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Monday, May 14th, 2012
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7:29 am - Shadowed
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For about as long as I've been reading film reviews, I've been reading film reviews that talk about how scripts to Tim Burton movies are incoherent, messy, or lackluster. I distinctly remember reading a review that described Batman Returns as "incomprehensible," a statement that struck twelve-year-old me as itself borderline incomprehensible. What was there not to comprehend?
I'm probably particularly aware of this because my generation in general is primed to have opinions on Burton's work: he started making movies just around the time that many of us started watching movies, and became one of the highest-profile directors in Hollywood as many of us were approaching our teenage years, when maybe stories about whimsical outcasts and fanciful alienation will be best received. It's tempting to say that some of the current Burton apathy, then, comes from an inability to experience movies the same way you experience them as an eight-year-old, ten-year-old, thirteen-year-old, etc., but I'd like to give people my age more credit than that; I guess Sweeney Todd and Big Fish (to my mind, his two really exceptional movies from the past decade or so) aren't as universally successful at evoking adult emotions as his earlier movies are at evoking kid-and-adult emotions. And apparently most people my age really dislike his Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (a much better movie of the Dahl book than the seventies version) and Alice in Wonderland. A dude I'm Facebook-friends with sometimes asks people to rank movies from a certain actor or director when the new one is coming out, and noticing that a lot of his Burton respondents ranked Alice dead last, I mentioned that maybe those people weren't necessarily remembering just how disappointing his Planet of the Apes redo is. He replied that "Alice is his most genuinely off-putting, ugly, hateful, vapid, creatively poisonous film," which, you know, lots of adjectives moreso than real explanation or criticism, but OK. Kinda seems to me like one of those Narnia movies done with better effects, better designers, and better actors, but whatevs. Alice definitely doesn't feel personal to me the way that his best movies do. (That said, I love Edward Scissorhands but I do find it weird that everyone seems to think they're being super-objective about a movie they saw at ten or twelve.)
Anyway, this is all to say that after years of having little understanding of what is meant when a Burton-directed script is called a mess, I can say with confidence that the script for Dark Shadows is one. It is short of incomprehensible, because I always understood what was going on and why, but it is crazy sloppy in terms of storytelling, in large part because it assembles a soap opera-sized cast of characters and then doesn't write many scenes that includes more than a few of these characters at a time, which means the narrative is disjointed and sketchy, and seemingly important characters disappear and reappear more or less at random. I have no idea if the movie was this sloppy as written, or if the Pride and Prejudice and Zombies guy just ran out of time, or if there's a 150-minute cut of this movie that gives everyone their due, but whatever happened, yikes. It evokes soap opera storytelling, to be sure, but not in a way that is particularly productive to the film (or even necessarily intentional. It's hard to tell).
That said, the narrative messiness of Dark Shadows doesn't stop it from being enjoyable. You might accuse the movie's tone of similar messiness, but it's one of those weird, jazzy mixtures of styles that really works, at least for me: there's a bit of silly-to-deadpan broad comedy in the reactions of Barnabas Collins (Johnny Depp) emerging in 1972 after a century or so locked in a coffin; there's a bit of gothic-horror melodrama about his tortured soul and his relationship with the witch (Eva Green) who made him a vampire and put him in the ground; and there's a kind of earnest sweetness as he tries to restore his family's fishing business to its former glory. These stories don't work up much momentum (individually or apart) and don't fit together particularly well, but scene by scene it's a lot of fun. As much as the movie may look or sound stereotypically Tim Burton-y (although the trailers really just emphasize one particular aspect of the movie; they're not exactly misleading so much as selling it with the one-third of it that's pitched as comedy), it's odder and more perverse than a lot of his recent family-friendly work.
Similarly, while Burton's movies tend to be recognizably his from a visual standpoint, Dark Shadows doesn't actually look much like, say, Sweeney Todd or Alice in Wonderland or Edward Scissorhands. Of course the set design and gothic imagery is often gorgeous, but what really stands out to me is the character designs -- an odd quality to highlight in a non-animated movie, but there you have it. Eva Green in particular has an eye-popping look; I love the way her bright red convertible matches her lipstick, the way her whole office looks like soft-focus porcelain; the way she affects a kind of forties-style New England-ish accent; the way cracks appear in her facade. The whole movie is a pleasure simply to look at. I know this is considered a problem with Burton in some quarters: yes, they're fun to look at, but where's the emotion, or whatever. But I see a lot of movies, of wildly varying quality, and even some of the good ones are of little to no visual interest. Visual inventiveness and sumptuousness aren't aspects I take for granted: this is why movies exist; this is why I do not home and try to catch up with every great book I've never read. I'm grateful when a movie wants to feed me visual information for complex and eye-filling than "good guy has gun" or "nice girl works at normal office" or "whirring parts click together launching an unidentifiable CG-metal object at another CG-metal object" (this is on my mind as I am seeing Battleship tonight). And even beyond the summer-movie escapist realm, I find the visual richness of Dark Shadows a lot more engaging than something like the suffocating art-direction-as-directing of A Single Man.
In the end, it's a case of a lot of love not quite adding up to more than like, and I do wish Burton and the mashup guy had taken more care to build a screenplay that could've made these characters and design elements sing. But frankly, I'd rather watch Burton screwing around a little than a lot of other directors giving it their all. I don't appreciate Tim Burton because I'm some mall-punk who thinks his movies are super-dark and twisted (I don't think Burton thinks of his movies that way, either; maybe not much of his audience at all thinks this way, although I did like Marisa's recent comment that "loving Tim Burton is one of the most suburban things about me"). I just like movies that reflect their makers' personalities and sensibilities, and bonus points when that personality doesn't belong to, you know, Michael Bay. (For more meta-crit on the tendency to notice something that someone does repeatedly, and then treat that as inherently bad, check out my column from last weekend, which now includes some back-and-forth between me and my editor where he coins the term "reverse auteurism" which I like quite a lot.)
I put together my own Burton ranking before I saw Dark Shadows, which makes it easy to place in his filmography: it's a peculiar comedy and genre tribute, like Mars Attacks! (although, to be fair, not as laugh-out-loud funny as that movie at its best), and more about style and performance than telling a great story, like Sleepy Hollow (although, to be fair, Sleepy Hollow tells a pretty straightforward murder-mystery, and effectively). It's a bit of a goof, but a memorable, vivid goof. I saw it at the real IMAX theater on 68th St, and Burton's 1.85 compositions are a great match for that screen size (and I'm already lusting to review the Blu-Ray in the fall).
To be revised after Frankenweenie, and presumably argued with some more (sample commentary from my friend Marie: "YOU ARE LOSING YOUR MIND, Hassenger. You are a BIG FISH OF LIES."):
1. Batman Returns (1992)
2. Ed Wood (1994)
3. Big Fish (2003)
4. The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)*
5. Beetlejuice (1988)
6. Edward Scissorhands( 1990)
7. Sweeney Todd (2007)**
8. Sleepy Hollow (1999)
9. Pee-Wee's Big Adventure (1985)
10. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005)
11. Mars Attacks! (1996)
12. Dark Shadows (2012)
13. The Corpse Bride (2005)
14. Alice in Wonderland (2010)
15. Batman (1989)***
16. Planet of the Apes (2001)
*I know, not an actual directing credit, but come on. I doubt he had way more to do with Corpse Bride than this movie (no offense, Henry Selick).
**I just rewatched this movie the other night and it is a delight. A chilly, angry, kind of not very delightful delight.
***Seriously, this isn't just pro-Nolan revisionism, because see my #1 choice. You want to talk about a mess of a movie? The 1989 Batman, as wonderful as parts of it are, is one.
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| Friday, May 11th, 2012
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8:07 am - Assembled
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Before The Avengers, which I saw last weekend but am I just getting around to mentioning now, the pleasures of the Marvel-produced movies sometimes seemed incidental, though not insubstantial. Jon Favreau did such a solid journeyman's job shepherding the first Iron Man that his approach -- a combination of strong casting, comics faithfulness, good humor, and not much in the way of directorial flourishes -- became the de facto house style. As plans for an on-screen Marvel Universe grew, the later movies were also saddled with SHIELD plot-advancement baggage, and even at their best began to feel more like parts of an enjoyable whole rather than the more distinct work at the heart of the best X-Men and Spider-Man movies. You had to take idiosyncrasy where you could ferret it out: from the what-script? messiness of Iron Man 2, for example, came a sense of actorly playfulness. Captain America: The First Avenger could've felt like an awful lot of backstory, but it got extra zip from Joe Johnston's old-timey blockbustery classicism. In fact, the only Marvel-produced movie I didn't much like was The Incredible Hulk, OK enough while I was watching it but a comedown from the ambitious Ang Lee version -- and coming off like Marvel Studios firmly planting their flag on the side of the journeymen with Favreau and Louis Leterrier, rather than the more personal likes of Lee, Sam Raimi, or even Bryan Singer (the rare director who found more of a voice working on a comic-book property than he had before). So I was a little surprised, in a good way, when Marvel hired Joss Whedon to make their Avengers movie, supposedly the culmination of their Marvel Universe movies so far. Whedon has a far more distinct writerly voice than anyone credited on a previous Marvel Universe, and less experience on a big-budget action-adventure movie than most, too.
But he does have experience with comics and comics-like narratives, juggling eclectic ensembles, and elevating genre material. Whedon's version of The Avengers does use the series set-up (although I don't imagine it would be particularly hard to follow not having seen the other Marvel Universe movies), but in most cases he goes in and makes improvements to what's come before, as necessary. Really, his handling of almost every single character in this ensemble is pretty great. Let's do, as Tony Stark says, a headcount:
Iron Man: Downey and Favreau really had this character figured out well before doing an Avengers movie was on the table, but Whedon has a lot of fun with him nonetheless, giving him plenty of Downeytastic/Whedontastic zingers. He also gets to have meaningful relationships with both Cap and Banner, which keeps the wiseass shtick from getting stale.
Captain America: In Whedon's run on Astonishing X-Men, you could tell he really respected Cyclops, so often dismissed as a bland straight arrow, as a character, and emphasized his role as a likable, skillful leader. This comes through in his Captain America characterization; he's the superhero in the group most dedicated to actual superheroics, but Whedon makes that squareness and strength part of his appeal. He also gets some of the movie's strongest pure ass-kicking outside of the Hulk.
Hulk: As just about everyone has mentioned, the Hulk finally finds his calling... as a supporting character. While I'd totally go see a whole movie with Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner, I almost hope they don't rethink their initial plan not to try another Hulk solo film (I can only assume, with the massively positive reaction to him in this movie, that it's crossed their mind); Hulk is so well-deployed here and it would be nice to keep him as a treat in future Avengers movies (or other Marvel Universe projects, for that matter). Whedon holds back, letting us get to know Ruffalo's version of Banner before letting him Hulk out -- and when he does, as I've mentioned to so many people by now, he gets probably six or seven of the ten biggest laugh/applause moments in the movie.
Thor: I would've thought that Whedon would be more interested in writing elevated-dialogue gags for Thor than really revitalizing the Hulk, but Thor turns out to be the one who maybe gets the faintest hint of a short shrift. He's present in the movie more because of his relationship with Loki than as a major part of the team dynamic, which is only a shame because Hemsworth the Greater showed in the Thor movie that he's a pretty charming, charismatic guy in this role. Still, he's not bad at all, and used pretty well; he just happens to be doing more physical action stuff (fighting Iron Man, for example) than hilarious dialogue/interaction stuff.
Black Widow: It shouldn't surprise anyone that Whedon shows an affinity for the young-ish ass-kicking girl character in the ensemble, but in a series where even the most interesting female characters are treated as mostly disposable when team-up time comes, I appreciate the work Whedon and Scarlett Johansson do to make Black Widow an actual character with feelings and background. Here and in We Bought a Zoo, Johansson feels more grown-up onscreen than ever before, and honestly, her character in The Avengers is better-written than the one in We Bought a Zoo. I liked her well enough in Iron Man 2; here, she's a nonsuperpowered highlight.
Hawkeye: He has the least to do, but his relationship with Black Widow is well-sketched, especially considering that it doesn't veer into stupid romance territory.
This is all well within the framework of a comic-book action movie. In fact, the movie's first ten or fifteen minutes are so clearly assembled from the comic-movie warehouse, chock full of jargon-y gobbledygook, that I got a little worried (what is it with Disney and lame expository geek-speak leading off their megablockbusters? John Carter had a similarly off-putting, cheesy opening). But once the team starts assembling, the movie is great fun.
It's still recognizably a Marvel Movie; it doesn't have the headlong momentum of a Nolan Batman picture, and the climax of the movie may not be dissimilar to smash-em-up final sections of movies as stupid as Transformers: Dark of the Moon. But here's a crucial difference: it's one of those smash-em-up climaxes done spectacularly well. The interplay between the characters, the way the action is filmed, the geography, the comic relief... it's all very, very satisfying if you enjoy this sort of thing. I understand the weariness with which some critics have approached this orgy of fisticuffs, shooting, and smashing, just as I understand the feeling of revelation that must strike many comics fans as the watch their favorite characters fighting side by side onscreen. I fall somewhere between the two: I'm not going to get excited just because Iron Man is up there with Thor and Captain America all at once, just like in the comics I devoured (although it is pretty cool, even just having seen the movies), but I can't just dismiss an awesome superhero rumble with huge laughs and applause moments as, you know, too loud and stupid.
For me, the only place where the Marvel limitations became clear is just under the movie's surface. As with that last Mission: Impossible movie, you have this extremely well-made, crazy entertaining movie where the basic theme is: hooray, teamwork! I know the subtext in the X-Men or Batman movies is hardly subtle or always surprising, but at least it acknowledges that maybe there could be segments of the audience who might be attuned to real-world themes more interesting than the lessons imparted by your average Saturday morning cartoon. I wonder if Marvel Studios is so dedicated to their films as live-action realizations of holy texts that they reject any suspicious depth out of hand; no subtext could be as important as their actual text!
But I don't go to the movies trolling for subtext, so that's not a huge problem, especially when the movie is as much fun as The Avengers. I just hope they keep Whedon on for the next one, and that a $207 million opening weekend buys him carte blanche for at least a little while.
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| Thursday, May 3rd, 2012
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7:55 am - Pre-summer clean-up
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Hey, the summer movie season starts tomorrow! I'm a little out of sorts because for the first time in a couple of years, I'm not kicking it off with a Friday night at the Ziegfeld. For reasons that I can only speculate on while biting my nails over whether the Ziegfeld will eventually go the way of other one-screen NYC movie houses, the Ziegfeld is not playing The Avengers this weekend, though they did play Thor in this slot last year and Iron Man 2 the year before. They are getting Dark Shadows next weekend, which is awesome; I wonder if they aren't so simpatico with Disney (who is releasing The Avengers despite a weird contractual snag that has the logo of Marvel's former partner Paramount appearing on the film); they didn't do The Muppets over Thanksgiving or Cars 2 last summer, I don't think.
Anyway, The Avengers on Saturday, not at the Ziegfeld. It's not the end of the world (though it does look like another end for midtown Manhattan). Before we enter summer mayhem season, there are a bunch of April titles I had to see: some movies dumped out before the onslaught; some movies that will probably prove much better than seventy to eighty percent of the big-ticket summer items; some movies that were both dumped and superior; and some that were just regular old shelf-clearing (although, in this batch at least, nothing I really hated).
Marisa and I killed some time in Times Square a couple of weekends ago by seeing The Three Stooges, even though I try awfully hard not to spend money on anything that stars anyone from MAD TV on general principle. But, you know, this Three Stooges thing is pretty likable and silly, even for someone like me who never watched Stooges shorts as a kid (not enough cartoons or puppets or time-travel) and as such doesn't have the residual affection for their antics. It's very much a Farrelly Brothers movie, which is to say even when they try to structure it as three 30-minute shorts, they have to shoehorn in an unnecessarily complicated seamy crime subplot -- a shame, because the actual idea of three interconnected 30-minute shorts is a good ones. The performers are all game, and I was surprised and delighted by the old-timey-ness of the Stooges' style, which gives it some added zing beyond eye-pokes and head-smacks. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it (if you want to see a Three Stooges movie, you'll probably like it; if you don't want to see a Three Stooges movie, the best you can hope for is mild surprise by its painlessness), but I can't say I had a bad time watching it.
We went back out to Times Square the next day to see Detention, a bizarre and barely-released high school comedy from the director of Torque (a distinction that carries weight for almost no one but Rob) and the video for "Toxic" (there we go). Torque is a vehicular action movie that simultaneously ripped off and parodied The Fast and the Furious back in 2004, complete with nutty music video-y stylistic flourishes. In Detention, Joseph Kahn pretty much makes the Torque of snarky teenage comedies, which probably adds a level of difficulty (and overall ill-advisedness) as it's a lot trickier to parody a comedy. Kahn winds up bending the material even further, from a more typical slasher plot into stranger time-travel and body-swapping territory, all directed at the same whip-crack music-video pace. For much of the first half-hour, I found this all a bit much: kind of smarmy in its nonstop in-quotes self-awareness. Maybe it just took me awhile to get into the movie's rhythms, but I also really think that the second half of the movie is plain cleverer and funnier than the first, with fewer pop-culture name-checks that only kind of make sense but are supposed to be funny just because someone is checking those names at all, and more brain-knotting time-travel weirdness that is far more up my alley than snarkily-snarking-on-snark or whatever the movie opens with. It's still kind of a mess -- throwaway jokes and major plot points are treated as more or less equally important, which means that the relatively more normal expository stuff is just as hard to follow as the time-travel stuff, if not, actually, even harder. But I admire Detention and its bright-colored weirdness, and might even watch it again someday to make better sense of it.
Also weird if in an exponentially lower key is Richard Linklater's Bernie, with a strong and against-type Jack Black performance. I reviewed it. I also covered The Five-Year Engagement in last week's column. It's not the funniest or all-around best of the Apatow-crew comedies, but it is, for the most part, characteristically smart and funny about things many comedies are neither smart nor funny about. I also recommend The Pirates! Band of Misfits, maybe my favorite Aardman feature so far (review!); it's a shame that the studios couldn't find better slots for either of these mainstream entertainments.
I'm also a little surprised that Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan's Hope didn't get a wider release, at least in NYC; I guess, as a documentary, it'll almost certainly be on Netflix by the end of the year, and that wouldn't be a bad way to see it. It's a lightweight but enjoyable look at fandom centering on Comic-Con-related stories, and shepherded (though not narrated or otherwise augmented) by director Morgan Spurlock (I wouldn't have minded if Spurlock popped up, though; good for him that he doesn't have to center his movies around his personality, but at the same time, cheering the lack of Spurlock in his movie to me reads a bit like "shame on anyone who tries to make documentaries fun!"). The biggest beef I have with this movie is its title. God, documentaries have the worst fucking titles, especially when they're courting some level of mainstream interest. They always approach the cliff's edge of cleverness and then either try to straddle that and another cliff's edge (King of Kong OR A Fistful of Quarters, guys; trying to parody two unrelated movie titles in one is just greedy, not to mention waffly) or just plummet the fuck off. Like, OK, you want to have a con-doc title that mentions Star Wars, even though a good chunk of the movie is about people in comics, sometimes complaining that general geek culture has overshadowed the comics-based purpose of the convention. But fine, Star Wars is an instantly recognizable reference point and a good symbol of geeks going mainstream. Then you try to parody A New Hope because of the wide-eyed hope of fans entering the convention... OK, a little hokey but I'm still with you. But then because of that, you wind up thinking you have to add "Episode IV," even though, uh, it's not a fourth episode of anything, in any sense: it's not the fourth documentary. It's not the fourth Comic-Con. It's not the fourth time going to the Comic-Con for any of the subjects, at least as far as the movie lets us know. I get that they're just trying to parallel the Star Wars title; what you wind up with is a vague title, a colon, and a pointless reference that telegraphs an OK reference that's coming. I know, I know, it's just a title, but seriously, what a clusterfuck.
Speaking of nerds, I'm not sure if it was nerdiness that led a full five of us to go out and see The Raven the night it came out, but that happened. I know five isn't really a crazy number of people, but I'm also pretty sure only The Cabin in the Woods attracted more people to an opening-night showing with me so far this year. And that was for a Whedon-penned movie that got great reviews, as opposed to a movie starring John Cusack as a serial-killer-hunting Edgar Allan Poe that got significantly worse reviews than, say, Safe, the Jason Statham programmer it opened against (and which Marisa and I, at least, also saw. It's pretty much par for the Statham course, except for the weird distinction that unlike recent movies that had Statham opposite Clive Owen, Robert De Niro, Donald Sutherland, Ben Foster, etc., the only other cast member in the entire movie that I recognized was James Hong, although I guess Chris Sarandon is probably technically more famous). Anyway, The Raven: not a great movie, although it's serviceable enough for a gothic serial-killer movie. Mostly it inspired me to write a mini-essay about John Cusack and how his career has some parallels with fellow anti-Brat Packers Nic Cage and Johnny Depp.
Now that it's out of my system, though: summer movies! Last year, I looked back on movie summers of the recent and no-longer-very-recent past and ranked the movies I was most excited about for the coming season. I see no reason not to do this for 2012:
1. The Dark Knight Rises (WB, 7.20)
2. Moonrise Kingdom (Focus, 5.25)
3. The Avengers (Disney, TOMORROW!)
4. Dark Shadows (WB, 5.11)
5. Prometheus (Fox, 6.8)
6. Brave (Disney, 6.22)
7. Neighborhood Watch (Fox, 7.27)/The Campaign (WB, 8/10)/The Dictator (Paramount, 5.16) (cheating to say: at least one of these comedies better be great!)
8. Magic Mike (WB, 6.29)
9. To Rome with Love (Sony, 6.22)
10. Savages (Universal, 7.6)
I'm sorry not to include a Spider-Man movie in a summer top ten, but there it is, huh?
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| Friday, April 20th, 2012
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7:27 am - Next up: TV vs. the Radio
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Allow me to direct you to an essay I hate. James Wolcott, a guy at Vanity Fair, wrote a long article about how TV is way better than movies, you know, empirically. Putting aside the absurdity and hubris of a Vanity Fair writer claiming as his own what is essentially an Entertainment Weekly cover story from ten years ago (seriously: EW did an article about this and it was not recent), there's the stunning arrogance, as pointed out by my L Mag editor Mark on Twitter, of the article's summarized thesis ("James Wolcott: Television Has Officially Surpassed the Movies"). You guys, it's official! This one medium is superior to another! Television now only needs to defeat painting and magazines, and then it will be OFFICIALLY all over!
So naturally, I'd like to take this article apart a bit and talk about what's wrong with it and these general state-of-the-union-compared-to-an-entirely-different-union nonthinkpieces.
First, I have to note that I'm actually a little confused about the online version, if it only represents the first two pages of a longer work or if it really does just trail off -- or maybe it's an intro to a bunch of pieces in their TV issue and therefore needs no conclusion? I'm not sure. But even without an ending, Wolcott does blather on for 2,000 words, which gives me more than enough to examine. Italics will be Wolcott; my comments follow.
After I fell out of love with movies (new movies, that is—classic Hollywood I still adulate),
Ah, a preamble: this isn't a piece about how Citizen Kane is no longer great! It's about how movies today just aren't as good! Just so we're clear! Wolcott wouldn't want you to think he's a philistine. He's just saying that the good old days (ascribed the conveniently vague definition of "classic Hollywood") are better than the bad now.
I realized during my rare visits to the multiplex that what I missed wasn’t the big screen, that Mount Rushmore larger-than-lifeness, but the short vacation in the receptive dark, the comfort and calm of the blinds being lowered on the city outside. But even that respite is too often tattered by the cell-phone compulsives texting and checking their messages, whatever spell the filmmakers attempted to cast spoiled by these mousy little screens flashing their gray pallor.
Were I unkind, I might summarize this as "Wolcott is old and no longer likes to go out to watch movies." But yes, people texting and phoning and chatting through movies is horrible. These people are no more produced by the medium than people who walk too slowly or say stupid things in an art gallery, but no matter: television provides comfort and sanctuary, while movies force you to leave the house. If whether you must leave your house is a major qualifier for evaluating an entire medium, by all means, continue to use this sound argument.
As movie theaters switch from film to digital projection, home flat-screens take up a wall, Blu-Ray discs exhume masterpiece-painting volumes of color and intricate detail from popular releases, and the unholy moviegoing experience cries out for human-pest control, cinema has lost its sanctuary allure and aesthetic edge over television, which as a medium has the evolutionary advantage.
This is sort of a weird classic semi-falsehood at work with many of the stay-at-homers (even cinephiles who would just rather watch the Blu-Ray): that your at-home set-up is anything like a movie theater. Do you know anyone whose home flat-screen takes up a wall? I've seen some pretty big TVs at friends' places, and yet they're generally smalelr than the smallest screen at the Nitehawk. This is a minor point, but definitely worth making, I think, when the home-viewing experience is glorified as this distraction-free temple where you can't fall asleep, check Twitter, pause the movie to get a snack, or answer the phone.
Movies will never die, not as long as a director like Terrence Malick can make every green blade of grass sway like the first dance of creation, but TV is where the action is, the addictions forged, the dream machine operating on all cylinders. As I write this, the Academy Awards are a few days away, with The Artist the odds-on best-picture winner. Does anyone think The Artist is better than Mad Men?
I have no idea if anyone thinks if The Artist is better than Mad Men. Probably most people who have seen both like Mad Men better. Probably also there are some people who dislike Mad Men and therefore prefer The Artist. It's kind of a weird question, not least for the apples-to-oranges factor. For the sake of argument, let's indulge the comparison (hey, some people have strong opinions about apples or oranges being better than other fruit). How were these particular items selected? The Artist is brought up because it was the odds-on favorite to (and did) win the Oscar for Best Picture. Mad Men, presumably, is given as the TV equivalent because it won the Best Drama Emmy. What this really compares, apart from apples and oranges, is the comparative skill of two relatively small voting bodies in choosing something that the author or reader approves of. Can you find a lot of people who prefer The Artist to Mad Men? I really don't know. Can you find a lot of people who prefer Bridesmaids or The Tree of Life or Rise of the Planet of the Apes or The Muppets or Super 8 or Drive or Hugo or The Descendants to Mad Men or Game of Thrones or Breaking Bad or The Good Wife or 30 Rock or Mythbusters? You know what, you probably can.
Even in cine-mad Manhattan, where the admonitory ghost of Susan Sontag haunts theaters by night, the new movie that everybody’s talking about is being talked about by a shrinking number of everybodies. It’s seldom the presiding topic of cocktail chat and intellectual quarrel, as it was when critic Pauline Kael led the wagon train. (Her successors at The New Yorker, David Denby and Anthony Lane, might as well be tinkling the piano in the hotel lobby for all the commotion they create.) Movies divide and stratify; television, like sports, is the democratic includer.
Oh, Jesus. This is going to be one of those things where a Vanity Fair writer namechecking Sontag and Kael will also prove his common-people bona fides by talking about how real people like TV -- just like sports! That feels a bit like a, what's that sports word, ah yes, a Hail Mary, when you begin your paragraph with an unscientific pronouncement (lacking only the designation "officially") that movies are "seldom" talked about at cocktail parties.
Mention Breaking Bad, Madonna’s Super Bowl halftime Cleopatra-a-go-go procession, Abby Lee Miller’s latest volcanic diatribe on Dance Moms, or Downton Abbey and all the birdies start to pipe up, except for the one pill present (there’s always at least one), who takes pride in declaiming that he or she never watches television—they only listen to NPR.
Dance Moms: it's what everyone's watching! Officially, far more people watch Dance Moms than have even heard of Bridesmaids! Note also that people who don't watch TV are a pill. Not like people who take pleasure in bragging about how little they care about going to the movies.
A sophisticated sensation such as public television’s creamy soap Downton Abbey (Upstairs Downstairs with fancier airs and more elbow room) corrals an audience and achieves a critical mass that explodes and expands beyond its actual viewership, the series’s cast, costumes, and signature strokes … inspiring tributaries of parodies, homages, fan fiction, fashion shoots, and tweedy commentary.
TV is good because people really, really like it! This is some New York magazine-covering-Gossip Girl-level analysis here. If only people really, really liked movies or books!
By contrast: for those of us who have fallen out of romance with movies, its franchise blockbusters seem to be leeching off the legacy of pop culture and cinema history, squandering the inheritance with endless superhero sequels and video-game emulations that digitize action stars into avatars and motion-capture figures, a mutant species with an emotive range running strictly in shades of bold.
The most popular shows on television right now are American Idol, Dancing with the Stars, NCIS, Criminal Minds, NCIS: Los Angeles, and Two and a Half Men -- you know, as long as we're talking about how the fairest representation of a medium is its most popular mass-appeal product (you know, since Wolcott is such a populist).
And those films that aren’t aiming for an opening-weekend monster kill seem to dwell solely within a realm of discourse dominated by film bloggers and Twitter twitchers, these configurations of loyalists and lost-causers adopting a film that they fell for at some festival and cradling it like a football as they chug downfield in a deserted stadium.
Hey, sports! Sports invoked to try to make anyone who likes movies sound kind of precious and twitchy and weird, but whatever! We're just supposed to be impressed by Wolcott's vast knowledge of sports. Movies are so lame they're like a football game that nobody watches! Who could even think of that? Everyone watches football! And also HBO! They are basically the same!
This is also a strange comparison because it seems to assume that every possible TV show is available for everyone and anyone who wants to watch it, regardless of what cable package they have, whether or not they subscribe to HBO or Netflix or whatever else, and how available their Internet streaming options are.
Margaret, Bellflower, Martha Marcy May Marlene, The Future, Shame, Take Shelter—these are quality titles (so I assume, I haven’t seen most of them, I shall Netflix them in the fullness of time) that become objects of obsession for a few but float in limbo for those not on screening or “screener” lists.
It's a shame that no one is allowed to see any of these movies in any form: weeks-long theatrical engagements in big cities; DVDs; television airings. Actually, I would prefer to believe that, rather than listen to someone brag about not bothering to see movies he assumes are good but doesn't care enough to watch.
The controversial, heavily anticipated spooker We Need to Talk About Kevin fizzed out at the box office from too much foreplay; by the time civilians got to see it, it had already been pre-gnawed to death in the press and online. Arty entries may accrue a cult status over time that collects more disciples into the fold, but they lose the catalytic moment to set the culture humming.
And this, in any medium, is what truly matters (except when we're talking about watching The Wire five years later, in which case it is evidence of how revolutionary and lasting television is; see next paragraph for totally cogent explanation of this).
Whereas those who missed out on what all the initial fuss was about with Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones (it and Spartacus spearheading premium cable’s brawny-buxom pagan revival), and Dexter are able to catch up with past seasons on DVD—an immersion course of binge viewing—and bring themselves up to speed in time for the next season’s debut, fully conversant with the workings of Walt’s woefully understaffed meth lab, say, or the latest trend lines in zombie migration. And those who missed out completely on The Wire can get hold of the boxed set and ingest the entire drug saga, boring all their friends with revelations about plot twists that everyone else marveled at five years ago.
So TV is superior, because it can also be watched on DVD. Unlike movies, which, uh, hey, isn't it fun watching a whole season of a show on DVD or Netflix?!
I mean, yes, it absolutely is. I just watched Terriers. It was so fucking good, you guys, and I felt remorse for not watching it when it was on, and I wish there were four more seasons of it instead of just the one. I don't really see what this has to do with the inherent superiority or vast evolution of television as a medium. It's interesting and fun and important, but I don't understand how this makes it better (maybe because arguing about what media are better makes absolutely no fucking sense, but more on that later).
The characters in a thick-tapestried, treachery-strewn series such as The Wire acquire dimensions, depths, personal flaws, moral failings, and discordant quirks that seem integral and variable, not pinned on like prom corsages. They’re given enough time to sit and stew, to mull over the next move, a luxury seldom extended to movie characters (with a few notable exceptions—Brad Pitt’s Billy Beane in Moneyball, for one). These beats of downtime are how TV protagonists and those in their orbit take a novelistic hold on viewers, each story arc unveiling another aspect of their personality without extinguishing the inner shadow of a Don Draper, the ruthless ingenuity of Walt in Breaking Bad. The slowly etched outlines of psychological terrain are what endow ambiguous heroes with their own 3-D quality, a by-product of excellent scriptwriting that doesn’t feel the compulsion to connect every ridiculous dot. Actors, in turn, don’t have to serve as pointers, message carriers.
On its own, this is a fine point. That is definitely an advantage of television narrative: writers have more time to tell their stories, actors have more time to develop their characters, and there can be a novelistic immersion into a place, time, and ensemble (at least for a certain type of show; it should be noted that despite the cursory faux-populist references to Dance Moms, Wolcott is essentially referring to a handful of top-tier dramas from the past five years that put together air about as many hours per calendar year as a cycle of American Idol).
Yet this is where the more fundamental pointlessness of this argument also comes through. I object to many of Wolcott's points on the grounds of stupidity, smugness, inaccuracy, etc. But more importantly, I can't see the difference between television and movies as an argument of pure quality. There are certain things TV is better-suited to accomplish; there are other things that movies are better-suited to accomplish.
If I wanted to make the equally pointless "pro-movie" version of this argument, I could talk about the individuality you can see in some great filmmakers, the sense that their personality and obsessions are all over their work, or the stylistic flourishes I so rarely see on television, even as the average TV drama (and even comedy) has become far more cinematic than the average programming from ten or twenty years ago. There are rarely amazing images or shots in even some of the best television shows, because ultimately they're much more about storytelling. But all media is not about storytelling and narrative, or at very least not multi-character storytelling and long-form narrative. I don't always get the sense that even the most dedicated showrunners have a particular obsessive worldview or style so much as themes and storytelling tropes that interest them. There's nothing wrong with that, of course; a lot of these guys and girls are brilliant at their jobs. And there are certainly stylistic voices coming from TV: Joss Whedon or Aaron Sorkin, no matter what you think of them, have very particular styles -- although both are rooted more in their writing than visual style (or at least, the visual style of their shows can't always be attributed to their sensibility so much as directors finding signature ways of adapting to their detailed scripts). Film can have a speed, fluidity, and economy of visual storytelling that just isn't always necessary or even correct for a great TV show.
But that wouldn't be a real argument about why movies are better than TV; it would be an argument why I generally prefer them. Preferences are fine. But preferences are not really astute criticism. Preferences aren't really an argument, because they don't boil down to much beyond: but I prefer this. I don't mean it's all just, like, your opinion, man, so none of it matters. I frequently state my opinion with absolute certainty, trusting people to understand my feelings without adding "in my humble opinion" to anything. But to reduce something as vastly different as the medium of television versus the medium of film and reduce it to an argument that one is much better isn't just foolhardy; it's vaguely insane.
It's also counterproductive if your goal is to argue for how amazing television is. If you're arguing that TV and movies are basically the same except TV is just a way better version, that shortchanges a lot that's interesting and challenging about television as a medium. I might make an analogy between short stories and novels, although in some ways I'd say short stories and novels are way more closely related than film and television. But in any case, if you want to make the case for TV, don't think of it as Movies 2.0 or even Movies Plus Novels. Just think of it as its own medium that may have superficial production resemblances to film but doesn't really go about its business the same way at all.
Then the article goes into a bit about how TV found bigger and better roles for underappreciated actors like Steve Buscemi and Gretchen Mol, to name two from Boardwalk Empire. I'm not sure how that squares Buscemi being great in Ghost World and Reservoir Dogs and Trees Lounge and Mol not really having that huge of a role on Boardwalk, but, again, for the sake of argument, say that their work on Boardwalk will be unequaled in either career. I'm not sure how that reflects poorly on movies. I agree that some people really find their potential on TV. Sarah Michelle Gellar would probably not come across as a very good actress in movies. But given time to really work with her character on Buffy, she was often surprisingly terrific – almost as if movie acting and TV acting are markedly different in a lot of ways. Hey, speaking of actresses...
It’s the contemporary woman that movies don’t know what to do with, other than bathe her in a bridal glow in romantic comedies where both the romance and the comedy are artificial sweeteners. (And it’s not even a sumptuous bridal glow. The flight attendants on ABC’s Pan Am are more flatteringly lit, framed, and costumed than the female stars of most movies, whose tensely toned emaciation cries out for a cookie.) To trace the arc of Reese Witherspoon from Legally Blonde to This Means War is a depressing business, and the overpraise for Bridesmaids—a lumpily paced, indifferently shot, distended exercise with funny scenes fending off plotty inertia—reflected a craving for something more real and bumptious from the rom-com formula.
First of all, I may have missed the episodes of Pan Am that weren't about skinny girls. I like Christina Ricci a lot, but where was she more full-figured and less in need of a cookie? In Buffalo 66 and The Opposite of Sex, or on TV in Pan Am, a solid twenty or thirty pounds lighter? And look, the girls on Pan Am look great for the most part, and I do hate how crummy-looking most studio rom-coms look. But talking about the amazing, glamorous movie-star treatment Pan Am provides sounds less like a sharp analysis of the aesthetic differences between movies and TV and more like someone who watches a few movies and a lot of TV.
Second, I'm not sure what is meant by "tracing the arc" of Reese Witherspoon from Legally Blonde to This Means War. I guess the idea is that of diminishing returns, after a great and popular success (so this article may or may not be assuming that Legally Blonde is a really good movie? It's hard to tell. But just FYI, it's not), or maybe that there hasn't been much of an arc: that ten years later, Witherspoon is still doing junky rom-coms. OK, sure. I mean, that "arc" does include her winning an Oscar in between junky rom-coms, but let's assume Wolcott doesn't much like Walk the Line either (fine by me; it's an OK movie, not a great one). Wouldn't it make more sense to trace her arc, then, from Election to This Means War? Does he not bring up Election because it has the disadvantage of being really fucking great and therefore unuseful in this article that fails to mention specific movies the author particularly likes apart from non-answer "classic Hollywood" and one comedy that gets mentioned below?
Third, Bridesmaids, which I apparently was foolish to bring up earlier as a high-point of comparison for movies, which Wolcott wishes was more stylish even though, if anything, it looks like any number of TV shows as directed by Paul Feig, mostly a TV guy. But its digressions from standard rom-com formula are dismissed as too little too late, and, anyway, "lumpily paced" and "distended," not because Feig doesn't know how to direct comedy (he absolutely does) but because... well, I'm not sure. Because it's two hours instead of a trim eighty-nine minutes? Because it doesn't have easily outlined act breaks? If anything, a dislike of Bridesmaids (which I would fault, if only slightly, for not having enough time to explore all of the interesting and funny characters it creates) might provide generous ammunition for the idea that the values of television can't just be applied to movies to make them better.
And, for the young and the listless, the quartet of twentysomethings scraping by in the upcoming HBO series Girls. An attempt to create a rookie division in the Sex and the City genre (signaled by a Sex and the City poster in the premiere episode), Girls doesn’t cater to the shiny pretty richy-bitchy stick-figure expectations of a CW audience bred on Gossip Girl and the rebooted 90210; it’s moored to the pokier manner and metabolism of its writer-director-star, Lena Dunham, whose low-budget, tightly enclosed, first-personal debut film, Tiny Furniture, made a critical splash that helped get her profiled in The New Yorker, which means we’re stuck with her.
Just to summarize: in this article about how TV is vastly and "officially" superior to movies, Girls (which I really like so far) is praised for not resembling two current TV shows that are on the air right now and as such presumably count as "television," but for hewing closer to a recent independent film which reached a far smaller audience than almost all of the indies Wolcott cheerily dismissed sight unseen as "probably good" curios he'd catch up with eventually on Netflix.
In fact, anyone looking for comedy should just nest at home, because Hollywood comedy has become a plague, a blight, and an affront to humanity. The gross-out element in film comedy (puke, poop, sperm, breast milk—any bodily fluid with projectile possibilities) has gotten so prevalent and predictable that it’s as if filmmakers had their heads diapered. […] Feature-length film comedy is harder to pull off than the episodic sitcom—it doesn’t have the same factory machinery up and running, teams of writers putting familiar characters through permutations—but that doesn’t explain the widening quality gap that makes movie humor look like a genetic defective. (Check out Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star if you doubt my word.)
You know what does actually explain the "widening quality gap" referred to here? Picking Bucky Larson, a consensus choice as one of the very worst movies of last year (which I'm supposed to assume Wolcott has seen despite skipping Take Shelter, The Future, Martha Marcy May Marlene, etc.), and perhaps one of the worst comedies of the past five or ten, as an example of Hollywood comedies, and comparing it not even to the likes of Two and a Half Men or 2 Broke Girls (which in all likelihood would trounce it anyway!) but to a highlights-only version of TV comedy as a whole that refers mainly to the most acclaimed half-hour comedies on the air (and, OK, also The Big Bang Theory, which is a different sort of red flag: if you're lumping The Big Bang Theory in with 30 Rock, maybe you just have a soft spot for TV comfort food). This is a classic move when pitting movies and TV against each other: take something that represents the worst or at very least the mediocrity of movies and throw it against some of the strongest stuff on TV. Maybe there are fierce movie partisans somewhere writing articles about how movies trump TV because There Will Be Blood is better than Jersey Shore, and if there are, hey, I'm sorry, that's a stupid comparison. But I don't know; I see a lot more going the other way around, ignoring the vastness of TV, and how much crap it must therefore include, without affording the same considerations to film.
And look, I also find it frustrating that I can go see a Steve Carell movie that isn't as funny as three episodes of The Office, or a Tina Fey movie that isn't as funny as three episodes of 30 Rock. But he's right: movie comedy is hard, and TV comedy is having a great couple of years. But weirdly, the fact that I currently watch seven or eight half-hour comedy programs that I like-to-love doesn't make me more impatient with a lack of great movie comedies any more than Star Wars makes me mad that there isn't a big-budget sci-fi-fantasy show on TV that measures up to it.
There’s more imaginative attack, ensemble mesh, unmuzzled personality, and exuberant id in Arrested Development (rerunning on IFC, with talk of a TV revival and a film to follow), It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Curb Your Enthusiasm, 30 Rock, Modern Family, The Office, Community, Parks and Recreation, The Big Bang Theory (Jim Parsons’s Sheldon: the Niles Crane of nerd-dom), the cellular regeneration that is The Simpsons, and the crazed rapport between late-night host Craig Ferguson and his gay robot sidekick, Geoff, than in almost any recent Hollywood comedy I’ve seen, apart from Horrible Bosses, which has the makings of a reprobate classic.
Again, I'm questioning just how many movies Wolcott has seen if he's holding up Horrible Bosses as an instant classic. If that's the bar, last summer I laughed just as much or more during Submarine, The Trip, Bad Teacher, Bridesmaids, and 30 Minutes or Less.
Its three male leads all came from TV: Jason Bateman (Arrested Development), Jason Sudeikis (Saturday Night Live), and Charlie Day (It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia), which only reinforces whatever point I’m trying to make. TV also found the perfect fairy jar for Zooey Deschanel (the Fox sitcom New Girl), providing a role model for a new generation of Tinker Bells, something even a manly man like me can appreciate.
That can't be the end of the article, right? Surely there's additional pointless scorekeeping to be made, on the order of Buscemi being a film guy whose potential was squandered until he did TV, but Bateman, Sudeikis, and Day being TV guys who were generous enough to spread their talents into decrepit, floundering film?
I know I might seem kind of bitter and bent out of shape over a silly Vanity Fair essay. But honestly, these pieces turn up more or less annually now, and it's a ridiculous argument to have. If you want to write about how TV is eclipsing film as a watercooler/cocktail party medium or whatever, I mean, that's still pretty fucking difficult to quantify, but sure, you can probably make that argument (not least because sitting at your computer tweeting about a show you're watching isn't considered rude the way doing that through a new movie obviously is). You could also make the argument that this transition actually happened forty years ago (hence that semi-outdated "watercooler" language) but that a lot of self-satisfied self-styled cultural experts want to pretend now everyone is watching this newfangled TV thing because of The Wire. And sure, even if it sometimes comes from snobbery, it's interesting to consider the cultural implications of those changes in different media. But maybe in doing so, we could refrain from the need to declare an "official" winner.
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| Thursday, April 19th, 2012
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6:23 pm - Better than any song, better than x's and o's in the subject line
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Going to the Bell House last night, I accepted that the Eleanor Friedberger/Hospitality show might be pretty similar to the Wild Flag/Eleanor Friedberger/Hospitality show I saw last fall, just minus Wild Flag at the end. But there were some differences besides cheaper ticket and different venue.
For example, I know Hospitality's songs now. I liked them when I saw them as an opener in the fall, but they mentioned their record wasn't out until January, so I forgot about them for awhile. I did remember to pick up the album when it came out. The record store clerk (they exist!) told me he had already played it twice in a row that day. I told him I was buying the album because I saw them open for Wild Flag. "Is the singer cute?" he asked me. "She sounds like she would be cute." Then he got embarrassed for asking. I told him it was OK and yeah, from what I remembered, she was cute.
But I actually didn't remember much about what any of the band looked like. They're all cute in an unobtrusive, presentable sort of way. They're not exactly an electrifying stage presence, and the singer's delicate, slightly peculiar vocals sometimes get lost in the sound mix, but they are looser and a little noisier on stage. They played almost all of the album, which is really solid, plus two songs ("Monkey" and "Drift") that I don't know.
Don't you know:
Sleepover
The Birthday
The Right of Profession
Friends of Friends
Liberal Arts
Drift
Eighth Avenue
Argonauts
Betty Wang
Monkey
All Day Today
Eleanor Friedberger used her headlining gig not to play radically different songs -- she still only has the one solo album, and she doesn't seem to do Fiery Furnaces songs at these shows, although it seems from some online research that she made an exception out in Australia -- but to stretch out and, say, turn opening song "My Mistakes" into a seven-minute number with a super-extended intro (although: I am getting old and my memory fails me; maybe it was that long last time. I don't think so, though). The sped-up "My Mistakes" actually seemed to switch tempos with a slightly slowed-down "I Won't Fall Apart on You Tonight" (the other contender for most poppy song on Last Summer). Just as her solo songs go down easier than a large chunk of the Fiery Furnaces discography, her penchant for re-arranging the songs live is less radical but probably more enjoyable overall (it's also a smaller range of material in terms of style, but that's fine).
But an unexpected highlight of the set was getting to hear a bunch of new songs, which made up almost half of her 70 minutes on stage. She's ostensibly still touring Last Summer, but the show played more like a between-albums set, with a lot of new material getting tested out right before going in the studio to record. I hope that's the case, anyway, because I'm ready to learn "Stare at the Sun" and "That Was When I Knew" properly, not just from glimpses at shows.
I don't think I have the setlist exactly right, especially with the high concentration of new songs that don't always have reliable names; I'm not as good as Marisa at memorizing a line or two to look up later.
My Mistakes
I Don't Want to Bother You
Heaven
I'll Never Be Happy Again
Roosevelt Island
Glitter Gold Year
Stare at the Sun
Early Earthquake
There Are Other Boys Too
Scenes from Bensonhurst
Inn of the Seventh Ray
That Was When I Knew (I Was Wrong)
I Won't Fall Apart on You Tonight
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Echo of Your Encore
More of the Same
Then I stole a poster and came home.
Now that the April run is over, I only have tickets to one more show (Los Campesinos! in June). So far the Central Park and Prospect Park outdoor show line-ups are a little underwhelming; lots of bands I'd see if they were playing together, but not for $40 each. It might just be a light summer for shows, considering how odds-and-sods the records coming out are. Like for example, the big day for albums I'll probably buy is May 15th, where we get new releases from Best Coast, Garbage, and Tenacious D. I like all of those bands and I still admit that's pretty mangy, and, again, get those bands on a triple bill and I'll pay $40-50, but separately, I'm not so sure. However, I could still be convinced that day two of this might be a good idea.
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| Tuesday, April 17th, 2012
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7:57 am - Seven movies
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I've written before about how reviewing movies more for other outlets makes me pay less attention to them, however briefly, on the ol' LJ (see previous five posts: all about music), but I only just recently realized just how few 2012 movies I saw but haven't formally reviewed this year: ten. Three of which came out in the past few weeks. So while I might've been able to write an okay review of Wrath of the Titans right after I saw it with Marisa, Nathaniel, and Dave -- like literally right after, if I sat down in the Kips Bay lobby by the windows and scribbled something out -- I don't find myself with much to say about it weeks later even without the parameters of an actual piece on it. It's one of those sequels that is probably better than the original in a lot of ways... that are almost too technical and minor, even added together, to make the actual experience of watching it any better. The characterization and story of Wrath probably makes more sense than those aspects of the 2010 Clash of the Titans, but I can't really say I had more fun watching it. There are some cool creatures and battles and stuff, but it's also a bit more serious-minded in the first movie, and I don't know, I know the whole deal with fantasy and sci-fi is that as a nerd I'm supposed to want all of it to be taken extremely seriously, but I'm not so sure that Wrath of the Titans was really crying out for such a treatment.
While I was busy not writing about Wrath of the Titans in any way, I did write pieces on:
Mirror Mirror (here), the new movie from Tarsem Singh. I feel like my appreciation for Tarsem stems from my disappointment in Alex Proyas movies. Proyas made The Crow and Dark City, which I love (especially the latter), which made the disappointment of Garage Days (likable but inconsequential), I, Robot (visually kind of cool, but ultimately a waste of time/resources), and Knowing (which I like more than most people but is no Dark City). Tarsem has a similar signature -- distinctive fantastical visuals -- but maybe because he started with The Cell, and because I saw what happened to Proyas in the studio system, everything since his first movie has been a nice surprise. The Fall is his only really exceptional film, but after the huge gaps in his filmography, a movie as silly as Immortals doesn't really bother me, and a movie as silly as Mirror Mirror actually qualifies as a minor delight. It's actually probably his second-best movie ever!
Dark Tide (here), proof that Nicolas Cage does not have the monopoly on starring in thrillers that go almost directly to DVD after inauspicious theatrical runs. Dark Tide is even worse than most of Cage's worst because, among other reasons, Halle Berry is not Nicolas Cage. Watch for the DVD coming this month! And run away from it!
American Reunion (review), which you may enjoy if you graduated high school around 1999? Or don't mind hanging out with the guys from the American Pie series, who, with the passage of time, seem more and more likely to be actually pretty toolish. Strangely, it's Stifler, the Fonzie of the series, who takes on perhaps an inch or two more depth than the rest (and, anyway, is still the funniest one).
Damsels in Distress (here), which I mostly loved and have already seen twice: with Ben and Lorraina and Marisa opening weekend, then again with my sister a few days later. Marisa and I have just caught up with Whit Stillman's filmography, and it's probably best that it happened now, rather than a time when we'd have to wait five or six or ten years for his next movie (although I assume that next decade-plus wait has already begun). We watched Metropolitan and Barcelona in quick succession last fall, and then we went to a BAM screening of Last Days of Disco (I had seen it on VHS way back in '98 or '99, but it's a movie, like the Stillmanish and Eigeman-starring Kicking and Screaming, that developed more resonance with me after college and beyond) with fellow Stillman aficionados Ben and Lorraina. Having seen all four movies, I can't choose a favorite (though, okay: maybe Disco). Damsels in Distress definitely stands apart from the other three; if you wanted to call them a trilogy and this one a strange, recognizably Stillman-y yet very different riff on his pet ideas and concerns, that would make sense. But it's no less delightful than the rest.
Then this weekend, two more I didn't review formally, and a study in contrasts. The Cabin in the Woods, which I'm actually happy to not write about in detail as the gymnastics required to avoid spoiling it would be exhausting, is the rare horror movie -- the rare genre movie, for that matter, or the rare movie in general -- that actually capitalizes on its best ideas and goes further, weirder, and funnier than you're hoping or expecting. It's also not especially scary; creepy in parts, yes, and potentially disturbing, but not really classically scary or suspenseful. It is, however, hilarious and awesome. I can't imagine it holding quite as much delight a second time around (although I guess it would be fun to see other people experience it a first time), but I wouldn't hold that it against it, as I had enough fun with one viewing of Cabin in the Woods to outstrip most of the horror movies I've seen in the past two or three years. So I'll say what all of the other geeks said: don't read about it; just go see it; it's wonderful. Of course, I've heard audiences as a whole aren't liking it (a "C" grade CinemaScore, a system where anything below a "B+" is considered middling or worse). This is why we can't have nice things, audiences.
Lockout, meanwhile, is exactly the kind of lazy genre movie that makes my heart sink. I was all about a Luc Besson-produced/co-written ("from an original idea by Luc Besson" says the credits, twice) thriller about Guy Pearce pulling an Escape from New York on a SPACE PRISON, for Christ's sake, but in non-classic fashion, the movie makes stunningly little use of the seemingly fool-proof SPACE PRISON concept. The deal is that there's this SPACE PRISON where the worst and the worst are sent and put into a kind of hypersleep, making it a supposedly more humane and easier to manage prison where no one gets maimed, assaulted, raped, etc. But when the president's daughter (Maggie Grace) goes to investigate conditions there, there's an unexpected breakout (naturally), the inmates take over the asylum, and only Guy Pearce (CIA guy, convicted of a crime he didn't commit, etc.) can go in and get the daughter. Sounds like Taken in space minus the xenophobia. Sounds fucking awesome.
But isn't! It isn't! So these crazy prisoners break out and have their run of a giant space station, and here's the breakdown: about eight of them mill around a control room, and then several hundred more seem to be milling around in another room (which looks weirdly similar to a prison mess hall). You'd think this movie would be about Guy Pearce and Maggie Grace fighting their way through an angry, scary mob of psychopaths who wreak havoc on a delicate spaceship, but it's pretty much the same ducts and catwalks you'd see in any other generic prison thriller, and the SPACE part of SPACE PRISON only asserts itself about once every twenty minutes until the very end of the climax. Oxygen and food shortages on a prison not designed to hold hundreds of not-hypersleeping people; breaking in and sneaking out of a spaceship by someone who isn't a trained astronaut; considering the lives of other hostages besides the president's daughter; managing the demands of crazy prisoners who have just taken over a space station...none of these complications really come into play (or they do come into play only to be summarily dismissed by the movie at its convenience). That wouldn't be such a problem if the movie kicked ass, but it doesn't. Guy Pearce obviously isn't a guy where you can build an entire action scene around his physicality, so instead of being a hardcore action hero, they concentrate on him spouting detached wisecracks with about a fifteen percent success rate; mostly, they sound like they were written by someone with a pretty poor grasp of Sarcasm in English (you know, like the banter in The Expendables) (just kidding; not that bad). The movie is plenty violent, but there's scarcely a single memorable fight or shoot-out in the whole thing.
Look, I'm not too good for a Luc Besson SPACE PRISON movie. In fact, I am, if not the direct target audience (not being a male aged 13 to 22), certainly part of the fanbase that will go see just about anything with spaceships. If I can't find much to enjoy about your movie, if my expectations throughout the running time go from "maybe it'll be as good as a Transporter" to "maybe it'll be as good as Colombiana" to "maybe it'll be as good as Taken," then you've got severe awesomeness deficiency. Lockout isn't the same genre as Cabin in the Woods, but in a way, it's the kind of lazy B-movie Cabin is going up against.
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| Wednesday, April 11th, 2012
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8:03 am - Is this the way they say the future's meant to feel?
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Last night I went to see the band Pulp at Radio City Music Hall with Marisa, Meg, and Briana. One thing all four of us have in common: I don't think any of us were really listening to Pulp before 1998, the year they played their last show in NYC. That was the year This is Hardcore came out, and I remember I had a burned copy from Chris or Jeff when that was still kind of a novel experience. I think I bought Different Class my freshman year of college, or maybe the summer before. My roommates found "F.E.E.L.I.N.G. C.A.L.L.E.D. L.O.V.E." unsettling, though I recall Andrew being amused by "Disco 2000," mostly the way it would come on around when he'd be calling his high school friend Deborah (Deb-o-rah).
I guess Pulp never came to the U.S. to promote We Love Life, which makes some sense as that record was a fall 2001 in the UK (I remember Marisa brought me back a copy from England that January) that didn't even come out here until the following spring. And then they broke up sometime after that. I never really understood the break-up, though, because the line-up never seemed all that consistent, and Jarvis still played with a couple of his old bandmates on his solo records. Oh well. I listened to the old records. I bought the solo records. I finally bought His 'n Hers. I went to see Jarvis not play Pulp songs.
Now, like everyone else, they're doing a reunion tour, although it sounds like Jarvis may well return to leading Pulp as an actual band putting out new material. Which makes sense, really. It's the ten-year break that I don't really get. But it did make a Pulp gig in 2012 super-exciting.
The idea was that this Different Class "classic" line up would be playing songs from "all eras" of Pulp, which turned out to mean "all eras of Pulp after 1992, particularly the era involving most songs from Different Class." They played everything from that record except "Monday Morning." This is not a bad strategy. Different Class is a great album, one of the best albums ever recorded by man, woman, or child. It might be an even better album than This is Hardcore for containing no duff tracks by which I mean no "Seductive Barry." But I would've gladly traded a "Something Changed" or "Live Bed Show" for something more from This is Hardcore (three songs, if you count "Like a Friend" which the band may not consider a track from that album as it was a bonus song on the U.S. release) or even We Love Life (one song!).
But you can't really complain about seeing a re-formed Pulp doing most of Different Class, can you? They also chose excellent songs from His 'n Hers, including my sister's favorite, "Babies." Jarvis ran around and threw candy into the audience and threw himself to the ground and climbed up almost to the first mezzanine, as Jarvis does. (Parsing the Jarvis theatrics: I remember more high-kicks from the solo show; the Pulp show had more suggestive grinding, and also more too-sexual-to-be-considered-merely-suggestive grinding.) There was a really cool laser-projection effect for "Sorted for E's and Wizz." And good lord, just look at the songs we got to hear:
Do You Remember the First Time?
Misshapes
Razzamatazz
Pencil Skirt
Something Changed
Disco 2000
Sorted for E's and Wizz
F.E.E.L.I.N.G. C.A.L.L.E.D. L.O.V.E.
I Spy
Babies
Underwear
This is Hardcore
Sunrise
Bar Italia
Common People
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Like a Friend
Live Bed Show
Party Hard
It's not just you: that is a weird encore. "Like a Friend" is a good choice, but it was a little deflating to have them circle back and pick up one of only two songs they skipped from Different Class in the main set, and then close everything off with Rob favorite "Party Hard." (Text from Rob after I informed him of this: "That's right! Jarvis agrees with me! Case closed!") Honestly, you could kinda feel the audience letting out a collective "oh... OK" at this point, as they checked their clocks and realized with the strict Radio City curfew, yes, this really would be the last song. Although really, they painted themselves into a corner already by playing all of their big Different Class tracks in the main set. I mean, I would have personally been ecstatic if they closed it all out with "A Little Soul" or "I'm a Man" or "Help the Aged," but I'm not sure if it would've thrown the crowd into a final frenzy.
Another nitpicky setlist note about British bands: I feel like they are far more likely to muffle a song's introduction by, well, introducing it. As I was saying on the G train home, if you have a song as immediately recognizable and fantastic as "Disco 2000," especially one with an immediately recognizable riff, there's no reason to coyly talk about how your next song is a disco number. You just start the fucking riff to "Disco 2000" and everyone will lose it.
On the bright side, I got to hear "Disco 2000" with thousands of ecstatic people, so, you know, that's fine. I've found a buyer for the Wednesday tickets we initially bought (we got better seats for Tuesday); if it turns out this was This is Hardcore night, well, I'll do my best not to complain.
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| Tuesday, April 10th, 2012
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1:56 am - Music week
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Obviously I don't turn to Entertainment Weekly for comprehensive, ultra-informed music coverage. I don't even turn to Rolling Stone for that. I turn to Entertainment Weekly for something that's fun to read at the gym or in bits on the subway without reaching the shame levels of People or Us Weekly (you know, eighth grade reading level instead of fourth grade). Nonetheless, EW's current list of "30 Greatest Artists Right Now" for their "music issue" managed to irritate me far more than I thought I was capable of being irritated by Entertainment Weekly because thinking "this puff piece really isn't very substantial" doesn't irritate me. But even with the meaningless "right now" distinction, vaguely designed as a combination of "hitmaking ability" (far more than with movies or even TV, hit songs and albums are almost always conferred with status as high-quality on some level) "longevity" (describing a list where almost a third of the honorees have made two albums or less), "street cred" (describing a list with multiple American Idol winners) and "above all: talent," this list is something of an embarrassment. Here are some stupid things it says!
On Adele (#1): 21 is "a stunning account of heartbreak, loss, and romantic recovery that appealed to everyone from gurgling toddlers to your Sinatra-loving grandma."
Fantastic metrics here: Adele rules because, for example, she's able to appeal to two demographic groups almost guaranteed to have little to no understanding of or appreciation of pop music of the last sixty years. I mean, that certainly helps her sell records, and good for her, getting people to buy records. I'm not saying some Entertainment Weekly list should be determined by punk-rock cred (which I guess is different from the "street cred" 22-year-old Adele obviously possesses); then again, I'm also not sure what gurgling toddlers the EW crew knows who gurgle for Adele by name.
On Taylor Swift (#2): "a masterful storyteller"
How long is it before we can stop being impressed that Taylor writes these songs herself? Telling someone exactly how you feel in the simplest terms possible is not inherently strong storytelling.
On Katy Perry (#5): "'She's an incredible artist because she's the total package,' says producer Dr. Luke. 'She's a great writer, she has a great vision, she puts on a great live show, and she's got the voice.'"
Ah, OK, I guess if we're referring to Katy Perry as a "writer," we are agreeing to be impressed by Taylor Swift for at least the next ten years. I like how Dr. Luke is totally blown away that the same person can co-write songs, sing them, and also sing them at a live show.
On the Black Keys (#7): "It's rare that one of the coolest bands also ranks among the most popular."
I'm surprised the word "hottie" somehow avoided making its way into this yearbook-worthy description.
On Mumford & Sons (#9): "Rarely has a band whose name sounds like an olden-times barbershop and whose sound is built on defiantly uncommercial genres and instruments been so...accessible." (Ellipses theirs! I'm not eliminating anything.)
This is how Entertainment Weekly has learned to process rock music. "It's rare that lots of people like this, so when someone does, we know it's really exceptional."
On Fun. (#20): "Each member of the trio served time in various nonstarter acts first, lending them a humility and perspective many young stars lack."
Yes, although we've already established that few rock bands break out in any kind of mainstream way, what's really notable about Fun. is the way that not being successful before becoming wildly successful has taught them about life and stuff. Watch your big head, Colin Meloy! The set-the-world-on-fire-burn-brighter-than-the-sun guys are armed with CRAZY humility!
On Bruce Springsteen (#23): ...
Actually, the number tells you plenty. Springsteen is ranked below Coldplay, Carrie Underwood, Kelly Clarkson, and Fun. Among others. God I sound like some classic-rock asshole here. But I'm left with no other recourse!
On Lady Gaga (#24): "WHAT'S NEXT: She's been lying relatively low, but if even half the rumors about the upcoming Born THis Way Ball world tour are true, except a fittingly bombastic true to form."
Huh. I never really considered that an artist with two albums could embark upon a "return to form" (which form?!) simply by mounting a tour for one of those albums.
Bonus Lady Gaga Quote That Sounds Like Every Stupid Thing Lady Gaga Says About Herself: "Once you start to get bigger, people around you don't know how to filter what you began as into something larger. It takes time, and it takes originality. It takes uncertainty and trusting in your gift. That's sort of my biggest achievement, and something that I really perceive as what will keep me around for a long time in the future." Let's strip away the excess verbiage and find what she's actually saying in this quote, which makes up a bulk of her entry's explanation of WHY WE LOVE HER: "Once you start to get bigger, people around you don't know what's going on, and for them to eventually understand, you have to be uncertain and confident, and also wait around. My combination of uncertainty, confidence, and waiting is what I do best, and I will continue to hang out here."
On Beyonce (#26): "As a pop diva, actress, and newly minted power mom, she's a triple threat."
You all know I love Beyonce and would complain that she should be way higher on a list like this. But how in living fuck does her having a baby make her a "triple threat" as an artist or musician?
After the list, EW joins in on the collective pass being given to One Direction (I'm surprised they hedged on giving them a list-spot and merely fawned over them in a profile) in an article that contains this fantastic jumble of contradictions: "Perhaps the biggest thing separating them from the boy bands of yore is that they don't need some Svengali to connect them with their fans. True, two years ago Simon Cowell handpicked 1D's members from a group of hopefuls competing on England's X Factor and turned them into an ad hoc group. But having amassed millions of fans on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, One Direction might be the first boy-band phenomenon created entirely by the Internet."
So, to recap: they don't have some Svengali, except Simon Cowell, and after they were created by Simon Cowell, they were created "entirely" by the Internet. In short: this boy band is different because they have lots of fans!
I know it's just a silly list and Entertainment Weekly is a lightweight magazine, but you also have to figure with #1 Adele on the cover, you don't actually have to cater to pure straight-up populism on the rest of the list to sell magazines. So hey, maybe all of this profoundly bad taste is genuine, at least.
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| Saturday, April 7th, 2012
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1:36 am - Good Friday/Rise Up
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Going to see Bruce Springsteen in concert basically invites a bunch of stuff that my indie-rock brain has been trained to avoid in my show-going whenever possible: It will be at a huge, probably impersonal venue. That venue will not have great sound because few huge venues have great sound, especially once you get up into the 300 section. There will be seats (though I'm relaxing this anti-seat standard as I get older). There will be a bunch of people who are dying to hear some particular hit singles. There will be bros.
But here's the thing about Springsteen, which I guess I'd read before but never experienced before actually going to Madison Square Garden tonight: all of that stuff is basically part of the Springsteen live aesthetic. He makes that part of the show, and I don't think he's doing it grudgingly: he's a proud populist and he's had years of practice giving a big show to a lot of people -- to thousands of people, of all ages and degrees of bro-ness.
Of course, he doesn't have much of a choice. He could, technically, choose to play Roseland or someplace even smaller, either doing five-to-ten-night runs or shows where basically no one could get tickets (or even five-to-ten-night runs to which no one could get tickets), but practically speaking, he's too big to really tour like that. But rather than letting his immense popularity (even almost three decades past Born in the USA, he's probably one of the bigger rock stars out there; even his underperforming records tend to go gold, even in these leaner music-industry years where the biggest-selling album of the decade so far moves half as many copies as Born in the USA) serve as a point of no return in creating a worthwhile rock show, he embraces that mass-appeal challenge and gives it his all. He puts on a really good arena show with a huge band -- at times, as many as fifteen or sixteen people on stage -- and without costume changes or fireworks or other stuff I assume they do to keep people awake at Katy Perry shows. Basically, Bruce Springsteen is Too Big to Fail. But in a good way.
He tears through songs, too, often playing three or four in a row with barely a pause between them. He played for just under three hours tonight, about the longest I've seen a band play apart from the Cure (and no offense, Robert Smith, but Bruce feels a lot more amped for those three hours). Here was the deal:
Badlands
We Take Care of Our Own
Wrecking Ball
Out in the Street
Death to My Hometown
My City of Ruins
Murder Incorporated
Johnny 99
Jack of All Trades
Shackled and Drawn
Lion's Den
Easy Money
Waitin' on a Sunny Day
The Promised Land
Cover Medley: The Way You Do The Things You Do/634-5789
American Skin (41 Shots)
Lonesome Day
The Rising
We Are Alive
Thunder Road
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Rocky Ground
Kitty's Back
Born to Run
Dancing in the Dark
Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out
I can't help but find it weird that he played four songs from The Rising versus none from Magic. I mean, I get it; he obviously considers The Rising more important and/or more popular and/or more related to what he's doing on Wrecking Ball, but the songs on Magic are just so much better. That said, "My City of Ruins" and "The Rising" were both great. I just would've swapped "Waitin' on a Sunny Day" and "Lonesome Day" for two good songs off of Magic. Then again, the crowd seemed really into every song off of The Rising, so what do I know? The crowd also sang along on a bunch of the new tracks -- some of the people around me seemed a little antsy during "Jack of All Trades," but there was big time audience-chorus on "We Take Care of Our Own" and "Wrecking Ball." That's pretty amazing for the type of artist where more than a few people must've been there based on an album (or greatest hits) they bought years ago without picking up anything else more obscure.
Speaking of obscurities: the Rolling Stone press from this tour has repeatedly emphasized that they're going out on the road and playing not just Wrecking Ball material, but songs from The Promise, the Darkness on the Edge of Town outtakes record that came out since the last big tour. The Wrecking Ball material was intact -- eight out of eleven tracks, and pretty much all of the best stuff -- but instead of songs off of The Promise, we got other non-album tracks like "Murder Incorporated" and "Lion's Den." I mean, if you had told me those were Promise songs I probably would've believed it, but it's strange to specifically call out something they don't seem to actually be doing. That's what I get for reading music coverage in Rolling Stone, I guess.
Anyway, quibbles aside, it was great. I get why this guy is revered. He really believes in rock and roll with an unabashed, unembarrassed, showstopping faith. This is his religion. In a good way.
Oh, and people really do that BRUUUUUUUUCE thing. I had to keep reminding myself they weren't boos. Although booing would not have made any sense at any point.
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| Wednesday, April 4th, 2012
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5:51 pm - Bring on that wrecking ball
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When I last wrote a bit about Bruce Springsteen, Working on a Dream had just come out and I'd acquired ten of his then-fifteen all-original studio records, and listened to all of them and gave my early reactions, as well as a ranking of my favorite songs of his so far.
Three years later, I've completed my Springsteen album set, and even sprung for tickets to see him in concert this Friday. He also has a new record out, Wrecking Ball, getting the usual five stars from Rolling Stone, good-not-great notices from most other places. So it seems like a good time to go back to Springsteen's discography and rank it, because I love a good senseless list.
I'm still no kind of Bruce expert. When I decided to listen to all of his albums in order to (simultaneously over-and-under-) prepare for the show, it was definitely the first time I listened to a few of them all the way through, and I've still probably only listened to half of them more than three or four times total. This is all pretty rough and instinctive, not informed by any deep music scholarship (you are totally shocked).
The Albums of Bruce Springsteen Ranked and Graded
1. Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978)
For the top spot, I was torn between "favorite" and "best." I think Darkness on the Edge of Town is more important and therefore "better" than, say, my second-place choice. Generally I try to keep to the principle that you like what you like, and try not to affect a great sense of objectivity about this sort of thing. But Springsteen is so populist, and his run of seventies and early eighties records so strong, that this felt like the right choice for his best. It has moments as anthemic as Born to Run, but with songs as sad as Nebraska. It synthesizes so much of what's interesting and cool about Springsteen: despair in its subject matter, hope in its kick-ass rock and roll. It has an unfair advantage, too, with The Promise, the two-disc collection of Darkness outtakes that I haven't ranked because it's not really a proper album, but it pretty much could be, which contributes to the sense that this was probably Springsteen's most creatively inspired period. He also showed remarkable discipline in getting that wealth of material down to these ten songs -- something that doesn't always happen on his more recent records. (A)
2. Magic (2007)
But this record is probably my favorite. It's a strange choice, I know, coming so far after his peak in either critical adoration or widespread popularity. I know a lot of Springsteen hardcores also regard it as part of an overproduced trilogy with The Rising and Working on a Dream. This is the kind of album that usually becomes my favorite because I heard it first, but it wasn't actually the first Bruce album I heard straight through. Yet it feels like it, because for some reason Magic sounds like more or less my platonic ideal of how Springsteen is supposed to sound (sorry, purists!) -- or at least how he's supposed to sound in his current phase of his career. It doesn't sound quite as connected to Springsteen's past and life's work as some of his earlier records, but for pure enjoyment, it's an easy go-to. Magic also just has a number of great, great songs: "Girls in Their Summer Clothes," for one, as well as "Radio Nowhere," "Living in the Future," "Your Own Worst Enemy"... Springsteen is not always a super-catchy songerwriter but the studio polish of these songs represents some of the grabbiest, sing-alongiest work he's done yet. (A)
3. Nebraska (1982)
This is kind of a hipster cliché, and indeed it was the first Springsteen record I bought, but it is pretty amazing, especially hearing it in chronological context after the spirited, overflowing old-time rock-and-roll of The River. Apparently Springsteen did demos of songs he had written for Nebraska, intending to add the band later, but most of those demos wound up being the album versions. It's just a minimalism fetish that makes this album great, though: it also has some of Springsteen's best lyric-writing, character-sketching, and storytelling. (A)
4. Born to Run (1975)
I don't have much to say about Born to Run that hasn't been said already, so I'll just mention that as far as anthemic, going-for-it Springsteen goes, I prefer this to Born in the USA. I don't usually get reissued albums but I have thought that I bet the remastered version of Born to Run they did for its thirtieth anniversary probably sounds great; some of the older Springsteen records suffer because I'm often ripping an original-release CD from a used bin (so a CD circa 1988 or so) into lower-quality mp3s. I do wonder if that's what makes me prefer Magic to some of his more recognized classics: it just sounds better and richer. (A-)
5. The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle (1973)
You know what's kind of weird? Hardcore Springsteen fans seem to have a very clear idea about which albums of his are "E Street Band" albums and which aren't, even though they are never credited as such. I mean, obviously it's easy to look in the liner notes and see who plays on a given record, and obviously he has some more full-band sounding record and some solo-sounding records... but there are plenty in between, too. And even this one, named after the damn band, is still just credited to "Bruce Springsteen." So even though I'm pretty sure most of my favorites of his are in fact E Street Band-backed records, I do wonder if too much is made of that mystique. Anyway, this album is awesome because while it has some great choruses ("Rosalita" especially), it's a little more sprawling and rambling and hopped-up than some of what came after. It's also got the kind of storytelling you can hear in even the earliest, least fist-pumping Hold Steady songs. (A-)
6. Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ (1973)
An underrated singer-songwriter-y record with hints of Dylan and Billy Joel (or maybe I just generally think of Springsteen as the halfway point between those two). Yeah, for a long time I had no idea Springsteen wrote "Blinded by the Light" (or "Because the Night," for that matter, though his version of that one is only on The Promise). (B+)
7. Born in the USA (1984)
This one is jarring to hear, especially after the starkness of Nebraska; Springsteen comes back to E-Street rock, and suddenly it's super synth-y and polished and slick. I have no objections to big, slick production, but I can see how someone who loved Nebraska would feel a bit put off by this, especially now that some of its production touches sound a bit dated. I understand because sometimes I am that person. But song for song, this is a strong (if less unified and more single-friendly) record. "Darlington County" is probably my favorite, but I like "Working on the Highway" and "I'm Goin' Down" a lot, too. (B+)
8. The River (1980)
Given some time, I wonder if I might prefer this album to some of those I've ranked above it, but it's a little hard to get my arms around it: it's a double album, and a lot of it has a similar updated-fifties-and-sixties style that I find appealing individually but blends together a bit when I listen to the whole thing. (B+)
9. Wrecking Ball (2012)
The new album isn't quite up to Magic, but at its best it's invigorating and energetic. The first half of it is especially strong, from "We Take Care of Our Own" to the stomping "Death to My Hometown." After that, some filler creeps in: "You've Got It," in particular, is a vague throwaway (who are you? And you've got what now?), and "This Depression" doesn't do much for me. But the title track is aces and the album on the whole is one of his best post-heyday albums. (B+)
10. Devils and Dust (2005)
Another Nebraska-ish collection of downbeat folksy songs; it's not as haunting as Nebraska, but a lot of it is very strong. You can hear him playing around with his voice here, making it reedier and lighter -- it has some of his most Dylan-ish singing. The title track is one of my favorite Bruce songs ever. (B)
11. The Rising (2002)
I read somewhere, after the fact, that The Rising got great reviews more on the strength of what people wanted it to be, as Springsteen's post-9/11 album, than what it actually was. I can totally see that. There are some great songs on here, especially "My City of Ruins," written about Asbury Park but transformed into a NYC anthem of sorts following the WTC attacks, and "The Fuse," remixed for the 25th Hour credits, and the title track. But some of it is pretty dopey and slapdash. There is actually a song called "Let's Be Friends." This marks the beginning of his Brendan O'Brien-produced unofficial trilogy; Magic is the only one that doesn't feel pretty noticeably padded out. (B)
12. Tunnel of Love (1987)
While I tend to love Bob Dylan's relationshippy songs and albums even more than his protest-y social-change-oriented songs and albums, Springsteen's more romantic stuff doesn't work as well for me. This isn't a bad record, though. (B)
13. Lucky Town (1992)
This album might even be a touch underrated -- it sounds less eighties-y (by which I mean cheesy) than Tunnel of Love and Born in the USA at their eighties-est, and the first half of it is especially good. If you've covered all of the major Bruce songs, "Better Days" and "Lucky Town" are semi-lost semi-gems. Slight, but decent. (B)
14. Working on a Dream (2009)
I liked this album when I first got it, and I still enjoy some of the songs, but it's fallen a bit in my estimation. Listening to all of Springsteen's albums, I've noticed that the major difference between his strongest period and his work since then is the presence of filler songs. I'm sure he doesn't consider them as such, but his albums from the nineties and beyond tend to have some share of inessential tracks, and Working on a Dream feels rudderless enough that it might be all inessential filler tracks, albeit including some charming ones. The stylistic change-ups are neat, ranging from the bombastic epic "Outlaw Pete" to the short, gentle "Tomorrow Never Knows." But Dream lacks a strong center or point of view; the whole thing is well-produced and often catchy, but feels oddly pointless and time-killing. As a result, it's easy to forget which song is which even after multiple listens; you should probably not have songs called "This Life" and "Life Itself" on the same record. (C+)
15. The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995)
I really want to like it any time Springsteen does his roughly once-a-decade collection of mostly-acoustic Americana-ish songs, and I don't dislike Tom Joad but it doesn't really stick the same way as Nebraska or Dust. (C+)
16. Human Touch (1992)
Released concurrently with Lucky Town, this pretty much is the wan, disappointing album everyone says it is. It's not painful, but I understand why Springsteen shelved the project when he was first working on it. Further sessions led to the Lucky Town songs, which do feel more energized and spontaneous. "57 Channels (And Nothin' On)" is Springsteen complaining about how TV sucks. That's a temporarily-out-of-ideas type of move. (C)
I still don't have the Seeger Sessions record; it's a studio album, but mostly covers, though I've heard almost nothing but good things and eagerly await its appearance in the Permanent Records used section.
Last time I did a big Springsteen post, I did rank his best songs. I suppose I should revise for my current favorites, expanded out to a top twenty:
1. "Girls in Their Summer Clothes" from Magic
2. "Atlantic City" from Nebraska
3. "Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)" from The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle
4. "Devils & Dust" from Devils & Dust
5. "Darkness on the Edge of Town" from Darkness on the Edge of Town
6. "Born to Run" from Born to Run
7. "Radio Nowhere" from Magic
8. "Death to My Hometown" from Wrecking Ball
9. "Thunder Road" from Born to Run
10. "Racing in the Street" from Darkness on the Edge of Town
11. "Darlington County" from Born in the USA
12. "Tenth Avenue Freeze Out" from Born to Run
13. "My City of Ruins" from The Rising
14. "Badlands" from Darkness on the Edge of Town
15. "Streets of Fire" from Darkness on the Edge of Town
16. "Livin' in the Future" from Magic
17. "Growin' Up" from Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ
18. "Independence Day" from The River
19. "The E Street Shuffle" from The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle
20. "Highway Patrolman" from Nebraska
If I hear five of those on Friday, I'll be pretty psyched.
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| Friday, March 30th, 2012
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4:48 pm - Charts at the end of the first quarter
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This again. Even though an embarrassing over-fifty percent of my current Top 40 chart comes from just three bands.
The Top 40 Most-Played Songs on My iTunes Playing Pod Device as of Right Now
1. "Estate Sale Sign" - The Mountain Goats
2. "Canajoharie" - They Might Be Giants
3. "Damn These Vampires" - The Mountain Goats
4. "Old Pine Box" - They Might Be Giants
Here's my current heavy plays in a nutshell: All Eternals Deck, which I haven't taken off my ipod since March, and Join Us, which has been there since its release in July. What do TMG and TMBG have in common, besides initials and some nasal singing and good lyrics? I find it really, really difficult to get people to like them, which is weird because I have no shortage of songs from both of them to go on mixtapes forever, so if you're wondering when I'm going to wise up and stop putting Mountain Goats and/or They Might Be Giants songs on mixtapes for you, the answers are probably sorry and never. I don't know if it's the nasal voices or what, but something about them really sets people off; it's like a goddamned blacklist! It can't just be vocals, can it? The Hold Steady have kind of an abrasive vocal sound that's not for everyone, but it certainly hasn't stopped seven or eight people I know from getting to like them pretty quickly. TMBG's catchiness and humor plus TMG's quietness and lyrical style would, I think, make them easier than the Hold Steady's classic-rock punk thing. I guess I'm just as stubborn about disco-y stuff like Passion Pit or shoegazey stuff like Beach House, and I know plenty of people who like both TMBG and TMG so it shouldn't really matter to me, but once I listen to a song thirty or forty times, I want to make other people listen to it a bunch. Any of those aforementioned fans of either band should weigh in regarding songs they think work as strong gateway tracks (although it's not as if I haven't tried a pretty strong variety).
5. "Where I'm Waking" - Slow Club
6. "Half Drunk" - Slow Club
I love both of these songs just as much or more every time I hear them, to the point where I've started thinking about what it is that makes them work so well. Probably the highlight of "Where I'm Waking" is how the verses are quieter and the chorus louder and more clamorous, which is not unusual in the least, BUT: then, towards the end of the song, when they repeat a verse, it's in the turned-up clamorous style of the chorus, and it's just exhilarating. A simple trick, but a good one. "Half Drunk" just boils down to the vocal melodies and Rebecca's voice, particularly the way she goes high on "I'm just hoping you'll call in the morn-ing" and the between-lines way she repeats "I'm all better now, I'm allbetternow."
7. "I Won't Fall Apart on You Tonight" – Eleanor Friedberger
8. "My Mistakes" – Eleanor Friedberger
Eleanor Friedberger is playing the Bell House, in April, with Hospitality, whose debut album is really good despite not having any songs on this list! Who's in? No one? OK, then.
9. "Can't Keep Johnny Down" – They Might Be Giants
10. "Cloisonne" – They Might Be Giants
I was also trying to figure out why my brother has had trouble getting into post-2000 TMBG songs despite being a MASSIVE fan back in the day and still loving those old songs. Am I just forgiving of the bands I loved as a teenager and therefore unduly excited for their new music? That's part of it, but I don't think it's all: I don't think either "Can't Keep Johnny Down" or "Cloisonne" would sound out of place on TMBG's early records. I wonder if part of it is the emotional component. There are undoubtedly fewer TMBG love songs and break-up songs these days, I imagine due to both Johns being in long marriages (although they also claim to not really write autobiographically, so maybe I'm wrong about that).
11. "Early Earthquake" – Eleanor Friedberger
This song is so beautiful in such an offhand way I can hardly take it (and my heart swells up like a balloon... just kidding, it doesn't do that). "Better than x's and o's in the subject line," dear lord, I wish I wrote anything that great.
12. "The Weekenders" – The Hold Steady
13. "Hello Sadness" – Los Campesinos!
It's really weird to me that I still haven't heard LC! play this song or any of the others from this record live yet. But soon! And practically in Greenpoint, even! The first three songs off of Hello Sadness really are straight up classic This Band. I like the rest, too, but it's weird how I think that happens on their last few albums: they start with a small suite of exactly what any LC! fan would want to hear and then go other ways.
14. "If We're Still Alive" – Slow Club
15. "Romance" – Wild Flag
This almost makes the lack of a Sleater-Kinney reunion for now OK. In related news, this Blur on-and-off thing is driving me a little crazy. They've been making noises about maybe getting Blur back together for a year or two now, in between whatever the fuck Damon needs to noodle around with to convince himself he's a world-music guru and not a fucking songwriter, and this year they're even doing gigs in England and played a new song recently. But then you actually ask Damon about this stuff, and he's dodgy as hell about it before basically saying nah, no plans for an album right now, who knows. I guess I should just start ignoring him until Blur tours the states, and maybe just read the Alex James autobiography Derrick got me for Christmas.
16. "Police Sweater Blood Vow" – The Fiery Furnaces
17. "Judy Is Your Viet Nam" – They Might Be Giants
See, this is the kind of rock genre thing TMBG can make feel effortless, in contrast to the heavy, almost oppressive effort I feel in everything Jonathan Coulton does, even if it's superficially similar. For some reason this also reminds me: should I go see Fountains of Wayne next month? Their last few albums haven't been my favorites, but I realized it's been a solid ten years and three records since I saw them with OK Go.
18. "Owl's Head Park" – Eleanor Friedberger
19. "High Hawk Season" – The Mountain Goats
Two bird songs in a row! Menacing! (If you are scared of birds.)
20. "Two Cousins" – Slow Club
Speaking of the Bell House, my proudest moment of the Slow Club show there was not asking people to be quiet (because it didn't work) or being way nicer about it than I should have (because it still didn't work), but rather stealing a show poster with drawings of Charles and Rebecca on it. It's on our office wall now, next to the Adrian Tomine Weezer poster.
21. "Let Your Hair Hang Down" – They Might Be Giants
22. "Caffeinated Consciousness " – TV on the Radio
Wouldn't this song be great in a trailer? I think it would be great in a trailer. I should keep a list of these things. I would make an excellent trailer music scout, I think.
23. "Codex" – Radiohead
I'm a little surprised that this isn't "The Daily Mail" but I guess King of Limbs has a year on the ipod as an advantage.
24. "Celebration" – They Might Be Giants
25. "You Probably Get That a Lot" – They Might Be Giants
26. "In Fact" – They Might Be Giants
OK, now we're getting to the point where Join Us songs I don't even like that much are on this list. Actually, I do like all of these fine; "Celebration" and "You Probably Get That a Lot" in particular have grown on me a lot. But the point is, I've listened to Join Us a lot.
27. "A More Perfect Union" – Titus Andronicus
28. "We Better Talk This Over" – Bob Dylan
I'm still working, slowly, on my goal of acquiring all of Dylan's original studio albums, even the sucky ones. Street Legal isn't one of the sucky ones, but I love this song from it so much that it sort of overshadows everything else on that record. Also, I'm only a couple of crap eighties albums away from realizing that Dylan goal, and I got all the Springsteen albums over the last few years, so I'm going to need a new scavenger-hunt rocker with a massive back catalog. Neil Young, maybe? That might be sabotaged by the fact that I owned Broken Arrow (the album, not the movie) on cassette and didn't really like it much. And also that I've failed to buy something like the last six or seven new Neil Young albums. I do like Neil Young, though! I swear! Part of me wants to have Trans on hand just to be stupid on purpose.
29. "The Dismemberment Plan Gets Rich!" – The Dismemberment Plan
30. "Birth of Serpents" – The Mountain Goats
31. "Liza Forever Minnelli" – The Mountain Goats
32. "Never Look Back" – Slow Club
33. "Beginners" – Slow Club
34. "You, Earth, or Ash" – Slow Club
35. "Gold Mountain" – Slow Club
Yep, here's most of the rest of Paradise.
36. "Three Might Be Duende" – They Might Be Giants
37. "Countdown" – Beyonce
It took me awhile to figure out that no singles from this album were super commercially successful. The album itself has apparently sold a million and change, which seems pretty good in this deflated-sales era, but the apparent lack of ability to recognize the great singles on this record is depressing, given what an easy time LMFAO had following up their horrible song with another horrible song (or even how pretty much every song from Teenage Dream has charted in a big way). They did a decent job picking diverse, awesome songs to represent the record, too: "Run the World," "Best I Never Had," "Countdown," "Love on Top," and I guess "End of Time" (another unsung awesome song from this record) is coming this month. That's a pretty telling statement about the major-label record-release cycle, by the way, that Beyonce can straight up take off and give birth to a child, take a break from touring, come back, and still be promoting the album that came out last summer.
38. "Ponzi" – The Felice Brothers
39. "Weekend in Western Illinois" – The Mountain Goats
40. "Rider" – Okkervil River
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| Monday, March 26th, 2012
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9:43 pm - Odds
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Not this past weekend but the weekend before, I saw four very different comedies that nonetheless feel like they could've swapped stars, writers, and directors in various permutations. The new film-comedy scene of the mid-aughts has expanded beyond the Stiller/Wilson/Black/Ferrell/Vaughn axis to include just about any mainstream comedian with any aspiration of making something at least pretty good, and the directors who want to help them (and/or work with people who can get their movies released theatrically).
The biggest hit and highest concept I saw over that weekend was 21 Jump Street by a mile; semi-miraculously, it's also the funniest. The directing duo made Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (also funny!), and the pace of Jump Street is similarly antic and cartoony; compared to Jonah Hill's other high-school buddy opus, Superbad, this one is a little more slapdash about its character relationships and story developments. But teaming motormouthy Hill with a dim but mostly sweet Channing Tatum is something of a masterstroke; they're very funny together, as is the supporting cast. This one gets the action-comedy mix just right, which is to say it's far more of a comedy with some larger-scale slapstick danger than an action movie with a few jokes. It's great fun; I'm shocked that the same dude wrote Project X.
21 Jump Street is the kind of hit comedy these guys want early in their careers to establish that they're here to stay. Casa de mi Padre, meanwhile, is the kind of movie you make when you've made a bunch of successful comedies and want to do something for the hell of it. Hence, Will Ferrell, having logged five or six big hits, now stars in a feature-length spoof of telenovelas. A lot of comedies get tagged as being like a Saturday Night Live sketch stretched to feature length, and often that either means "this movie isn't very funny" or "I became bored with laughing at funny stuff after ten minutes." But Casa really does have the feel of an SNL project – specifically, the kind of oddball, sometimes filmed bit they might drop in the last fifteen or twenty minutes of the show. Ferrell, acting entirely in (pretty credible, to my ears!) Spanish, plays it semi-straight; sometimes his intense delivery is funny, but he doesn't chase big, broad laughs. The movie is consistently amusing and odd, with some wonderful sight gags (often centering around the bargain-basement aesthetic -- although in its own way, the movie is weirdly nice-looking), and it's a neat experiment. That said, it's the kind of oddity that even at 84 minutes, would probably play better to me at 70 or 75, and I'm unlikely to rewatch it with the same frequency as the best Ferrell comedies. Still, it's great to see a comedian following his muse rather than figuring out which kiddie franchise he can slide into. I wrote in my column a few weeks back how much I admire Ferrell for never doing that myopic comedian thing of refusing to hire funny supporting casts or good directors lest they detract attention from him or money from his quote or whatever (hey, Eddie Murphy!). Stiller is pretty good with that too, but Ferrell has nothing like Meet the Fockers or A Night at the Museum on his resume (I'll take Bewitched over those any day of the week). Ferrell is the comedy superstar who shoots a million and a half feet of film to make Step Brothers and takes a month out of his schedule to produce and star in a deadpan Spanish-language comedy for no good reason.
Jeff, Who Lives at Home also finds relatively big comedy stars going the indie route, but it's less of a goof. The Duplass Brothers give Jason Segel and Ed Helms relatively persona-familiar parts as the flaky stoner brother and the uptight awkward brother, but both of them turn out to have more nuance than you might expect -- especially Helms, who between Hangover Part II and some of the weaker Office episodes and even Cedar Rapids, which I quite liked, had begun to feel like a limited performer with fewer modes than, say, Ferrell or Steve Carell. But Helms plays a jerkier yet more grounded character, and Segel is enormously touching as the Signs-obsessed slacker. The Duplasses have strange, sometimes shaggy, sometimes undercooked ideas about how to actually tell stories, but Jeff builds to something better than probably any of their other movies (I like Cyrus a lot but after a point it can't do much but hug it out and call it a day), and has their best ending so far. They're the only mumblecore guys so far to get into mini-major studio filmmaking and use bigger stars, and their work in this area has been impressive.
Finally, keeping it real for the transgressive set, there's Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie, which stars the guys from Tim and Eric's Awesome Show, Great Job, but supported by some more famous comedy guys like Ferrell (again, always doing the kind of weird cameos that guys like Jim Carrey seem to have just realized they can do in the past year or so), John C. Reilly (who was in Cyrus), and Will Forte (who's in Ferrell's next movie!). I've actually only ever seen a handful of Tim and Eric sketches; I saw the movie because those sketches were often funny (if nonsensical), I like the supporting comedians, and because of my fond memories of the proudly anti-narrative Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie. I didn't enjoy Billion Dollar Movie as much; it's just as bizarre and sometimes grotesque as Aqua Teen, but as surreal as that cartoon gets, the characters do have pretty clear personalities, which is not so much the case (as far as I can tell) with the "Tim" and "Eric" characters, who are mostly interchangeable and arbitrary. I do love the wasteland-ish milieu of their movie, which finds them accidentally blowing a billion dollars on a three-minute movie that they believe stars Johnny Depp, but does not, and then running away to manage a broken-down mall to make the money back. Many of the scenes are funny; I laughed a lot, especially at Ferrell playing the mall's owner and Reilly as a childlike inhabitant. But it does ramble on, and after awhile simulating low-budget weirdness no longer feels all that difficult or hilarious.
This weekend, of course, was all about The Hunger Games. I didn't exactly review that movie in part because I wanted to go see it at the Ziegfeld with (deep breath) Marisa, Amanda, Harald, One Maggie, Another Maggie, Tom, Andrew, Lily, Ben, Nathaniel, Anne S, Tim D, Katie, Sara, Dave and his friends, Jill and Dustin... not everyone I know in NYC, but a pretty good cross-section of the different types of people I know. However, I did have the opportunity to write about the movie in a bit of Monday morning QB for The L Magazine, which is basically a long and semi-organized sorta-review through the filter of having read the books pretty recently before seeing the movie, which happens not so often.
One point about The Hunger Games I didn't go into in my sorta-review is about the rating: PG-13, instead of the R that the events of the book would likely garner if depicted in full. Of course, this illustrates the silliness of a rating system at all, that kids of literally any (reading) age are free to pick up a book that describe some horrific violence for them to picture in their heads, but a movie that shows even half of it onscreen would be unavailable to a large chunk of its target audience, because, you know, someone please think of the children or whatever (although it bears repeating because a lot of people seem to forget this: the MPAA, totally not law!). But that's the system we're dealing with, and I know some people feel that the Hunger Games movie is hampered but stylistically (by fast-cutting and shaky-camming around the violence) and thematically (by softening the brutality in the book). Stylistically, well, it probably isn't a coincidence that much of the movie's strongest stuff doesn't have much to do with the thrilling or violence sections, although I didn't find the shakiness or fast cutting particularly egregious in that I could follow what was going on just fine. Thematically, sure, I can understand how it might feel like a shortchanging, but I think within this idea there's a pretty outdated and/or simply inaccurate idea about how onscreen violence plays: that is, that a more violent version of The Hunger Games would be more "real" and therefore more attendant to the consequences of the violence. I mean, superficially it might be more disturbing, especially for younger audiences, and certainly you can use realistic violence to instill disgust and horror, a la Saving Private Ryan or any number of other movies. But The Hunger Games is nigh-inescapably placed in a thriller context. I don't see how you can divorce the story from that without altering it pretty severely. For better or for worse, richer thematic concerns or not, it's an exciting, page-turning book. Isn't it entirely possible that maintaining the book's level of violence would not automatically get audiences to not cheer for Katniss? Do audiences not stomach ultraviolent imagery all the time? Would really gruesome kills suddenly make audiences stop rooting for Katniss's survival and start rooting for the more abstract collapse and cessation of violence in general, as writers who perhaps give Suzanne Collins a touch too much credit as a cunning and unrelenting satirist seem to think might happen? I don't know, man. A lot of audiences are fine with extreme violence, even if it's horrific. Maybe it would be worse if it's inflicted upon kids, but a lot of the focus in Hunger Games is on the career tributes who are less sympathetic than the kids who get immediately slaughtered (which is certainly sad and horrifying but even in the book is treated more matter of fact than truly lingering).
Case in point: the violence in the Indonesian action movie The Raid: Redemption is definitely horrific. There's plenty of standard martial-arts fighting that, as Andrew pointed out toward the end, would result in multiple concussions if not outright brain-death for most humans attempting those hits and kicks for longer than a few seconds. But there's also loads of gunshots to the head and martial arts knife-fighting galore, and I definitely recoiled a few times. It basically has all of the unflinching stabbings and gorings left out of The Hunger Games, and it's treated not as a seriously grim horror movie, but an ass-kicking good time. Which it is: it's a kick-ass martial arts movie that I generally had a blast watching (although, sorry, for anything to be remotely like the best action movie of the past ten years, I probably would have to care about or like the characters in it a bit more than this one. This is basically like a Jackie Chan-level movie -- which is no small praise: I really like Jackie Chan movies -- with a little more style from the director, a lot less charisma from the star, and empty faux-hard-hitting seriousness in place of Chan's usual light comic touch). There are some truly wild, stunning fight sequences with fists and blades. But the extremity of the violence (which in terms of gore isn't at cartoonish Evil Dead 2 levels or anything) doesn't make it more serious, or suddenly about the consequences of violence, any more than Drive (which I loved!) is really super-serious about its violence. I don't think it's all a jape for the filmmaker or anything, but I don't see a serious statement being made.
I guess my point is that it's up to The Hunger Games as a movie to convey its themes or messages independent of rating or violence levels. If you find the movie too casual or flip about the consequences of its violence in a PG-13 form (and I don't, particularly; I'd say some of the non-violent characters were softened in a way more detrimental to the movie than the cutting around of some carnage), you'd probably find the R-rated version lacking in that department, too. Just a hunch.
More violence! Seeking Justice, which I saw to review, is more Nic Cage thrills! Except not that thrilling! Hang in there, Nic Cage.
Non-violence! Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, which I also saw to review. It's watchable. It will not interefere with any possible crushes on Ewan McGregor and Emily Blunt, but you might wish they were making another, better romantic comedy together.
Finally, a few weeks back I saw this movie The Deep Blue Sea for review, and I was genuinely surprised to find out that it's receiving critical acclaim. Minute for minute, it may be the worst movie I've seen this year. Not the most morally reprehensible or worst-made or most empty... just the plain old worst.
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| Monday, March 19th, 2012
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8:55 am - Gaps
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I'm going to go ahead and lay some ignorance bare for you all: there are some important movies I haven't seen.
This may not surprise you in general, because that statement is true for almost everyone, even part-time film critics, even full-time film critics. But the particulars may look a little damning. I've caught up with a lot of movies in my life, but I do believe in the importance of keeping current with movies that are actually coming out in my lifetime, even (sometimes especially) the mediocre or bad ones. So I try to both: catch up with the movies I haven't seen yet, keep up with contemporary movies as they come out.
I subscribed to Netflix in large part as a catch-up measure, but last year Marisa and I switched to streaming only for a variety of reasons (rising costs; already having Amazon Prime and cable and now HBO; feeling that eight dollars a month for unlimited streaming was probably better bang than fifteen or sixteen with physical discs we weren't always great about watching). But I acknowledge that part of the problem of the vision of a streaming-only future is the way a streaming service generally gives you access to a selection of movies rather than movies you specifically pick out. You trade choice for convenience. It's fun, of course, seeing what movies pop up unexpectedly on Netflix or Amazon streaming; it's less fun when they disappear, or when you can no longer just send for The Last Days of Disco because you don't want to pay extra for discs and Hulu Plus is the service that streams Criterion movies.
As such, I've stalled a little on my catch-up operation. But I have decided to return to a running list of movies that I need to see, inspired by my departed Netflix mail-queue and, perversely, my current inability to see a lot of these immediately (though a few of the movies listed below-- some Scorseses, Kubricks, and Hitchocks -- I have at home or will soon, thanks to overzealous box-set purchases). Maybe you can help with it. If there's anything not listed below that you don't think I've seen and feel like I really need to, feel free to pipe in. I'm focusing primarily on U.S. movies at the moment, though there are some foreign-language selections sprinkled throughout. And I'm pretty much not putting documentaries on this list for now. I'll see the odd documentary here and there, but it's not really an area of expertise or great interest for me. An area where I'm probably more deficient would be cultier movies, those less likely to pop up on your standard best-of-decade or massive-influence type of retrospectives.
So yeah, tell me what else I need!
100 Movies to Watch, Give or Take a Few:
Ace in the Hole
Adam's Rib
The Adventures of Robin Hood
The African Queen
The Age of Innocence
Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore
Altered States
Another Woman
Badlands
Barry Lyndon
Big Trouble in Little China
Body Double
Born Yesterday
Brief Encounter
Bullitt
The Bridge on the River Kwai
The Candidate
Carnival of Souls
Cat People
City Lights
The Color of Money
The Color Purple
Days of Heaven
Dead Ringers
The Deer Hunter
Don't Look Now
Dressed to Kill
Duck Soup
Easy Rider
The Gold Rush
Family Plot
Five Easy Pieces
The 400 Blows
Frenzy
Gone with the Wind
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
The Godfather, Part III
The Great Escape
Harold and Maude
Heaven Can Wait
High Noon
Holiday
Interiors
Isthar
Kiss Me Deadly
The Last Temptation of Christ
Lawrence of Arabia
Lifeboat
Lost in America
M
The Magnificent Ambersons
The Maltese Falcon
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
Marnie
M*A*S*H
McCabe and Mrs. Miller
Modern Romance
Modern Times
Moonstruck
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Nashville
Network
New York, New York
A Night at the Opera
Night Moves
No Way Out
Notorious
On the Waterfront
Once Upon a Time in the West
Out of the Past
Pickup on South Street
Rebecca
Rio Bravo
Rocky
Roman Holiday
Scarecrow
September
Serpico
Shadows and Fog
Shampoo
Sisters
Some Like It Hot
Spartacus
Stagecoach
Stardust Memories
Straight Time
Sullivan's Travels
Sunset Boulevard
Superman II
The Thin Man
The Third Man
To Have and Have Not
To Kill a Mockingbird
Topaz
Torn Curtain
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
Various James Bond movies (particularly: Dr. No; From Russia with Love; Diamonds Are Forever; The Spy Who Loved Me; Moonraker)
Who's That Knocking on My Door
The Wild Bunch
You Can't Take It with You
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| Monday, March 12th, 2012
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10:10 pm - Nothing but flowers
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I legitimately do not know how much of the "regular" moviegoing public reads about movies and the making of movies and the buzz about movies and all of that. I guess that's another way of saying that I don't know what the regular moviegoing public is like. I can only guess based on what I see and overhear when I go out to the movies. Otherwise I'm pretty much insulated by knowing smart and relatively movie-literate people. So I was going to say that John Carter will be forever known more as an expensive boondoggle than as a real movie. But I don't know. It's probably going to make eighty or ninety million in this country, more abroad, and I don't know if all of that trade-paper/movie-blog ink/pretend-ink will translate to actual public perception being any different than, say, Prince of Persia.
In any case, it's a shame, both the gossip-rep and the potential for Persia-level popular indifference, because Andrew Stanton's version of John Carter of Mars is pretty fun. There's a certain kind of sci-fi/fantasy/adventure filmmaking that I thrill to, usually old-fashioned spectacle delivered with dizzying rollercoaster speed and inventive variety, like the last forty minutes of Attack of the Clones, the second half of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, or the climax of Avatar (or really, the climax to almost any James Cameron movie). John Carter has the materials for this level of spectacle, and doesn't meet those lofty standards (possibly because they weren't trying to do that at all, but it's definitely in that sincere-pulp-fantasy wheelhouse). But it's that kind of deal: sumptuous visuals seemingly (or in this case, actually) ripped from the pages of pulp novels and a total lack of concern for appearing silly.
In that sense, while I wasn't impressed by the marketing campaign for John Carter that apparently doomed it to box-office underperformance, I understand why Disney had some difficulty with it. It's a style of movie that has had a few massive successes that are usually lucky enough to feature a prime Harrison Ford performance or a decades-established brand (and John Carter, despite its nerd cred, is not a brand), or it pretty much just disappears if it makes it to the screen at all. It's not as contemporary as Marvel Comics movies, it's not bro-friendly like Transformers movies, it doesn't have the faux-gravitas of a Lord of the Rings movies... John Carter is pretty nerdy straight-up fantasy craziness with different Martian species and a chase romance and creatures galore.
On that level, I really enjoyed it, while noticing that this was not the slickest, smoothest pulp concoction I've experienced. I'm surprised to read that apparently Andrew Stanton got carte blanche while making the movie; that makes sense for the visuals and budget and ambition, but it feels a little like something that has been futzed with. Not to a crippling degree, but here and there. It's strange, really, how it almost alternates between really great moments that you'd expect from a Pixar guy and then passages of lumpiness and repetition. For example, the movie opens with the kind of clunky pre-credits sequence that you see in a lot of B-movies desperate to patch something spectacular into the first reel... before launching into a really cool and interesting prologue showing how John Carter gets to Mars (including two or three of the movie's biggest laughs via expert matched smash cuts). Then Carter gets to Mars and there's some really cool stuff as he's getting acclimated to the planet, but then the movie spends a good chunk of time with Carter getting imprisoned, then lionized, then re-imprisoned, then re-lionized, etc., by the Tharks, the awesome alien-looking Martians. It's all pretty cool, but it doesn't feel like the story is moving forward, and the part of the story that does move forward concerns the humanoid Martians who are rendered far less interestingly than the Tharks.
Eventually it streamlines a bit more, and props to the movie for finding excitement in exploring a new world rather than constant smashing and exploding and killing (though there is a fair amount of that). But the story doesn't feel as organic as the best sci-fi/fantasy I've seen, and, you all know I'm not saying this as a backhanded compliment or to be ironic or something, it's not as complex as what the Star Wars prequels are up to, and there isn't anyone as charismatic as Ewan McGregor or Natalie Portman on screen, either. I mean, Taylor Kitsch, who I guess I should call Gambit rather than Tim Riggins to be honest about what I really know him from, is fine -- kind of cool, even. I also liked his X-Men Origins: Wolverine co-star Lynn Collins, which I did not expect because, you know, she also fell somewhere between unscathed (Hugh Jackman, Keamy) and, uh, entirely scathed (Will.i.am) on the Wolverine call sheet. Speaking of Hugh Jackman: yeah, that kind of guy is the kind of guy this movie could use.
But it has creatures! And awesome ships and special effects! You just kinda have to get on its wavelength. That's what I might've said about Avatar, too, but Cameron really does have a second sense for making nerdy shit really palatable to as many people as possible. I can see more of the seams in John Carter, even if this movie's silly, occasionally laughable dialogue is not any worse than Cameron's silly, occasionally laughable dialogue.
Marisa and I went to see that movie at the Ziegfeld with Burroughs super-fan Nathaniel, Gambit super-fan Sara, and tolerator of Mars nonsense Katie, and then she and I tried to go see Being Flynn the next day, but someone pulled the fire alarm at the AMC 68th Street when we were an hour into it, and then AMC spent an hour lying about when the movie might come back on, and we had to leave. It held my attention for that hour, and De Niro was good, and also frankly it's good to see Olivia Thirlby in literally anything else after Darkest Hour. But it's not the kind of movie I particularly want to re-watch for an hour just to get to the final 40 minutes, so whether I ever see the rest may depend on whether I have opportunity to slip into it after another movie, and/or Netflix streaming.
Then there was TMBG and then we went to the Bronx to look at flowers for Rayme's birthday!
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| Sunday, March 11th, 2012
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12:08 pm - Yes I was a snowball in hell
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I said this on Twitter, but: I'm really quite impressed by the way that They Might Be Giants can have me looking forward to seeing a show of theirs despite having seen them forty times before last night. Maybe it was because last time I saw them was July, and it was a good but shorter outdoor set, and the time before that was October 2010 in a longer but seated set, and I used to be able to see them several times a year. In fact, I did have pangs of nostalgia and the irrational urge to show-travel when I saw their last few dates before finishing the current tour in NYC were in Northampton and Providence. I used to see them in Northampton and Providence! Tear.
But a two-hour show at Terminal 5 with Marisa, Amanda, Harald, Anne S and her friend KC, turns out to be a pretty good substitute. Lincoln actually edged out Join Us for the most-represented record, with the former's six to the new one's five, but there were tons of songs from all eras of their now basically thirty-year career (!). John and John were in fine variety-show-style form, bringing back "Battle for the Planet of the Apes," doing a weird but funny extended bit with puppet avatars of themselves shilling for a made-up drug called Pandor, and marveling at the venue where they'd never played (Flansburgh, after assuming that it used to be where someone made boats: "I'd like to meet the Russian man who built it"). OK, there was one bit in the first encore about finding audience members and giving them nicknames, that played like a clunky Conan O'Brien bit to me, but generally, really funny and high-energy, and also horn-augmented by Mark Pender (from the Conan show, actually).
Songs songs songs, lots of songs:
Birdhouse in Your Soul
Cowtown
Mr. Me
Clap Your Hands
Can't Keep Johnny Down
Damn Good Times
Snowball in Hell
Particle Man
Ana Ng
Careful What You Pack
Battle for the Planet of the Apes
Paranoid/Pandor Jingle
Spoiler Alert
The Mesopotamians
Lie Still, Little Bottle
Cloisonne
Don't Let's Start
We Live in a Dump
Where Your Eyes Don't Go
New York City
Spy
Dr. Evil
Dr. Worm
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Celebration
When Will You Die
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How Can I Sing Like a Girl?
Istanbul
Total nerd notes:
*I remember when "How Can I Sing Like a Girl?" was being used as an encore song and it was kind of a bummer choice! But this version was just John and John and accordian, and it was really nice. Also, the song has grown on me over the years.
*The heavy-noise intro to "Ana Ng" they're using lately is pretty awesome. I am pretty much forever doing a ghostly pantomime of the "Ana Ng" video dance when they play this song even if I am not technically or fully or visibly doing it.
*While I would expect "The Mesopotamians" to survive into the tour rotation well after The Else came out, I would not have expected the same for "Careful What You Pack," which I love, so: good choice, fellas.
*I don't usually buy tourdate shirts and lord knows I don't need a new TMBG shirt but: this exists (updated with the 2012 tour dates), so, yeah, I got that, obviously.
Total nerd complaints that shouldn't count as complaints:
*They were just one Apollo 18 song and one Mink Car song away from playing something from all of their rock records! I guess that doesn't sound that close, but considering they had songs from John Henry and Factory Showroom, I figured we'd at least get "The Guitar" or "Fingertips" to inch ever closer. Perusing other recent setlists, they've repeatedly come tantalizingly close (in Providence they were only short a Mink Car track and in Northampton they were only missing something from John Henry, at least if you count Older as a Mink Car representation which I guess it basically is. Obviously a good mixed-up set should be prioritize over some kind of technical completeness, but look, after forty shows, I'm trying to maintain some kind of pointless goals in seeing them over and over. Plus all shows are better with "The Guitar."
*As a longtime TMBG setlist nerd, I personally would prefer that they not open with "Birdhouse" and, especally, not encore-close with "Istanbul." But they do change their sets a lot so it's not like this always happens.
*My two favorite Join Us songs, "Canajoharie" and "Old Pine Box," were MIA. But I guess there's something for show forty-two.
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| Friday, March 9th, 2012
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8:51 am - Art of giving up
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In general, if I make it as far as a season or two of a TV show, I'm unlikely to drop it. This probably has to do with my general disinterest in the "jump the shark" phenomenon of trying -- often too excitedly, I'd say -- to peg when a show reached a point of no return, quality-wise. I don't doubt the cleverness and utility of this phrase in the cultural vernacular, but I'd be reluctant to pick those exact crystallizing moments for many shows I actually like at all, because it always comes across as a bit reductive (and, as mentioned, weirdly eager -- like a race to be the first one to call "over it!"). There are certainly shows where I can make that call (first seven seasons of The X-Files = my X-Files. Last two seasons = basically a separate spinoff that I had minimal interest in), but more often than not, if I like a show enough to watch it for three or four seasons, I'll like it enough to stay even if the average quality dips a bit. How I Met Your Mother and The Office are two current examples, both basically in their seventh seasons (The Office is technically on season eight, but the first season was only half a dozen episodes that play more like a trial run); Mother is hampered a bit by its success in that the narrative probably would've been a perfectly lovely six or seven-season arc but has been stretched out to at least eight now (hopefully only eight, as much as I enjoy it) by its excellent ratings, while The Office, which should theoretically be more capable of sustaining itself post-Carell with such a large ensemble, has been floundering on and off. It's gotten better in the second half of the season, and even a bum Office episode usually has a few laugh-out-loud moments for me, but even the better episodes of this season feel a little too heightened, a little too much like they're being written by people who know the show as much as fans eager to make their mark, moreso than people blazing a new trail. It's a lot like the second half (really more than that, by this point) of The Simpsons in that regard.
But I'm sticking with both shows, because I like spending time with those characters. Even as Parks and Recreation has supplanted The Office for my go-to deadpan workplace comedy and New Girl and Happy Endings feel like fresher reconfigurations of the Friends DNA than How I Met Your Mother (though neither Girl nor Endings are as structurally inventive or, from what I've seen, as emotionally involving as the best of Mother), it's still comforting to see what Ted and Marshall and Jim and Ryan and Erin get up to week in, week out.
Why, then, did I just kinda decide to stop watching Modern Family, a show that is still, in most critics' and fans' estimations, more or less at its peak?
It actually started with that Happy Endings show. I heard from various sources (Rebecca, Nathaniel, Briana, and the generally-less-reliable-than-those-people Entertainment Weekly) at various times that this was something I should be watching. But even without watching a single hourlong major-network drama (note to self: totally forgot to watch the DVR'd first episode of Awake or DVR the second one), I felt a little overwhelmed by the number of 22-episode shows on my to-watch list: Parks and Rec, 30 Rock, Community, The Office, Up All Night, How I Met Your Mother, New Girl, Modern Family, The Simpsons, plus cartoon curiosities on Fox that I'll indulge in any given week (Napoleon Dynamite, Allen Gregory, and Bob's Burgers didn't all get 22-episode orders, but I've checked out all three to some extent, which basically adds up to one additional show). I'm not pretending that my time is absolutely precious, or that all of those shows air every single week, but I do like to watch movies and read and write, too, so adding a tenth or eleventh half-hour comedy to a line-up that also includes the less frequent but still potent Saturday Night Live, Futurama, Beavis and Butthead, Degrassi, Justified, and Boardwalk Empire didn't feel particularly feasible.
But then I thought about it: do I actually like Modern Family very much?
I mean, it's not painful to watch. It makes me laugh or at least chuckle pretty regularly. I like the cast a lot. It's a very likable show. But I've had a few issues with it since the beginning, and those haven't gone away as the show has turned into a huge hit.
First and foremost, it's difficult for me to shake the feeling that Modern Family is a sitcom about the diversity and richness of family life as interpreted by people who are extremely well-off. This is not a new problem in television shows, especially sitcoms, and to some degree, you have to ignore the way that few comedies apart from Roseanne (or The Simpsons in its earliest days) acknowledge class beyond the most cursory nods. But there's something faintly nauseating by the level of white privilege assumed by Modern Family, maybe because it purports to be about all of the different ways families can form and bond. Not one of the three major families on the show has anything remotely resembling a money problem.
I'm not suggesting that it needs to introduce token economic hardship, but there is something a little ostentatious about the family's wealth, especially the way the show seems to unironically admire Jay (Ed O'Neil) for his hard work and successful business, which conveniently seems to require very little of his time or attention in most episodes. It smacks, to me, of lifer comedy writers who have taken their own wealth for granted for long enough that this is the world they know: people just have a lot of money, and can afford huge houses and two cars.
Up All Night has a similar problem, in that it's very much about the difficulties that ultra-successful and extremely wealthy parents have: whether they can survive on one enormous income instead of two! Whether the ultra-successful lawyer dad can stand to wait some more years before returning to his ultra-successful law practice! Who to hire as an extra nanny even though the father can also afford to stay home full-time! How to throw money at various problems! (Did you catch the episode where Arnett makes amends for bringing a cranky baby on a plane by buying everyone a round of drinks? Nice bribe if you can afford it.) All that said, there's something a bit less craven about Up All Night, maybe because it seems a bit more aware of its characters' privilege, and while it doesn't always see fit to satirize them in full, at least pokes fun at the kind of Greater Los Angeles yuppie-hipster lifestyle these characters enjoy.
I could ignore the economic rosiness of the show enough to enjoy it, as I have with Up All Night and so many before it, but I have some more straight-up comedy issues, too. There's the sitcom repetition of plots, which, sure, happens to a lot of shows, but not (at least with the good ones) with such clockwork regularity as it does in the first few seasons of Modern Family. Alex and Haylie make cracks about each other's stupidity/nerdiness. Gloria has passionate outbursts against laid-back Jay, who usually knows best. Mitchell craves Jay's approval and interest. Phil craves Jay's approval and interest. And so on. Some of this is just durable comedy set-up; it's a tribute to the show's talented ensemble and to some extent their writers that they have room for so many different classic comic formulas, and have enough characters to shuffled around pretty consistently.
But then there's Cam and Mitchell, well-played and often very funny characters who nonetheless take the show's signature repetition into a whole other, for me less comfortable area. I think it was Vulture who ran a discussion piece some time ago asking: Do Cam and Mitchell actually like each other? That question gets to the heart of my discomfort. Yes, there are a fair amount of Claire/Cool Dad bickering moments and stories about them in conflict, but so, so many of Cam and Mitchell's stories seem to be driven by them sniping at each other, either while Cam is offended and hurt by Mitchell's insensitivity, or when Mitchell's uptightness clashes with Cam's more Midwestern sensibilities (and you'd be forgiven for asking whether that's really actually the same conflict described twice). This comes across to me like the writers as a whole don't know what else to do with a gay male couple besides snipe at each other like characters in a buddy comedy.
I have no idea if the writing staff has any gay people on it; in all likelihood, it does. And in a lot of ways, the Cam/Mitchell relationship is groundbreaking; it's wonderful that one of the most popular comedies on TV often focuses on two gay guys who have a kid together, rather than say, the sniggering homophobia of Two and a Half Men. But as a viewer, I've gotten less enjoyment out of Cam and Mitchell as characters. Then again, the same is true for most of the characters on the show, save Phil and Luke.
As a couple of Modern Family episodes stacked up unwatched on our DVR, I realized I wasn't much missing it; though I don't tend to watch comedy shows for their master plots, there are some emotional and/or narrative stakes in most of the other comedies I watch, even if episode to episode, I'm watching them more for the characters and laughs than storytelling (sidenote: I have this whole other thing about how episode recaps and reviews have become sort of a culture-writing monster that have made TV writing impossible to tame, but I do read a fair number of AV Club episode reviews and I feel like the go-to move for a sitcom where they have little to say about it -- because really, even good sitcoms often do not warrant 700-word analysis of each episode -- is to talk about the "good storytelling" or lack thereof, and while I should just be happy that comedies are being talked about in such lofty terms, I mostly just find it vaguely insufferable. I don't really have much use for in-depth critique of whether the storytelling on New Girl is up to snuff. Is it funny? Are the characters enjoyable? Does it try to do something interesting or original with its sensibility? Even if the answer is "yes," maybe you don't actually need to chart its episode-by-episode development. Clearly, I shouldn't read these anymore). So Marisa and I have tentatively jumped over to Happy Endings instead. It's funnier and weirder than Modern Family, and while I don't (yet?) love it as much as the best of the NBC shows -- its slanginess and reference-heavy dialogue make it sound a little more self-satisfied than I think it's supposed to -- I've actually begun to look forward to watching it. We haven't taken Modern Family off the DVR yet -- if I hear that there's a particular stand-out episode down the line, maybe I'll check it out again -- but as easy as the show tries to make itself to like, it's also become pretty easy for me to skip.
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| Monday, March 5th, 2012
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10:53 pm - Every moment red letter
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Where have I been?
Well, this weekend I went upstate. It was my dad's 75th (!) birthday so I and Marisa met him and his lady friend and her nephew and my brother and sister in Albany for dinner and cake on Friday. I haven't done a spring trip up in awhile -- mostly we do one or two in the summer plus November and December -- so this was a nice change of pace, plus I haven't seen my dad on his actual birthday in a few years. Then we went on to Saratoga in the sleet (that's just upstate for "spring") (although their winter has scarcely been harsher than ours), and it was more eating, plus sleeping, from there. Plus we said bye to Rob and Sabrina's apartment and I bought a belt and some Star Wars toys at TJ Maxx. It was also a zero-movie weekend! I'm not sure of when the last time that happened. I got the wide releases out of the way early with The Lorax (review) and Project X (review). The weekend before was pretty much a movie-only weekend: we saw Wanderlust with Sara and Amanda, and I liked it a lot -- it didn't tug at my heartstrings as gently as Wain's Role Models did (which is to say it did not really tug at my heartstrings at all), and I would have preferred to see Jennifer Aniston's role given to Elizabeth Banks, but it's a loose, funny studio comedy that should't be dying at the box office. And then the next day we went to the Lorax screening, Gone (sort of unreasonably positive review here), and Silent House (review coming Friday) on Saturday.
Somewhere in there we also got to go to Rent Off-Broadway because Bayard was taking his class and had some extra tickets. This means Rent is challenging (possibly surpassing?) Little Shop of Horrors for the show I've seen put up the most times, although the movie version of Rent will never come close to the number of times I watched the movie of Little Shop of Horrors in, say, 1990, let alone my entire life. We also used some BAM gift certificates to catch Kevin Spacey doing Richard III, which I'd previously only seen as that alternate-WWII movie version with Ian McKellan. A few weeks before that, we got press tickets to Porgy & Bess, which I basically knew nothing about except that it was Gerswhin-related and, in this production, Sondhiem-baiting. Seemed pretty good to me, though. I don't know. It's not as if I don't take a critical eye toward theater (oh how I wish I liked Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson as much as anyone else I know!) but it is kind of weirdly nice to have this area of the arts where I see so little of it and know so relatively little about it that it really only counts as a hobby or passing interest or whatever you call things you only do a little bit but wish you could do more. Speaking of which: I kind of want to go see the Spider-Man musical. I mean, ideally I would travel back in time and see some incarnation of the crazy Julie Taymor version, but that version was never on TKTS and this one is. So... I kind of want to see it. Is that wrong? Every promo that I've seen (by which I mean, heard half-asleep during the Today show) makes it seem like it has all of the Andrew Garfield-related prettiness problems I'm sensing about the upcoming movie, plus bad songs. Yet: I do want to see it. Just putting it out there.
Anyway, here's 2012 so far, with the caveat that I've been really bad about taking pictures for most of this first quarter.
I'm going to try to take more pictures.
I'm going to try to post here more.
I'm going to try to keep writing one or two real movie reviews per week.
I'm going to try to keep finishing short stories and working on non-short stories.
I'm going to try to read all of the comics I borrowed from Rob plus the various SNL memoirs I bought on remainder plus the other books in my to-read pile after I finish the goddamned Hunger Games books.
I'm going to try to actually watch those Criterion Collection movies I impulse-bought because of the Valentine's Day sale and I'm going to try to actually watch more stuff on Netflix Instant that I've been saying I need to see for years before more of it disappears.
And I think we're going to actually get HBO.
I don't think all of that adds up.
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| Thursday, February 23rd, 2012
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6:02 pm - Caged Heat
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One of the reasons I was bummed about the This Means War Valentine's Day debacle was that I had planned to write about it for my L Mag column from a standpoint of having seen the movie, not just speculating on whether it would be mostly terrible or absolutely terrible. It sounds silly, that I was disappointed not to write about a McG movie; you'd figure doing that once or twice would be more than enough. But having actually caught up with This Means War on Saturday with our dedicated War crew (minus Nathaniel), I found This Means War interesting, for its successes as much as its many failings. Namely: McG isn't wholly incompetent as a director. He has the technical prowess of a mid-level music video director (which of course he was), which is to say some of his big-deal shots, like a long tracking bit that takes follows Reese Witherspoon from her car, through a club with Chris Pine, not cutting until the moment she decides to turn around and leave, are a little gimmicky but also fun; in a dopey action rom-com about spies feuding over a girl, I appreciate the effort. There's another scene where Pine and Tom Hardy are (semi-inexplicably) tiptoeing around Witherspoon's house, gathering intel while she unknowingly sings to herself and makes a bowl of popcorn. The idea behind the scene is ludicrous -- why would two spies do this while she's awake, or at home at all? -- but the choreography of the scene is kind of delightful.
These touches makes the movie's general carelessness even more obvious. It's a cliché, by now, to complain about the technically masterful director who can't tell a coherent story. This Means War, though, offers something more nuanced and, frankly, kind of bizarre: a technically decent director who patches together a story as if he had to shoot the whole thing in a week and edit it the next day. So you have sequences that show real effort, and then you have random characters who walk into a scene to give Chris Pine information about his best friend that he should already know, or you have spies who remind each other repeatedly that they're on a "covert" mission (you know, unlike those non-covert spies) even though most of their training seems to involve loud gunfights and punching, or you have Chelsea Handler (I mean, you have Chelsea Handler at all, full stop, but wait, there's more) deliver a moment of sincerity, saying that Reese should pick not the better guy, but the guy who makes her better, even though nothing that happens before or after indicates that either of these guys are making Reese remotely better or even different. The movie has lots of little, unnecessary stuff like that, stuff that could be fixed by just being a little more on the ball. In other words, it's lazy, and also selectively lazy. Even that aforementioned scene with the guys sneaking around Reese's house: it's a lot of fun, and then it just fades out without any real build or payoff. It's like McG choreographed it, forgot why he was doing it, and then hurried on to the next scene. He's like Brett Ratner with style.
Here's the thing: there's a whole bunch of new-ish directors, often with some kind of Spielberg connection, who obviously aspire to the Spielberg/Lucas level of dazzling, crowd-pleasing, sometimes self-aware entertainment. I've heard them referred to as the "hack pack" (though if you Google "hack pack" with "Ratner" and "Bay," the first entry is my LJ entry discussing Super 8 -- so clearly it hasn't caught on in a huge way. But I didn't make it up!). McG, especially, comes off like an attempt to do with mass-appeal movies what Quentin Tarantino does with movies you've mostly never heard of. I thought about this again during This Means War because everything in it is so utterly synthetic, which is maybe why you get well-crafted synthetic stuff mixed in with hollow, distractingly synthetic stuff. I get that this isn't a movie that's going to have realistic spy action (and remember, I like the Charlie's Angels movies), that McG is going to go for a pop James Bond aesthetic. But the movie treats James Bond movies (kitschier ones, not the Daniel Craig version) as the realistic starting point, deciding that this needs to be even more heightened and movie-ish. It's like a parody of a parody, a movie version of another movie. At the same time, the movie doesn't have the ambition to go Full Bond, either, and make it an all-out goof, with a supervillain and a crotch-slicing death ray and whatever else (for me, Charlie's Angels goes far enough into silliness that it works). Some people make the same complaint about Tarantino -- that he lives only inside the movies -- but Tarantino exerts such control over his material that it becomes fully his, not just a reference grab-bag. This Means War, meanwhile, is a reference grab-bag without much in the way of references. It's not painful but I couldn't say that it works, either.
If you want more sincere silliness, I say with all sincerity that I liked Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance. Perhaps even more than the movie, I liked that Andrew and Mike and Kate and Marisa were all willing to re-up (along with Deborah, who I don't think was in town last time we all decided to go see a Ghost Rider movie) with the Cage version of this character despite a lackluster first outing and terrible reviews for the second. I can definitely see how if you go in expecting basically like Crank with Nic Cage and a flaming motorcycle, this movie would be disappointing. But if you want a cool but silly, vaguely self-aware, less blatantly dull Ghost Rider movie, this is the ticket. In the time it took for my Ghost Rider 2 review to publish, I already saw another Cage movie, although it won't be out until mid-March. I want more to come out so I can work out how and when I might start and finish an all-encompassing essay and/or book about Cage's career, particularly his post-Oscar career, and I need to know when the "low-grade supernatural thriller shot mostly in New Orleans" and "low-grade urban thriller shot mostly in New Orleans" phases are over before I know how much time to dedicate to them.
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| Saturday, February 18th, 2012
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1:11 am - Born to lose
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That was kind of a shitshow.
TRUE SHRED GUITAR
BORN TO LOSE
RIOT RHYTHM
A/B MACHINES
KIDS
END OF THE LINE
COMEBACK KID
TELL 'EM
LEADER OF THE PACK
STRAIGHT A'S
TREATS
INFINITY GUITARS
[TOTALLY MISSED THE ENCORE BREAK BUT]
RILL RILL
DEMONS
CROWN ON THE GROUND
Sleigh Bells themselves at Terminal 5 were in fine form. Strobes guitars loud Alexis charisma. Their sets are a little longer now that they have two records, but still concise, still a nonstop blast, musically. "Tell 'Em" could've been louder. "Rill Rill" was surprisingly gangster (for that sort of thing) (at least more gangster than Lana del Rey). New songs sounding good.
But, I can't believe I'm saying this, the crowd was just kind of too much. We stood eight or nine rows back for a couple of hours watching a 15-minute hardcore set (kind of awesome!) and a 30-minute Black Bananas set (kind of horrible! Why would you have a band basically doing the same thing as you but way way worse open for you?!), enduring people trying to squeeze their way to the front because can you imagine ANYTHING worse than being ten rows back when you could be ZERO rows back? These people can't [yet cannot also imagine anything more difficult than getting to the show early enough to hang out at front the whole thing]. Further to that, when the music started, it was just a frenzy of shoving. Not like, people dancing without regard for smacking into each other. That I kind of like. This was just straight up hundreds of people trying to shove their way to the front. It was probably the purest most aggressive mass shoving I've seen at a concert; it wasn't fun at all. So Marisa and I left and went off to the side (where there was still a little shoving, but not as much). Kind of a bummer to have a good spot for a couple of hours and then have to leave because people lost their shit, and not in a fun Hold Steady/Los Campesinos sort of way. Basically the crowd was the physical equivalent of a Brooklyn Vegan comment thread: everyone mutally deciding to act like the most asshole-ish versions of themselves because everyone else was.
Even when the shoving on the side calmed down, there was this muscled douche trying to create an arm perimeter around the girls he was hanging out with, because the last thing any girl at a Sleigh Bells show should EVER have to deal with is even brushing up against another person. This crowd was also, no joke, fifty percent girls at minimum, and the girls he was trying to surround were dancing and jumping plenty, so I'm not sure why this guy had to do curls for a couple of weeks to run interference for them. I mean, it was rough if you tried to push your way to the front with half the room, but these girls were in no danger from Marisa or me, but thanks anyway, some guy's arms, for being up against us constantly.
So yeah, Sleigh Bells is fucking awesome and sounded great but I had more fun last time when somehow people could control themselves even though it was in a smaller space. Maybe they have reached critical mass in terms of show size and fanbase, and it can't be fun any more? I guess I've heard of that happening, but I've never really experienced it that I can remember. How does it work? Do I have to start going to see them in other cities or something? As with Slow Club, I got this weird feeling like, wait, have any of you been to shows before? Do you get to behave at one, even a raucous one? Is this who likes this music?
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| Friday, February 17th, 2012
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8:02 am - I look into your eyes, and you don't know who I am
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When we last left Slow Club in concert, it was a good show that should've lasted longer, held at a cramped venue. For this tour, they got upgraded to the Bell House, and played for over an hour, so we're getting there. Marisa and I and Sara (note: neither of the Saras I've known for longer. A third, entirely different Sara; "Sara" might be eclipsing "Katie" for "least clear way to refer to someone I know") still got there earlier than probably necessary, but with two relatively concise opening bands and not one that took forever to set up or tear-down, and a larger amount of space around us, it felt slightly less agonizing than the wait at the Rock Shop, too.
The setlist was pretty similar, but the additions were key, especially the first one: the show started with just Rebecca and Charles singing a stripped-down, slowed-down, absolutely fucking gorgeous cover of "Disco 2000." If there was a way to get me more in the tank for a band, there you go. They also played a couple of extra new songs (new EP coming soon, they said), and "Christmas TV" (!!). And the best parts of the last show were still there, a clamorous "Where I'm Waking" and stomping "Two Cousins." Rebecca looked more glammed-up this time, and I think she danced more, especially during "Two Cousins," although she almost had to, because the Bell House stage looks two or three times bigger than the Rock Shop one. So yeah, anytime they're in the US, I'm in.
Lay me down:
Disco 2000
Where I'm Waking
Our Most Brilliant Friends
If We're Still Alive
Horses Jumping
Never Look Back
Beginners
Gem*
The Dog
Only If You're Certain
[another new song, origin unknown]
Two Cousins
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Christmas TV
Giving Up on Love
*I would've called this "Everything Is New" but I think Charles referred to it as "Gem" when someone shouted for "Christmas TV."
But something has to be said about Slow Club fans. I don't know who they are or where they come from or why they are the worst people in the world, but some of them are. Before the show, I was trying to explain to Marisa and Sara that the crowds at these shows so far haven't really looked the way I'd picture them, which I guess would be something like Belle and Sebastian crowds; maybe a touch less bookish, so split the difference between B&S and Los Campesinos! But twice now I've gone to see Slow Club and found myself in close proximity to douchebags -- last night specializing in people who could not shut the fuck up for longer than two minutes. Is it because their biggest American successes have involved some songs getting placed on ads and Chuck? Do people know them from TV soundtracks or something and go see them on a whim and don't really get how concerts work? I have no idea why else they have the kinds of casually clueless fans that bands like Vampire Weekend or the White Stripes needed several hit albums to accrue. Also, I used to think that concert scenes in movies where people are basically having a conversation in the fourth row with a band playing behind them were utterly fake, but maybe I've just been going to concerts without a typical number of idiots. Maybe I've been spoiled by Mountain Goats audiences and the fact that when Darnielle plays a quiet song, it gets pin-drop fucking silent in the crowd to, you know, listen to the words and music. That happened with "Disco 2000," then not so much the rest of the night. Even when the girl behind me spilled her beer on me (yep) and started to apologize, and I said in all sincerity: that it's fine, if you want to make it up to me you could just be a little quieter, and she completely straight-facedly said sure, of course, she maybe got thirty percent quieter out of sheepishness and did nothing to silence her friends, one of whom was laughing for about ten or fifteen minutes straight, breaking only to point out that she was still laughing. I don't know if that's lack of self-awareness, or just alcohol making you feel invincible and awesome, or what. They're such an adorable band; I don't know how they wound up with such jerky pockets of fans (it looked like the more hardcore people were off to the side of the stage).
So there's still room for some improvement here. Showmanship, they're all set; I'd watch Charles and Rebecca do whatever for an hour. I also like their backing band, especially the guy -- it wouldn't be accurate to call him the bassist as everyone switches off instruments pretty handily -- who plays in socks. Setlist-wise, just adding in one or two more songs from Yeah, So would be perfect, although the contrarian in me enjoys that they seem to circumvent that album carefully, to the point of including B-sides, unreleased songs, and covers in a fourteen-song set. I don't know how to correct for crowds, because if idiots are going to follow an obscure band to Gowanus, Brooklyn (I know we were in Gowanus because there was this really clever thing these two guys did where toward the end of the show they yelled "Gowanus!" a bunch of times. I'll never know just how hard that yelling made the girls they were with sleep with them. I can only assume VERY, because come on, what's more awesome than yelling?), then we may not be safe anywhere. I think the solution is for everyone I know to love this band and buy up as many tickets as possible next time around.
Now onto irresistible boy-girl duo part two!
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