“Across the Universe”

The first half, about up to the “Mr. Kite” sequence, is great because of the Beatles songs, the novelty, and the production values. The second half blows because of the Beatles songs and the slippage into the most abyssmal sixties cliches. The plot sinks into sub-TV-mini-series-type material, and eventually all of the entertaining dialectics between sound and image evaporate. It’s obvious early-on that the producers could have chosen any music to accompany the image and narrative, and by the end, it’s offensive that they chose the Beatles (if you’re a Beatles fan). Still, the first half impressed me, especially the “I’ve Just Seen a Face” sequence (great tune that I’d forgotten about!) and I actually hope that Julie Tamor continues to do work in this vein. She should just find her own songwriter.

The Lives of Others

Last year’s Foreign Language Academy Award winner reads like old New Hollywood. Weird, since it’s about the GDR. Think 70s Scorsese and Coppolla, so much so that some scenes are probably homages to The Conversation. Worthwhile for most viewers, myself included, as a history lesson. We should all know Stasi. But did it have to be so damned sentimental? Nein. Distracts from actually existing democracy.

Cormac and Oprah

I have nothing against Oprah’s Book Club.  I don’t necessarily support it, but I don’ t think that it in some way “ruins” literature.  To think so is just basically pretentious and dumb about not only “literature” but art and commerce and the relationship between the two, in general.  I fear that many of the huddled masses that read Oprah’s selections probably don’t “get them,” but another few million probably do.  They learn something, they gain a greater appreciation for life, or whatever.  Conversely, I don’t “get” Harry Potter (because I don’t “get” adults reading children’s literature), so I guess we’re even.   It’s not a matter of stupidity, it’s just a matter of acculturation.

So when Oprah chooses Cormac McCarthy’s The Road for her club, and then proceeds to conduct the first ever television interview with McCarthy (this link will only get you started, you actually need to enroll with Oprah to watch the interview, but it’s worth it if you’re a McCarthy fan.  Trust me.), it doesn’t somehow offend my sense of literary propriety.  It just strikes me as downright weird (like many of her other selections).  McCarthy sitting down with Oprah doesn’t make him more commercial and less interesting, and Oprah interviewing McCarthy doesn’t make her more intelligent, incisive, or culturally “with it.” Instead, as the interview plainly shows, these two giants of their respective media meeting is simply a strange clash of two worlds that I never expected to see.  Neither relates to the other.  The viewer can understand why Oprah chose McCarthy’s book.  She sincerely seems to like it.  Why did McCarthy do the interview? Who knows.  He seems game, but he reveals little.  I imagine money.  Exposure? He says he doesn’t care about either of those things.  Maybe he’s medicated? A dare? Maybe he’s an Oprah fan? Honestly, I’m glad he did it.  I would have preferred a more penetrating interviewer, but maybe this is the level of discourse with which McCarthy was comfortable.  I’m going to go home and finish No Country for Old Men.

And, as a bonus, here’s the trailer to the Coen brothers’ film adaptation of that book, which is coming out soon.  It looks pretty damned good, although I find the trailer music really annoying.  Is it just me?

Half Nelson

Since school has been over, and LOST and American Idol ended their seasons, and now that The Office is in re-runs, I’ve had a helluva lot of time for DVD watching. Might try to write about a few this week.

Half Nelson came pretty well recommended from a trustworthy handful of friends. I just watched it this afternoon. After hearing about it, I marvelled at how the creators would pull it off — a teacher by day, a crack addict by night. I worried that it would slip into Dangerous Minds bathos. At best, I thought that it might achieve a sort of edgy sentimentality a la You Can Count on Me. It definitely fell hard into the latter category, and was in many ways kind of unrelenting.

The film seemed willing to accept the fact that the lead character’s drug and personal problems could have stemmed from the real, core problem of having to live in a racist, warmaking United States with few avenues for self-expression, compassion, or caregiving. I think this point of view is accurate, and since it is too often made a joke of in other culture and casual conversation, it was surprising and refreshing to see it on-screen.

A strong counterargument to this sort of thinking, though, and one that I think is at least in part right, is that the willingness to destroy oneself because of one’s social conditions results equally from one’s own sensitivities. There are many people sincerely disturbed by the state of the world and the state of the United States, but they don’t all smoke crack. (The fact that that last phrase almost sounded like a cynical joke is telling. It wasn’t meant to be.)

Ultimately, I am still unsure whether or not to read the film as an allegory or slice of life social realism. I guess it can be both, but it’s a difficult combination. I think that the film got the lead character’s descent into drug abuse and depression fairly right, but its depiction of the school where he worked and the life of its adolescent characters was a little strange, if not just downright wrong. The public service announcement history reports, filmed in a head-on Godard or Spike Lee style, offered by the students on events like Allende in Chile and Attica, etc. might have been interesting if you didn’t already know something about their subjects, but for me, they screwed up the pacing of the movie. The voice of social justice was dilluted. And this made the ending, too, for me, and for at least one of the people I watched the film with, unappealing, flat, and kind of empty. Another of our number dug it though.

Probably a film that I will watch again and one that I can definitely recommend with my usual caveats about the basic dissipation of the independent cinema.

I’m Not There

I don’t know who you are, but if you care about ‘Life’ or ‘Art’ then you got to at least be interested in Todd Haynes’s new one, the biopic about Dylan called I’m Not There.  According to IMDB, it won’t be out until much later this year, but I’m already excited.  Stumbled across some pics today from the film  (you have to click the link on the right-hand side of the page).  While they don’t give us much to go on, they at least suggest that Haynes hasn’t lost it on the project.  Blanchett as early-electric era Dylan seems like a sound choice.  A lot of great minds behind this one.  Hope it’s better than Masked & Anonymous, which I actually liked, but was still confused by.  Back to work now . . .

DVD Review: Marie Antoinette

I feel compelled to write today for several reasons:

1) I haven’t written in an awful long time.
2) Even in my absence, I’ve continued to get a fair number of hits per day.
3) I’ve gotten two positive comments in the past week, and
4) I have something to write about.

What is that something? Well, if you read the title of this post, it should be obvious, Sofia Coppola’s 2006 film Marie Antoinette. Quite a while ago, I stated on this blog that I was really looking forward to this film, but I never got to see it in the theaters. I think it came out around the time that I was starting school, so I was just way to busy to get to the theaters much in those days. When it showed up on Netflix, I was again psyched even though the film disappeared from public consciousness fairly abruptly and got fair to middling reviews.

Frankly, I loved the movie. I want to write “stunned,” but it wasn’t really that. The film is a little bit too much of a music video to have the *pop* of a stunner, and I kind of knew what was coming; but it’s certainly good, much better than Coppola’s last film Lost in Translation, which I now view as a total snoozefest; and probably better than the Virgin Suicides, which I only saw a long time ago in the theaters, but which I remember being similarly snoozeworthy.

Marie Antoinette is flat in many ways, meaning that it’s all about surfaces, emptiness, the waning of affect, etc, but it’s a monumental and engrossing flatness. The cinematography is wonderful, the costumes are gorgeous, the men and women in the film are hot. It’s really great. It’s clearly a homage to a lot of past filmmakers and films, in particular, Kubrick’s middle- and late-periods, all sorts of surrealist filmmaking, and especially Josef von Sternberg’s great and underappreciated Scarlet Empress. So many elements of that latter film are lifted wholesale that Marie Antoinette often just feels like a remake recast in France instead of Russia. Certainly, the new film is probably just as much of a fantasy as Sternberg’s classic, but to me, that was the whole point. There are far too few pure fantasies projected on screen anymore (in the phantasmic, ghostly, mystical, magical sense), and to me, that’s a loss for cinema, especially the independent cinema, which is now so totally obsessed with secular realism. The choice of Marie Antoinette as the subject of this fantasy is historically and politically fascinating, as is the visual and sonic milieu into which Coppola injects her. Admittedly, it was probably going to be hard for any movie that includes songs from New Order, Aphex Twin, Gang of Four, and the Cure, among others, to really disappoint, but this one certainly didn’t, and it went beyond all that to truly impress me.

I would like to write more about the film, and more of substance. I jotted this stuff down very hastily, but I really need to do some work before I go out tonight to see Acid Mothers Temple. Psyched for that . . . Might write on it later.

Drawing Restraint 9

Spoiler Alert!

I went to UVA’s student run cinematheque Off-Screen to see Matthew Barney’s latest Drawing Restraint 9 tonight. I’d never actually seen a Barney joint in the theatre before so this was a rare pleasure. I have seen plenty of images in books, though, and the DVD of excerpts from Cremaster 3, and I’d read a lot of reviews, so I basically knew what to expect. I was impressed, in a fashion, but perhaps not blown away in the way that one imagines his first Matthew Barney film blowing him away. It is fantastic to see a filmmaker with the sensibilities of a video artist, sculptor, or painter harness the whole apparatus of big-budget Hollywood filmmaking, but to what ends? There were definitely ‘messages’ being bandied about in these images of Barney’s, but the whole thing was fairly sober for such a massive undertaking, and not exactly sobering either. Which is to say, that, yes, I was slightly underwhelmed. I had mixed feelings about a lot of the movie. It’s Japanese setting, for one, but also the film’s penultimate scene in which Barney and Bjork (his co-star) butcher themselves, literally, as in, they take knives and cut off slices of each others’ flesh. The scene was obviously grotesque, to some extent, but it wasn’t exactly gory. In one way, I appreciated this. The scene didn’t need to be gory. But then again, it didn’t really need to be there at all. And that was the problem. It certainly seemed as though Bjork and Barney, a couple, were just getting each other off. And that’s fine too, but didn’t exactly make for either great art or great entertainment. With Barney’s making strides outside the art gallery, one has to wonder what he’s going for. Still, five dollars well spent.

1000 hits/Greatest artists

My blog just reached 1000 hits. Kudos for me. I think that’s pretty miniscule in the internet scheme of things, but it’s quite an attractive number, so I’m happy . . .

Today when I was eating brunch at the Blue Moon Diner here in Charlottesville, I sat next to two guys who I overheard talking about the following things: their incapability to see the Big Dipper in Washington, D.C. last weekend; the fact that when the Nazis made the yellow star mandatory for all Jews in Norway, the king of Norway commanded that everyone wear the yellow star (unconfirmed); some obscure references to habeus corpus law; extended discourse on Roman musical notation and its contemporary legibility; brief reference to the musicological accomplishments of Pythagoras. And the best thing about all these comments was that they were disconnected by long periods of silence before another comment would suddenly bubble to the surface, and there seemed to be no overarching logic holding the conversation together. It was like overhearing a Beckett play.

But my real point in writing . . . In my review of the new Bright Eyes EP this past week, I mentioned my view that Dylan was “the second or third greatest American artist in the 20th-century,” and ferdogg took me ever so lightly to task in a comment. Well, first of all, I think I misspoke. I would have preferred to have written “at least the second or third greatest American artist of the 20th-century” so as to leave things slightly more ambiguous. I didn’t want to overspeak and cause just such a protest on the part of my readership by leaving myself some wiggle room. I’m totally confident that I could argue successfully for Dylan’s top-three status, but arguing that he was somehow “the best” I think would be hard (but maybe worthwhile nonetheless).

Still, the basic logic behind what I wrote was that, for me, the “best American artist of the 20th-century” would probably have to be a popular musician or filmmaker because those are two forms with the greatest cultural impact and highest level of aesthetic development during that century. Yet I think it would be hard to argue for an individual filmmaker. Kubrick, Hitchcock, Ford, Hawks, Scorsese, Coppola, Altman, and others created amazingly varied, complex, and aesthetically adventurous bodies of work over long periods of time. Welles, Chaplin, Peckinpah, Keaton, and others made startling accomplishments in a limited range of films. But it would be hard to argue that any of these filmmakers defined the form or stood out from the pack in the way that someone like Joyce or Beckett or DaVinci or Melville or Newton stood head and shoulders over their peers in terms of quality, accomplishment, or originality. If I did include a filmmaker in my top three it would probably actually be an avant-garde filmmaker like Stan Brakhage or Hollis Frampton. In other words, if I could figure out the best American avant-garde filmmaker of the 20th-century, I might put him or her in the top three, but more so for aesthetic/theoretical reasons than preference. Arguing from my own preferences, I actually think I could make a strong argument that David Lynch is the greatest filmmaker of the 20th-century, but here I would get hung up on the fact that he’s still working and may still create even better work in the future (thus becoming more thoroughly associated with the 21st-century). I think that the mainstream, canonical filmmaker that you could make the best argument for would be Hitchcock, but he is really only ‘American’ by default since 1) he was British by birth, and 2) his films don’t reflect on classical American themes in the way that some of these other filmmakers do. These two latter examples prove the basic futility in exercises such as this as well.

In the popular music realm, the strongest candidates, for me, would be Bob Dylan, Robert Johnson, Elvis Presley, John Coltrane, or Duke Ellington. The reason I would give Dylan a slight edge over the last two artists is that his accomplishment was slightly less singular than theirs, i.e. it fit into an American tradition that was already well established and that still continues today. If the American idiom has a Shakespeare, it is no doubt Dylan, and even though Coltrane and Ellington both achieved aesthetic brilliance on par with Shakespeare, their brilliance is nearly impossible to imitate without sounding like empty ventriloquism. In the case of Dylan, a performer can create a fair to middling effort in the Dylanesque, American folk tradition and still be saying something somewhat worthwhile and lasting. Every American songwriter, poet, or literary artist toot court must respond in some way, in their art, to Dylan’s accomplishments and innovations.

Robert Johnson, on the other hand, is just without peer. To my mind, the brilliance in his music is nearly incommunicable, although not unintelligible. Listening to him is much like studying quantum physics. At this level of artistic accomplishment different rules of possibility reign. In some way, Johnson cannot even be discussed as a sort of best artist, because he is more like a god-man or something. We need to discuss, rather, his position in the pantheon or in the heavens. St. Robert.

And a similar argument goes for the King. When the archaelogists excavate the ruins of Las Vegas and see the temples built to this figure Elvis, he will appear to them in much the same way that figures like Zeus, Athena, and Apollo appear to us today — real but unreal figures of a hallowed yet unapproachable past. In the same way that we read of the Greek pantheon and don’t quite understand how these figures were gods, the archaeologists of the future will not quite understand how we considered Elvis a ’star’ — what that meant, how that happened, etc.

OK, there is a lot more that I could write on this, but I need to do schoolwork so I’m stopping. Next post I’ll address the literary and plastic arts.

Innocence and the Oscars

In honor of the Oscars, I went to see a French movie from two years ago tonight called Innocence as part of the Francophone Film Festival that was held here at UVA this weekend. Wish I’d seen more of the festival films, but alas. Innocence was excellent — totally creepy and enigmatic — actually a lot like Pan’s Labyrinth, but also much better in certain ways. It reminded me a lot more of a long, projected video art piece than it did of a feature-length film really — like something Matthew Barney might do. It’s about a “girl’s school” of sorts in a forest where no one gets out and no one comes in. Impossible to tell what’s going on in the film, except for the fact that the girls are trapped there. A weird psychic tension permeates everything, which is increased by the fact that the girls are often put on semi-sexual, almost anthropological or biomorphic display, both for the viewer and for characters in the film. Also, they’re seen naked fairly frequently, which is pretty unheard of on American screens — these are very young girls. But none of it is salacious either. In fact, it’s quite beautiful, and it’s obvious, in one sense, that the movie is driving you to wonder whether this is not such a bad fate for the film’s characters. In other words, perverse viewpoints win the day, but the film is never exploitative, and it nevers goes for any easy shocks, which I’m usually quite vigilant about in a movie of this nature, viz. ungeneric, indie-type.

The Oscars were the usual sort of good fun that you’d expect. I’d had a party the past couple years, so it was kind of a bummer not to do that, but I still enjoyed myself. Of course glad to see Martin Scorsese win — really he’s the only real ‘artist’ that won anything tonight. Well, actually, that’s not true. I have respect for Helen Mirren and Forest Whitaker and Ennio Morricone and Jennifer Hudson and a lot of other people too. So I guess I’m just talking shit. But Marty is in a class by himself, and it was great to see the cat finally win even if it certainly wasn’t for his best film (probably just cracking his top ten, actually). Or maybe not even . . . Let’s see. What’s better? At least No Direction Home, The Aviator, Gangs of New York, Casino, Goodfellas, Raging Bull, The Last Waltz, Taxi Driver, and Mean Streets. So, being generous, that’s just top ten, not counting Last Temptation or King of Comedy, which are probably both way better, but neither of which I’ve seen in awhile. (Also Cape Fear and The Color of Money, which are borderline, and probably ten or so other flicks which I haven’t seen, but could be just as good.)

But anyway, it was good that Scorsese won. That shit with the scrim and the shadow puppetry was totally whack. Al Gore proved so many of my theses about American political life. And the singing contest between Beyonce and Jennifer clearly went to Jennifer. In fact, I found the whole evening a little embarassing for Beyonce. It seemed like the Academy was attempting to let her retain some of her dignity, but it really didn’t work. Poor woman. She’s still a pretty good singer with some great songs, but the personality just doesn’t work for me.  Does it work for her “public”?

Volver Song

Probably the best scene in a movie last year.

And while we’re on the subject of performing, the American Idol performances tonight were, in general, pleasantly pitiful. I thought AJ Tabaldo was the best, really the only one that I would describe as quality, but I also don’t know his song, and from what I could tell from the judges comments, the original was much better. Sundance Head was the biggest disappointment. I mean, he just blew. “Nights in White Satin”? Are you kidding?