nine to ten minutes.
--I love Beyonce and I loved her remixed performance of "Single Ladies," but if you're hyping up a musician/recording artist/whatever, it's probably not best to brag about how she played "over 70 concerts" during the past year. You don't say! More than one concert per week! Amazing!
--I haven't heard a Muse song all the way through in like eight years, but the music press has told me that they've become huge and epic and way way so much super-way crazy bigger than just a dumb man's version of The Bends-era Radiohead. This was not really reflected, though, in their performance of a song that sounded like a plodding version of "Call Me" by Blondie. I can go back to not paying attention to Muse, then? Sounds good.
And with that, bed.
current music: stuff from beatles anthology 3
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