Pretty Goes with Pretty

Great Touch

A week or two back when I took in Moon—excellent movie, by the way—I saw the preview for a new documentary called It Might Get Loud. The premise is simple: Jimmy Page, the Edge, and Jack White all get together and talk guitar. They jam. They discuss their approach to the instrument. Their egos drape over them like suits of armor. Here's the trailer:

Though I'm not a big fan of any of these guys or their bands, the doc still looks appealing to me. It seems like it's trying to get at the craft of playing the guitar rather than a full-on cock-off. I've rarely seen movies (documentaries or fiction) that truly capture what it feels like to make music or to think about music—that giddy feeling you get when you put the right two chords together or eke a new sound out of your instrument by hitting a string in a certain way or finding the perfect balance between your effects pedals and your own playing ability. There's this incommunicable joy in making music—different from writing songs or listening to an album or seeing a show. Once is probably the last great movie to get at this feeling. And my hopes are up for this film, too.

That said, I know I'll leave this film at least a little unfulfilled because I really am not a fan of any of these guys—them, their bands, or their playing styles. I was joking with my wife that I'd love to see a do-over of this documentary that instead features Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo, Kevin Shields, and J. Mascis. If you want to get inter-generational then bring in John Cale and Lou Reed and Tom Verlaine. Talk to Ian Williams of Don Caballero and Battles. Maybe Bradford Cox of Deerhunter or David Longstreth of Dirty Projectors for the latest generation. (I didn't mention this in my Dirty Projectors take last week, but I do really respond to Longstreth's guitar playing—it's probably my favorite aspect of Bitte Orca).

I've talked about my favorite kind of guitarists before; they're the guys who focus as much (if not more) on textures as on technical ability. I was reminded of my bias all over again when I saw that trailer, then a week later picking up US Maple's 1999 album Talker. I haven't heard Talker for a good eight or nine years, but returning to it just reminded me all over again how brilliant this band was. Sure, they didn't make the kind of records you want to put on at a summer barbecue—Al Johnson's voice might the quintessential acquired taste—but fuck if they're not geniuses when it comes to sheer musicianship. Every US Maple song feels like it's held together by paste and band-aids. Each player—Pat Sampson on drums and Mark Shippy and Todd Rittman on guitars—feels like he wants to walk off in a different direction, yet they somehow adhere just enough to keep their songs moving forward. They never devolve into aimless noise.

• US Maple: Go to Braises

If you ever watch tennis then you've probably heard the commentators say that a player has "great touch" or "great hands." What they mean is the player has a skill and finesse in his game that goes way beyond a monster serve or a power forehand. A player with great touch knows how to adjust the pace of a match mid-point, to shift from defense to offense, to place a shot anywhere on the court with as much delicacy as it requires. (If you watched this weekend's Roddick/Federer classic then you can see it: Federer has amazing touch; Roddick not as much.) This is a good analogy for what I love in a great guitarist. Great touch. They know how to go out of tune gracefully, they know the difference between volume and intensity—not always related—and they know when to play loose and to when to stay tight. When I listen to US Maple I can practically visualize Shippy and Rittman's fingers on their fretboards, applying pressure—but not too much, almost none at all—to the strings as they alternately stumble and shimmy through a track. White, Page, and the Edge warn that "it might get loud"—to me that's like a tennis player (Ivo Karlovic or Andy Roddick, say) claiming that they'll beat you with their serve. Okay guys, let it get loud. A loud, ripping bluesy solo can have its magic, but it doesn't tell me you have great touch.

Five more songs with great touch:

• US Maple: Breeze, It's Your High School
• Dirty Three: Stellar
• Jesus Lizard: Then Comes Dudley
• The Walkmen: In The New Year
• Deerhunter: Nothing Ever Happened

Scott Walker at the End of the World

I watched two documentaries over the weekend: Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World, about the wonders of Antarctica and the people who choose to go there, and the Scott Walker documentary 30 Century Man. In a weird way they were perfect complements to each other. Throughout his film, Herzog is most interested in what kind of people wind up at the bottom of the world; none of his subjects could really answer him with any clarity, but more than one noted that arriving to Antarctia, they finally met an entire group of people who were "like them." These were all people who seemed destined to make their home in the most extreme place on Earth.

Over the ninety minutes of interviews and clips taking you across Walker's nearly fifty-year career, you sort of get that same feeling from him. It's impossible to get him to explain how he arrived at the music he makes now--a far cry from his days as a pop star in 1965 England. It truly seems as mysterious to him as to anyone else who might hear his music. Yet the trajectory from his early days with the Walker Brothers to his more avant-garde output of the last ten or fifteen years seems positively natural when laid out as the filmmakers did. I wasn't really familiar with Walker's material past Scott 4, so to watch this film illuminate his work in the 70s (though it does glide right past a number of albums from that decade which Walker stubbornly keeps out of print), 80s (yikes), and 90s-00s (out there), is absolutely fascinating. I can't say I'm running out the door to pick up his more recent material--it strikes me as being terribly interesting but not exactly pleasant to listen to--but seeing him get from point A to Z is engrossing. I recommend the documentary if it screens in your town or comes out on DVD. In the meantime, here's a sort of cliff's notes.

• The Walker Brothers: Make It Easy On Yourself (from Take It Easy with the Walker Brothers, 1965)

The Walker Brothers: The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Any More (1966)

 

Scott Walker: Mathilde (from Scott, 1967)

 

Scott Walker: Jackie (from Scott 2, 1968)

• Scott Walker: 30 Century Man (from Scott 3, 1969)

• Scott Walker: On Your Own Again (from Scott 4, 1969)

The Walker Brothers: Nite Flights (from Nite Flights, 1978)

 

Scott Walker: Track 3 (from Climate of the Hunter, 1984)

 

Scott Walker: The Cockfighter (from Tilt, 1995)

 

Scott Walker: A Lover Loves (from The Drift, 2006)

Juno

I saw Juno over the holiday and liked it a lot. Small quibble, though: so you're telling me that Juno loves Patti Smith, Iggy & the Stooges, and Mott the Hoople, and gets a Melvins reference, but needs to be schooled on Sonic Youth? To the point when she picks up one of their albums she is surprised to find that it's "just a lot of noise"? I don't think so, Diablo.

This has honestly been nagging at me for the last two days. Bungled musical reference aside, it was a great movie.

Graham Greene and Alfred Hitchcock: It Wasn't Meant to Be

Readers of pgwp know of my ongoing obsession with Graham Greene—I’ve been working my way through his bibliography for the better part of 2007—but did you also know that I’m equally obsessed with Alfred Hitchcock? Slowly but surely I’ve been watching all of his movies—not in order, though one day I’d like to. So you can imagine I was quite excited by AMC’s “7 Nights of Hitchcock” last week. I was able to catch many that I hadn’t seen before (Saboteur, Marnie, Frenzy, and Torn Curtain) as well as revel in my old favorites (among others, Vertigo and Rear Window—by the way, I have a similar must-see-everything obsession with Jimmy Stewart).

I’ve been thinking about both Greene and Hitchcock together lately. The more Greene novels I read, the more I think Hitch might have done something great with one of them. I’ve already noted that the atmosphere of The Man Within reminded me of Jamaica Inn, an early Hitchcock (made in 1939, ten yeas after The Man Within was published). Likewise Orient Express was positively cinematic in its execution—and I don’t think it takes much effort to imagine that Hitchcock could have made a fantastic mystery-on-a-train with that material.

Wishful thinking aside, many of Greene’s “entertainments” really do seem to have very Hitchcockian plots. A Gun for Sale, for instance, is about a hired killer who is exposed by the very people who hired him, so he’s on the run from the cops while hunting the “real” criminals down—looking for personal justice but also uncovering more nefarious plans. Of course, a beautiful woman gets involved, and the novel reaches its climax during a town-wide safety drill which requires every citizen to wear gas masks. It’s a brilliant set piece Hitchcock could have had a blast with. (Instead, it was butchered in the 1942 noir This Gun for Hire, which transplanted the action from England to California and from a small town filled with gas-masked citizens to an employee drill in a Los Angeles factory. How a director could reject the opportunity to show a young paperboy riding his bike up a desolate street, wearing a gas mask, I'll never understand.)

But apparently Greene thought Hitchcock was tremendously overrated. Greene actually met Hitchcock while Hitch was making Sabotage—a movie based on Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, which is possibly noteworthy since Conrad was one of Greene’s favorite novelists, and The Secret Agent influenced Greene's own writing.  According to Norman Sherry's biography, Greene wrote his brother Hugh,

I had to see Hitchcock, the other day... A silly harmless clown. I shuddered at the things he told me he was doing to Conrad's Secret Agent.

Upon the movie's release, as a film critic for The Spectator, he elaborated on his feelings for the director:

His films consist of a series of small “amusing” melodramatic situations: the murderer’s button dropped on the baccarat board; the strangled organist’s hands prolonging the notes in the empty church; the fugitives hiding in the bell-tower when the bell begins to swing. Very perfunctorily he builds up to these tricky situations (paying no attention on the way to inconsistencies, loose ends, psychological absurdities) and then drops them: they mean nothing: they lead to nothing.

Greene apparently found Hitchcock’s lack of subtlety to be akin to a lack of real talent. There’s no real arguing that many of Hitchcock’s movies are designed to end in stunning set pieces—look no further than North by Northwest, the entire plot of which was apparently written with the express purpose of reaching its climax atop Mount Rushmore. Yet the same could be said for A Gun For Sale—let's face it: filling a town with men, women, and children in gas masks is no more of a "'tricky situation" than hanging Cary Grant from George Washington's nose. It's obviously an image devised at the expense of naturalistic plot.

It's too bad, because I really can't think of a novelist and filmmaker better suited for each other. And perhaps their similarities are no accident. Their careers both started in the 1920s and lasted into the 1970s, and they both hit their creative and commercial peaks at the exact same time. On one level or another, it’s quite possible that Greene influenced Hitchcock, despite Greene’s own dislike of the director’s work. Indeed, at some point—I assume in the early 1960s, shortly after the novel’s release—Hitchcock apparently tried to get the rights to A Burnt-Out Case, but Greene wouldn’t allow it, according to this Times article from the 1980s:

“I have not got all that much admiration for Hitchcock. He was offering a rather derisory sum and announced that he had bought it so I said no,” Mr Greene confessed.

Assuming that had happened in the early 60s, and compounded by Greene’s reviews of Hitchcock’s early films, it might explain Hitchcock’s awkwardly mum answers to questions by Bryan Forbes in this interview from 1967:

BF: Am I right in saying that you have never worked with Graham Greene?
AH: No. Never.
BF: Do you regret that?
AH: I don't know. It's very hard to say until you put the thing into practice. It's very difficult to tell.
BF: I think he has so many affinities with you that I'd love to see you two come together.
AH: Yes.
BF: I think he's such a superb craftsman.
AH: Oh yes, he is.
BF: And he writes on the page. He visualises so well. All his sentences just grip you. I'd love to bring you together. If you ever come to ABC, it's you and Graham Greene.
AH: Right. Good.

Based on such taciturn answers, it's hard to really know what Hitchcock thought of Greene—though he had to have known what Greene thought of him.

Watching Psycho this weekend, however, I couldn’t help but see a connection. Psycho is, incidentally, one of my least favorite Hitchcock movies; I think it’s terrifically overrated, except for the one specific thing the movie is hailed for—Hitchcock’s move to set Janet Leigh up as the protagonist, only to kill her off in the first act and flip the story to follow Anthony Perkins. It’s an ingenious move—and by the way, one that Greene had already done at least twice in his novels. Most explicitly is Brighton Rock, which from page one seems to be about Hale, a reporter who immediately realizes he is being hunted in Brighton. He meets a nameless boy early on who threatens his life, then disappears. The rest of the chapter is all Hale, looking for a way to evade the mobsters gradually surrounding him. He befriends a woman, Ida,  so that he won’t be found alone. It all seems like the classic setup for a Greene entertainment—or, for that matter, a Hitchcock flick—until Ida wanders off to the bathroom and Hale is never heard from again. From chapter two onward, the book belongs to that boy, Pinkie, the villain—just as Psycho belongs to Norman Bates. Greene employed the same trick (though in a less sinister fashion) in The Power and the Glory, which begins as if it will be about Mr. Tench, the dentist. The first chapter is his star turn, as he looks out at the pier and wiles away his time in desolate southern Mexico. Like Hale, he encounters a nameless man—this time a priest—who quickly disappears. When chapter two begins, it’s the priest, not Tench, who the cameras, as it were, have chosen to follow.

Hitchcock’s film is regarded as a classic in large part because he dared to do something that hadn’t been done in film before (actually, Antonioni’s L’Avventura does the same thing, but it came out the same year as Psycho so couldn’t have been an influence), but it’s precisely something Greene had dared to do in fiction, more than once, more than twenty years earlier.

Ultimately I find it downright bewildering that Greene and Hitchcock never came together. Greene's distaste for Hitchcock is particularly strange given his own willingness to write what he called "entertainments," as opposed to those works he felt had more literary aspirations. He clearly wasn't too good to write novels that hinged on gunplay and chorus girls rather than larger, philosophical themes, and he was certainly not above cashing a paycheck. To know that there was even a glimmer of a chance in the 1960s for Hitchcock to actually make a film based on one of Greene's novels is all the worse. Greene has gone on record as being disappointed by most of his film adaptations, including those by filmmakers he admired (see Otto Preminger's The Human Factor). Who knows: maybe Hitchcock would've been just what Green was looking for.

Spielberg. Scorsese. Kubrick. Jong-il. (et al.)

Phnom Penh International Film Festival, 1969

Let me guess your first thought in reaction to this article: bu-huh?

As the dictator of a nuclear-armed nation, Kim Jong-il should be a busy man, preoccupied with weighty matters of state.

But a bizarre museum in Pyongyang suggests that the North Korean autocrat may reserve his greatest zeal for his biggest obsession: the movies.

The museum, located on the grounds of the country's biggest film studio, is a majestic 16-room ode to the 65-year-old Dear Leader's enthusiastic love of cinema. In every room, huge portraits show Mr. Kim overseeing every aspect of movie production in North Korea, from camera placement to scripting and acting.

The article goes on to describe Kim Jong-il's groundbreaking work on the film Sea of Blood, for which he innovated the idea of using more than one camera, and making the actors read the script a hundred times. It's a bizarre thing to imagine—almost as bizarre as the most advanced nation in the world electing a star of Hollywood westerns to lead them!

The funny thing is that Kim is not the first leader of an Asian nation to harbor filmmaking aspirations. In fact I think you could write a dissertation on the subject. Cambodia's Norodom Sihanouk, who was in power prior to Pol Pot and then assumed power again after Pot was deposed, was (and is!) a director. IMDB lists five films under his name, including See Angkor and Die (!!). In fact he has done more than that. According to David P. Chandler's book The Tragedy of Cambodian History, Sihanouk's hobby began in the 1940s and was reignited in 1965:

In 1965, Sihanouk revived a hobby he had taken up in the 1940s: making feature films. He may have been pushed into it by his envy of the success of an American production of Lord Jim made in Cambodia in 1964. The French director Marcel Camus, who had made a film in Cambodia in 1962 [L'Oiseau de paradis], also encouraged Sihanouk to move in this direction. Between 1965 and 1969 the prince wrote, cast, produced, and directed nine films. Because he had no formal cinematographic training, monopolized the stage, permitted no criticism, and listened to little advice, the films turned out to be amatuerish and self-indulgent.... The first of them, Aspara (The Goddess), was screened in May 1966 and starred Sihanouk, his wife, and Nhiek Tioulong [former Prime Minister of Cambodia] cast as a philanderer. The last two, Joir de vivre and Crépsuscule (Twilight), were screened in 1969.

...

Sihanouk screened Aspara at a time he was telling the nation to tighten its belt and get to work. The scenes of the film... included "Scene 5: A Facel Vega, driven by a pretty young woman; Scene 6: General Ritthi and Rattana get out of his Jaguar; Scene 10: Along a fine asphalted road... drives a black Cadillac convertable," and so on. As Charles Meyer has written, "Official vehicles, planes, ships, infantry, youth, ministers, generals, and officials... were all requisitioned for the needs of the production." Aspara, like Joir de vivre and Crépsuscule, depicted the raffish behavior of Sihanouk's circle. None of the films, including the ostensible historical ones, had any footage of ordinary people.

Perhaps Sihanouk was a formative influence on Kim; according to Chandler, when Sihanouk was exiled from Cambodia during the 1980s, he lived in North Korea and continued to make films there. He returned to the throne in Cambodia in the 90s—and made even more films! Best of all, he has his own website, where you can actually watch some of his films if you so desire. Kim Jong-il, meanwhile, has yet to dial up, so you'll have to just read the description of Sea of Blood in the article. More from that article:

The Dear Leader's fetish for film has only grown deeper since Sea of Blood. He is reputed to have a personal collection of some 20,000 videotapes, including The Godfather, Rambo, and every James Bond film ever made.

In the early 1970s he wrote a 329-page guide for filmmakers, entitled On the Art of the Cinema, which is still on the shelves of North Korean book stores today.

"Begin on a small scale and end grandly," he tells filmmakers in the book. "Conflicts should be settled in accordance with the law of class struggle. ... Show the new noble lives of the backward characters after their re-education. ... A film should always demonstrate that the revolution is continuing and that the struggle is being pursued ever more vigorously."

In the late 1970s, Mr. Kim fulfilled his film obsession by serving as director of the North Korean Bureau of Propaganda and Agitation. And in 1978, in one of the most bizarre episodes of North Korean history, his agents reportedly kidnapped a South Korean film actress and her director husband, imprisoning them and forcing them to produce propaganda films for North Korea until they finally escaped.

Kim's love of cinema, coupled with his propagandist insistence, recalls China's infamous Jiang Qing— Mao's wife, so-called "White-Boned Demon," and part of the Gang of Four. Qing was an actress prior to getting into politics. In the early 50s she took on a position within the government as part of the Film Steering Committee of the Ministry of Culture, according to Craig Dietrich's book People's China: A Brief History. During her tenure she singled out a film called The Life of Wu Xun, based on a Chinese folk hero who rose from poverty to wealth, then used his fortune to create schools for the poor. The film was deemed anti-Marxist and newspapers began printing lengthy criticisms of the film and the real-life nineteenth-century subject. According to Dietrich:

Wu Xun was unmasked as a wrongheaded, idealistic reformer who imagined that education and reform could save China. Marxism taught that only revolutionary class struggle could truly change society. Thus, the film violated proletarian thinking. There could be no defense of it as being apolitical. Filmmakers had no right to indulge in private expression. A person "is either progressive or reactionary—there is no third way."

The maker of The Life of Wu Xun was ultimately driven to publish a self-criticism in the People's Daily. According to wikipedia, "During the Cultural Revolution, Wu Xun was attacked as a supporter of "feudal education." Red Guards exhumed his corpse and carried it to a public square where it was subsequently given a trial and ordered burned. Red Guards broke the body into pieces before lighting it with gas."

Kinda puts my loathing of Dreamgirls into perspective. Could you imagine if the Bush Administration hated the upcoming Across the Universe so much that they exhumed the body of John Lennon and immolated it?

And now that you've read this post, let me guess your reaction: bu-huh? I came here cuz I wanted to read about Feist and turntables! Pretty goes with pretty , folks. Pretty goes with pretty.

Once

This weekend my brilliant wife and I passed over the various blockbusters and took in Once instead. It’s a small “anti-musical” starring Glen Hansard, the singer-songwriter behind the Frames. I definitely recommend seeking this film out if it’s in your town, or renting it as soon as it’s available. It’s probably the best movie I’ve seen that takes a struggling songwriter as its subject. Unlike biopics like Ray or Night and Day, or fictional travesties like Dreamgirls, the protagonist of Once was not touched by the hand of God and is now merely waiting to be discovered. He’s someone who loves making music and really has no idea how to find real success, beyond “going to London.” There is no payoff to that end, either. The movie climaxes with the recording of a demo over two days in a real studio—no small victory for any would-be songwriter.

The story of Once concerns Hansard, a songwriter in Ireland that works in his father’s vacuum-repair shop part-time and spends the rest of his day busking on street corners and writing, writing, writing. He finds a fan, then a bandmate, in Markéta Irglová, a Czech ex-pat who cleans houses by day and shares an apartment with her mother and daughter. Irglová is a refreshingly direct woman who says what she wants and doesn’t beat around the bush, yet is hardly abrasive. She sees real talent in Hansard’s songs and seems more enamored by his music than by him at first; likewise Hansard finds that Irglová can sing and play piano, and a songwriting relationship blossoms. A tentative romance reveals itself as the story progresses, but both characters have exes in their past, haunting them throughout the film and barring them from ever consummating their feelings.

As a modern-day Brief Encounter the movie is well done, but that’s not where its true strength lies. What sets it apart from other movies (never mind other musicals), is how perfectly it captures the smallest and best pleasures of making music with other people. The very fact that recording a demo is the ultimate high of Once shows just how small the slice of life is. This would have been the first twenty minutes at most of any blockbuster musical. But by honing in on these short weeks of a this musician’s life, Once is able to capture a lot of subtleties that every musician will appreciate. The best is when Irglová leads Hansard to a piano shop, where Hansard quickly teaches her the simple chord progressions to one of his songs and then puts the lyrics in front of her. As he sings the first verse and chorus, she picks up on the song and begins singing harmonies and adds small flourishes on the keys. Hansard gets that look on his face—the one every musician gets when they hear one of their own songs made better for the first time. Later, when they make it to the recording studio with a full band, many of the details are just right. From having an idiot savant bandmember (the drummer) to having a recording engineer decide the music was good enough to put in a lot of extra effort. The all-night session, the “car stereo test,” the sheer enjoyment of hearing your own music on tape. It got all of that right.

Details aside, Once is most definitely a musical, but don’t let that scare you off. I’ve heard it described somewhere as a “video album,” which it nearly is. It is packed with songs, and unless you like the genre of music (fairly sappy, sad brit ballads—you know, like the Frames), you might be annoyed with the movie. The tone of the songs are fairly somber throughout; it doesn’t have the pacing of a typical musical. This didn’t really bother me, though, since those are the songs the guy writes, after all. It felt real. That realness is what many reviews have pointed to when they call Once an “anti-musical.” Unlike other musicals that buck the Hollywood model, such as Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which is wall-to-wall singing, or Dancer in the Dark, which puts the music in the protagonist’s fantasy life, the songs in Once are naturally integrated into the movie in a not-jarring way. The guy’s a singer, so he’s going to sing. And he’s not going to sing one verse and one chorus just to expedite the plot.

Yet I hesitate to join in calling Once a “video album,” because it risks putting the film in a modest little corner. The songs’ naturalistic placement might be what makes the movie palatable to people who don’t normally like musicals, but it’s not what makes it successful as a film. Once could easily be a collection of great Glen Hansard songs interspersed with some excellent attention to detail—and likely that’s all it is to a number of people who see it. But there’s one thing that truly sets it apart from other musicals, and this is what made the film, for me, a great piece of cinema: the lyrics.

Because Hansard and Irglová aren’t so focused on enunciating every lyric, it’s easy not to pay close attention. But in fact they tell a great deal of the movie’s story. Both characters have a significant other with whom they’ve recently parted ways. Ironically, as they are building toward a romance with each other by connecting through their music, every song they sing is about their past. The exes hardly appear in the movie itself, but you get all the back story, all the character, of these two phantoms through the lyrics. Paying attention to the lyrics actually deflates any comparison to Brief Encounter, because you realize that while their chemistry as songwriters is wondrous, their hearts have really never left their previous relationships.

This is where Once really draws a line between itself and standard musicals, where songs are used to explicate a person’s feelings right now. In reality, songs are never about the present. Even a day after writing a brand new song, it’s already a portrait of your previous self. In the immortal words of Jennifer Lopez, “this is me… then.” The power of Once is that it shows how mysteriously two people can connect through music; how much they can tell each other not only through lyrics but through the looks on their faces as they sing or how uncomfortable they are talking about their music when the song is over. Once is the first musical I’ve ever seen where it actually makes sense that the characters express—rather than explicate— their feelings in song.

Len Lye

City of Sound has a great post up on the work of Len Lye, an experimental film artist working from the 1930s through the 1980s. Rather then doing traditional animation using stop photo techniques, Lye drew, stenciled, or etched directly onto his film.

According to the wikipedia entry on Lye,

His 1935 film A Colour Box.... was made by painting vibrant abstract patterns on the film itself, synchronizing them to a popular dance tune by Don Baretto and His Cuban Orchestra. A panel of animation experts convened in 2005 by the Annecy film festival put this film among the top ten most significant works in the history of animation (his later film Free Radicals was also in the top 50).

In Free Radicals [1958, revised 1978] he used black film stock and scratched designs into the emulsion. The result was a dancing pattern of flashing lines and marks, as dramatic as lightning in the night sky.

Here they are together, thanks to youtube:

CoS has one more, Rainbow Dance. Meanwhile here's a third, Swinging the Lambeth Walk (1940):

Dreamgirls: And I Am Telling You—Go Away

Since Dreamgirls got snubbed for best picture last week, numerous journalists, critics, and industry folk have been intepreting it as some sort of sign of the apocalypse. Dreamgirls didn't get nominated? Have you looked outside the window to see if the sky is still blue? The grass still green? The latest in a long (and growing) line of articles investigating this catastrophe comes in today's New York Times. But wait! Don't bother reading the article, I can spare you litany of excuses. I saw Dreamgirls this weekend and explanation is actually quite simple: this movie stinks.

Jennifer Hudson was the best thing about the movie, yes. And her rendition of the "And I am Telling You I Am Not Going" was the highlight of the film, yes. And she deserves the Oscar over the ten-year-old from Little Miss Sunshine, yes.

But let's talk plot: cliche, cliche, cliche. Let's talk Eddie Murphy: not bad, but grossly overrated. Let's talk songs: except for maybe three--the aforementioned "I Am Telling You...," "Fake Your Way to the Top," and the "Dreamgirls" theme song--they were all indistingiushable. Not to mention the entire second half is ballad after ballad after ballad, thus killing all momentum. Nevermind that this is a musical about Motown, and there were perhaps three songs total that could lay claim to that sound. And a major red flag, by the way, is that this movie begins in Motown but ends in disco--meaning that the songs are predestined to descend in quality. Great trajectory for a musical. The movie begins at one of pop music's greatest heights and ends at one of its lowest depths. No wonder the climax hits at the middle and the last hour is sheer drudgery.

The way the songs were used was inconsistent, in a frustrating way--sometimes they're sung dialogue, sometimes they're soundtrack to a montage, sometimes they're a natural part of the story, but they're none of these things frequently enough to actually serve the story in a helpful way. And where was the performance? Only a few songs involved people actually performing while they sang. Even when the song was part of a stage show, the performances (barring Murphy's James Brownisms) were wooden. More often, Bill Condon seemed to get bored of the song and instead chose to use that opportunity to move the maudlin plot forward via montage. In one fell swoop he manages to take the steam out of the song by not letting the audience enjoy it, and drains the plot of any nuance by not allowing the actors to do anything but the broadest of strokes, mute on screen as a visual cliche does their work for them.

Most of these flaws seem to be inherent to the original play. Curiously, though, and most frustrating, is that critics have noted the weakness of the songs and the predictability of the Behind the Music-esque rise, fall, and redemption plot. But they've been noting these things as if they were a minor flaws. How can you rave about a musical if the music not very good? If the songs aren't that good, the plot is cliche, the dialogue nothing special, and musical performances also not terribly great... can two supporting actors--one, really: Hudson--really make this movie that necessary to so many people?

The answer is no. There is no great mystery as to why this movie got snubbed at the Oscars. The great mystery is how it got so many nominations (and wins) elsewhere.

A Different Kind of Starchitects

The San Fransico Chronicle has an article today looking into why so many movies make their leading men architects. Adam Sandler, Keanu Reeves, and Luke Wilson all played architects this summer, and (thankfully without seeing the movie) I know that Mark Ruffalo played a landscape architect in last year's Just Like Heaven. I hadn't noticed this trend until just a year or two ago, but the Chronicle's Ruthe Stein takes us in the wayback machine to show us just how cliche it is—right up there with the leading women working as journalists. Both careers have the same thing in common—the implication of creativity and the plausability of a high salary, to justify the inevitable to-die-for apartment and pricey wardrobe.

Robert Osborne—of  my one true television addiction, Turner Classic Movies—had this to say (surely walking toward Stein as he was speaking to her):

There are very, very few professions that still have a ring of heroism about them, and architecture is one of the few that does. If an architect is portrayed going off the deep end, it's always because they are so committed to what they're doing and that's an honorable thing. And it's one of the last manly professions—you are building something outdoors.

Of course, if you've ever encountered an architect, you know they're often not the most heroic sorts. [See here, on a daily basis.] Will Peter Cook kill Hollywood's untarnished vision of architects? I guess we'll have to wait for the next cycle of romantic comedies to find out.

[via ArchNewsNow]

Scratching a Surreal/CGI Itch

Nicholas Rombes, editor of the book New Punk Cinema, and author of an upcoming 33 1/3 book on the Ramones, has been scratching an itch over at his film blog, Digital Poetics. I get the sense that he's circling around a longer article, but in the meantime each time he tosses out a little nugget, he just gets my mind spinning. Last month it was about viewing the new X-Men movie as a surrealist work, (which I mentioned back then) and now he's back on the topic again, stretching beyond the one movie, bringing Barthes into the conversation, and basically just beginning to dig a little deeper. Sooner or later he's going to spit it all out at once and it's going to rock me a little.

Attention Trainspotters: The Radio Dept. is Leaving the Station

In honor of the release of Marie Antoinette last weekend—which, by the way, is a great movie—I thought I'd repost this bit I wrote about the Radio Dept. back in July [slightly edited/updated], to tide over all you dedicated fans of pgwp—surely you are dedicated!—until my tangible life settles down a little. Enjoy.

Last weekend Sofia Coppola released her third film, Marie Antoinette. And with it, as with her previous two films, comes a killer soundtrack. She is one of the few filmmakers out there right now—Wes Anderson, too—that really puts serious effort into making the soundtrack simultaneously heighten the film and stand alone as a great album. (And I draw distinction here between the pop-music soundtrack and a more typical film score.)

Unlike Anderson, however, Coppola has an added (golden) touch when she makes her compilations. At least one band on each of her previous soundtracks got a serious career boost thanks to her selection. With The Virgin Suicides, it was Air; and Lost in Translation  sparked huge hipster lust for Phoenix. In both cases each group had previously released their debut albums, which met with a fair amount of success (more in Europe than the U.S.); then they appeared on Coppola’s soundtracks; then their sophomore albums hit stores and achieved much greater notoriety. I doubt Coppola’s endorsement was the sole reason for their spikes, but it was certainly a factor.

Next up is Marie Antoinette, and with it—if there is any justice in the world—Malmo, Sweden’s Radio Dept. will find the same destiny. Three songs on the upcoming soundtrack are by the Radio Dept. Their presence on the soundtrack is akin to Air’s in The Virgin Suicides, in which they blended seamlessly with an otherwise all-‘70s modern rock collection; the Radio Dept. should acheive similar results within the otherwise largely '80s tracks for Marie Antoinette. You might wonder, while watching the film, if the song playing in such-and-such scene is from that New Order or Jesus & Mary Chain album you never picked up.

But while it’s accurate to cite New Order, the Jesus & Mary Chain, or Roxy Music as influences (as well as some '90s shoegazer), the Radio Dept. deserve more credit than that. They are truly a great pop band in their own right. I discovered them a couple of years ago while writing for the (now-defunct) webzine Splendid. The promo for Lesser Matters showed up in my mailbox and I had no expectations—and it turned out to be one of my most obsessively listened-to albums of the year. (See my review here.) In fact I’m still not tired of it.

Since then they have released two EPs, which I haven’t been able to find anywhere, and in July their second full-length, Pet Grief, hit stores. I happened upon it while browsing at Sonic Boom in Seattle last weekend and haven’t stopped listening to it since. The “’80s sound” that the group will inevitably be associated with at every turn is the result of rudimentary drum machines underlying each track, occasional synthesizers, and an added layer of fuzz or reverb over the top of everything. In fact I thought this method was used to better effect (read: less obviously ‘80s) on their first album. With Pet Grief, they’ve left the fuzzy distortion behind and played up the keyboards. The result is an album that hits the same note a little more often than its predecessor. My experience of it is similar to hearing a band like Bedhead or Sigur Rós, where the overall record blurs together but a concentrated effort spent listening to any particular track is rewarding. After listening to Pet Grief for about a week, certain songs are beginning to reveal themselves as standouts (e.g., “I Wanted You to Feel the Same,” with its boldly reverbed piano).

Lesser Matters managed to sidestep this criticism largely due to its more frequent changes in tempo from song to song, not to mention more vocal harmonies (and in one instance a female lead singer). That album seemed to aim for making a collection of great songs, whereas Pet Grief seems more concerned with setting a tone or mood. I prefer Lesser Matters, personally, but both albums are worthwhile purchases.

Radio Dept. has a myspace page, where you can hear four tracks and judge for yourself. Currently they’re on Labrador Records out of Sweden, which makes tracking down their albums in the U.S. tough, but not impossible. (Amazon does have all their material.) I’m willing to bet that by the end of the year, if buzz for the movie and its soundtrack continues to grow, you’ll be hearing more about this group when some smart U.S. label picks them up here and re-release everything (hopefully putting those two EPs on one convenient record for me). But in the meantime, you know it’s so much more gratifying to discover a band before the hype hits, so have at. I’ve led you to water: now drink!

Darth Python

First music mashups, then recut film trailers. It was only a matter of time before film mashups would start showing up. Here's Monty Python and the Holy Grail meets Star Wars.

Pretty funny—though I think it's funny because it's the best scene in Holy Grail, not because James Earl Jones's voice has insinuated itself into the scene.

I Rate This Amazon Review 5/5

In the dregs of summer television, my wife and I have become—well, not addicted to, but regular viewers of—So You Think You Can Dance. Last week one of the pairs had to dance in the style of '80s Disco. My first thought was that this almost doesn't even make sense; what, dance like Molly Ringwald? Of course my wonderful wife did her usual thing—took what I was thinking, said it out loud, only much more astute, brilliantly so. "If they really want to do a good '80s disco dance routine, they should just do the climax scene from Girls Just Want to Have Fun, step for step." After demonstrating some of these moves (trust me, it'd be on YouTube if I had a camera—for visualization purposes, it was something similar to whatever it is Sarah Jessica Parker is doing on the VHS cover, above), she got nostalgic and wondered if the soundtrack was available. To Amazon!

Lo and behold, Amazon has ONE copy of the soundtrack for sale. On CASSETTE.

Also, for NINETY-NINE DOLLARS AND THIRTY-NINE CENTS.

Seriously, a hundred benjies for a cassette tape? My wife paused—this couldn't possibly be worth it, could it? Unsure, we checked the reviews. All reservations were removed:

This rare and totally awesome soundtrack from the movie is well worth purchasing it has all the good up tempo classics that contributed to the feel-good factor of the movie.

Come On Shout: this song was in the opening sequences/credits of the movie, when Dance Tv started. I rate this song 5/5.

On The Loose: when Janey sneaked out to dance with Jeff at the court. I rate this song 5/5.

I Can Fly: this song was playing when Janey and Jeff are rehearsing, Jeff finally does a sommersalt and dancing is co-ordinated. I rate this 5/5.

Dancing In Heaven: this song was played during the contest finals. I rate this 5/5.

Girls Just Want To Have Fun: played when Janey, Lynne and Maggie distributed bogus invites to Natalies ball, I rate this 5/5 as good as Cyndi Laupers version.

Dancing In The Street: This was playing when people were up on stage trying out for the Dance tv contest,I rate this song 5/5.

Too Cruel: played during Janey and Jeffs first rehearsal session. Rate this song 5/5.

Technique: played during the dance off between Natalie/Ben and Janey/Jeff. rate this song 5/5.

Wake Up The Neighbourhood: Played when the Ball at the Country Club was Gatecrashed. rate this song 5/5.

Could it be that the Girls Just Want to Have Fun soundtrack is the greatest collection of songs ever produced? It was beginning to seem like it. I advised my wife to make the purchase. This could be the next Beatles' Butcher album. Purely from a collector's standpoint, it just seemed silly not to buy the $100 cassette.

In fact I Don't Think the New South Park Movie Will Top This

[via the Hot Blog - thank to Joseph Finn for pointing me to it.]

Matthew Barney to Direct Next X-Men Sequel? We Can Only Wish

Digital Poetics has probably the most interesting take on the new X-Men movie:

Actually, this is a surrealist film, disguised as a blockbuster. I don't believe there's any difference today. X-Men: The Last Stand can only be understood as an experimental film--it just doesn't work on any other level. Its images aren't that different from something by Matthew Barney. Sure the pace of X-Men is faster, and it's less pretentious, and less aggressively self-conscious, but on the sheer level of images, it's as striking as the Cremaster cycle.

I think this is offered tongue-in-cheek. I'm not sure since the post is unfortunately too brief. I would love to read a lengthier essay on this idea--not just the review of X-Men, mind you, but also DP's larger question on why CGI is solely in the realm of the summer blockbuster when it could be applied in a provocatively artier way.

Now then, surrealism aside, I can't figure out what everyone's beef is with this movie. It moves too fast? (Hi, it's an action movie.) It tries to cover too much ground? (Hi, it's an X-Men movie—character and plot development has always been handicapped  in this series, due to its sheer size.) Personally I thought it was great. Whatever complaints I had are niggling. Ultimately I had fun for a couple hours as I scarfed popcorn and watched silly blue people clamber about.

Animated Math Music

This is pretty neat, courtesy Jim Bumgardner:

This weekend I’ve been playing, once again, with the ideas of experimental film pioneer John Whitney, using both graphics and audio. While Whitney was interested in turning musical ideas into motion graphics, I’m doing the inverse — turning one of his key animation ideas back into music.

…

In this movie, each of the 48 dots is moving in a circle. Each of the dots is on a 3 minute cycle. At the end of 3 minutes, the outermost dot will have moved around the circle once (this dot represents the first harmonic or fundamental). The next dot will have moved around the circle twice (representing the second harmonic). The next dot three times, and so on. The innermost dot moves around the circle 48 times.

Now, imagine these dots are raised bumps on a disc which is controlling a music box, with each bump triggering a note when it passes the zero degree line (a line extending from the center to the east).

Open this page in a new window and listen and watch. Meanwhile, follow this link to read all about just what is going on. It's a trip to watch the notes line up and splash down as a chord. Check the many variations as well. I get a kick out of nos. 11 and 12.

[found this via a post at Last Plane to Jakarta forums.]