Mo' Movie Mo' Music

Four Year Strong - Enemy of the World

2010-03-09T18:46:00.000-08:00

Boston-bred hardcore/pop-punk band Four year Strong's Enemy of the World opens with the single "It Must Really Suck to Be Four Year Strong Right Now," which contains the lyric "Don't fix it if it hasn't broken yet." It's a good thing to remember - I'm going to sum up their approach and my reaction in that single line.

...

Just kidding.

Four Year Strong aren't a band that sets out to reinvent themselves with every song or every album; they set out to be consistent, riff your brains out and write some tight, explosive pop-punk. I'm in the middle of writing a feature involving The Offspring, and their approach makes me think this is the evolution of that band's approach: some very metallic elements laid over a foundation of strong hooks and punkish speed. Their sound is heavy, but never brutal - even their singers' roaring vocalization isn't really going to threaten anybody but the feebly elderly. It's just what you expect of the sound. The drums rarely slow, and the instruments push and pull on different tempos ("fast" and "wicked fast," in Bostonian parlance) to make everything feel like everything is always moving toward something. Yet there is never a shortage of listenability - all eleven songs present on the album pulverize the ears, but they also keep the melodies at front and center. The choruses are infectious.

This is important, because Four Year Strong's music is specifically meant to be channeled into its audience singing back to them in concert. All the backing vocals are recorded to sound how they probably are in concert: like a huge mass of fans singing back these lyrics. These are little songs meant to make little shows sound like arena spectacles. They're not gonna stop to smell the roses, but they also make sure that everyone can keep up. The bridges slow down just enough to let everyone feel the music swell before the chorus hits again. A single word to describe the band is "Communal." They told AbsolutePunk that they "just play exactly what we want to hear." To an extent, most bands do that (I'm sure Radiohead's not in a studio right now noodling around on music they hate), but for Four Year Strong, that means their fans share their very same passions.

That leads to all the lyrics being very overdramatic: broad but deliberately and easily relatable. Everything's about misery; death is almost a recurring theme. Variations on the idea of "proving that [someone is] alive" show up on "Nineteen with Neck Tatz" and "Find My Way Back" - two consecutive songs in the middle of the album. The hook to "Flannel is the Color of My Energy": "'cause I don't wanna live another day without your company." Even the album's title implies a unity against something bigger than the band. Is this directness a fault? Maybe. It gets repetitive to hear it over and over again, but there's comfort to be gleaned from the very shared nature of everything in music. Everything is tailor-made for maximum chanting, singing along and being part of something in the moment.

So, no, the album doesn't quite set the world on fire. They're not the most original band, and their set of ideas can feel limited a couple songs away from the end of it. But the genre's not meant to be experienced as a record on a hard drive as an end unto itself. This music thrives in concert, surrounded by fans who feel the same way. As a side note, it's admirable that there's nothing alienating about it. Everyone gets a chance to feel, whatever that feeling is. It almost feels like a bonus that they're skilled musicians who aren't wasting their time on silly novelty ditties. It hasn't broken yet.

The Lady Eve: Old Hollywood Were Magnificent Bastards

2010-02-09T19:31:00.000-08:00

Oh hello. There.

Give The Lady Eve a shot this Valentine's Day, or any day, for that matter. Those 1940s romantic comedies truly hold up compared to most of the stinkers that come out these days; there's just an easygoing charm about them that's hard to resist once you get into it. The Lady Eve isn't my choice for the funniest movie of the era (I'm a big fan of His Girl Friday), but it's probably one of the tightest and best-scripted. The dialog can be subtle, and it helps that Henry Fonda seems to be up for anything to be spilled on him or to trip over however many times. The physical elements are often missing from modern comedies (is it an insurance thing?), so there's some fun in seeing a screen legend like Fonda fall all over the place for a movie. He's not known as much of a pratfall guy, y'know. And this might be Barbara Stanwyck's best role, if not for Double Indemnity. It's certainly neck and neck - I feel like it's easier to gravitate to her character here than in the latter. But then, the reasons this works in Double Indemnity's favor is a whole other essay. My point is: God, why can't they make romantic comedies like this anymore?

Hollywood churned out movies like a production line at this point, so maybe they didn't overthink things so much. Certainly, it's been said that Casablanca was "just another movie" to everyone involved, and I have no reason to think that The Lady Eve would be different for anyone else. Maybe this is why the comedies of the era strike that balance of being fun to make and fun to watch. Stanwyck, in particular, seems to have fun playing the grifting seductress who wins over Henry Fonda's naive trust fund kid. I'm sure it was hard work and all, but there seems to be a lightheartedness in Stanwyck dressing up in so many costumes and playing with accents in character. It's a rare performance that manages to be simultaneously great acting and infectious. Even the momentum of the picture isn't forced in any way; there isn't extensive fretting over will-they-or-won't-they drama. It actually resolves itself so suddenly, that's almost a joke in and of itself. That leave a tidy 92 minutes packed full of jokes and fun.

While I could go in a couple directions on what would be Barbara Stanwyck's best performance, I would also nominate this as the best role Henry Fonda got in his prime. Not just for his pratfalls - which are funny and taken with aplomb. But his boyish good looks work absolutely perfectly here. His roles in dramatic fare such as The Grapes of Wrath hold up; don't get me wrong. My Darling Clementine is my favorite western of the 1940s. But Fonda's good looks work best for me when they are conveyed with the light stupidity here. Can you really truly buy Fonda as OK Corral gunslinger Wyatt Earp? Exactly. That's why playing a kind-hearted simpleton works so well here; it's easier to believe he's a sheltered rich kid's son than a wandering outlaw. It comes down to his looks and is not a knock on those roles or Fonda himself. His playing a villain in Once Upon a Time in America is a whole other story, though, partly because it plays off of his good guy roles such as this one.

It's the sheer charm of the leads that helps elevate this movie. Charm that Dane Cook cannot match. A kind of simple decency that a movie like I Hate Valentine's Day could never decipher. And a focus that He's Just Not that Into You and the upcoming Valentine's Day don't have, despite the star power attached. It's a simple love story, with two double crosses. Sometimes, several shots of trains running through tunnels are all the punchline you need.

A couple followup thoughts:

2010-02-06T17:15:00.000-08:00

After watching The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, I got into reading the wikipedia page for the real Kaspar Hauser. That dude sounds like a lying bastard. I'll take the Bruno S version any day.

Also, an extension of my Nic Cage thought from earlier: there is a brutally honest and metaphorical truth to be found in a film where Nic Cage plays a famous actor who buys a European castle to save it from decay, goes broke and then takes creatively unfulfilling, miserable, big-money roles to make his money back to live his dream.

Expect me to keep pushing that idea until it happens.

The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser: The Liveblog

2010-02-06T14:50:00.000-08:00

Hi there, all!

Superbowl weekend. Usually I take two days to make a single post, but with the festivities around this weekend, I would rather get something up quickly. I've been thinking of using this format every now and then, so let's test it out: I will be liveblogging Werner Herzog's The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. Never seen it before, but I've blogged about other Herzog films before. Consider this as though I was tweeting these thoughts individually. Here goes something (hopefully!)

Hoo boy. It's gonna be interesting to do this for a movie with subtitles. All those years of learning to type without looking at a keyboard - finally worth something!
I like that this film was introduced via scrolling text explaining Hauser's life (discovered not knowing how to speak, not knowing how to walk, no history, no name, etc,). It really lets us get on with the thing - imagine if every movie used the first half of its trailer to rush through the setup before the action began.
Strange note I realized before starting: there is no trivia page on IMDB, and this is, last I checked, Herzog's highest-rated work on the site. A movie as mysterious as its character...
Ah, some wonderful still shots of the village, fields, etc. Such a great eye for these little details, and the elegant opera brings the perfect ethereal mood.
Same goes for the shots of townsfolk looking at Kaspar and the diagetic sounds that have been paired with them.
Bruno S. as a screen presence, is a find. I may have mentioned that in writing about Strozek last week, but there's just something fascinating about him: always nervous and not exactly "endearing," but something a standard deviation removed from that. It's different from the contagious intensity of Kinski or his work with Christian Bale and Nic Cage.
On the subject of Nic Cage: doesn't his recent off-camera life sound like a Herzog movie? A world famous actor buys a broken European castles with the intention of fixing them up, then goes broke? I hope one of them thinks of making it into a movie.
It's impossibly endearing when Bruno or the children look off camera. It's like the next words out of their mouths are "What do I do next?"
I don't think anything has made me smile so much all day as Kaspar making a cat walk on two feet.
The use of animals in this movie is freaking fantastic. I would say the parallels between Kaspar and the animals is a little heavy-handed, but this movie has some really cool shots of animals. And what is up with that camel!?! What the fuck - is that what they look like?
I have little to say about this scene where Kaspar is being taught religion except that it is an excellent scene, both in concept and execution.
This scene trying to explain inanimate objects is better. Go apple!
Yesterday-ish, a couple of people I follow on Twitter were saying that Herzog's movies feature somewhat stilted acting. I propose this: it is not the acting that is stilted, but the situations. The actors in many of his movies are reacting as natural as they can while knowing they've got a camera watching.
I feel like I've seen something like this before, where someone is corrected but their "misspeak" reveals some kind of truth. Yet, there's still something very moving about this film and its tone.
Helping the dreamlike atmosphere: the untraceable passage of time. I was shocked earlier when it said Kaspar had been in society for two years. Now, he's learned to read music and play some piano, and no one's mentioned how many years it's been.
I may have to rewatch this movie with the swans in mind - there's a definite motif there, but I've got to focus in on it to see what that's about.
Oohh, that was actually pretty perfect timing: I was just typing that the second half of this movie loses some of the natural-ness of the beginning, so it's less charming. But then it switches to a story being told by Kaspar.
Okay, I thought the story about the procession up the mountain through death would be a good ending. Then I thought the story about the caravan led by a blind man would be better. But the actual ending is superb thematically.

I hope this has been as readable as anything. This has been fun writing and watching a truly remarkable film in a lot of ways. Like most of Herzog's films, I can't wait to watch it with commentary sometime (though I have yet to actually listen to the commentaries).

"Thank you all for listening to me. I am tired now."
-Kaspar Hauser

Pierrot Le Fou, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Be Ok I guess with Godard Sort of Probably

2010-02-05T13:32:00.001-08:00

O! Hall hallo there there

I'm gonna have to apologize now, before you go further. The first chunk of this entry's less about Pierrot Le Fou than it is about my reaction to it. Why? Because I can't think of any other way to write about anything by Jean-Luc Godard. Here's one of the directors that forms the backbone of the French New Wave, and he's the only one of the bunch I've seen whose critical praise leaves me scratching my head... up until now.

Some history, to start: the first Godard film I saw was Notre Musique, in a film class, and I honestly cannot recall a thing about it other than it being in color. There's a distinct chance I nodded off during it, since my sleeping patterns get weird in the winter. I bought and watched Alphaville next - as part of some deal on Criterion Collection DVDs at Barnes and Noble. That one left me cold, but it was interesting. Next, Breathless, possibly his most renowned film - I quite liked that one. So going into this movie, Godard was 1 for 3: a track record hardly befitting an acclaimed director. And now I've watched Pierrot Le Fou, which has charmed me more than the rest. Yet, I can't decide if it's because the film's that much better, or if I have gotten used to Godard's directing style.

I'm inclined to think the difference is that I'm getting increasingly used to what he's doing; the last three, at least, are almost entirely built around exemplifying film technique. More consistently than any other major film maker, Godard makes me consciously aware that I am watching a movie. His characters, at least in Breathless and Pierrot, are seemingly conscious that they're in movies, or at least are consciously willing to imitate movie characters. Music and sound cues are conspicuous; the characters break the fourth wall (one character to another: "who are you talking to?" "the audience." "oh."). They don't behave realistically, at any rate, and the plot is a vessel through which one hangs a feeling.

And in this way, while watching Pierrot last night, I realized: my feelings for Godard must be how someone who dislikes Quentin Tarantino's films feels about those. Specifically Pulp Fiction, where the characters exist solely to have highly stylized dialog come out of their mouths. Are you really that worried when Uma Thurman overdoses in that movie? Nah, but it's the shit when Travolta stabs her in the heart with the adrenaline needle. Pierrot Le Fou is the same way: you barely see the gangsters chasing the main characters, or even remember them half the time, but the characters are fun to be around.

Part of the fun is the contrast between the two leads: Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a man of stoic cool, and Marianne (Anna Karina), an almost impishly joyful presence. They play off of each other beautifully, so when a spontaneous musical moment breaks out (the movie's not a musical), it's fun to watch, rather than annoying. Similarly, they're both easygoing about the whole "being chased by gangsters" thing, which gives the film a playful tone. This is helpful: at times with Breathless and Alphaville, I got annoyed by their protagonsts' almost dour nature. It makes the dissolution of their relationship feel more subtle, and I almost did a double-take when I realized they'd split. It also grounds the movie, which is unnatural in its editing and sound choices.

The editing, specifically the pacing of the thing, is what won me over the easiest. Time isn't wasted on fight scenes or action sequences. They're memorable and brief, but more or less beside the point. It's an inversion of most action movies: when an Asian midget is holding Marianne hostage and a scene later is face-down with bloody scissors in his neck, no explanation is necessary. Who cares how Marianne got out of that predicament? It's like a dance they do, splitting and rejoining, so it only makes sense Marianne would be out of Ferdinand's life before they inevitably meet again. The ending is also well-paced. Ferdinand spends lots of time painstakingly painting his face blue and wrapping his head in dynamite. He lights the fuse, then instantly says "this is stupid" and tries to put out the flame. He can't; he explodes. From him lighting the fuse to the explosion is less than 10 seconds, I bet. It's a smart use of timing, since the movie knows that there's little tension to be taken from this predicament. He's gonna die, and the movie's gonna end. And then Ferdinand and Marianne meet in a meta, characteristically pithy way to end the movie, too.

All of this adds up to how self-aware the movie is, which can be grating but generally works well. The verbal dance where Ferdinand and Marianne speak over shots from offscreen, alternating sentences, can be hit or miss. It feels too cute. Same goes for Ferdinand addressing the camera with his angst. But then it adds something when the music clashes with what's going on onscreen, like when dramatic music fades in and out while Ferdinand is looking at a car. Or when Marianne imitates a Lauren and Hardy gag (after stating her source of inspiration) to get out of a tight squeeze. It's these moments that are fun and, most of all, make you consider the construction of a movie without being alienating.

That quality is probably the thing that dawned on me, this time around. There's something very mechanical about the construct of Godard's films (from the few I've seen), and in some ways it clashes with what might be a personal perspective. His interest in how films work is laudable, and understandable given his past as a film critic. It doesn't necessarily make for movies that I'd revisit very often (though I would see Pierrot again if someone wanted to watch it with me), but there's also something necessary and vital to his films from this period. I at least understand why he's "important" now.

Bigger, Stronger, Faster: The Size of Manliness

2010-02-03T16:19:00.000-08:00

allo ther

"I think pro athletes should be forced to use steroids. I think we as fans deserve the greatest athletes science can create! ... I have high definition TV; I want my athletes like my video games. Let's go! I could care less if you die at 40. You hate life after sports anyway, I'm doing you a favor." -Daniel Tosh

Daniel Tosh is a stand-up comedian, but there's a harsh truth to that quote. Bigger, Stronger, Faster is just over 100 minutes, but it covers a lot of ground in the subject of steroids. Too much, I would argue. There's a lot here, and Chris Bell, the director, does a little bit of a lot of things. Including:

His brothers' and his own history of using steroids
The perception of steroids (and their effects) in the media vs. the results of research
The competitive cultural pressures that would lead an athlete to use them
Societal pressure that would lead one to use steroids for aesthetic purposes
His family's reaction to finding out he and his brothers use them
The supplement industry
The government's investigation into performance enhancing drugs in baseball

And a few more things I'm probably just not remembering right now. It is a packed documentary, and any one of these topics alone could have been given the 90-minute treatment. Yet, I can't really imagine any documentary about this topic without covering nearly all of these bases, especially after the attention that baseball has gotten. It's all informative and interesting, though little of it is particularly shocking (e.g. they use Photoshop on the before/after shots for weight loss ads? o rly?). Because the movie doesn't have much going for it from a film perspective, I can't say I'd want it to be any longer, but it's a bit much for such a short running time. Despite that, it's a helpful movie to have out there, especially since it manages to be somewhat impartial, with the goal of sparking discussion.

I think the most notable thing about this movie is that it implies that Bell is less concerned with the medical side effects of performance enhancing drugs and more concerned with the things that cause a person to use them and the effect heightened performance has on society. He's a bit disingenuous about this; he cites numbers that say drinking and smoking cause more deaths than steroids, for example. Of course they do - but few people are going to need to enhance their physical performance with drugs compared to the people who drink and smoke. It's probably the most obvious example of misrepresentation here, but it makes steroids seem more harmless than they probably are. His focus on the medical effects are more or less focused on steroids straight-up killing a person, while he glosses over the possibility of sterility. It still seems nearly fair compared to the "facts" constantly repeated in news reports whenever the topic comes up.

Essentially, this means that much of the movie focuses on the various ways society reacts to and sometimes encourages it. Bell recounts his youth, idolizing action stars of the 80s and watching pro wrestling. It's these images of larger than life men that can define society's image of manliness, and it's not surprising that Arnold Schwarzenegger is the inspiration to every model and body builder he talks to (his name is even in my spell check!). The example set by these kinds of entertainment is less ubiquitous than the influence of models and women's magazines, etc. etc. on women, but it still got through to a small subset of guys. And these guys wanna be bigger than would be natural. It also seems to stick out that everyone Bell interviews is around the same age group, and they all cite 80s action movies and pro wrestlers as inspirations for their lives. That makes it seem like there's a chance that this is somewhat of an aberration in cultural history: before and since Arnold's heyday we've seen action stars trim down to more reasonable levels of muscularity.

The near-impossible quest for washboard abs remain, but it's probably easier to a Jason Statham level of fitness. This slow changeover isn't covered in the movie, but then, it isn't covered in the heads of the guys Bell interviews. His brother, most notably, seems driven to obsessive levels of becoming a big star, either in wrestling or in acting, and he's not alone. The sight of grown men who believe that with size everything will go their way is thoroughly depressing. His brother and at least one gym employee says "you never know" and hold out hope for an acting career based on looks. It's like a weird alternate universe, now that our action stars include Nic Cage and John Cusack. Reliable ol' wrestling will still promote the shit outta John Cena, though, and Hulk Hogan's still limping around. I guess not everything has changed.

The parts about athletics are informative, too, and the movie itself is persuasive enough to reconsider whether 'roids are "cheating" in light of regular-ass modern medical advances. Not persuasive enough to convince me totally, with its aforementioned occasional leaps in logic and such. The kinds of surgeries and other medical/health knowledge that makes today's athletes so much better than anyone even in generations past is fascinating; it'd make a good PBS special on its own. Hell, it probably has been done, and most know better than to directly compare an athlete from the 1930s to one today. I was also impressed by the research going into better enhance people's physical abilities; those segments create a vision of the future that is either amazing or frightening.

The most convincing segment of the movie, though, is Bell's interview with Rep. Henry Waxman, one of the congressmen who spearheaded Congress' then-current (current?) investigation into steroids in baseball (and, to a lesser extent, pro wrestling). His inability to answer anything - even the legal drinking age for alcohol - without help from an aide was saddening at best, distressing at worst. A cynic might say that it's no surprise that politicians will put their face on a cause they don't really care about (and Bell does juxtapose the segment with an interviewee saying just that). It's just captivating to see it illustrated so directly.

In the end, though, the movie stops short of being very great for its information, mainly because there's so damned much of it presented. There are good and insightful bits here and there, but Bigger, Stronger, Faster feels like it's trying to cover as many bases as possible. It thankfully isn't pro- or anti- anything directly, but it also lacks focus. In its explicit primary goal, it works to start considering a more balanced discussion on the role of performance-enhancing drugs in sports that likely will never happen. Otherwise, though, it works better as a reflection of a conflicted culture, which is one of its secondary goals.

Orson Welles' The Trial: Feel the Gathered Masses Closing in

2010-02-01T13:09:00.000-08:00

heeelllloooooo there!

Why the hell is Orson Welles' The Trial a cult item? It's based on a story by Franz Kafka! It stars Anthony Perkins (shortly after Psycho, at that)! Directed by Orson Goddamn Welles! By the praise Citizen Kane gets, you'd think every one of his films would be revered, if not puzzled over for their failures. Instead, it seems like the consensus is that Kane, Touch of Evil, Chimes at Midnight and The Magnificent Ambersons are Great Films, and you're on your own for the rest. Those last two aren't even available on DVD in America right now!

"Bollocks!" I say! The Trial is at least as great as Touch of Evil, and it seems like it was released more or less as Welles intended (though it looks like there was an edited version in the US). That's more you can say about Touch of Evil. All The Trial needs, I reckon, is a Criterion DVD release with cleaned up audio.

Welles' European years generally get short shrift, though, and I guess The Trial is no different. It makes me glad that it's at least available on DVD (among a slew of bootleg copies, though). Like I said, seems that it's a bit of a cult item; it's at least generally well-regarded by the subset of people who have seen it and have rated it on Amazon and IMDB. Yes, that's part of the same demographic that once put The Dark Knight as one of the top 5 films of all time, but it's still high praise from a relatively large group. Does 4-stars from Roger Ebert sound better?

(Side note: I generally don't link to Ebert because he's that much better a writer than I am, but I do like that review an awful lot for its insights. I will try to avoid doubling over on it. What he has to say about Perkins' sexuality is fascinating, though.)

But on to the film itself: it's a story centered on accusation. Anthony Perkins plays Joseph K, who is accused of... nothing in particular, and eventually he stops asking. But he's put through the rigeurs of a legal system that seems to only consist of loopholes and an unrelenting, loopy but lockstep logic. Everything seems to be going against him in this series; every person, no matter their intention, seems to be getting in the way somehow. He never sleeps once he wakes up at the start of the film. At every turn, it seems like the world is out to trap him. In its shadows, in its rules, in its multitudes.

It's those multitudes that caught my eye on this first viewing; almost every scene that takes place in a space that would be cavernous is filled, packed with details. The actual courtroom where Perkins is on trial is a large auditorium consumed with people. It echoes the stage of Charles Kane's big campaign speech. But where that was a triumph for that character, this setting is terrifying. Joseph delivers a speech, too, but it's harried and interrupted. The room is relatively small, but every frame is packed with so many people watching this "trial" that it is intimidating, even for a viewer from home.

Perkins carries himselfs perfectly, too, giving his character the perfect blend of innocence, determination and frazzled intensity. The guy's under stress, and it's not just his trial, from what we see of his workplace. His office is an endless sea of rows of people at typwriters, typing furiously. It's a constant, noisy racket, made only noisier by the lousy sound quality on the version streaming on Netflix. Just walking from the door to his desk (a lone desk on a short pedestal above the other desks) seems to take minutes, and there isn't an open space within the frame in that whole time. Later, we see there's a computer, and this, too seem to be the length of infinity, a giant even among the standards of the early computers.

Welles was a master at using expressionism to get into his characters' heads. It was somewhat subtle in Kane, but increasingly apparent by Touch of Evil. In this movie, it's at an absolute peak. His lawyer, The Advocate (Welles) lives within what appears to be a maze of bookshelves, walls and windows, lined with hundreds of lit candles. It's as intimidating as the castles in Super Mario Bros, where it always seemed like the same castle with new traps. There's a sense of paranoia and dread here that's impenetrable, and the very use of objects plays a large role in it. Would the mood be the same if The Advocate's study was littered with random objects, rather than seemingly infinite newspaper bundles? I think not. Would The Advocate himself seem as much like a big deal if his office was lit with a few lamps or a chandelier? These things get into your head, too, don't they?

The effect changes the tone from a could-have-been comedy to a psychological torture. I imagine this movie was one of the influences on Scorsese's After Hours, which has a similarly absurd plot (that one is Kafka-esque, this one is by Kafka). But where Welles' movie creeps along with great fear, Scorsese's is comedic in its absurdity. The strangeness. Note how the protagonists wind up chased by groups: Joseph by a horde of young girls, After Hours' Paul by an angry mob of people he'd run into over the course of the movie. The latter is directly threatening the protagonist's life, yet it's taken as a dark comedy. We understand their misunderstanding, and their familiarity makes it funny. Not so in The Trial. The girls (again, we're talking huge numbers that overwhelm the frame) seem to only annoy with their persistent adoration of Joseph. They are less a character and more an unrelenting force, much like the movie's events. More unsettling is when they're locked out of a room with shabby wood, perfect for peaking within.

It's interesting that this is the kind of story told by two great filmmakers in despair. Welles always seemed to be despairing in his later career, with his films almost obsessively centered around men whose world is collapsing while he scrounged for funds for his projects. Scorsese found himself needing to show resilience with After Hours. It's the mark of their genius that the freedom afforded by surrealist stories let them consolidate their strengths, but their genres reveal much about the film makers. In The Trial, the protagonist is constantly being watched or surrounded by others. He's being judged. How much of this is a reflection on Welles film career? His films seem to be awfully perceptive of their maker's place in the world at all times.

In a lot of ways, The Trial is a great film. There's something deeply personal about it, I'd say, that makes the absurdism gripping. The internal logic is fascinating on its own, anyway. Some of it, too, is the grand scale of so much of it. Much has been written about Citizen Kane's... well, everything. But its camera tricks specifically. The Trial contains much of this ambition in its very framing of things, and not for the sake of doing things on a grand scale. Put aside just great film making; The Trial is straight-up great psychological trickery.

Expect it to come up again when I do After Hours some day.

Les Diaboliques: The Stranger Details

2010-01-31T09:29:00.000-08:00

O 'ello there.

I've greatly enjoyed Henri-Georges Clouzot's work before. Le Courbeau was one of the first pre-New Wave French films to really wow me, and Wages of Fear easily ranks in my top 5 all-time thrillers. So it was a no-brainer that eventually I'd check out ,Les Diaboliques, his most renowned film (according to IMDB, which, I know, isn't saying much). Supposedly, it was an influence on Hitchcock before he made a little film called Psycho. I can definitely see the influence it had in its suspense-building techniques. I'm a bit underwhelmed by the movie overall, but there's a lot of excellence going on throughout and a lot of peculiarities I'd picked out were resolved in the closing minutes.

Anyway, I think it's only fair that I warn that there will be spoilers here. Normally, I don't care, but this film does end with a warning not to spoil the movie for my friends. Plus, it was nice of the movie to ask that specifically. And I do consider anyone reading this to be a friend.

Les Diaboliques concerns two women, the wife and mistress of a boarding school principal named Michel, and their plot to murder him. The wife owns the school, technically, but the principal's force of will seems to overpower that detail. He's a cruel man, not just to them, but also the schoolchildren and his other employees. He seems to have a short fuse, and the first time we see Nicole (his mistress, played by Simone Signoret), she's got bulky sunglasses on to hide bruises. The guy's painted as a bastard quick and hard, activating my Sword of Vengeance: Sense of Justice rule, as it should. The murder's only the setup, so it makes sense to make the audience understand why these women want this guy dead fast. Michel's murder is wrapped up in the first third of the movie; a less inspired film could've done that as the whole movie.

From the get-go, though, something's off: Nicole is awfully dead-set on killing Michel. Christina, his wife (Vera Clouzot), is nervous about it and backs out a couple of times when it's too late. This is one of the things the movie gets right, since my inclination to think the two women would turn on each other. They don't, which is an interesting surprise. In some ways, that's more surprising than the idea of a wife and mistress working together, but I digress. I was actually more worried about Nicole more than anything for the first third of the movie; she would not take "no" for an answer for the murder. At one point, she says that she's seen a corpse before in her life. Does that imply she's done this before? I was glad at the end that, winds up, she was conspiring with Michel all along to kill Christina via heart attack (she's got a heart condition. It's a movie. She's gonna have a heart attack.) to take ownership of the school. Winds up she wasn't a sociopath. Just your run of the mill... uh... Conspirator-Thief?

Also somewhat run of the mill nowadays: the detective character, a cold investigator, just interested in the facts, ma'am kind of fella. In this instance, he's a fresh presence on screen, mainly because of the added pressure he gives Christina. Odd that he never seems like his investigating Nicole. He asks questions of everybody at the school, and, at one point, shows up in Christina's room in the middle of her sleep. Again, it ratchets up the pressure. He's an odd character that adds to a movie that's already unsettling. I will say this, though: It does seem fishy when Christina admits to murder and he doesn't arrest her or have much of a reaction. Later, you find it's because he'd figured out Michel and Nicole's plot.

But then again, the guy does let them murder Christina. Their plan does come to fruition, and he only comes out of the shadows to arrest them after the deed is done. The ending may imply that she and he came up with their own solution - but how would they do that?

That ending, in and of itself, makes be absolutely glad we got this movie in 1955 rather than 2005. A young boy who'd previously been the only student to see Michel after his "death" mysteriously gets his confiscated slingshot back from Christina after she was already dead (I know! OH SHIT!). It's a final turn of the screw that maybe goes too far, since it doesn't make much sense. Yet, it's the kind of thing that's become standard for horror films. If this movie had come out in 2005, we'd be on our third or fourth direct-to-DVD sequel by now, where the ghost of Christina (or otherwise her ghastly friends) would be haunting the new owners and boarders of the school, slow dread of the original replaced by hilarious, cheap gore. I do appreciate that Clouzot thought it would be necessary to add one more mystery to the movie, though. It's some out of nowhere business to throw off a movie whose real twist is one of those "that makes so much sense, why didn't I think of it?" deals.

Another logical choice the film makes is to explain why the boarding school was so crumbling and shabby: because Michel's a cheap bastard who doesn't even want to run the school (again, Sword of Vengeance rule). That gives the movie the freedom to have the building be functional without ever seeming pleasant. In the black and white photography, it allows the pool to be so dirty it looks like ink. Along those same lines, the setting helps make the climax - where Christina seems to be chasing Michel's ghost - so much more enveloping. The sight of Michel rising from the tub after this chase is easily one of the most memorable images in film. It and the chase preceding it are easily the most virtuoso sequence in the movie; it's the one thing that moves Les Diaboliques from mysterty/thriller to horror movie. Its technique won me over, though, making me truly love the film in that moment.

Much of the middle part of the movie, where Christina and Nicole investigate the strange occurrences around Michel's disappearance, was tense and well-done, but I never bought it. I did get a real shock when I found out Nicole was planning this whole thing with Michel, but I had guessed that Michel was still alive. In some ways that makes me a jaded modern viewer, but I recently watched Psycho and found it effective, still, even knowing every step of the plot. Maybe my opinion of Les Diaboliques will improve with repeated viewings. There is much to love here, though, most of all, the way the movie makes all the little details matter.

ROTTEN TOMATOES: 25 Movies So Bad They're Unmissable

2010-01-31T05:01:00.000-08:00

ROTTEN TOMATOES: 25 Movies So Bad They're Unmissable

You best believe many of these will make the Hall of Fame.

Tears of the Black Tiger: How to Make an Intentional-Bad Movie

2010-01-30T17:55:00.000-08:00

In some ways, making an intentionally bad movie is more daring than making a good movie. If you fail, you have failed at something others have done by accident. If you succeed, there are going to be plenty of people taking your movie's badness at face value (as Rodriguez and Tarantino learned with Grindhouse), and at some level, being intentionally bad can be a lot less satisfying than accidentally stumbling upon it (as Snakes on a Plane will tell you). Compounding this is the difficult balance between winkingly bad and truly bad. I general good rule for this is that you can never, ever be boring. It's one thing to go way over the top, like in any of Chuck Norris' movies. But if you attempt some form of emotional content and miss the mark, the bad movie suffers as bad as a good movie. Case in point, Tears of the Black Tiger proves this in its potent mastery of fight scenes and its flailing attempts at emotional context.

Granted, the emotional context is as over-the-top as the action scenes. But they're boring. They're slow and filled with rote dialogue. It's built around one of those Slumdog Millionaire-esque "boy meets girl, grows up to find girl as an adult" scenarios. Our protagonist Dum has a couple flashbacks to his youth as he saves a young girl, Rumpooey, from harrassment again and again. She loves him, but class separates them. Blah blah blah. The story is, I assume, intentionally cliched, but the scenes are too slow to make an impact. There is much weepy-eyed hugging and sadness at broken promises. The simple story, the love plot also weighs down the momentum badly, taking up so much time pouting and being sad. Dum's flat acting is helpful when the movie settles into Western bullshit, but when it has to carry actual complex emotions (like conflict), the scenes just seem like tedious monologues for Rumpooey. If there ever needed to be a case to show why Clint Eastwood-directed westerns are low on the intimate sweetness, this is a pretty good one. They clash with the gleeful "I'm getting away with this!" attitude of the action scenes, and it's always hard to trust the emotional subtext when the movie includes a gag where an officer forgets to pull the pin from a grenade.

Let it never be said that they don't go gore well in Asia, though. This movie's a take off of Westerns, so it's filled with gunfights. Ever see someone take a rocket launcher to a gunfight? Ever see someone get shot at the tip-top of his ten-gallon hat and bleed from it? How about a bullet ricochet off a dozen different objects in the room before nailing its target? These scenes are absolutely fantastic and inventive. The cliche-ridden dialogue works so well here, as it underscores the corniness of these Western conventions and the ham-fisted impossibility of every fight. Best of all, it doesn't talk down to westerns; it's as much an homage as parody. There's a clear love for the revisionist westerns from the 60s, and it bursts out of every frame when it's an action scene. In the moments like the bloody shootout between the police and outlaws, which includes the aforementioned rocket launchers, the movie is incredibly entertaining.

But these scenes are relatively (emphasis on relatively) few and far between, and their tone clashes with the romantic subplot. Similarly, the relationship between Dum and his sideman, Mahesuan, underlines how distant the actor playing Dum is when he's talking to his love interest. There's even a montage that gives the best Brokeback Mountain parodies a run for their money. I can't find a clip right now, but let's just say... lots of drinking and smiling at each other while spinning in a circle happens. Also, horseback riding side-by-side along a beautiful landscape. It's not inherently gay, but let's just say neither is pro wrestling. They just seem closer than Dum and Rumpooey (his love), but not in a way that makes it any more convincing when Mahesuan turns on Dum. Their final gunfight never plays on their relationship at all, either, which makes the montage seem more an aberration than anything.

But let's get back to those landscapes. The set and costume design for this movie are phenomenal. I'm reticent to say "cinematography" because a lot of it seemed blurry and dimly lit to me, to the point that my eyes were feeling a little strained, but that also might be the DVD transfer. Everywhere - from the verdent greens of the lake filled with lillypads to the Barbie-pink of Dum's university - there are shockingly gorgeous colors used. Everything is over-saturated, like Speed Racer. Everything looks cheap, too, though, so imagine Speed Racer being done on a soundstage rather than CGI. Some sets are specifically on a soundstage to be similar to older Thai films. The aesthetic pleasures of the mvoie alone are almost enough to make this a recommendation, but not completely.

That underscores why I am put off by the romantic subplot, too. It's standard for the fighting in westerns to be over a woman, but these scenes appear to attempt face-value emotions. Then everything around it, from the settings to other scenes, is over-the-top. There's even a little person dancing around in a cowboy outfit! There's no way that little person is meant to be anything but comedic in this movie, or he'd do more than dance in his cowboy outfit. Anyway, everything else about the movie strikes the right tone, so I do recommend it if you want to see the western (arguably the most American of film genre) reflected in Asian cinema. Hell, even the mock-Morricone (Mockorricone?) score is absolutely note-perfect. Actually, that might be the best thing about the movie, really. But it's also a definitive case study on why it is difficult to make an movie that knows it's bad. Compared to this, I'll defend Snakes on a Plane or Shoot 'Em Up any day. They at least treat themselves like bullshit the whole time.

Stroszek: The American Landscape and its Buried Dreams

2010-01-29T18:27:00.000-08:00

HI THERE

Some of Werner Herzog movies have a way of growing on me, unlike other filmmakers' projects. I liked Grizzly Man when I saw it, but over the years after that, I came to identify it as one of my favorite documentaries. Similarly, Aguirre: The Wrath of God felt like a fun (in its own way), surreal trip, but I never really got it out of my head. After rewatching it one more time, it became one of my all-time favorites. One of the keys to these movies, and Stroszek, too, is that the characters are so damned inherently memorable. In the minutes after watching it, I was pleased but not overwhelmed. Now, writing about it a day later, thinking about individual scenes makes me smile or cringe.

Part of this: Bruno S. (the character: Bruno Stroszek, the actor who plays him: Bruno Shleinstein) is an unnatural presence in front of a camera. He's awkward and nervous throughout; even when he's ranting loudly, it doesn't sound like a man with much confidence in the moment. His friend Scheitz is also intensely memorable for his quirks, but not in the indie-quirk way we've seen in, say, the works of Wes Anderson. Movies like Rushmore have characters that are clearly written creations (which is not to take away from Rushmore's greatness); Herzog at times seems like he could make a feature-length film about any random inmate at an asylum or a prison. That's definitely one of the things that gets commented on a lot in relation to this film, though. I'd rather go in another direction and focus on the settings, which reach a kind of verisimilitude of their own.

The movie begins in Germany, with Bruno getting let out of prison. He goes to a bar and has an apartment. The movie depicts the city as live-in; even Bruno's apartment is a cluttered mess. He's a street performer, and he performs in an alley that looks dingy and empty while he's playing his song. His prostitute friend Eva cleans it up, but Bruno's piano always seems too big for the room. Eva's pimps wreck the place, soon enough, anyway. Overall, the city is dark and confining. There's so much history there; it's almost a metaphor for Europe itself. It may just be coincidence (the nagging of film professors tells me it's not), but everything does seem small and lived-in, but also homely. Despite the mess, Bruno still has a fond nickname for his piano, and, once out of jail, picks up his street performing where he left off. Even as violent pimps roam the streets, it's clear tha thte city in some ways is home, or at least familiar, to Bruno and his friends.

Later, they move to Wisconsin, which is mostly barren fields. Even when Bruno's on the run after robbing a barber shop, the streets seem wide and inviting. Their trailer, a massive, hulking box, cannot fill in the space of the desert landscape enough to make the place seem populated. The truck yard nearby seems so empty. Scheitz wanders a field at one point testing "animal magnetism," and the land seems to go on forever. He never once has any conversation with anyone but his nephew and Buruno. There's something beautiful about these areas, but there's also something alien and strange about them, captured by the main characters. It helps to make Bruno a more sympathetic character, since America's such a strange place to him, yet it's not so strange that society will accept him.

Underscoring this, there's a scene where their trailer is auctioned off. Eva was the only person of the little group who spoke English, and she's long gone by this point in the movie. The auctioneer calls prices for items, too fast for me to fully understand what he's saying. One can only imagine how overwhelming it is for someone who doesn't speak English. From an establishing shot, the camera captures how empty this part of the country is, while a small mass of people huddle outside the massive trailer. Bruno's there, weaving in and out of the crowd, understanding what's happening, but not its specifics. After the auction is over, the town's police chief starts his car. Bruno berates and directly threatens him, but he drives off after apologizing for not understanding him. Bruno and Scheitz are alone, and it's painful to watch their every word be met with a sad confusion.

Some have said that this movie seems anti-American, but I don't think that's the intention. Almost everyone in the area is strangers to the group. They have no stake in their well-being, and they all treat the immigrants with politeness. The language barrier is too much to overcome for almost anyone, though; they're only there for a short amount of time before their living arrangements start to come apart. When Eva pays the man from the bank with cash she earned prostituting, he's bewildered that it's not in check or card form. Neither side really has the time or inclination to get to know the other. This is one of the scenarios where the casting of non-actors helps; the townspeople seem even more dumbfounded by what's happening then Herzog's actors. From the way from the guy from the bank continually apologizes for demanding payments, it's like their housing issues move along on their own accord.

It's interesting, then, that the happiest moments in the film are when Bruno, Eva and Scheitz are sightseeing in New York. Now, all I know about New York circa 1977 is learned from Scorsese movies, Al Pacino's 70s works, Saturday Night Fever, and the Rolling Stones album Some Girls. I am under the impression that a lot of motherfuckers got shot up a lot and things that would be crimes in other cities went unchecked. That makes it interesting that the most idyllic part of the Stroszek takes places as these immigrants who barely speak English looking around this city in a sunny daytime. You never see New York having that in those movies. New York, too expensive for a street performer, a prostitute and an old man to live, is the American myth that they hope to find when they first set out. At one point, Bruno admits that he believed America would be different from Germany, only to find that he's an outcast in both places.

More pro- or anti- anything, though, the movie is observant. It's the perfect mode for a director who went into documentaries later on, where everything seems natural-ish, if not truly natural. Hell, I went this whole way without even mentioning that the Wisconsin town was the homeplace of noted grave robber Ed Gein (try to find that on their welcome sign, though). That's never brought up in the movie, though. Does knowing that add anything to it? I don't know, but it kind of explains some of the emptiness, doesn't it? It doesn't? I don't know, then. The movie ends with a chicken dancing nonstop, though. What does that mean? I have guesses, but I would venture to say it was filmed with nothing specific in mind. Just feelin' right, like the rest of this movie.

Big Fan: Does This Jersey Make My Ass Look Insane?

2010-01-28T13:57:00.000-08:00

oh hi there

Robert Siegel's directorial debut Big Fan can be seen as a companion piece with The Wrestler, also written by him. In some ways, each are grittier versions of Funny People, too. They're all movies about guys who live arguably misguided lives, come close to death and learn nothing from it. I'm not going to compare the three further than that, since I think The Wrestler and Funny People are each worthy of their own entries, but I just thought I'd point it out. Of the three, Big Fan is probably the easier to relate to, and is maybe the best-balanced of the three, all-around. That is to say, The Wrestler almost built entirely around Mickey Rourke's (excellent) performance, and Funny People meanders somewhat badly (though I find myself defending it frequently). Big Fan's biggest strength is its story, which stays down to earth in even the most unlikely of times.

Patton Oswalt plays Paul Aufiero, and to say Paul is a huge Giants fan is an understatement. The movie takes place over the second half of a regular season of football, and leaves you with no idea what the guy does when the Giants aren't playing. That's most of the year, right? At the start of the movie, we see Paul at work as an attendant at a parking garage, listening to sports radio. He's listening to his arch-rival, Philadelphia Phil (Michael Rapaport) rave about how the Eagles are going to kick the Giants' asses. Paul spends the dead time during his job scribbling a rebuttal. This is a weekly dance they do; aside from actually watching the Giants play (for home games, in the parking lot of Giants stadium on TV), Paul lives to be a fan. He calls into the sports show after work to read out of his notebook while his mother yells at him to quiet down. His friend congratulates him afterward on a job well done. It's not crazy if someone else thinks you're right, I guess.

The rest of Paul's family is introduced at a nephew's birthday party. They've all got "normal" lives while Paul lives with his mother; it's an obvious source of tension for a man in his mid-30s. He's happy to be just a fan, though. It's going to sound odd to say this, but the scenes with his family introduce sexuality into the picture. He has a long and funny conversation with his mother on the way home from the party about his brother taking up with (and marrying) his secretary, who looks like a reject from the Jersey Shore auditions. The movie lingers lovingly on his poster of his favorite player, Quantrell Bishop (Jonathan Hamm). His size and muscles are romanticized in thr picture. Paul masturbates under bedsheets, but never appears to look at porn ot be interested in women. The movie smartly has the meeting between Paul and Bishop (which ends with Bishop beating the living fuck outta Paul) take place in a strip club. Paul and his friend are so enamored with Bishop's presence that they almost don't notice a stripper, or, really, that they're in a strip club. The way the duo watches Bishop from afar almost resembles a kid in elementary school being too shy to approach a crush. They even buy Bishop a drink.

So am I saying Paul gay? Not any more than the millions of football fans who idolize big, muscular men. But it's an inherent homoeroticism (which does not mean to be gay!) in sports fandom, and I enjoyed that the movie pointed it out.

But even if there's something strange about Paul, Oswalt plays him with a warmth that makes him understandable. His fanaticism is tested in probably one of the strangest, most difficult ways imaginable. Wisely, the movie avoids having him debate whether or not to continue being a Giants fan. There aren't any big speeches about the nature of fanaticism, even if that's one of the movie's themes. His only verbally explosive moment is when he yells at his mother for insisting he live a "normal" life. Even after being concussed, he's more concerned with how the team is playing - and blaming himself that the team suffers while Bishop is suspended for the incident. It could have been subtitled "The Passion of Paul," since his allegiance to his team is tested so thoroughly.

Late in the movie, he takes on the guise of an Eagles fan, which leads to something similar to a Jesus-like death/redemption without so much as a single Jesus pose. After defending the Giants from Philadelphia Phil for the whole movie, it seemed like the ultimate betrayal for him to wear the green, black and white. He seems so resigned when he sits in a bar with Phil, there's palpable psychological torment. In the end, though, movie only flirts with a Taxi Driver-esque descent into madness, which leads to a perfect climax. It works much like a joke that is only funnier because of how long it is (unlike The Aristocrats, or its namesake). Paul still winds up in jail, though, and because of that, we never see how he spends a normal off season. Handled differently, the implication that this could all happen again next football season could be horrifying, but instead Siegel gives it a fair amount of warmth and optimism.

Something that helps keep things warm is probably the kind of fanaticism he exhibits. Philadelphia Phil is an obnoxious douchebag; I don't even think other Eagles fans like him much. Paul, strange as he is, pretty much only roots against other teams when they're playing his Giants, or as a rebuttal to other football fans. It helps keep him likable, even if his decisions are irrational and unfair to himself. This (as well as that punchline of a climax) is probably why this is often cited as a comedy. It's really not funny for most of its duration (and it's not a long movie, either), at least in the way one would expect from a normal comedy. Or even possibly a dark comedy. It's a bitter and observant kind of comedy, which makes it wholly successful and digestible movie than a drama would have been. As a previous writer for The Onion, Siegel is probably familiar with the cliche "it's funny because it's true." And, while Big Fan isn't necessarily true (and for the sake of any real-life Pauls, I really hope it isn't), it contains a kind of truthful insight that applies to any kind of passion that makes it funny in its own way.

...Go Pats

Laura: For When Your Movie Barely Needs to Make Sense

2010-01-26T16:28:00.000-08:00

OH! Hi there!

My first exposure to Laura came in a "Music in Film" class I took in college. The professor used it as an example of film makers going to strange lengths to shoe-horn music into their movies. In the scene he showed as an example, Dana Andrews' Det. McPherson walks into the home of the titular Laura (Gene Tierney), whose murder he is investigating. While he looks around and talks about the case, he turns on her phonograph and pipes in music. When watching it yesterday, I especially noticed that he did that again in another scene. It's an odd man who goes around turning on strangers' radios for ten seconds before shutting them off.

But then, Laura is a strange movie. It's a noir that deals with a murder, but its characters are played to a campy effect. Not only that, but its main characters almost all seem to belong in their own separate movies. Yet, they all make sense together and form the cast of a genuine classic. The most interesting of the bunch is Clifton Webb's Waldo Lydecker. The film starts with his narration, but eventually that gets dropped. He also narrates a flashback, which includes scenes that he is not present to witness. It's an odd inconsistency, but it works within the film because the whole thing is so surreal by 1944 standards.

For this reason, I wish I had seen this in tandem with Masked and Anonymous. It accomplishes a lot of that movie's goals with seemingly a lot less effort (and a 579% reduction in plodding monologues). When I wrote about that movie, I noted that the casting was eclectic but predictable. Well, how about this? Webb, an open homosexual (I didn't even know they existed in 1944 America), plays Lydecker as a person who at least carries a prissy narcissism with him at all times. At most, he's a full-blown caricature of homosexuality. At the same time, he's fiercely protective of Laura, his ...what, exactly, is she to him?

Lydecker's relationship with Laura is poorly defined. He's shown to be a mentor to her; it's implied they might be lovers. They at least live together and have a set weekly routine. But the age difference is enough to make it strange. His demeanor is so distant, one wonders what Laura sees in him. From his nastiness during their meet-up to the odd moment where he reminisces about reading his own articles to her, the relationship is somewhat amorphous and vague.

Similarly, McPherson's relationship to Laura is odd, even by the low standards of romantic subplots. He falls for Laura while investigating her murder. Lucky for him, it turns out Laura is alive. The woman who was murdered wasn't Laura after all, but a model having an affair with Laura's fiance. Still, the characters lack any chemistry, so when they kiss near the climax, it's a forced moment, like the characters are doing things out of some kind of obligation. Up to that point, Laura showed no interest in the detective. It becomes another odd detail in a movie full of them.

Laura herself is an odd character, so perhaps it isn't so strange that her relationships are a little off, too. Played with detachment by Gene Tierney, she is hailed by Waldo, and her fiance as being a kind and radiant person. Her housekeeper is so grief-stricken at her "death" that she comes off as a nervous wreck. She's so wonderful, remember, that the detective falls for her a little while he still thinks she's dead. Later, the maid is absolutely terrified at the apparently alive Laura. Laura's reaction? About a minute of comforting words and a request for eggs. When Laura shows up midway through the movie, she's a curiosity precisely because she doesn't live up to the hype.

There apparently was a scrapped studio-mandated ending where the whole thing was a dream. This ending was scrapped because it was hard to understand. What's interesting is that the movie itself very much has its own internal logic, much like a dream. So many little things fall apart under scrutiny, whether it's the characters, their motivations, etc. To nitpick a movie like this ("Why didn't McPherson try harder to find the woman who was with Laura's fiance once he found out about her?") is to miss the point. It's a tightly-wound, pulpy little mystery that casts suspicion on everyone. When a movie has me wondering if the most minor of characters are the criminal, it's doing something right.

Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance: The Art of Waiting to Slice a Dude

2010-01-25T14:04:00.000-08:00

o hello

Before watching Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance, I had been watching The Incredible Hulk (AKA Hulk: Ed Norton remix). In few ways are the movies similar. Yet, they build on the same foundation of a guy who destroys opponents with ease taking his time to be coaxed out of his shell by others doing wrong. What I mean is that the plot of each is pretty much the protagonist getting treated badly and then RRAAAAWWRRRGGGHHH (or in Lone Wolf and Cub's case: SWOOOOSH SWISH!): instant gratification and justice. It's a comparison that can be made to the westerns by Sergio Leone, where gunfights are not drawn out; it's Rainbow Six rules: one shot kills. This probably doesn't last for The Incredible Hulk (I only saw the first half; it's in my Netflix now to finish at some other date), but Lone Wolf and Cub never creates a villain who is able to equal its protagonist, Ogami Itto.

That's notable, in looking at so many superhero adaptations. John Favreau's Ironman and Ang Lee's Hulk both struggled to create a suitable villain in their final act. One of the flaws of the (still good) Tim Burton Batman movie was that they spent more time on the villains than the hero. The villain of the series has no fighting prowess in this Lone Wolf and Cub movie. He's an old man running a "shadow" clan, an elderly man played in an overdramatic way, like a Noh theater character. His strength is in the number of men he commands, and while his villainy sets off the movie's narrative, he is not seen for the last third.

The movie is almost strictly an origin story for is first two acts; it's a story of betrayal and corruption that ends with Itto vowing to be an assassin for hire as he travels with his son. It establishes his skill with a sword, and the aesthetic of its fights. The fights tend to be bloody - individual swordsmen are slashed and killed in single swipes, while Itto is untouched. No one, not the officers come to arrest him, nor the army trying to stop him after he refuses to commit seppuku for his crimes, can touch him. Throughout, we see him wronged until he unleashes the awesome power of slicing the fuck outta someone with a really sharp blade. Then, he fights the odds in self-defense until he uses his cunning to get into a duel. Then, he uses his cunning again combined with his ability to decapitate motherfuckers to win the duel.

The action is handled with vigor, handling special effects for the various severed limbs and campy spraying blood smoothly. Yes, it's all cartoonish, but it's also fun in a B-movie way. Of course, the movie saves the best for last, with Itto taken captive in a town taken over by an evil chamberlain and his men. Upon first sight, they threaten to cut down a bridge while he is on it. They rape a woman. Then kill her father. One guy demands to challenge him because he is insulted. They force him to have sex with a prostitute while they watch. They even wipe a bloody sword clean on the robe he's wearing. The movie pushes them to cartoonish levels of depravity, not even feigning a chance that Itto could be beaten by them. Instead, we get a violent bloodbath of righteous vigilante justice (AKA justice in its purest form).

Anyway, I can't labor over this entry because the movie is both simple and short (82 minutes! When was the last time anyone produced a movie that was 82 minutes? Freaking Cars was nearly two hours!). Also, the entire series is on my Netflix queue now, and I fully intend on doing an entry for each. It's just that sometimes it's the simplest things that are great pleasures. Like when a dude gets pushed too far and winds up he can cut your sword in half and then jam the loose half through your throat with blood sprouting out of the top of your head somehow. Or when Bruce Banner's got some spanish dude and his posse kicking his ass for no reason while the government's on his back, and he's been running, and his Portuguese isn't so good and RRAAAWWRGGH HULK SMASH. Of course, in the case of Lone Wolf and Cub, it helps that it's a straight-up well-made movie, with great cinematography and some extremely well-chosen set pieces. But, in the end, how much of the audience is gonna care about that really gorgeous waterfall with a wood bridge overlooking it?

Masked and Anonymous: No, Your Song Is Not a Screenplay

2010-01-24T13:53:00.000-08:00

Oh, HELLO there?

Can you name a song turned into a movie? Not counting rock operas or full albums? I can't, at least off the top of my head. I suppose it's possible; if Spike Jonze can turn Where the Wild Things Are into a movie, it follows that some songs can become movies. If you have an interest in doing this, see Masked and Anonymous. It's very much an illustration of why you should probably put that screenplay of yours in the shredder. While not based on a specific song, it was penned by Bob Dylan and its director, Larry Charles. It's more a curiosity than a movie, featuring the same kind of impenetrable imagery one might find in Dylan's songs. Charles admits as much:

When I made the Bob Dylan movie [Masked and Anonymous], I wanted to make a Bob Dylan movie that was like a Bob Dylan song. One with a lot of layers, that had a lot of poetry, that had a lot of surrealism and was ambiguous and hard to figure out, like a puzzle.

Mission accomplished, I say. It truly is a movie that's "ambiguous" and "hard to figure out," but to what end? A Dylan song can be densely packed, full of small details, contradictions, literary and historical characters. His "Desolation Row" is an example of this, but I would not want it as a movie.

The problems with the idea itself are numerous, and they undercut some okay acting, a great cast and interesting direction. Dylan himself is cast as Jack Fate, one of many unfortunate names that would probably sound fine as a character in a song (others include: Tom Friend, Pagan Lace, Uncle Sweetheart... aw, fuck it. Look at imdb's page). As characters in a movie, though, they are all one-dimensional creations. Fate is much like the singer in a song: an observer, which is unfortunate because Dylan is not much of an actor. If the canonization of his music and persona has sealed him into an almost inhuman figure, his flat line readings and evasive maneuvers when questioned by the press aren't helping. His physical appearance - so small and thin - makes him a worrisome presence (and it doesn't help that he spends much of the movie standing next to John Goodman). He would not be out of place in the background of a diner in a David Lynch movie. Of course, he is based on Dylan: Jeff Bridges' journalist questions him about not being at Woodstock; the songs by "Jack Fate" are old Dylan songs.

Aside from those details, though, he is an observer to the events around him, passively listening as Jeff Bridges berates him with questions, or as Val Kilmer waxes philosophical about God-knows-what. That's a problem for a movie, because the viewer is already an observer to the action. If a song is like a story being relayed (via its singer), a film is like a memory being shared. You don't need the passive figure to hang up your decorative crazy characters. It frees up the cast to do a whole lot of "ACTING" around him in monologues, which, unfortunately, are not as full of insight as they (the actors, writers, directors, characters) may think. They all riff on the nature of revolutions, war, the world, whatever. It's all related to the plot, which is just window dressing for Dylan and Charles to congratulate themselves on their ability to write a good comeback ("If you had to kill a man, what would you use? A knife or a gun?" "My bare hands," and so the conversations in this movie goes). One of the problems of the movie is the sheer normality of its characters, despite its attempts at strangeness. Of course John Goodman's a blowhard. Of course Luke Wilson's a really nice guy. Of course Mickey Rourke's a bit of a bastard. Part of the problem with loading the cast with such big names is that you can't get past the types of characters these actors generally play. It robs the movie of its attempted weirdness to typecast everyone in roles we've seen before.

One could argue that maybe that's another layer to the movie, like, maybe the "movie" is commenting on how we "perceive" these "people" as "characters," maaan. But even if that was intentional, doesn't that seem like an awful burden to load onto a movie that already ruminates on the nature of war, man, the role of the protest singer, journalism and whatever the hell else Dylan and Charles were getting at? A Dylan song's lyrics can run into wild, surreal directions, but they're always much more focused than this movie. Even something that twists and turns like "Tangled Up in Blue" or "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" are focused on one subject or mood.

Masked and Anonymous struggles to share the dense detail of a Dylan song, too. Every frame is packed with little decorations, but to what purpose? The lighting has a greenish hue. John Goodman wears an atrocious powder blue suit. Penelope Cruz wears a Metallica T-shirt (to his credit, Mickey Rourke probably just showed up on set looking like that), but why? People exist and say things that don't matter. It's like a dream, but in a bad way. A song can coast on its melody; if the lyrics are merely evocative (and Dylan's often can be), it's merely for the mood or the idea that's being expressed. Feature length films don't generally have this luxury because they're at least 90 minutes long. An exception might be David Lynch films, but his inventions are more outrageous than anything here.

Anyway, I don't want to belabor this point much. In the end, as an attempt to make a movie out of a song (or some kind of "movie song"), it's proof that maybe this isn't a great idea. To leave on a positive note, though, the reworkings, remakes and covers of Dylan songs are pretty interesting. Also, near the end of this movie, you do get a chance to see the (estimating from this movie: 4'7"/27 lbs/205 y.o.) Bob Dylan beat up the (estimating from this movie: 6'1"/250 lbs/47 y.o.) Jeff Bridges without any effort (or acting) whatsoever. This won't be a Great-Bad Hall of Fame entry ever (too boring), but that scene on its own certainly deserves a mention.

Let the Right One In: How to Make an American Remake

2010-01-21T15:29:00.001-08:00

"It's funny, but is it going to get them off their tractors?"
-Gammabot (of Futurama) evaluating a TV show

Oh, Hi there!

So, Let the Right One In, right? Like, fuck Twilight, right?

That's got to be the first thing lots of people in America thought upon seeing this movie. Unfortunately, that's only 5 words, not counting titles. I don't have any word limit, but, you know... Let the Right One In was a sweet movie. It's deliberately paced and has some wonderful acting and cinematography. But I do wonder if the movie would be so critically acclaimed if Twilight wasn't playing at the local multiplex down the road from it, its siren song like the world's loudest brown note.

Anyway, apparently an American remake is in the works, under the title Let Me In. From what I gather from interviews and shit (read: wikipedia), it's going to be based on the novel on which the original movie was based, but I don't know how different it will wind up. Obviously, it would be slicker in terms of production. Could they go for the Twilight crowd and tone down the gore? They could also make it gorier, too. Make its pace faster? Probably. This is all speculation on my part. It's being directed by the guy who helmed Cloverfield, so maybe they're going for more horror than Twilight-esque romance. All kinds of things can be done with this plot. It'll be interesting. They're at least changing the names of the names of the characters (instead of American-izing the spelling. Because why the fuck not, right?). But then, from wikipedia, I see this:

Producer Simon Oakes has made it clear that the plot of Let Me In will closely resemble that of the original, except that it will be made "very accessible to a wider audience".

Well, of course. Because this movie was so freaking impossible to understand. Let's see if you can make sense of it: a lonely boy (Oskar) is a social outcast, picked on by bullies. A girl (Eli) is lonely because she's a vampire. The two meet and strike up a friendship. Yadda yadda yadda, Eli's vampirism puts her in danger of being discovered and she must flee the town, but her mutual love with Oskar is deepening.

Sorry if I went too fast - those tweens get into so many complications! (Also, I yadda yadda yadda'd over some pretty cool shit.) But all joking aside, I understand why Hollywood insists on remaking any foreign film that isn't a European historical drama. A lot of America is averse to reading subtitles, and in other cases some places lack smaller cinemas that will show independent movies or indie flicks. I get that. For awhile, the trend of remaking Asian horror movies made some good bank, too. It makes total business sense, so I can't blame Hollywood for going to that well so often. (I actually think it's too bad the Battle Royale remake never came to fruition, because I would love to see how any American studio would handle that particular movie.)

So, with that in mind, here are some more ways that Let me In can changes things for an American audience:

More slow-mo. Emotions are too fleeting - I need time to register my sadness
One-liners. Eli should be making bad vampire puns every 3-4 lines in her scenes (Oskar: Would you like Twizzlers? Eli: No fang-k you!)
Oskar should get into a kung-fu fight scene within the first 30 seconds of Let Me In, just to get your attention. He should lose, though, because his character's a wimp
It takes place in the early 1980s. Each scene should be devised around a pop culture reference from the 80s - the failest decade! lmao!
All of Eli's vampiric attacks should be more gory than anyone would imagine
The amount of body glitter is indirectly proportional to how much your plot needs to make sense. (Not a suggestion, just some math to keep in mind)
Can Oskar have a wisecracking (ethnic?) best friend to provide comedic moments? You damn well right he can!

With these suggestions in mind, I think America will get a Let the Right One In remake that plays to its sensibilities. Let the rest of the world have their subtitles or lips that don't match the words! This is America! We deserve better than that!

...this pretty much damns me into having to watch Let Me In to give it a fair chance, doesn't it?

Jan Svenkmajer's Alice: The Only Film I Like Dubbed

2010-01-19T16:55:00.001-08:00

Oh hi there...

Lots of attention given to Jan Svankmajer's Alice is given to its visuals. As a stop-motion retelling of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, they should be. Here's a plot summary for the uninitiated: Alice encounters a White Rabbit and chases him. A bunch of shit happens, and the shit that happens is fucking crazy. This movie's dark, haunting, maybe not disturbing, but definitely strange and uncomfortable. When I first saw it, it was the first for a college film class, in an auditorium with booming loud speakers. At the time, I thought that was just the auditorium. Now, after rewatching it via Netflix on my computer, it definitely does not seem that way. This movie is loud, and that does so much for the movie's ability to get under your skin, it almost outdoes the visual aspects. Almost.

Remember how cute Disney's Alice in Wonderland is? And how distorted but still kinda cute (or at least "wow look at the bright colors!") Tim Burton's looks (from the trailers)? Svankmajer's version includes stop-motion, which is an inherently creepy form of animation. Objects are more dimensional than traditional animation, but are given an unnatural jerkiness that can be used to great effect, as it is here. It helps that there's so much death in this retelling. Not that characters die, but in their design. The white rabbit is a stuffed rabbit that comes to life; his friends are all made of bird and fish bones and doll parts. It's a combined creepy effect, with everything being somewhat jerky, yet remarkably smooth, like everything is played at only a couple frames per minute slower.

So, you get Alice in Wonderland, but told with dead animals. If that doesn't seal the creepiness, the narration will. All dialogue is delivered by Alice, with a closeup of her mouth ending each phrase (sample: "'I'm going to be late!' SAID THE WHITE RABBIT"). At first, the effect is intriguing. Then annoying. Then strangely unsettling. The version I've seen is dubbed in English, this intensifies this effect greatly. The lips in closeup clearly don't match what's being said, and it become surreal because you're forced to read her lips. This causes a mental dissonance, at least for me. It's the exact reason I can't stand dubbing. (and I've heard people insist that the only way to watch bad martial arts movies is dubbed. Can't do it. Sorry.) It magnifies how strange the film's world is.

This extends to the sound effects, too. The majority of the film takes place with clearly puppets, either among Alice or occasionally when she becomes a doll. Every crash and clang is mixed far louder than would be natural for the dolls. There's a dissonance with comes with these little objects causing such a racket. For example, there's the scene with the Mad Hatter and March Hare, which is driven by repetition of the Hatter ("'I want a clean cup!' SAID THE HATTER"), the sounds of the hare's cart, chairs scraping against the floor, butter slathering over clocks. In its extended repetition, the scene grates partially because of its sound.

In the end,talking about the sound of the thing is mostly just me trying to find a unique perspective on this movie, though. The striking animation of it - alive, yet unnatural, much like the White Rabbit who bleeds and eats sawdust constantly - is the real star here.

Still, I don't want to give too little credit to Kristyna Kohoutova, who plays Alice. She plays the role with the perfect mix of curiosity and bratty determination. The latter trait is probably magnified by her refusal to be intimidated by anything she sees throughout her journey, but it makes her reactions fascinating. She deadpans her way through being turned into a doll, being trapped inside a doll, being attacked by a bunch of dead animals, having her socks come alive, being nearly submerged in her tears, among other strangeness. In some ways, this is a dark comedy, and she is its straight man.

Overall, Alice is an interesting trip down some surrealist stop-motion animation. It's more a showcase of technique than a narrative film, given that there isn't a real plot to it. It's unforgettable, though, for its design and style, which deftly walks the line between horror and nonsense. There isn't much wonder here, just unending madness falling into itself.

SAID THE FILM BLOGGER

The Great-Bad Hall of Fame: Rocky IV

2010-01-18T16:06:00.001-08:00

Oh! Hi there!

For years, I've been saying that there should be a hall of fame for movies that are so bad they're good. Then I realized I have a blog! I can be proactive and make this happen! So with that, I am going to write about Rocky IV. If you don't know which Rocky that is from the title, let me summarize it for you: Rocky ends the fucking Cold War -nay, the very USSR itself- via boxing.

The thing that makes Rocky IV stand out as a great bad movie, for me, is that it's the continuation of a film series that began with a great film. It's a perversion of all the things that made the first one great. The Hollywood rule for sequels is "like the last one, but more of it!" Much like a game of Jenga, though, the base erodes until it is unstable as you add sequel after sequel. So, eventually, you get a series of events that reads like this:

Rocky: Rocky, a fighter around 30, is drafted to fight the Heavyweight Champion, an undefeated Ali-esque character. He doesn't win, but his ability to stand toe-to-toe with the champ inspires the nation.
Rocky IV: Rocky, a multimillionaire who must be nearing 40 now, must avenge the death of his best friend who was killed in a boxing match against a hulking Soviet, a probable steroid user with double the punching power of an average professional boxer. He wins against the Russian, and also inspires the all-Russian audience to look at themselves and realize their government is wrong. The audience includes the government.

Of course, Rocky wins the fight. That's fine. This movie was produced in America, after all. But who would have guessed that Rocky would end the movie with a rousing speech about about, well:

During this fight, I've seen a lot of changing, in the way you feel about me, and in the way I feel about you. In here, there were two guys killing each other, but I guess that's better than twenty million. I guess what I'm trying to say, is that if I can change, and you can change, everybody can change!

Because when it comes down to it, wasn't the Cold War just a bunch of pansy-ass "feelings?" The thing is, this speech barely makes sense in the script's dramatic continuity as "change" appears as a theme multiple times. Apollo and Rocky talk about "changing," with Creed claiming that he and Rock are always fighters and will never change. Meanwhile, Rocky says things can never be the way they were before. Later, Rocky insists that he can't change, which is why he has to fight Drago. Which makes him a hypocrite. But then Rocky wins - as a fighter, without changing his core nature - and insists that the entire USSR can just switch over and we'll find world peace. Even on its emotional axis, it's an astounding, hilarious failure.

Speaking of emotional axes, how about that Adrian? In every movie, she goes from "Rocky, you can't fight!" to "Go get 'em, tiger!" Except in this one, it literally happens over the course of two laughably perfunctory scenes.

Really, it's an abomination against everything that was good about the original movie. From the opening shot in this movie - an American flag-decorated glove punching a Soviet flag-marked glove and EXPLODING - you can tell something's amiss (and not just the fact that the Russian glove falls down before the explosion happens. Or was that symbolism?). At 91 minutes, it's the shortest Rocky movie. Let's look at that running time a little more closely, though.

After the gloves go off, the movie spends the duration of "Eye of the Tiger" summarizing Rocky III. Then, we see the last scene of Rocky III in whole. So it's probably about seven minutes until we get to the actual movie.
Later, Apollo Creed fights Drago, and his entrance is an entire James Brown song and performance ("Living in America," the "Batdance" of the James Brown discography). That takes up another six minutes.
After Creed dies, Rocky drives in his car to reflect on life and friendship, or love, or something. The movie switches here to another montage. This one summarizes the entire Rocky series up to that point. And when I say "up to that point," I mean from the original Rocky to the the events of Rocky IV as of a minute ago. This also includes Rocky III, which you just saw in a montage that started this movie.

So this movie is actually less than 80 minutes long, which is the perfect length for a good bad movie. Then you have the obligatory training montage, where Drago trains with the latest technological advances (and implied steroids). Because using technology is cheating, and if you're going to use computerized gym equipment, you might as well be on steroids to boot. Meanwhile, Rocky is outrunning a KGB car and running up a mountain in the snow. Because all Americans need is some elbow grease and good old-fashioned (and revenge-driven!) determination. It's an impossibly heavy-handed moment that winds up being hilarious. Again, if you keep stacking the odds, you're gonna get Jenga'd. And Jenga is at its most fun when the thing falls down.

Can I just mention that this movie also has a robot? In 1985? And it has some advanced AI, even by today's standards? Did you ever notice that Rocky's kid watches the fight (the one with a high likelihood of his father dying live on international TV on Christmas) from home, and in the background, the Robot is in a Santa outfit, with beard? Just thought I'd mention it.

So yes, Rocky IV is the first entry of the Great-Bad Hall of Fame. I can't think of another sequel that does so much to piss all over a great film. Even the Rambo sequels have the benefit of First Blood being only okay. What's one more thing that's definitive about Rocky? The theme. You know it. This one scraps that for pop songs. So fuck you if you liked the original. The thing is, I love the original. When I worked at Hollywood Video, before opening the store, I'd pop it in while I counted the money and did all the opening duties. Damn near every week, I'd half-watch and listen to it. So this movie holds a special place in my heart as the most wrong-headed sequel possible, even compared to the much-maligned Rocky V, which is just a depressing mess. No, this one is deserving of being in the Good-Bad Hall of Fame.

Chaplin: A King in New York (and very nice guy)

2010-01-17T19:37:00.001-08:00

Hello there!

It's probably fortunate that Charlie Chaplin's A King in New York did not get released in the USA until 1973 because of accusations that its maker was a communist. It wouldn't have been well-received at the time, anyway, with a key character being a child (played by Chaplin's son) who's unusually well-versed in Anarchist and Communist teachings. As it is, it's cult item for enthusiasts of the silent film greats, who, at this point, are probably a pretty small group. It's not even given much respect as a DVD: In the The Chaplin Collection Vol. 2 box set, it's packaged together with A Woman of Paris, while the rest of the movies in the set are given the double-disc treatment. Once you get past the feeling that Chaplin then looks like Mel Brooks five years ago, though, it's a worthy addition to the man's canon, especially among his underrated later works.

The vibe that I get most from A King in New York is that Chaplin must have been a really, really nice guy. Here's a guy who is exiled from a country without trial, based on rumors (truthful or not). He's making a movie about a foreigner who finds himself lost in America, culturally. Yet the movie doesn't strike me as bitter at all; everything is taken with the same light, comedic tone of his more famous works, parodying American film, music and especially commercialism. But, all of the gags are light teasing, rather than barbed swipes. Or maybe not. Offhand, I can't think of anything comparable from the time period with a similar anti-advertising bent.

The majority of it follows a pattern one would expect from a director whose work began in the silent film era. There isn't much of a plot to speak of; the king needs money and winds up doing commercials. This leads to the episodic structure that Chaplin did so well in his prime, and even during his last starring role, showed a great amount of inventive spark. A scene featuring the king with a heinous amount of plastic surgery goes off perfectly: he attends a comedy show, unable to laugh in order to avoid "stretching it too much." The show he observes is an homage to his own silent comedies, and Chaplin's lone face, struggling not to smile amid a sea of laughter, is hysterical.

Then Chaplin's character, King Shadow, meets a young boy, Rupert at a school (long story). Shadow tries to engage in a conversation with Rupert, who fires off on a long tirade about the futility of all forms of government. The gag is that kids off-screen fool with the king, flinging soup at him while he tries to offer a rebuttal to the kid. It's not a great joke, but it shows a conscious decision to stand up to the accusations that banned him from America. Rupert also gets another showcase later in the movie, and troubles with his parents (staunch Communists) become the emotional center of the movie. Most telling, though, is when Rupert declares himself a communist after previously being an anarchist. Shadow asks him why; Rupert replies: "I'm so sick of people asking me if I'm this, if I'm that! So if it pleases everybody, I'm a Communist!" That's the sound of Chaplin throwing his hands up, and likely his reason for summarizing Marxist screeds in his comedy film about America that he made from Europe.

These moments really deaden the momentum of the movie, and they'd be a confusing choice without knowing the director's personal issues. At the same time, so much of the movie is joyfully sublime. The king performing the angriest "To be or not to be" speech in recorded history is a standout. Similarly, a (surprisingly spry!) 68 year-old Chaplin and his assistant peeping through a keyhole to see a woman bathing is some inspired silliness. Also, while many sometimes deride Chaplin for being mawkishly sentimental, this is probably the least sentimental movie I've seen with his name attached (except maybe Monsieur Verdoux, but I need to rewatch that to remember it better). It seems like he found freedom in his exile, to poke fun at his contemporaries (jokes specifically referencing Ed Wood and the declining western genre). Its energy buoys is well, and it's not nearly as slight as I'd expected. It's a little slower than City Lights and not a Great Film, but if you ever wonder if man who was once The Tramp ever lost it, this movie answers "No."

Whisper of the Heart: The Least Anime Anime

2010-01-16T13:37:00.000-08:00

Oh, hi there

Yoshifumi Kondo's Whisper of the Heart, and it has to be the least "anime" anime I have seen. I mean this in the sense that little of this movie needed to be done in animation. What makes it jarring: its screenplay was penned by Hayao Miyazaki, auteur of the fantastical (Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, Porco Rosso), but it's an humble, earth-bound story. It's not like the box (or Netflix envelope summary) or any description elsewhere ever promised me another exemplary tale of strange creatures and worlds that can only be done in an animated medium; I apparently have a Pavlov dog-like effect whenever Miyazaki's Studio Gibli logo shows up in front of me: Yes! Ghosts and myths and imaginative creations! Wonder!

So imagine my surprise when the movie unfolded and spent almost all of its time focusing on a simple story of first love before shifting into a tale of maturation-via-writing. This approach isn't refreshing, or novel; for much of the first half I found it slow (the second half was probably the same pace, but my head adjusted). "Pleasant," I think, is the most apt word to describe Whisper of the Heart. There aren't any antagonists, per se, nor is its central conflict presented in a grandly dramatic way. It's never cutesy, nor funny, like a romantic comedy. Despite all the things it doesn't have or do, thought, it's still incredibly warm. So... "pleasant."

The movie concerns Shizuku Tsukishima, a girl in middle school taking exams to get into a good high school. She's an avid reader and lyricist who one day notices that one guy has checked out all of her library books immediately before her. Based on this, she develops a crush on him, and of course, they meet. There's also subplot about her friend receiving an anonymous love letter while having a crush on a school athlete. The movie sits in its place and plays with these elements for its first two acts. Along the way, there's a small shop run by a grandfather, a bossy older sister, busy loving parents and teasing voyeuristic classmates. All of these characters populate the world without adding any conflict; just a warm supporting cast.

It takes a dramatic shift late in development, though. The boy leaves to take up a two-week apprenticeship in Italy, making Shizuku feels inadequate and unprepared for her future. During his absence, she focuses her energy on writing her first story to prove herself to herself. When all this happens (somewhat rapidly), it feels like things just started. In reality, it only has twenty minutes to go. It's a testament that the film breezes by so effortlessly up to that point, but it creates a strange momentum. The emotional crescendo is only a high relative to what came before it. At this point, too, it stops being an observational story about schoolkid crushes and sets its sights wholly on Shizuku developing as a story writer.

This shift is sudden and unnatural, and it brings with it the movie's only fantasy elements. Shizuku's story concerns a cat baron who's lost his love and a young girl he brings to his world. We see some of this story - with floating planetoids, caves that glow, people with cat ears - as she's writing, but it's a tease. According to Wikipedia (master of all knowledge for unpaid bloggers), these fantasy elements were the seeds that eventually became The Cat Returns. In Whisper of the Heart, though, these segments are seconds long. Structurally, it feels like this cat world will parallel Shizuku's real life, and both stories will come to a parallel resolution. Except that doesn't happen. Instead, the story-within-the-story winds up being yet a distraction, albeit a fun one.

So little happens - the struggles and victories are so internal - it almost seems incomplete, somehow, but it's not. Despite this, there are a subtleties here in its emotional tone and relationships that make its protagonist worth watching as she develop in tiny ways. The movie is genial; it's fun to watch. Pleasant.

Burden of Dreams and Avatar: For the Love of Jungle

2010-01-15T17:28:00.001-08:00

Burden of Dreams, Les Blank's documentary about the filming of Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, is shocking in its hardships and its compassion for Herzog's vision. It's a testament to either Herzog's brilliance or his stubbornness in this project. The film's narrative - of a man determined to beat great forces far out of his reach to accomplish a seemingly benign goal - parallels the story of Fitzcarraldo itself. But with hindsight, it also sharply contrasts with James Cameron's Avatar, its drippy nature-worship still fresh in my memory from less than a week ago.

Going in, I knew the Fitzcarraldo shoot was difficult. Jason Robards and Mick Jagger, original stars in the picture, had to leave with the film 40% completed. Robards was replaced by probable lunatic Klaus Kinski. Herzog insisted that the film's centerpiece, a boat being dragged over a mountain, be a real boat. Couple those factors with filming in the dense Amazonian jungle, and you have the recipe for a turbulent ride.

It's a surprise, then, that the film barely focuses on most of these things. Instead, most of Burden of Dreams is mostly concerned with the Native extras and their relationship to the film. The personnel issues with this film boggle my mind. There's political issues, propaganda and forces the crew to relocate. A few extras get shot with arrows, and everyone involved risks their lives bringing the boat over the mountain.

Bringing the steamship over the mountain is the issue that makes the film blur the line between fiction and reality. Herzog's insistence - several years into this project already - that the boat must overcome a 45 degree slope is absurd (his engineer prefers they flatten it to 30 degrees; Herzog insists this would ruin the power of his film's "central metaphor."). This is even after the film crew clears some forestation and discovers that the ground is feet-deep with watery mud. Their bulldozer, a luxury the film's protagonist doesn't have, is a second-hand purchase that breaks down frequently. It requires that fuel must be flown into the forest and shipped down river, and it burns more gas because it cannot get traction on the mud.

Before seeing Burden of Dreams, I was already lukewarm on Avatar (and I still am; new perspective doesn't affect the good things about it). Its central message is that nature is to be revered, like a god or goddess. It's slammed into our heads in the following ways:

in order for blue people to enter adulthood and fly dragons,they must create a bond
an impassioned speech about how killing a creature in self defense is "a sad thing"
a montage of its protagonist learning to become one with nature
another impassioned speech: Sigourney Weaver about why shooting missiles at a big tree is bad
another montage: people crying at a big tree that has been shot with missiles

So James Cameron wants you to know: nature is a beautiful thing to be revered and loved. Also, it might be a good idea to build your civilization around it.

Except Cameron's "nature," is mostly computer generated, shot in LA and New Zealand. The message rings false on the surface to anyone who's so much as had a dog growl at them, but then begins to slide into heinous idiocy when you have real-life examples of films that actually have to film in nature (the storied production of Apocalypse Now being another example). All coverage of the creation of Avatar focuses on its computer generated effects (check Wikipedia), and its resulting film is a ham-fisted screed about the wonders and beauty of plant life.

In some ways, it is an absolute wonder that technology to do this exists at all. Burden of Dreams features a scene showing the crew filming, over and again, a large group of Native Americans canoeing toward the protagonist's ship. Sometimes, one of the extras would be in a wrong position; often they had only two hours a day (golden hour!) to film this sequence. It took days. The resulting footage in the final film is astonishing, but brief compared to the time it took to get it right. Avatar's computer-generated nature is just plain easier. But "easier" doesn't require the same kinds of sacrifice as the old approach to film making.

At one point, Herzog shares his impression of the jungle (edited):

Kinski always says it's full of erotic elements. I don't see it so much erotic. I see it more full of obscenity. It's just - Nature here is vile and base. I wouldn't see anything erotical here. I would see fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and... growing and... just rotting away. Of course, there's a lot of misery. But it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don't think they - they sing. They just screech in pain. [...] But when I say this, I say this all full of admiration for the jungle. It is not that I hate it, I love it. I love it very much. But I love it against my better judgment.

Notably in the film, this monologue is intercut with shots of the creatures around him. The death of a bird feeding the bugs, a frog breathing rhythmically on a tree, etc. It shows the true natural world, and in its way, is beautiful in its continual cycles. When he says that "[he loves] nature... but against [his] better judgement," it shows a level of self reflection impossible for a director whose greatest successes are in the realm of big-money special effects demos (which is not meant as an insult to James Cameron; his films require an entire skillset Herzog doesn't have).

The main takeaway I got from Burden of Dreams was probably unforeseeable by its subjects and creators. There was an entire era of film making that has been lost with the advent of CGI effects that look so realistic you can almost imagine they're real. I don't demand that every film's production is the equivalent of pulling a plastic spork through the palm of your hand, but there is something great to be said about the arts and entertainments that are completed despite setbacks that are seemiingly impossible. And that's also not to imply that CGI special effects work is not fraught with its own challenges (though I doubt anyone at ILM has ever been shot with a freaking arrow), and I definitely don't mean to imply that challenging on-location filming is dead (The Hurt Locker, for one). But there's a point now where a film's very production and its methods for coming into existence can clash fully with its deliberate. Or when the a focus on special effects can lead to a director completely missing the point of a film's source material (as Ebert points out in his review of The Lovely Bones). It's all a matter of hard-earned self-awareness, something Burden of Dreams illustrates fantastically.

Marilyn Manson - Antichrist Superstar

2009-09-06T15:55:00.003-07:00

I've said it before: Manson is generally better when he's not trying to be the boogie man. So, I've not much of a proponent of Antichrist Superstar, which unabashedly baits for controversy with its title and music. At seventeen songs, it's way too long. Every song seems to be built around the same 90s industrial grind, but it lacks Nine Inch Nails' taste for atmosphere while turning the theatrics up to 11. The big hit, "The Beautiful People," is the best thing on here. The strangest thing is that, for an album that's almost entirely driven by aggressive guitars, nothing sounds as heavy as it should, which lessens the impact. Manson got better over his next few releases.

Metallica - Metallica (The Black Album)

2009-09-06T15:55:00.001-07:00

Probably realizing that "faster and more complex!" as a mission statement for every album is a cul-de-sac, Metallica chose to slow things down significantly for their self-titled album. It has more of their biggest hits than any of their other albums, with "Enter Sandman," "Sad But True," "The Unforgiven," "Nothing Else Matters" peppered throughout the tracklist. It also has some duds, though: "Holier Than Though" is a bit on the nose, and "Don't Tread On Me" is more slogan than song. It's not that the hits are the only good things on here ("My Friend of Misery" is excellent), but here's my theory: by scaling down their sound, Metallica made shorter songs. So, to fill up an album, they had to make more songs. So more of their songs felt forgettable. So the overall quality of Metallica dipped.

Morrissey - Years of Refusal

2009-09-06T15:54:00.001-07:00

In this decade, Morrissey's settled into a relatively predictable pattern. His solo albums build on his considerable strengths: a deep and affecting baritone, a wit for poignant lyrics, and, above all, a taste for the theatrical (which generally translates to gloriously overblown hooks). Years of Refusal closes Morrissey's decade in the same way, generally favoring his harder guitar approach and layering some light strings ("That's How People Grow Up") and new elements (Latin-sounding horns on "When Last I Spoke to Carol") over that. Highlights: "That's How People Grow Up," "Throwing My Arms Around Paris," "Something is Squeezing My Skull," "It's Not Your Birthday Anymore." He's still got a knack for being a compelling sad sack, and he never dips into the bluntness of its predecessor (2006's Ringleader of the Tormenters). In short, this one's a winner.

Taking a break...

2009-08-30T14:34:00.001-07:00

Will be taking a break from blogging for awhile... Just tired of keeping track of things this way.

Bob Dylan - Another Side of Bob Dylan

2009-08-28T19:09:00.001-07:00

This is my favorite acoustic Dylan album. Focusing less explicitly on politics compared to its predecessor, he's at a new songwriting peak here. Songs like "To Ramona" and "My Back Pages" are slow ballads rich with lyrical detail."All I Really Want to Do" is a playful ditty that reverses romantic pop songs, and "Motorpsycho Nightmare" is a hilarious, surreal talking blues song. Much like the early Beatles albums, Dylan's early period sometimes gets relatively (stress: relatively) overlooked compared to the years after he went electric, but he had the presence and gravitas as a songwriter and especially as a vocalist to pull off an album alone. if there's one criticism I have, it's that "Chimes of Freedom" always sounded a bit like a re-write of "The Times They Are A-Changin'." But overall, this is one of the definitive Dylan albums, right down to many of the songs eventually turning up in cover versions by The Byrds.

Meat Loaf - Bat Out of Hell

2009-08-28T19:08:00.003-07:00

An overblown, amazing classic. Meat Loaf has a voice big enough to carry these songs convincingly, whether they're power ballads ("Two Out of Three Ain't Bad") or rocking odes to teenage sexuality ("Paradise By the Dashboard Light"). Everything here works precisely because it's so big and dumb. Take the title track, for instance. At the six minute mark, there's a false fade-out that leaves me thinking "I could go for more of this song" - but AH! There's another three whole minutes of rocking out. And like I said, it's all grandiose moments in the teenage identity - those moments when the big dumb this shit is the most important stuff in the world.

Angie Aparo - Out of the Everywhere

2009-08-28T19:08:00.001-07:00

Angie Aparo, Atlanta-based singer-songwriter, has a deeply compelling voice. It soars at the high notes instead pf pinching. His songwriting isn't memorable lyrically, but the album is deeply affecting for his vocals, which stand out. The settings are basically unadorned, acoustic guitar and singer-style. He doesn't quite have the gift for hooks that eventually would get him noticed by Faith Hill, but this is probably the best distillation of his talents in his discography.

Jon Brion - Meaningless

2009-08-28T19:07:00.005-07:00

Jon Brion has made his name on his distinct orchestrated pop productions (Kanye West, Fiona Apple, Rhett Miller, the score for Punch Drunk Love), so it's no surprise that he isn't the most compelling singer in the world. Meaningless presents a gorgeous low-budget version of his sound. It's all very laid-back, with his thin voice sounding a bit haunting. It closes with an unexpected cover of Cheap Trick's "Voices," which upon listening to the album again, re contextualizes the preceding songs. After all, this is pop, but it's also rock. It's not heavy, but it's a beautiful and spacey kind of carnival music worthy of the experimentation of the psychedelic era.

The Hold Steady - A Positive Rage

2009-08-28T19:07:00.003-07:00

As previously mentioned, The Hold Steady are a great band. Having seen them live, they're a great live band, but this is not a great live album. It's not bad, but their loose playing comes off better in person rather than on CD. It sounds like a fun show, and it draws headily from Boys and Girls in America, previewing "Lord I'm Discouraged" and "Ask Her for Adderall" from the then-unreleased Stay Positive and featuring two non-LP tracks: "You Gotta Dance (With Who You Came With)" and "Girls Like Status." The old songs come off relatively well, but they lack the focus of the studio versions.

Paul McCartney - Driving Rain

2009-08-28T19:07:00.001-07:00

This might be awful to say, but some of the best music from McCartney's (solo) career has come after the death of Linda McCartney in 1998. It has given his music more of an emotional center, which can sometimes be missing from the projects with Wings. The first two songs seem to address these emotions head on: "Lonely Road" and "From a Lover to a Friend." Each are simple returns to roots, with the former being a straight-ahead rocker and the latter being a lovely ballad. Both feel like songs that could have been written in the beginning of his solo career. Given that McCartney's greatest strength is his melodies, the greatest effect the album has is that it reclaims his strengths. Those first two tracks are knockouts, while "Driving Rain" sounds like something that would've happened if the Beatles had been together to this day. The closing track, though, "Rinse in the Raindrops," echoes the kind of long, multi-part songs that McCartney's favored in the most ambitious parts of his career and might be the best thing here. The worst is "Freedom," a hastily written 9/11 tribute song. So simple, grating and bone-headed, it spoils the greatness of everything before it.

Stevie Wonder - Songs in the Key of Life

2009-08-26T15:05:00.001-07:00

Bloated, yes, but more Stevie Wonder is nearly never a bad thing. Looking back at it about 20 years later, it's helped by the fact that some recognizable hip hop has re-purposed and/or ripped off songs from here, with "Pastime Paradise" providing the backbone for Coolio's "Gangster's Paradise" and "I Wish" becoming (...*sigh*...) Will Smith's "Wild Wild West," proving if nothing else the durability of Wonder's compositions. Elsewhere, "Love's in Need of Love Today" is heart-warming and stunning opening song, a seven minute wonder of sheer bliss, and it's impossible to listen to "Sir Duke" and be unhappy. Try it. Impossible. And that's just the first LP. Side three has the hit "Isn't She Lovely?," featuring some of the best harmonica playing in Wonder's long career of excellent harmonica playing. If the second LP features some songs that are overlong ("Black Man" is a bit ham-fisted and overlong), the EP attached to the original album (tacked onto the end of disc 2 of the CD) has some brief but wonderful songs to make up for it.

AC/DC - Back in Black

2009-08-26T15:04:00.003-07:00

I always preferred Bon Scott as AC/DC's lead singer. The man had a wit that made their kind of sex-obsession fun, even if it's always aggressively stupid. With him gone, AC/DC seemed to lose songs like "Whole Lotta Rosie" or "The Jack," which walk the "fine line between clever and stupid." That said, Back in Black is one of the top three AC/DC albums, no doubt, but the filler takes it down. "Let Me Put My Love Into You" barely counts as a single entendre, let alone a double, and "Givin' the Dog a Bone" isn't much better. The singles (the title track, "You Shook Me All Night Long," "Shoot to Thrill," etc.) are tremendous accomplishments in the realms of riffage and cock rock, though.

Amy Winehouse - Frank

2009-08-26T15:04:00.001-07:00

On the album after this one, Amy Winehouse the personality would overcome Amy Winehouse the musician. In short, there's nothing as audacious as "Rehab" or "I'm No Good" here. Frank relies more on a neo-jazzy sound, leading to a very mellow album full of torch songs. Winehouse is in good voice, though. The songs have a very classicist bent, sonically, though something like "Fuck Me Pumps" obviously have modern sensibilities attached. There's a vague, subtle reggae undertone to some of this, too, which gives the rhythm a bit of a lilt. It's a strong debut that would be improved upon with its followup.

David Bowie - Lodger

2009-08-25T15:53:00.001-07:00

Bowie takes on world music, at least on the first side. "African Night Flight" and "Yassassin (Turkish for Long Live)" seem to pillage a bit from the music of their titular countries. Of Bowie's "Berlin" trilogy, with Brian Eno, this is easily the loosest. It explores dance music in a way that foreshadows many of the best Bowie songs of the 80s. When compared to Low or Heroes, or even early triumphs like Hunky Dory, it's a minor album, but Bowie seemingly having some fun and being playful is notable in and of itself. He also still has a strong grasp on hooks and song structures. One of the strongest of his pop-centric albums.

Method Man & Redman - Blackout! 2

2009-08-25T15:52:00.003-07:00

Delivers exactly what you'd expect. Some pot references, lots of great battle raps, well-chosen party beats. Meth has been on a winning streak since Wu-Tang Clan's last album, 8 Diagrams. His chemistry with Red is unparalleled, and it seems that hearing the two rap never gets old. "Mrs. International" is a fine R&B rap, while "Errbody Scream" is a great rave-up. Surprisingly, Redman squeezes a Christopher Reeve reference that doesn't feel like a labored cry for attention (eat it, Eminem) on "Dangerous Emcees" ("But I'm naughty like Tommy Boy Go back like Atari cords, still here, shit Superman ended up in a wheelchair"). It's those moments that make or break the experience, since this album's not all that different in tone or content than the original Blackout!.

Collective Soul - Afterwords

2009-08-25T15:52:00.001-07:00

Collective Soul's a tough band to critique because they're consistent, arguably into redundancy. Their brand of slick radio-friendly 90s rock doesn't vary all that much from album to album - some fast songs, some slow songs, everything following the same sonic blueprint. Ed Roland's voice is a beautiful kind of baritone that sells the big choruses in a fantastically tuneful way. It's hard to even tell when they're on autopilot! Afterwords features all of these elements in a mix that's pleasant but unremarkable. It peaks in the middle: "Good Morning After All" and "Hollywood" are the best songs here. The rest: if you like Collective Soul, you'll like the rest. Their not the kind of band out to change people's minds, it seems.

Emmylou Harris - Wrecking Ball

2009-08-24T14:34:00.001-07:00

Emmylou Harris is a legend with a gorgeous voice, an angelic whisper that is ethereal when coupled with Daniel Lanois' atmospheric productions. I'm not always hot for Lanois' work, which can occasionally come of as bland ambiance. Harris is a spectacular collaborator for him, though, as the otherworldly qualities of her voice embrace the ambiance rather than fight with it (as his Bob Dylan collaborations would later do), somehow making them more human. The versions of "Goodbye" (Steve Earle) and "Every Grain of Sand" (Bob Dylan) here are definitive. Her versions of Hendrix' "May This Be Love" and Lucinda Williams' "Sweet Old World" are also excellent, but it's the title track that is as catchy and beautiful as it is haunting.

Johnnie Taylor - Live at the Summit Club

2009-08-24T14:32:00.001-07:00

Johnnie Taylor's live set is more song-based than Solomon Burke's Live at the House of Blues (I hate to compare, but I did just listen to each back-to-back). It's also more band-based, a funky blend that gives Taylor a perfect sound to back his gruff, raspy voice. Taylor plows through a high-powered set that should be satisfying to soul aficionados, whether it's the funky "Who's Making Love" or the blues-ballad "Little Bird." The closer, "Jodie's Got Your Girl and Gone" is a fantastic mix of howls, chanted backing vocals and wild playing by his band's horn section.

Gorillaz - Gorillaz

2009-08-24T14:31:00.001-07:00

Damon Albarn and Dan the Automator's project sounds like something that would be halfway between their musical sensibilities. It has the tempered, subtle pop of last-period Blur, but with the hip-hop and electronic elements that construct Dan the Automator's resume. It seems that the Gorrilaz avatars have given Albarn the freedom to explore a varied field of sounds, but thankfully it comes together as a cohesive set of music. The result is an album that is a grower, but full of diverse songs that catch the ear, whether it's the dub track "Slow Country," the British hip-hop of "Clint Eastwood," or the punkish, well, "Punk." There are hooks everywhere on this album, but it rides along a slow tempo from track to track, which can feel tiresome due to the length, no matter how great all of these songs are.

Best of 00s: Those first three Hold Steady albums

2009-08-23T17:09:00.001-07:00

From 2004 to 2006, The Hold Steady put out three of the best albums this decade. If I was to make a top 25 list, all three would be on there. If I were to do a top 50, a fourth (Stay Positive, 2008) might land right at number 50. Simply put, they were one of the best bands this decade, melding their Springsteen-infatuated style with the gung-ho attitude of a bar band (and I mean all those things as a compliment). While staying true to their core sound, they evolved from a brash brand of hard rock with poetry to Springsteen for the bookish indie crowd.

In 2004, The Hold Steady Almost Killed Me came out with little to no fanfare. The album holds up, though, as their best guitar album. Fills and riffs sear and stomp on "The Swish," the second track. Frontman Craig Finn is in full form, lyrics dense with allusions and their own internal logic "She said my name is Rick Danko but people call me one-hour photo... She said my name is Robbie Robertson but people call me robo/I blew red white and blue right into a tissue/I came right over the counter just to kiss you." It's hard to discuss the band without quoting lyrics - one of the things that sets them apart is Finn. His lyrics on this album set a standard for the band in terms of detail, and his half-sung drawl is one of their most recognizable noises. But that's not to say the band doesn't tear it up elsewhere - the coda for "Most People are DJs" rips something fierce, too.

But Almost Killed Me would be a prelude, seemingly limited compared to their followup; Separation Sunday suffers no kind of sophomore slump. While the former is mostly a party record, about parties and their hollow good times ("Killer parties almost killed me," goes a lyric towards the end of it), Separation Sunday fully establishes Finn's voice as a songwriter and marks a shift in their sonic makeup. Organ, courtesy of Franz Nicolay from here out would be increasingly dominant, but their second album finds the best balance between organs and guitars. It's a concept album, but in the sense that Dark Side of the Moon is a concept album: there's a story, but not at the expense of songs.

It traces the story of a girl named Holly, whose downfall into a dirty world ends with a spiritual awakening. The band sings from a distinctly Christian perspective without being preachy. The characters are full of doubt and contradictions. But more than that, Separation Sunday marks the moment that The Hold Steady's discography has its own mythology. Ybor City: the scene of the hardest parties. Holly: The hoodrat with a Christian kind of conflict. Charlemagne: a pimp. The characters continue to appear on the next album (but not as frequently) and were present on the last. It creates a thematic consistency that becomes its own language.

When it comes to judging which of the band's albums are the best, it's either their second or their third. Boys and Girls in America ditches a full concept, but is thematically centered on, well, boys and girls in America. Its thesis is laid out from the start: "Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together." Or: "Sucking off each other at the demonstrations/Making sure their makeup's straight/Crushing one another with collosal expectations/Dependent, undisciplined, sleeping late." The key is that the music's nearly always rowdy (exceptions: "Last Night," "Citrus"). The organs are expanded. A glockenspiel sweeps the intro of "Stuck Between Stations" into a grandiose statement of purpose. "Citrus" marks the first acoustic song the band had done to that point. While the band gets more diverse, Finn's songwriting becomes more structured. No less nuanced, his words finally seem to fit into the context of hooks and melodies.

If pressed, only The Drive-By Truckers could run with The Hold Steady as the best band of the 00s. I think I may have short-changed the music here, but it's a muscular kind of torrent or classicist rock that owes its richness to Springsteen, but clearly has some roots in the 80s punk scene. Like The Rolling Stones in the 60s, they don't do anything revolutionary - they just do it better.

Johnny Cash - My Mother's Hymn Book

2009-08-22T14:31:00.001-07:00

Johnny Cash's voice easily qualifies for the adjectives "authoritative" and "compelling." Country music itself has its roots in hymns. So when the two combine, it's a pretty thrilling listen. Cut around the time of Cash's American series of albums, My Mother's Hymn Book is exactly as its title says. Unadorned - just Cash and his guitar, these songs feel personal in ways that few albums can capture, let alone one not written by its performer. "I'll Fly Away" is joyful in ways that Cash's music sometimes avoided after the success of American Recordings, and many of these songs are a breath of fresh air. Meanwhile, "I Am a Pilgrim" sounds like something recorded in a private moment, such is its intimacy. Cash was never an album artist - just about anyone who started on Sun Records wouldn't be. But among his handful of consistently strong studio albums, this would rank near the top.

Solomon Burke - Live at the House of Blues

2009-08-22T14:30:00.003-07:00

Part preacher, part singer. Burke's baritone voice commands attention, whether he's giving relationship advice ("Don't beat her - drop the "b" and LOVE") in his many spoken interludes throughout this live album. It's a compelling listen, but not a starting point for a neophyte. Burke's force of personality is capable of bringing down the house, but it's a bit overlong for those not familiar with his work. For those who are into Burke's brand of gospel-charged soul music, his enthusiasm is contagious.

Passion Pit - Manners

2009-08-22T14:30:00.001-07:00

Oh, dance-rock. So much fun, and yet, not all that great at setting itself apart sometimes. Passion Pit rides closer to the "rock" side than the dance side (compared to, say, last year's dash of dance-rock awesome, Cut Copy), but the synths and nimble drumming keep things perky, even if the lyrics say "Oh it's painful kneading/Yes, I lie and I wrangle with prospective angles" ("Make Light"). Singer/Songwriter Michael Angelakos has an impressive voice, especially because it's a high falsetto. While writing this review, I checked both Allmusic and Wikipedia to check who's the woman singing on here. There is no woman. Just Mr. Angelakos singing in a really high range. Melodically, each song is tightly constructed but sounds busy - synths whine or cascade in the forefront. Drums skitter or stomp where appropriate. Guitars enter when welcome. The lyrics veer into emo territory dependably, but if more emo bands sounded like a neon disco, people wouldn't deride the genre so much.

The Kinks - Muswell Hillbillies

2009-08-21T19:01:00.003-07:00

The Kinks take on America by imitating Americana - sort of. They still sound like The Kinks, but with more piano and twangy guitars. It's an itneresting change, and it's effective in spurts. Opener "20th Century Man" is one of their best songs, and it sets the tone for Ray Davies' latest slant on alienation. "Uncle Son" is an effective blues ballad, and "Alcohol" sloshes and sways like a drunken song should. The country-rock makeover fits The Kinks, though, making them a looser band than in their orchestrated pop days. While those days ultimately resulted in better music, Muskwell Hillbillies is still one of their best albums.

Elvis Costello - Secret, Profane and Sugarcane

2009-08-21T19:01:00.001-07:00

Last time Elvis Costello collaborated with T-Bone Burnett on an album, it was King of America, one of his best. This one is not. It's a relaxed, sweetly acoustic-based album that leans too heavily on those traits. It comes off as a friendly gathering of musicians playing. Yet the atmosphere works against it. By being a ramshackle collection of old and new songs ("Complicated Shadows" and "Hidden Shame" were previously released Costello songs, four others were previously composed for a play that was never finished), it feels inconsistent. "Complicated Shadows" is exactly what one would expect of an acoustic version, for example. I do like "She Was No Good," though, despite a staged-feeling kind of rowdiness. "Sulphur to Sugarcane" is probably the most memorable thing on here. Much like Dylan's new album this year, it's not a work that shoots for the stars, so when it comes up short, it's not horrible.

Spoon - Girls Can Tell

2009-08-21T19:00:00.003-07:00

Spoon has made its name on a very rhythmic, atmospheric kind of indie rock that coolly slithers rather than dances. It's in the sinister noir of "This Book is a Movie" or "Chicago at Night," the two closing tracks on this album. It's in the stuttering beat and "ba ba ba"'s of opener "Believing is Art." But it's undeniable that they have a way around a hook. These songs are infectious, tense and tightly-wound, though "Take the Fifth" proves that Spoon can let loose, too. It's the catchiest song on here, and while listening to too many Spoon albums can make you wish they'd learn some new tricks, on its own, Girls Can Tell is a major accomplishment.

Andrew WK - I Get Wet

2009-08-21T19:00:00.001-07:00

If you're not down with Andrew WK, you might be overthinking things. I once said for blink-182 that "gusto goes a long way," and Andrew WK is the living embodiment of gusto. Sure, I could delve into how "Party Hard" has a chorus that blows the doors down, enters your brain and starts headbanging and partying. Or I could mention how the keyboards throughout I Get Wet are so insistent they're infectious in and of themselves. Or that Andrew WK is so positive and so life-affirming that it would make me feel bad to criticize the music as being shallow. It is, but it's without the sexism and mean-spiritedness of, say, your standard Kid Rock or Motley Crue track.

Todd Rundgren - A Wizard, a True Star

2009-08-21T18:59:00.003-07:00

You know what an acid trip sounds like? I wouldn't know for sure, but I would guess this album. Not very song-based, but much more like a soundscape where there are no rules, Rundgren followed his pop masterpiece Something/Anything with this. Some tracks are bursts of seemingly random sound effects and tape noises. Sometimes, it seems like a joke, like on "Dogfight giggle." Sometimes it is a joke, such as "Rock and Roll Pussy." It's noise-art at its finest, though, abstract enough to draw you in for the sheer "wtf" factor before it wallops you with the same great pop songwriting of its predecessor. While most of side one is tape experiment weirdness, it does contain "Just Another Onionhead; da da Dali" and "International Feel," songs that challenge you to get them out of your head. The second side is a bit more conventional, but the jerky rhythms of "Does Anybody Love You?" remind you that it's only relative. I'd rate this a masterpiece, though, in the same way that Radiohead's Kid A is a masterpiece. Is it willfully weird for the sake of being weird? Probably, but it's performed by a master capable of pulling off this kind of weirdness in a compelling fashion.

Robert Randolph & The Family Band - Unclassified

2009-08-21T18:59:00.001-07:00

"Curse those handsome devils!" Bart Simpson once said. Listening to this album, I can't help but echo the sentiment, except I direct it towards James Brown, Sly Stone, George Clinton and Prince. Those four artists are arguably the faces that would make it to a Mount Funkmore, guys with personalities so big that no five minute single can contain them. So when someone like Robert Randolph comes along, sometimes it can't help but feel flat. Randolph is an absolutely incredibly Pedal Steel player; his lead lines on this album are absolutely electrifying. And yet, it feels undistinguished. No matter how loose and fun it is, Unclassified never feels quite as great as the playing is. It is passionate, though, with the single "I Need More Love" being a classic rave-up. "Soul Refreshing" is a lovely burst of melody. There is one thing they do better than the masters, though: they have a better sense of songcraft. This isn't funk driven by 20-minute jams; these are songs, none longer than five minutes. Maybe that's enough to set them apart.

Aerosmith - Rock in a Hard Place

2009-08-19T15:23:00.003-07:00

This shit borders on unlistenable. And "shit" is the best way to put it. Nothing is memorable on here after it plays. Steven Tyler's voice is a nasty mess. He tries to hit the high notes on the first section of "Joanie's Butterfly" and misses. I will give them points, though - "Joanie's Butterfly" ranks somewhere given that it's one of the few Aerosmith songs that has multiple sections "Cry Me a River" tries to stomp but kind of slogs. The whole mix sounds muddy, and Jimmy Crespo and Rick Dufay (replacing Brad Whitford and Joe Perry) don't have the kind of chemistry that makes Aerosmith great.

Beck - One Foot in the Grave (2009 Expanded Edition)

2009-08-19T15:23:00.001-07:00

In Beck's oeuvre, this one ranks pretty minor. A suspect part of the reason this was released at all was to not pigeon-hole the guy as some kind of postmodern slack-rock enthusiast (it was released around the same time as his debut, Mellow Gold and the lo-fi freakout Stereopathetic Soul Manure). It's a pleasant listen, though. Most of it is acoustic guitar-driven (aside from bursts of distortion on "Burnt Orange Peel"). Songs like "Outcome," "Asshole" and "Sleeping Bag" point the way towards the softer side of Beck's future on Mutations and Sea Change. As with those efforts, the hipster ironic kind of humor Beck employs on Mellow Gold is missing, but what's left is the melodic foundation that forms the backbone of his musical identity.

The Smiths - Meat is Murder

2009-08-19T15:22:00.001-07:00

Of the Smiths' four proper studio albums, this one is the worst. "This Joke Isn't Funny Anymore" and "Barbarism" are highlights, though, matching the material from their debut. "How Soon Is Now?" is probably the best song here, but it wasn't even included until the CD print. Nothing here is as bracing as anything from The Smiths, nor as flamboyant as The Queen is Dead. A sophomore slump.

Cannibal Ox - The Cold Vein

2009-08-18T14:50:00.001-07:00

Another El-P production, this time with rappers Vast Aire and Vordul Megilah. Strangely, it's not as abrasive as El-P's productions for Company Flow or his own work, featuring a sparse futuristic kind of shine that's as subtle as any of his heavier stuff. Synths drive the sounds here, adding a melodic touch to the album's sound. As for the rapping, Vast Aire and Vordul Megilah are both smooth rappers with a more stream of consciousness bent than others (read: some of it doesn't make much sense), and some of it is brilliant, such as on "F-Word" and "Battle for Asgard." Plus, there's some honest-to-God DJ scratching on some of these tracks. How often do we get that on hip hop albums these days? It's a dense album that asks for multiple listens, and I'm still processing it. There's a lot to love here, though.

Rhett Miller - Rhett Miller

2009-08-18T14:49:00.003-07:00

Took me awhile, but I'll concede that this is his best solo album. Maybe not by far - I'm still really partial to The Believer - but its consistency has won me over. Without looking for a big song like his previous efforts' "Our Love" or "My Valentine," he's crafted an album that's quietly pleasing without being bombastic. That doesn't mean it lacks fast songs: "Happy Birthday Don't Die" rocks hard smack in the middle like a T. Rex song. The bulk of the album is quiet moments of simple pleasure, whether it's the gentle high note Miller hits on the word "says" in the phrase "Nobody says 'I love you' anymore" or the quiet backing vocals on "Like Love" (notice a pattern here?). Nothing here hits quite as hard as the aforementioned songs or "Firefly" (or The Old 97's, for that matter), but Miller's album would be perfect with a beer on an autumn afternoon.

Black Sabbath - Master of Reality

2009-08-18T14:49:00.001-07:00

This has always surprised me: in parody and sometimes in practice, metal is sometimes painted as satan-worshiping and demented. Black Sabbath, by most accounts, are the roots of modern metal. Yet on this album, Sabbath have a strangely Christian perspective on the world. While "Lord of the World" takes the perspective of Satan, the song's message is clear (choose "love" instead!). The riffs, as always with Sabbath, provide a strong, devastating backbone. This time, they're punctuated with some sweetly acoustic pieces ("Embryo" and "Orchid"), which show Tony Iommi's skills at doing things other than riffs filled with dread. And, of course, Ozzy on these albums is unmatched for his frail brand of haunted wailing.

Who critiques the critics?

2009-08-18T13:40:00.001-07:00

Interview with Harry Owings about the pitfalls of the blogoverse. That's a word, right? I can use it? For the record, I have no industry connections and wind up reviewing albums I own. That's why there are no ratings... cuz very few things would get an F.

LA Times: The sorry state of Music Criticism

Related: The interview is conducted by Christopher R. Weingarten, who's reviewing 1,000 albums on Twitter.

Chris Weingarten's twitter

TruTV: The Life and Tragic Death of Motown's Marvin Gaye

2009-08-18T05:00:00.001-07:00

I got the Marvin Gaye box set The Master (1961-984) this weekend, and I'll be listening to that today. And while it's true that he was one of the most brilliant and versatile singers on Motown's roster, the man had some demons in the closet. Sometimes this stuff can get lost as a superstar dies young and is sainted (*cough*Michael*cough*johnlennon*cough*cough*). This one is a long read, but it's pretty fascinating to those interested.

TruTv: The Life and Tragic Death of Motown's Marvin Gaye

50 Cent - Get Rich or Die Tryin'

2009-08-17T17:29:00.001-07:00

One of the most hyped hip-hop debuts ever, and what were we to expect? The second coming of Snoop Dogg? In a sense, the comparison is apt. The Dr. Dre brand of gangsta rap can sometimes be steeped in talking lots and saying not much. On this album, though, 50 Cent isn't quite the test audience-neutered version we know now. He's still streamlined by the standards of gangsta rap (I mean, compared to Ice Cube... not compared to Snoop Dogg of the 00s), but he's determined. He's slightly gritty, and his lyrics alternate between clever boasts and witty jokes. He hangs with Eminem on two tracks, and while 50's rhymes aren't quite as inventive or rapid, he shows that he has enough charisma to keep him afloat. As for the beats, if Only Built 4 Cuban Lynx recalls The Godfather, consider Get Rich... to be Heat: more 'splodey, less meaty, still good. It's surprisingly varied, too, with the strings backing "In Da Club" seeming at peace with the steel drums on "P.I.M.P." It's shallow, sure, but Get Rich of Die Tryin' is the sound of 50 Cent mining gold from a shallow river.

Stacie Orrico - Stacie Orrico

2009-08-17T17:28:00.001-07:00

Released in 2003, Stacie Orrico's major label debut now sounds quaint, due to a reliance on then-state-of-the-art productions. "Hesitation" apes moves from *NSYNC's last album, while the rest of the album sounds exactly like you'd expect pop music from 2003 to sound like. But Orrico's got a strong voice as a singer and emerges as a songwriter with potential. The hits, "Stuck On You" and "More to Life" are the best songs if you're into this sort of thing (which I am). Unfortunately, Orrico's roots as a Christian singer tend to give the whole enterprise a sleek feel, lacking tension or danger. It could be argued that Justin Timberlake's come-ons always feel forced, though, so it's somewhat refreshing that Orrico avoided at least that bit of teen popstar awkwardness. I just wish "That's What Love Is For" wasn't as corny as its title.

Nine Inch Nails - With Teeth

2009-08-17T17:27:00.001-07:00

Nine Inch Nails, when more song-oriented than The Fragile or Ghosts, is an awesome proposition. Trent Reznor's most underrated skill is his devotion to songcraft, so With Teeth ranks as a success, easily. Maybe the songs aren't as passionate as those on his followup (Year Zero), and the production isn't as bracing as The Downward Spiral. Some of these songs ("All the Love in the World," "The Hand that Feeds," "Every Day Is Exactly the Same") are his best since The Downward Spiral. None of them are quite "Closer," but what is? With Teeth marks the end of Nine Inch Nails' music to brood to period, which took up their time during the 90s. Meet Nine Inch Nails of the 00s: noise rock arena stars.

No Doubt - Tragic Kingdom

2009-08-16T08:52:00.001-07:00

No Doubt's breakthrough doesn't age all that well. I was late on the bandwagon, so I'm more of a Return of Saturn and Rock Steady man, myself. Here's an album with a reasonable amount of filler and some key tracks, the best of which are the hits. Aside from those songs (which I won't even name. You know them.), the best are the title track and "Happy Now." The rest is the sound of a band having fun, but that never necessarily meant that you're having fun, too. I remember a conversation I had in high school, about No Doubt, around the end of Eve/Gwen Stefani's hit and when "Hey Baby" and "Hella Good" were starting to gain some footing on the radio. A friend asked, "Can we at least agree that Gwen Stefani ruined them [by making them more of a pop outfit]?" I replied, "No, I kinda like Rock Steady," to which he said "Ah, sorry. I have really good memories of Tragic Kingdom." I think that sums it up.

Best of the 00s: Eminem - The Marshall Mathers LP

2009-08-16T08:48:00.001-07:00

If this isn't a top 10 contender for the best hip-hop album of the decade, I don't know what is. At the point this album was created, Eminem had everything balanced perfectly: the beats by Dre, his flow was up to par, and he wasn't quite as over-exposed, making his shtick seem less self-involved (even if it was). The trick here is that he never draws a line between what's real and fake. After a brief intro, "Kill You" opens the album on a clearly hypothetical perspective, but the second song, "Stan," sounds so plausible and self-reflective, it seems genuine. The Marshall Mathers LP slings back and forth like this, so that by the time the domestic violence-cum-murder fantasy "Kim" rolls around, you can't say for sure if he plans to murder his wife. His flow is unstoppable: he slows it, rapping through gritted teeth on "The Way I Am," turns it into both sides of a nearly-natural-sounding conversation on "Kim" and speeds it up on parts of "The Real Slim Shady."

In the time that's passed since, Eminem's two followups have been nearly nakedly self-reflective and autobiographical, exploring the effects of fame on his life. Was he clowning when he put out his actual autobiography awhile back? Haven't his albums covered his long past, recent past and present already? All over the album, he raps about his mom, drug abuse, is wife, his kid, the price of fame, and harasses pop stars of the day. The act would get worn over the course of the decade, eventually resulting in the too-literal Encore and over-corrective steering that was Relapse, but for one album, Slim Shady, Eminem and Marshall Mathers balanced delicately to make a masterpiece.

Pulp - Different Class

2009-08-16T07:36:00.001-07:00

One of the best albums of the Britpop era. Maybe the best. Maybe my favorite album of the 90s, too. The dance-ready synthesizers tart up some truly threatening sexual and social tensions ("Pencil Skirt," "I Spy"). And that's when the band is not blasting doors down with anthems ("Mis-shapes," "Disco 2000," and the immortal "Common People"). It's easily the most consistent set of songs Pulp's ever gotten out in one go. Jarvis Cocker (singer) is fully formed as a songwriter here, with the wit and subtlety to write "I took her to a supermarket/I don't know why, but it had to start somewhere/So it started there" and the sense to sing it with matter-of-factness followed by wonder followed by a determined kind of finality. It's in these little moments of subtlety that make Pulp a lovable band. It's what makes a song like "Underwear" simultaneously sexy, depressing and menacing.

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart - The Pains of Being Pure At Heart

2009-08-16T07:35:00.001-07:00

Judging solely from their debut album, The Pains of Being Pure At Heart have part of the equation right. Their sound is distinctive. It's derivative, or course, of My Bloody Valentine, The Jesus and Mary Chain and a few other bands, but it's punched up with a certain amount of spunk that sets them apart. The lyrics pile on the melancholy with a love of the tabboo ("This Love is Fucking Yeah!" and its incestuous insinuations), but sonically the band is punkish with reverb in the back to add a foundation. It's not particularly inventive, but it's incredibly catchy. Also, it gives the rock critics a chance to show their knowledge of 80s and 90s underground scenes and bands, which I'm pretty sure accounts for some of the high ratings this album gets. Not that I dislike it - the hooks are there and will latch onto your very soul - but I see more potential here than execution.

Modest Mouse - The Lonesome Crowded West

2009-08-16T07:33:00.001-07:00

Years before "Float On," Modest Mouse where already putting out great guitar-driven rock music. Later, they would adopt Johnny Marr (of The Smiths) as one of their own, but this album exists as proof that they didn't need him. Loose, angular guitars parade through this release, while Isaac Brock's recognizable yelp takes a back seat compared to the band's later years. "Lounge (Closing Time)" forms the core of the album, a 7-minute jam that shifts its tone in several ways before quietly coming to a rest. "Doin' the Cockroach" plain rocks out, with Brock coming unhinged vocally, to a great effect. Nothing here is as catchy as "Float On," but that song is the outlier for which the band is best-known. The rest of the time, the serve up excellent, quirky guitar rock.

John Legend - Once Again

2009-08-15T04:33:00.001-07:00

Legend's pop R&B style is smooth enough that his music is almost uniformly pleasant, but a lot of it can barely rise above background music. His sophomore album opens with a one-two punch of "Heaven" and "Stereo," but by the end, it mires itself in slow songs that barely distinguish each other. I'm going to point out "Again" as the spot where things turn sour: backed only by his own piano, it's a 5-minute ballad that's passionate without being particularly moving or pointed. From there, highlights fail to materialize for the rest of it. It makes for pleasant background music, but not much else. I will say that "P.D.A. (We Just Don't Care)" has enough swagger to be a memorable cut away from Once Again.

The Streets - A Grand Don't Come for Free

2009-08-15T04:32:00.003-07:00

The Streets might be a great illustration that hip hop is not necessarily rap and vice-versa. Mike Skinner's music barely even fits into "rap," really, with a kind of drawl-ish delivery only coincidentally seems to sync with the beat. But it's in his relaxed delivery that his detailed narrative finds their heart. Few have captured the kind of middle class ennui present here, where returning a DVD and calling your mother can be such an inconvenience that, well, a song results from it. It's a concept album, but it's one of the rare ones where not a song is wasted on moving the plot forward. The beauty of the concept is its simplicity (guy loses money, must get it back). It recalls silent comedies by Chaplin in the sense that the plot is just window-dressing for a bunch of tangential skits that, maybe, don't add up to a complete sum but on their own are great entertainments.

Wilco - Kicking Television: Live in Chicago

2009-08-15T04:32:00.001-07:00

Rarely, you can sum up a live album by what songs appear from what albums. Wilco, however, is a band that lives by its albums; each has such a unique sound, sometimes it's hard to bring the picture together. So really, a live album is perfect for them, highlighting how they're really the same band despite lineup changes and a diverse set of styles. In this case, A Ghost Is Born is improved. "Heavy Metal Drummer" is looser, and "The Late Greats" is in a context where it doesn't sound like a throwaway at the end of a long album. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot seems less like an aberration to their general sound when placed next to Summerteeth and Being There songs. "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart" sounds natural coming between "Handshake Drugs" and "Shot in the Arm." Summerteeth mixes effortlessly with the aforementioned albums, and the songs chosen from the more roots rock-driven Being There unexpectedly feel at home. Their debut, 3AM was not invited, but a couple songs from their Mermaid Avenue project complete the picture. Until a "Greatest Hits" set is compiled for them (and maybe even after that), Kicking Television works best as a summary of where Wilco were in 2005.

The Cure - Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me

2009-08-14T04:49:00.003-07:00

The Cure's greatest gift is texture. They manage to give their core sound - that familiar, brooding kind of rock - various textures that carry them through their occasional double album. "The Kiss" opens the album with a somewhat violent kind of distortion that leads directly into the ballad "The Catch," yet it never sounds unlike The Cure. Elsewhere, they adopt a glam-like stomp on "Why Can't I Be You?" and a sitar drenches "The Snake." There are songs driven by strings, and "Hot, Hot Hot!!!" shows that they can be kind of funky. It's not a consistently compelling set of songs, but it's an erratic double album that tries out various styles without ever abandoning that core Cure sound.

Phoenix - Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix

2009-08-14T04:49:00.001-07:00

Seduced by "Lisztomania," a giddy pop delight, I'm not completely convinced about the rest of the album. Phoenix's sunny keyboard-driven indie pop approach works well, but when taken over the course of a full album, it gets to be a little same-sounding. Certainly, it's all lovely and dance-oriented, but is that all there is? I do love the centerpiece, "Love, Like a Sunset," parts I and II, which build slowly and cool off within their seven-minute duration. It's not quite the dance utopia created in the rest of the band's songs, which makes it interesting. Another highlight: "Rome," which pulls a similar hot-cold-hot dynamic but with the pop craftsmanship. Okay, I'm convinced.

M-1 - Confidential

2009-08-14T04:48:00.001-07:00

M-1's solo album sounds exactly like what it is: a solo album by one half of one of the more political rap duos to gain prominence in the past decade. Strangely, his vocals seem low in the mix, making the beats take precedent over his messages. The beats don't stick as hard as those on Dead Prez's albums, and M-1 himself doesn't have enough personality to carry an album by himself. That's problematic. What's good is that M-1 is a good lyricist, and some songs overcome the shortcomings found all over. "The Beat" is a highlight, with a pulsating production, and "Gunslinger" swings like any good Bo Diddley homage should. "Been Through" features the most R&B-indebted production and features Ghostface," which is a solid recipe for success at this point.

Passion of the Weiss - Top 50 Rap Albums of the '00s

2009-08-13T04:29:00.001-07:00

I have a lot of respect for Weiss and his bloggerly friends, and they've compiled a list of the 50 best of the decade. Worth a read if you're into hip-hop:

Passion of the Weiss Top 50 Rap Albums of the '00s: 50-1

Elton John - Goodbye Yellow Brick Road

2009-08-12T18:04:00.001-07:00

Goodbye Yellow Brick Road is far from the best album by Sir Elton. It opens like it might be - "Funeral For a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding" is among the best songs of his entire career. The cavalcade of hits - "Bennie and the Jets," "Candle in the Wind," "Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting," "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road," might tell you the same. But it's not. It's a sprawling double-album, but it sags in the time between the first batch of hits and "Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting." All of it is competent, but not all of it is entirely engaging. Part of the problem is that it's transitional in nature - following the stripped down, low-key releases of his early career, John was moving in a more showy, pop-inspired direction. For what it is, it's impressive and a great listen, but Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy would prove that John was capable of much, much better as his artistry evolved.

Edan - Beauty and the Beat

2009-08-12T18:03:00.001-07:00

A jazzy mix of psychedelia and hip-hop, with vague traces of trip-hop. Occasionally a familiar sound - say, a James Brown grunt - will penetrate the mix, but Edan's sound is all-original. It's like the strangeness of 3 Feet High and Rising without the whimsy. Sound bits, samples, voices fade in and out of the mix while the drums sound like there's a thick layer of smoke in the air with a damp kind of sound. It's a 3 Feet High and Rising for the 00s, tougher and shorter. No skits. A little bit of the weirdness of Kool Keith, but none of the spotty track record.

Ghostface Killah - The Pretty Toney Album

2009-08-12T18:02:00.001-07:00

On Ghostface's first album for Def Jam, two things are immediately
noticeable: he leans more on a sort-of loverman persona than on a
hardened gangsta one. How can a rapper carry an entire album of
relationship songs? By having Ghostface's eye for detail, that's how.
His rapid-fire rhymes don't calm down for the hour-plus this runs, and
the beats sound fuller than on past releases, probably due to a higher
production value. If it ranks lower than Supreme Clientele or Fishscale, it's mainly for what the Burgess Merideth soundalike says on the latter: he "ain't been hungry since Supreme Clientele!"
This is all not to say that he leaves street narratives behind - "Run"
is one of the most energetic songs here, and it's a definite highlight.

Company Flow - Funcrusher Plus

2009-08-12T04:27:00.001-07:00

"Funcrusher," indeed. El-P, Bigg Jus and Mr. Len are not your friends. Driven like few hip-hop groups since Public Enemy, they present confrontation verbally and sonically. Railing against the system, the man, and as always, wack emcees, their lyrics are packed tight with imagery and multisyllabic words. Sample lyric: "Bigg Jus mind invention the king battle of epic proportions/Lyrical intrigue, the master of contortion/Optimized computerization virus/Paradoxical acoustic sound bombing" (from "The Tragedy of War (In III Parts)"). Musically? It's not funky. They're always vaguely off-kilter, but intentionally. This isn't dance music: the beats don't make you think of a club or a party. but instead, Fight Club in a junk yard. It's a tough kind of complexity that stays rhythmic but sets itself into a niche, knives in hand. Company Flow intends to present you with a challenge, to your worldview, to your listening habits, and it's worth the effort.

Brian Wilson - Smile

2009-08-12T04:26:00.001-07:00

How do you rate this album? Nearly 40 years in the making, it started as a Beach Boys album to follow up Pet Sounds and came out a Brian Wilson album out of nowhere Like Chinese Democracy, you have to hold it to some higher standards, right? Unlike Chinese Democracy, it far surpasses those standards, right? It's a pop masterpiece, and if you don't like it, you may want to see a doctor. Ask if your heart is made of coal. I'll grant any naysayers (whom I have never met) this much: "Good Vibrations" probably comes off better as a Beach Boys single.

Marilyn Manson - Mechanical Animals

2009-08-12T04:25:00.001-07:00

When all is said and done, Marilyn Manson's a pretty shitty boogeyman. If anything in his oeuvre can be called scary, it's the darkly ominous Holy Wood. His shock tactics are blatant and shameless, and his lyrics can sometimes border on being an unintelligible mix of naughty words. The music, especially Antichrist Superstar always sound somehow less heavy than they should. So all in all, I prefer Manson when he's being a bit more theatrical. Here, taking a page from Bowie with a semi-concept album about an alien rock star (or some such bullshit) works better than most. Because it's got one Gary Glitter boot firmly in the realm of glam rock, he's free to stretch out a bit. The gospel singers on "I Don't Like the Drugs," for example, add a little bit of flavor to what otherwise would be an interminable stomp. The sinister, snake like first single "The Dope Show" ranks as the best track here, but the rest has a sort of flamboyant charm to it, making it my second favorite Manson album (first place goes to the absurd The Golden Age of Grotesque).

Green Day - 21st Century Breakdown

2009-08-10T15:05:00.001-07:00

This is Green Day's most ambitious album, probably. Divided into three mini-suites, the album continues American Idiot in sound and mood, if not in plot or characters. It lacks the zeitgeist of its predecessor, though, coming a bit too late. A few months after the end of the Bush administration can make a big difference, so the songs here feel like grumpy remnants of a long-gone era when they shouldn't and truly aren't. It's too bad, though, since some of the songs on here rank with Green Day's best, including "21 Guns" and "Last of the American Girls." It's possible that this set of songs, not quite as married to the political climate of the 2004 election, might age better than American Idiot. For now, though, it's the lesser of the two. Also, listening to it in 3 separate sittings is highly recommended: no matter how many tricks Green Day learns, a straight 80 minutes is still a long time to spend hearing politics from the guy who wrote "Longview."

Funkadelic - Cosmic Slop

2009-08-10T15:01:00.001-07:00

Cosmic Slop is one of the lesser Funkadelic releases, with only the title track ranking as one of their best, but thankfully the songs are all short. Not that their bad - but hearing any of these elongated too far would throw the album off-kilter. Funk in general, but especially that overseen by George Clinton in his prime, has the benefit of working as background music when it's not great. Funkadelic, too, is a very technically sound band, so it's never bad. It's just mediocre.

Say Anything - ...Is a Real Boy/Was a Real Boy

2009-08-10T14:58:00.001-07:00

Normally, my tolerance for navel-gazing emo bands is somewhat low, but Max Bemis backs himself (he plays nearly everything but percussion and some keyboards here and there) with enough musical muscle to make his self-aware (he's in a band, he sings about being in a band!) songs live with a sense of dignity. Instead of playing like some diary entries from a narcissist, ...Is a Real Boy comes off like a raging storm against shallowness, whether it's sexual ("The Writhing South"), critical ("An Orgy of Critics"), etc. Closing song "Admit It!!!" hits a bit close to home - attacking hipsters, some of the lyrics sound a bit like me. Which ones? Not telling. The strength is musical; unlike so many other bands with emo leanings, Bemis doesn't rely on preciousness to make his argument. It's not a brutal record on the level of a metal band, but it's incredibly powerful for a guy singing the insides of his head.

The bonus disc on the reissue, ...Was a Real Girl, is pretty inessential, sounding a bit like leftovers. Of the seven songs, I would say none of them are bad, but none are essential, either. "Wow I Can Get Sexual, Too" is a highlight, though - so catchy, so cute, such delightful little keyboards. It sounds nothing like the album, and in a sense that makes it more memorable than the rest. Not better - but more memorable.

Maroon 5 - Songs About Jane

2009-08-09T20:24:00.003-07:00

You won't hear me say "God bless the crass commercial concerns of major label execs" very often, but I will say it in reference to this album. The story goes that Maroon 5 submitted Songs About Jane only to be told that they needed to write a couple songs that would stand up better as singles. The results: the tense breakout single "Harder to Breathe" and the lite-funk of "This Love," two of the best songs here. They open the album, while the other best song, "Sweetest Goodbye" closes it. In between, you get some white funk and Prince-like falsettos, a sweet, delicious ear candy. Without those first two singles, the album wouldn't begin with a bang, no matter how you arrange them. Not a bad song here, but they all somehow feel less consequential than the ones they were forced to write.

Beastie Boys - Hello Nasty

2009-08-09T20:24:00.001-07:00

The Beastie Boys finished the 90s with a bang. Continuing in the vein of their sound for that decade (Check Your Head and Ill Communication), Hello Nasty puts their rhymes up against their instrumental prowess. A Beastie Boys record is like its own world, and in this world, dub experiments (Dr. Lee, PhD) can be preceded by the electro-flavored hits "Body Movin'" and "Intergalactic." The jokes and pop culture references here are as funny and sharp as ever, while the key Beastie Boys ingredient, their chemistry, remains potent. Few hip-hop groups exist, period, but even fewer can claim to create a great mix of voices. The way the three MCs have completely unique voices that clash and contrast with each other sets them apart, and it's a joy to hear just that, even without the amazing beats.

Amadou & Mariam - Welcome to Mali

2009-08-09T20:23:00.001-07:00

If enough people tell you something's good, why not check it out? This album was the top-reviewed album on Metacritic for 2008. Does it live up to that hype? Perhaps not, but what could? So far, after a few listens, individual songs don't seem to stick, but the sound does. And that's not to say I don't like it (my impression of The Arcade Fire is similar). It's such an exuberant listen, filled with chanting, quietly skillful guitars and subtle electronica elements, how can one turn against it? Reviews are useless against this kind of music. Much like the Stevie Wonder's "The Duke," it's impossible to listen to it and feel unhappy.

Bob Dylan - Nashville Skyline

2009-08-08T19:32:00.001-07:00

Dylan does country, but it's not an enormous leap. The most surprising things are his voice - a beautiful kind of croon that's far removed from his normal bleating - and the simplistic songs. The emphasis is on economy - words, arrangements - which makes this lighthearted jaunt one of the more compulsively listenable Dylan albums. Similarly, it's a bit strange to hear a country album so content. Most of these songs, "I Threw It All Away" and "Girl from the North County" (featuring Johnny Cash) aside, are neither rowdy barn burners, nor are they weepy ballads. They're just satisfied ditties best described by the genial-looking picture of Dylan on the cover. The best known song is "Lay Lady Lay," but I prefer "Tonight I'll Be Staying Here with You."

Nas - Stillmatic

2009-08-08T19:31:00.003-07:00

Nas's lyricism and flow will always, without fail, confirm him as one of the best emcees to ever grace hip-hop. Nas's beat selection is so erratic, it will always make it hard to come to a consensus on his post-Illmatic work (exception: nobody likes Nastradamus). On Stillmatic, he's fired up and motivated, laying down some of the best songs of his career ("One Mic," "Got Urself A...," "Rewind," "Ether"), but elsewhere, the productions are boring ("Smokin,'" "The Flyest"). At 14 songs, it's among the tightest things he's done since Illmatic, but it still could stand to lose a few songs to achieve true classic status.

Neutral Milk Hotel - In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

2009-08-08T19:31:00.001-07:00

Not quite sure where the Anne Frank thing fits into this, so if anyone can explain, I would appreciate it. All I know is that this is a one of the better lo-fi rock album for the 00s. Jeff Mangum's biggest gift is resonance; the songwriting is a bit obtuse and the guitar, while nothing to sniff at, aren't exactly going to get Neutral Milk Hotel into the next Guitar Hero game. At the same time, there's a stirring kind of melancholy consistently throughout the album. The ambient, shoegaze-esque noises enhance it, all shimmering and colorful. Many swear by this album as one of the classics of the decade, while others despise it. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle, skewered a bit toward the former. It's definitely something special, full of great songs worth checking out. Yet, aside from Pitchfork devotees, I don't know to whom I'd recommend it.

Concert Review: blink-182, Mansfield, MA 8/6/09

2009-08-07T14:34:00.001-07:00

For all the highs and lows of blink-182's concert last night, I couldn't help but think this tour might be the moment they enter the status of "legacy act," the polite term for bands whose concerts are well-attended for the hits while their albums sputter briefly in the lower half of the top 40. It might not be, but who knows how deeply-attached the fans at last night's show would be to new material?

But mine was probably the only mind at the show wondering that, and the thought only fluttered around for a second. The show was a giddy triumph of sweetness and nostalgia. I wrote in my Dude Ranch review that "gusto counts for a lot," and that was true here. Mark Hoppus' vocals were inexpressive, always managing to be both kind of flat and sounding like he wasn't changing pitch at all throughout the night. Tom DeLonge missed the intro on a song or two. But that didn't matter - for nearly every song, the rapturous audience was willing to fill in, singing (or screaming) each lyric with every breath they had. Outdoor stadiums obviously don't really have acoustics, and the sound from my section felt muddy and occasionally undistinguished throughout the night. Yet, that, too, didn't matter because of the energy the band and audience brought to the show*.

The setlist thankfully relied heavily on their past two albums: Take Your Pants Off and Jacket and blink-182. These albums are their tightest and most ambitious (respectably). Of course, the hits were the point, but let's face it: blink-182 do not have enough hits (or: they have plenty of hits and their songs are too short) to fill up an hour-plus-long set. So the songs from that last album were wisely chosen, showing some instrumental prowess that you wouldn't guess from listening to "Dammit" or "All the Small Things" on repeat. They're not virtuosos, but they can get it done when they're not goofing off.

But then, isn't goofing off the point? Few songs went by without Tom Delonge telling a dick joke and/or belching into the mic. It helped to keep the mood light**, and that's a great thing for a band whose M.O. is lightweight pop-punk. It's telling, too, that by sticking to the hits and self-titled album, they also don't do songs that involve much potty humor (No "Voyeur" or "Happy Holidays, You Bastard!"), which brings them one step closer to being an almost family-friendly act as they get older. If the Rolling Stones can get families to bring their brood with them to hear "Satisfaction" and see a cartoon topless woman riding the tongue of their logo, what stops blink-182 from being a family excursion by the time they approach their 40's?

Also important to bands whose sets are a litany of greatest hits: the encore. "This may or may not be our last song, depending on how loud you cheer for us after we play it," promised Hoppus. I never want to hear that statement again. Hands-down, the space between "Anthem Part 2" (the last song on the main set) and Travis Barker's drum solo was the loudest moment of the night. Louder than the actual music coming from the Comcast Center's aged speakers, and it did not seem to let up for an eternity. Once it did, Barker shows off his skills. He's the only band member I'd say is notably above average at his instrument, and it was impressive. But wait! There's more! While he drummed, the platform moved forward, rose up about 15 feet and rotated a few times while moving from side to side along the stage. The show wrapped with "Carousel" and "Dammit," the latter of which featured the requisite confetti plus six or so wacky arm waving inflatable tube men. It didn't need it. I haven't heard an audience so united in a sing-along since I heard Prince play "Purple Rain."

Immediately before blink-182 came Fall Out Boy. The questionable amphitheater sound quality did them little good, but I vaguely have some respect for Pete Wentz after hearing him pander shamelessly to the Boston crowd. I'm pretty sure, "This song is about sucking, it's also about fucking, but it's mostly about how the Yankees fucking suck!" is not completely true about "Headfirst Slide into Cooperstown on a Bad Bet," but I'm not the one who wrote the song. Their set was a short crowd-pleaser, with most of the songs coming off of their big breakthrough, From Under the Cork Tree. It shows that they know their place on the tour: it's not about them, it's about blink-182. Wentz's introduction to "A Little Less Sixteen Candles, a Little More 'Touch Me'" was how I learned that John Hughes had passed away (RIP), though I couldn't hear what he said very well through the speaker system. Also, the camera projecting the band onto the big screens for people far away (like me) missed it every time I saw an ant-like Wentz spinning wildly and swinging his bass, and every time guitarist Joe Trohman ran along the stage maniacally. Such is the reality of these venues.

Panic! at the Disco's Brendan Urie showed a surprising amount of charisma, and the band was pretty good for one that split in half two or three weeks ago. They, like Fall Out Boy, played mostly stuff from their breakthrough, which I've never been able to get into. The one new song they played, "New Perspective," shows that they have some promise and may not be handicapped by little things like half your band leaving. When Hoppus later asked if the crowd liked Panic!, they were they only band that got audibly booed. To be fair, when Panic! played, the venue was only half-full. That's better than Chester French, who probably played to a 1/5 full venue, in unkind for concerts daylight. I enjoyed them, since they seemed self-aware of their cheesiness. The opening slot seems about right for them now - lots of potential, but they're not for everybody.

Notable people in the audience: I spotted a total of three people in banana suits. Two of them together, one of them separate. The solo banana wore a shirt that said "I go bananas for blink!" The banana duo had a sign that said "TRAVIS is PREGNANT." They got a shout-out during Blink's set. The banana suit is a reference to the "All the Small Things" video, right? I can't remember. Sounds vaguely familiar. Some non-banana people had a banner that said "BUTTSEX" out in the parking lot. More confounding: someone was dressed as the red Teletubby. Awroo?

*Also brought by the audience: pot. This goes without saying at an outdoor/amphitheater concert, but here's a fun story: during "Adam's Song," somewhere around the last run through the chorus, the girl in front of me turned to give me her joint. Ashy, lit part aside, the thing was burnt down to fingernail-width at this point, so I didn't know what was going on. I tried to take it in pinched fingers, to which she indicated no, so I thought it might've been something else. What else would have a glowing tip and be held in her hand between pinched index and thumb? I have no clue. I was still singing along and not thinking. I opened my hand like I was a kid receiving candy, and I'm pretty sure that's the point where any semblance of street cred might have had escaped me. She put my fingers in pinched-finger position again, and realized it was what I thought it was in the first place. Again, it was so small, I don't think she was offering to share with me; I'm pretty sure it was a "hey, can you take care of this?" kind of gesture. I don't know why she couldn't drop it and put it out herself, but I did the honors and for the next song and a half feared that my sandal-clad feet might be set ablaze. After she gave me the roach, by the way, she and her friends (who must have also been averse to putting it out) left. Why not just smoke in front of a really loud stereo in your backyard?

**It's such a far cry from his stage presence with Angels and Airwaves¹ that you wonder if he hates doing these songs. Mocking the chorus of "First Date" ("and ever, and ever... this chorus... goes on forever") was funny, but something in the tone of his voice says to me that he's barely hiding his disdain for it.

¹Delonge appeared to be wearing an Angels and Airwaves shirt. Can we make a new rule? Bands shouldn't wear their own gear, especially for a side project, and double especially for a side project that sucks. God, the guy can't even wear a shirt without me thinking he's a tool.

Eminem - Relapse

2009-08-06T22:27:00.001-07:00

The time lapsed between The Marshall Mathers LP and Relapse just seems like a lifetime, doesn't it? And yet, Eminem, who spent nearly half the decade inactive and sequestered in his home, seems to have aged little. This is both good and bad. Good: his flow and way with words are completely unassailable. Verses here and there throughout Relapse are mind-blowing. Bad: The album feels a bit hermetically sealed and dated (he makes fun of Heath Ledger and Sarah Palin a year and half a year too late, respectively). There were some giggles upon his release, "He still does skits!" Yes, but not only is it laughable that he still do skits, they are continuations of the same skits that have appeared on all of his albums (ha-ha, his manager and lawyer still don't like him). What's worse is that on songs like "My Mom," and on the skit "Steve Berman," he recognizes that this is the same ol' shit before going on to do it anyway. Add this to the bloat that is a prerequisite for a superstar blockbuster rap album, and you have a bloated album that is 4 skits and 5 songs too long with some of the best bars of the year.

Raekwon - Only Built 4 Cuban Linx

2009-08-06T22:26:00.003-07:00

The key to the Wu-Tang Clan's earliest successes is easily The RZA's atmospheric beats. Yes, it is a group made up of some of the most unique and best rappers the east coast can provide (and U-God), but each individual rapper (except Ghostface) seems sapped of some power when divorced from RZA's cinematic orchestrations. Here, they recall the score of The Godfather movies with a touch of 70s soul. Yet, not all the credit for Raekwon's only great album (pending Only Built 4 Cuban Linx II next month) can go to RZA. Raekwon's rhymes set the atmosphere ablaze with his tales of hustle. His style is very low key, so often on the Wu-Tang albums, Rae can get overshadowed. Here, his flow is limber and occasionally astounding. Ghostface Killah appears on the vast majority of tracks here as a more high-octane counterpoint, solidifying Raekwon/Ghostface as the best tag-team in hip hop.

blink-182 - Buddha

2009-08-06T22:26:00.001-07:00

The most notable thing about this release is how tepid, unpolished and unsure the boys are here. Mark Hoppus takes lead vocal duties on the majority of the tracks, and his voice is seemingly always flat. Tom DeLonge's vocals are a higher pitch than they would be for the rest of Blink's career, but his voice is the most unique thing about these songs. "Carousel" sticks out for its long intro, and "Romeo and Rebecca" similarly employs a slow build before the same old girls-are-stupid-but-I-want-a-girlfriend dichotomy. The production is somewhat muddy, which makes this mildly interesting compared to the ultra-sleek (by punk standards) recordings starting with Dude Ranch. They don't quite have the "humor" thing down yet, either. I know I rag on them for being immature and populating their albums with fart and incest jokes, but it is something that sets them apart from other self-pitying pop-punk. A forgettable album for anyone but the most hardcore.

blink-182 - Dude Ranch

2009-08-05T14:13:00.003-07:00

Gusto can count for a lot in a band. This goes double for young bands, and in triplicate for pop-punk bands. While their later albums are more finely crafted in their playing and songwriting, they'd never match the sheer love of youth they show on songs like "Voyeur" or "Dick Lips." Hell, at any slower tempo, "Voyeur" would be unbelievably creepy, as opposed to kind-of amusing and very fun. They're not quite in the definitive iteration of the band - Scott Raynor is the drummer on Dude Ranch, just before being replaced by the (better) Travis Barker, and the album, but they're a young bunch of kids trying to make good and have fun, whether it's the occasional dick joke or a song dedicated to Princess Leia ("New Hope"). The rest of the album is filled with the kind of girl troubles that resonate best with teens whose every heartbreak is the worst catastrophe that could possibly befall a person. It's neither consistent nor in any way diverse, and the production is clean enough that riffage can sound like a droning if you lose concentration on it. At the same time, it's refreshing to hear blink-182 before they seemed to become a truly market-tested pop band.

Black Flag - Damaged

2009-08-05T14:13:00.001-07:00

I've grown up with Henry Rollins as an occasional TV persionality, DJ, spoken-word artist, the trainer in the video game Def Jam: Fight for NY, oh, and sometime ago the lead singer of Black Flag. Thsi knowledge makes Damaged a shock to the system: Rollins fronts the band through a lean, punchy album with songs about boredom, insanity, beers and TV. Yet Rollins never gives the band a break from his intensity, and the band follows suit. It rages through the songs propulsively with all the punk fury the riffs can muster. It's a masterpiece of sheer, unadulterated young rage. "TV Party" is the lightest track here (and the most familiar), and its satire is poignant and obvious, even nearly 30 years after this record came out. Greg Ginn is the not-so-secret ingredient that makes this album crackle, though - the songwriting is tight and his playing is filled with powerful riffs and fills that are brief but potent.

Brand New - The Devil and God are Raging Inside Me

2009-08-05T14:12:00.001-07:00

Brand New's breakthrough Deja Entendu felt like a revelation: a skillful, resonant bit of emo-pop that instantly put them in a different class of bands. Their followup, The Devil and God are Raging Inside Me takes the adventurous spirit of Deja Entendu and runs with it. The songs no longer depend on big hooks to make themselves known; many songs simmer rather than build. Take "Jesus" as an example. Its plucked guitars circle and repeat the same notes endlessly while lead singer Jesse Lacey's barely rise above a whisper for albums four minutes. Then they do, he's singing and not screaming. Brand New are admirable for their restraint here, letting tension build in their music. It lacks the big hooks to really be a "pop" album, unlike its predecessor, but it also depends less on soft verse/hard chorus dynamics. It certainly shows a greater eye to detail and subtlety, making it their best album yet.

blink-182 - Take Off Your Pants and Jacket

2009-08-04T13:45:00.001-07:00

I would argue that this is blink-182's definitive album, though Dude Ranch probably makes more sense. My choice is most because of consistency. They don't do much new; even "Stay Together for the Kids" sounds like an attempt to build off of "Adam's Song" one album prior. The singles are ("First Date," "The Rock Show"), for the most part, the best songs present, but the filler here, unlike those on Dude Ranch are consistently good, with "Happy Holidays, You Bastard," "Roller Coaster" and "Please Take Me Home" sticking in the memory after it ends. One would think that a group of guys in their mid-20s singing songs about being nervous around girls wouldn't work, but the songs seem fused with an underlying nostalgia and sincerity that make the contradiction bearable. Compare these songs to Tom DeLonge's post-blink band, Angels and Airwaves. No doubt he's sincere there, but his perpetually adolescent yelp doesn't fit his grand statements well, and it all comes off as dopey. Maybe blink-182 don't really shoot for the stars, but for this particular band, that might be their greatest strength.

Charles Mingus - The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady

2009-08-04T13:44:00.001-07:00

Fantastic, if a bit difficult. It's always tuneful and well-played, but its construction is very abstract. It's the logical avant-garde continuation of Duke Ellington's innovations, a very tightly constructed jazz masterpiece featuring alluring horns. Andthe horns do take center stage here - of the eleven band members, seven play woodwind instruments. Written as a ballet and titled for "dancers," ("Mode A - Solo Dancer," "Mode B - Duet Solo Dancers," etc.), the relationships between the instruments become most apparent as, for example, the pianos play against the multitude of brass on "Mode B." It's a bit of a chaotic listen as trumpets clash against horns while pianos skip and hop on the outskirts. Mingus is in control, his bass thumping in the background amidst the chaos. Cue the Almost Famous quote: "incendiary."

Funkadelic - Let's Take It to the Stage

2009-08-04T13:43:00.001-07:00

As with most P-Funk, the band's unity is the star here, with each song being a vehicle for a groove, interlocking bass, guitar, keyboard and chants. Following the deliciously filthy Standing on the Verge of Getting it On, this album continues in the vein of that album's party aesthetic, with less extended psychedelic jamming a-la Funkadelic. It's not the most uniformly strong Funkadelic record: "Baby I Owe You Something Good" is an interminable ballad, notable because it's the second longest song on the album. The longest, "Atmosphere" features some great organ-driven work, especially for a band whose guitars take center stage for most of the album. The title track, "Better by the Pound" and "Get Off Your Ass and Jam" are absolute classics, though. The rest is passable fun. Special mention has to go to "No Head No Backstage Pass," which finds the id and just runs with it.

blink-182 - blink-182

2009-08-03T18:17:00.001-07:00

While either Dude Ranch or Take Off Your Pants and Jacket would be the definitive blink-182 album, blink-182 may be the most int. It's also the most conflicted: opening track and first single "I'm Feeling This" marries the adolescent bullshit ("I wanna go in her room/I wanna take off her clothes") with some tricky changes in tempo, which immediately sets the tone for the rest of the songs. You get the sense that the band might be a bit directionless, trying everything at once, from the ballad "I Miss You," the instrumental "The Fallen Interlude," or the fact that songs with choruses that go "I don't wanna go/I don't wanna go" and "Should I go back should I go back should I/I feel alone and tired" are only a couple songs apart. Overall, though, the increased ambition and restlessness has caused them to put a dark, Cure-like veneer over their brand of pop-punk (Robert Smith even shows up on "All of This"). It winds up being a fantastic stylistic choice.

Dirty Projectors - Bitte Orca

2009-08-03T18:16:00.003-07:00

An arty sort of pop record, with extra artiness. Everything about this record is on unsteady ground - the jerky rhythms, the guitar work, band leader David Longstreth's vocals, the angelic harmonies of the other singers - but it works. Mainly because the melodies are strong. All nine songs are emblematic of this, and that builds a certain cohesion that seems impossible, even when it's happening. Different elements of Dirty Projectors' sound fade in and out of every song, whether it's the choir-like female harmonies or Longstreth's guitars. There's often a lot going on in this detailed production, which makes multiple listens rewarding. It's a bit like watching a good movie while drunk, then watching it again, sober: The first time, you might not know exactly what's going on, but it's pretty. As you get more familiar with it, it becomes wonderful.