Dazed and Confused

I've been thinking more about this movie since Monday. At first it struck me as a lot easier and more candy-coated than Slacker, but now I'm thinking that they're pretty close to the same movie. It takes place in less than a 24-hour period, features a cast of dozens (I'm pretty sure Dazed & Confused does not break 100), and non-judgementally features young people under pressure to conform to society. Perhaps it's because the scene is less immediate for Linklater, but here the characters are all much more glorified, it seems. We get a lot of weirdos and misfits and geeks in the post-collegiate Slacker, but here almost everyone is a young god or goddess, perhaps proto-gods and goddesses in the case of the freshman. This is accomplished both by casting good-looking actor types as well as the extensive use of slow-motion and pop music soundtracking. Example: Matthew McConaughey, who some might argue plays a creepy, pedophilic stoner. While he has few positive traits, the camera absolutely adores him. The shot that has been sticking in my mind is Wooderson's entrance to the Emporium with his posse trailing behind him as Bob Dylan's "Hurricane" plays for the viewer. Magnificent.

Even the beatings take place in slo-mo. All Movie Guide notes that the film is neither "warmly reminiscent" nor "intentionally bleak," but Linklater does seem to delight in the weird social strictures and norms of small-town Texas, such as the teacher's grin at the megaphoned announcement of the ritual beatings to take place on the afternoon of the last day of school. The incoming seniors hold no cruelty or malice toward their freshman counterparts, they simply exult in completing the circle of high-school life--except for O'Bannion who has committed an unpardonable sin by sticking around for a gluttonous second year, thus forfeiting the audience's sympathy.

Of course, it's impossible to reconcile everything in the film that way. While the coaches and teachers condone the hazing of the incoming freshman, they try to put a stop to all other sorts of fun. Perhaps this strict, overbearing authority grants the kids' partying and general recklessness a delicious sense of rebellion, whereas absent the oppressor they would seem purely nihilistic, especially the scene involving mailboxes, a bowling ball, and the rear window of an otherwise innocent parked car.

As always one wonders what concessions Linklater might have made to Universal since this was a studio production, but where I'd always assumed it was a feel-good, brainless teen movie (and it is), there's a striking amount of love, sympathy, and craftmanship evident as well.

MP3: February Mix

Part One
41:41

Brian Eno "1/2" [from Ambient 1: Music for Airports]
M83 "Run into Flowers (Jackson's Midnight Fuck Remix)"
Wighnomy Brothers "Wombat"
Heiko Voss "I Think About You (DJ Koze Mix)"
The Juan Maclean "Dance with Me"

Part Two
33:54

Pier Bucci "L'Nuit"
Ricardo Villalobos "Duso"
Keith Fullerton Whitman "Stereo Music for Acoustic Guitar, Buchla Music Box 100, Hewlett Packard Model 236 Oscillator, Italia Modena Electric Guitar and Computer, Pts. I & II"

Film Roundup #6

Slacker ***
Richard Linklater, 1991

Full review below.

The Thin Blue Line **
Errol Morris, 1988

A solid indictment of the justice system. Actually probably a little better than solid. In assessing "The Thin Blue Line," it's impossible not to take into account the social importance of the project, or the successful investigative reporting, which normally I'd avoid to focus on the intrinsic merits of the film.

Vernon, Florida *
Errol Morris, 1981

A more or less delightful little film about the (mostly) male, middle-aged to elderly inhabitants of Vernon, Florida. Much is made about how weird these people are, and most of them would be to people who'd never spent much time outside the city. Others make some hullabaloo about the Southern-ness of it all, but I think it's much more important that these people are relatively old and rural. Morris could have found these people in small-town Iowa just as easily.

It's Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books *
Richard Linklater, 1988

Linklater's first feature, shot completely on his own in Super-8. Watched this with the commentary on most of the time. Not much audio, sparse interactions between characters, mostly just images of Linklater, the "main character," traveling by train to or through Missoula, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston, and Huntsville, Texas, as well as his homebase of Austin. As he mentions in the commentary, there are a lot of now-embarrassing shots of him with his shirt off, but much of this was shot in summertime in Austin, so apparently there are to be no autoerotic undertones. He meets Daniel Johnston on the street, who hands him a tape, which he also does in his short attempt at a documentary of local music festival in 1985 called "Woodshock." Probably the best part of this for me, besides the scene of him leaving the note for the sleeping girl in the airport, was his monologue on the commentary track about his burgeoning interest in film and the years leading up to both this project and Slacker.

Dazed and Confused **
Richard Linklater, 1993

So I finally saw the whole thing. Great, perhaps amoral, ensemble drama.

The Frye

I went to a film lecture yesterday at the Frye Art Museum that was largely uninformative and a little boring. The audience comments were not great. However, I will be going back for a DVD screening of Alain Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad on March 19.

Slacker Review

Slacker ***
Richard Linklater, 1991

Okay, so I claimed that this was maybe my favorite movie ever. I suppose, given my hierarchy of pleasures, that means it must be formally adventurous, featuring characters who are at once transgressive yet sympathetic and marginalized in some way or another. Probably someone smokes in it and it evokes a location indirectly but powerfully. Near preposterous yet clearly rooted in a reality that is essentially our own. The answer, if that's indeed a question, is yes. I could probably do this kind of survey more comprehensively, but that can wait for another day.

Clerks is often mentioned as a direct result of this project, and as much as I love that movie, it seems almost insignificantly minor in comparison. Maybe I'm just overwhelmed by the hundred-plus actors who share screen time almost evenly. Then again, I'm probably at the right age to absorb this as I'm supposed to, perhaps a little more cynically than some. Charles asked me, not because he watched the film, if I fantasized about becoming a slacker. I don't and never really did while watching the movie. My fascination with the social scene portrayed here is not one of infatuation but one of aggrieved empathy. At the same time that I recognize the same frustration with society in almost every way, their lifestyle doesn't seem to me to be any sort of valid option. Partly this is because Austin or anywhere like it has seen skyrocketing housing costs in the fifteen years since this was released by a major studio. Linklater paid $133/month, bills and utilities included, at the time he was making this. Admittedly there's been a little inflation since then, but even so, places like this have been gentrified, I would expect in no small part by the formerly impoverished students who lived there and have now done well for themselves, Linklater himself being an improbable but perhaps representative example. Actually, Andrew O'Hehir has a very personal essay-cum-book review on Salon about the disappearance of this exact culture, though in San Francisco and Chicago rather than Austin.

Ultimately it's not the conspiracy theorists or the jerks or the circus freaks or the criminals or any of those people who get me, but the two old men, the anarchist more than the wistful microphone holder. "It's taken my entire life, but I can now say that I've practically given up on not only my own people, but on mankind in its entirety. I can only address myself to singular human beings now."

Film Roundup #5

Killer's Kiss *
Stanley Kubrick, 1955

Extremely low budget, ridiculous cuts and inserts. Weak love story. Terrific chase scene and totally bizarre battle at the end. Best moments toward the end: one is the loop Davy takes around the roof of the building over which he's trying to escape from the hoods, the other is the surreal final fight in the mannequin room.

Blood Simple **
Joel and Ethan Coen, 1984

They craft powerful and disturbing images. The sound is very... tactile. You can almost feel the gunshot or the shoveled dirt or the fan blades turning. The windshield wipers in the first scene also get a lot of amplification. Repeated use of the Four Tops' "It's the Same Old Song." The use of the dog panting as premonition was great.

The Ice Storm *
Ang Lee, 1997

Christina Ricci really did it for me here. Everyone else seems to just fill their role as Ang Lee fills in the story with moody shots of the surrounding environment. The storyline really reminded me of Magnolia with the powerful meteorological event that helps to provide or mirror the mounting tension and eventually brings together the characters in the end.

The Shop Around the Corner ***
Ernst Lubitsch, 1940

My favorite Jimmy Stewart role. I really have no idea why Hollywood left this set in Hungary, but it works just fine. The dark story of the shop owner really seemed odd to me, as I expected nothing more than straightforward romantic comedy, but it probably counterbalances the mostly submerged but ultimately triumphant romantic relationship. This is as good an example as any of why people lament the passing of the classic Hollywood era.

The Aristocrats *
Penn Jillette & Paul Provenza, 2005

I thought it was just going to be 100 comedians telling the same dirty joke, all in a row. There are lots of tellings of the near-mythical joke, "The Aristocrats," but they're often intercut with other tellings or commentaries or observations about comedy itself, etc, etc. In the end it's mostly a triumph of editing, at least when it works well. Worth watching, especially if you've never seen Bob Saget outside of network TV. Other than him, I think Paul Reiser and Martin Mull probably provide my favorite versions and comments, although the Christopher Walker impression is great as well.

Links Roundup

• PY Column for February: Good News, Bad News
• Falling Sand Game
• Mediaworks Student video from Carleton College
• 30 Boxes An online calendar
• The Onion AV Club interviews Dan Savage Also, I saw Dan Savage destroy mementos of other people's bad relationships on Valentine's Day
• BBC's Jesus sings "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Know" Best passion play ever
• Philip Sherburne's ten crazy, techno-filled days in Berlin

Radio Analysis

According to my records, during my junior and senior years at Carleton, I played 836 different songs on the radio. I know this is a slight undercount because, for example, I played all of Plastikman's Artifakts [bc] one night during a sub shift but it's not on here. However, this probably includes all shows for which I was notified more than five minutes before I had to show up.

Looking back over this list, I'm reminded of why I chose songs in the studio: timbre, emotional content, rhythm, and length, though for my last term most of the songs, pre-planned, were chosen for style or novelty.

What do we find within this list? Well, it's pretty obvious that My Morning Jacket is my favorite band with seven of these top 38 songs. I'm a little stunned at how often I played Do Make Say Think, but I remember getting several requests for them, which I think was a result of buying that record in Iowa City when basically nobody else was playing them on KRLX, thus convincing me that I ought to take advantage of that uniqueness. I'm surprised that I played "In My Hour of Darkness" five times, but I do enjoy it quite a bit. Songs in this list that I would not have ever considered a favorite are "By Your Side" and "Pairin' Off." Beyond these songs, several other Beechwood Sparks tracks were played multiple times, and I probably haven't listened to them for at least six months. Why on earth did I play three Jeff Beck tracks? I don't even like him.

Tracks that have an extrinsic advantage are those that I purchased early in my junior year. Stuff from Dear Catastrophe Waitress got played for four terms after the initial push in Fall 2003, but Antony and the Johnsons only got a term before I started playing techno and freak-folk. Similarly, had I discovered Nebraska a year earlier some of those Bruce Springsteen tracks might be closer to eight or nine plays rather than the three they got.

There's basically a ton of stuff missing from my sophomore year here. For example, were that year included, "NYC" might have more like 20 plays, and Trail of Dead would be a lot closer to a most-played artist. There would be several songs from Mermaid Avenue, especially "California Stars." Oh, and shockingly enough, I never once played "Hounds of Love," one of the best songs I've ever heard. "Next Exit" was junior year's "Everything in It's Right Place": a great organ or organ-sounding intro which I couldn't get enough of. Overrepresented in the first list, perhaps, is Wire: since many of the songs on Pink Flag are under 90 seconds long, I'd often play two or three at a time just to give myelf some time to transition. They should probably be more towards the middle.

Here, then, are the relevant lists, first the most-played artists:

75 My Morning Jacket (60 w/o Bandemonium)
34 Wire
27 Joy Division
25 Velvet Underground
22 Dismemberment Plan
22 Do Make Say Think
20 The Clash
18 Belle & Sebastian
18 Drive-By Truckers
18 Modest Mouse
17 Galaxie 500
16 Interpol
16 M. Ward
15 Death Cab for Cutie
15 Junior Boys
15 Neil Young
15 The Thermals
14 Fog
14 Pedro the Lion
13 Buzzcocks
12 Iron & Wine
12 M83
12 Mooney Suzuki
12 Mountain Goats
11 Bruce Springsteen
11 Keith Fullerton Whitman
10 Bob Dylan
10 Explosions in the Sky
10 Radiohead
10 Sigur Ros
10 Sonic Youth
10 DJ Shadow
10 Decemberists
10 Danger Mouse

And now, the most-played songs

Eight

My Morning Jacket "One Big Holiday"

Seven

Do Make Say Think "Auberge le Mouton Noir"
Joy Division "Atmosphere"
My Morning Jacket "Mahgeetah"
Wire "12xU"

Six

Belle & Sebastian "Piazza, NY Catcher"
Galaxie 500 "Tugboat"
Modest Mouse "Polar Opposites"

Five

Drive-By Truckers "My Sweet Annette"
Explosions in the Sky "Memorial"
Glenn Branca "Lesson No. 1 for Electric Guitar"
Gram Parsons "In My Hour Of Darkness"
Interpol "NYC"
Joy Division "Digital"
My Morning Jacket "Lowdown"
Sigur Ros "Olsen Olsen"

Four

Beachwood Sparks "By Your Side"
Belle & Sebastian "Stay Loose"
Brian Eno "The Big Ship"
Buzzcocks "Orgasm Addict"
The Clash "Career Opportunities"
The Clash "I'm So Bored With The USA"
Death Cab for Cutie "We Looked Like Giants"
Dismemberment Plan "The City"
Do Make Say Think "Frederica"
Do Make Say Think "Hooray! Hooray! Hooray!"
Drive-By Truckers "Sink Hole"
Galaxie 500 "Listen The Snow Is Falling"
Interpol "Next Exit"
Kid Dakota "Pairin' Off"
M. Ward "Helicopter"
My Morning Jacket "At Dawn"
My Morning Jacket "Golden"
My Morning Jacket "The Bear"
My Morning Jacket "The Way That He Sings"
New Order "Age of Consent"
Richard Thompson "1952 Vincent Black Lightning"
Wire "Three Girl Rhumba"

The Great Outdoor Fight

In case you don't read Achewood, I felt I should recommend to you the current "episode," or whatever you want to call it. It feels pretty adventurous, with many installments up to 12 panels each, rather than the more traditional 3 or 4.

You'll want to take a look at the Wikipedia entry first, specifically the section describing the characters. Technically the story starts on January 11. You could probably also jump in at January 18 or January 25, but that's as late as is reasonable.

I think what excites me about this is not that it's clever, since Achewood almost always is anyway. What gets me is the striking similarity to a TV show, every few installments constitute a scene and we've got skips in the action that could work well for commercial breaks. I suppose this sort of event tends to crop up every so often in the storyline, but this is the first time the cross-medium potential has struck me.

Savage Love

"There's this movement to form a day called Steak And A Blowjob Day, which would be the male version of Valentine's Day, where women would come through with a steak and a blowjob in return for the chocolate and flowers that guys come through with, and I support that holiday."

- Dan Savage in the Onion AV Club

SPL

I just found out that you can search for CDs by record label at the library. This is pretty obvious in retrospect, but it makes searching for music there a lot more fun, at least for someone like me. I think so far I've gone through the Kranky, Matador, Astralwerks, and Warp selections, which means I have a lot to go. I also realized that you can browse the Criterion Collection DVDs they have, so I went through and marked a lot of them.

The library has two ways to remember things: request an item and put it on hold, or put it on your list of things to check out some other time. Apparently something is wrong with the list "feature" and it tends to forget what you've marked, so that dampened my enthusiasm a little bit.

Ang Lee

2005 Brokeback Mountain
2003 The Hulk
2001 Chosen
2000 Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon
1999 Ride With the Devil
1997 The Ice Storm
1995 Sense & Sensibility
1994 Eat Drink Man Woman
1993 The Wedding Banquet
1992 Pushing Hands

Linklater

2006 A Scanner Darkly
2006 Fast Food Nation
2005 The Bad News Bears
2004 Before Sunset
2003 School of Rock
2001 Waking Life
2001 Tape
1998 The Newton Boys
1997 SubUrbia
1995 Before Sunrise
1993 Dazed & Confused
1991 Slacker

Delicious Roundup

• Hypertext Markup Disaster PY Column for January
• Fastr The Flickr game: try to guess what the common tag is before the other players
• What defined pop music in 2005? Simon Reynolds knows
• Pazz & Jop
• Simon Reynolds's reaction to Pazz & Jop
• Brian Rumsey emerges
• The Wisdom of Parasites Fascinating profile of wasp reproduction involving a "hypnotized" and ultimately devoured-from-the-inside cockroach
• Sony Classics: Viva Pedro Apparently Sony Pictures Classics is theatrically rereleasing a bunch of Almodovar films this April, eight to be exact

If you know any more than I do about what appears to be the upcoming traveling Almodovar retrospective, please comment.

Rung Theater

A self-described "microcinema" in the industrial neighborhood of Georgetown. It's in a really non-descript building, but they have a nice neon sign outside. The area seemed pretty abandoned on Friday. Tristan, who is Chloe's friend, said he'd been to a party in the area in some warehouse-type place that appeared to have blood stains on the walls. A former abattoir, perhaps?

It was really cozy. They showed no-budget short films from Seattle's F***ing Fabulous Film Festival. They were all short, all invigorating, and all more or less insane. The first somehow had Piper Perabo in it. Short descriptions:

• Knuckleface Jones directed by Todd Rohal
A nerdy guy wakes up in the forest completely tied up. A group of beatbox-ers in whitey-tighties picks on him. A girl makes a hilarious bowl of cereal, gyrates with a gasoline pump, and destroys small appliances with the help of two boy scouts, only to be visited immediately thereafter by the underwear bandits.
• Piledriver directed by Calvin Lee Reeder
A delightfully playful, offbeat little love story capped off by the best scene of the night: mutual declarations of love followed by a tragic and, I suppose, viscerally hilarious accidental murder. Not quite as evil as it sounds.
• Cat With Hands directed by Robert Morgan
Brief, terrifying myth with great effects.
• Son of Satan directed by JJ Villard (based on the story by Charles Bukowski)
Terrifically off-the-wall animation that switches styles with every shot. Kind of gruesome at the beginning, somehow the abusive end lightens things up.
• Printer Jam directed by Doug Pond
Seemingly dull until the second half where the elements of the first half are mashed up and remixed into some kind of a music video of itself.
• Milton Is A Shitbag directed by Courtney Davis
About a demonic cat and his increasingly frustrated owner. The cat voice is great.
• Hillbilly Robot directed by Todd Rohal
The frenetic Russian guy is hilariously demented. Oh, and one of the guys is wearing a Massillon Tigers jacket, which is unexpectedly cool, at least to me.

Film Roundup #4

Transamerica *
Duncan Tucker, 2005

Some reviews have suggested that the contrast between humor and emotional tragedy here is a failure but it seems only a reasonable compromise to me. My opinion is that overall the film tries to be too cute, aiming more for general likeability than any insightful observations. That's not to say audiences would necessarily have been as comfortable with such potentially harrowing content--if not for the comedy, the bedroom scene in Phoenix between Felicity Huffman's mother/father and his/her son would be almost unbearably intense. In, say, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, the intermittent levity seemed to relieve the building tension whereas here the comedy seems less injected into the narrative than the real basis for the film. Perhaps it's more of a traditional intergenerational buddy comedy with a transgender shtick than a transgender film with a comedy shtick. Is there anything wrong with that? Perhaps not. While I certainly didn't think it was terrific, it's enjoyable enough that you might want to just see it for yourself and decide.

The Iron Giant *
Brad Bird, 1999

Brice really likes this movie. It certainly has its moments, such as when the beatnik/scrap metal collector lets the squirrel out of the zipper of his pants in the restaurant, and when the 50-foot robot meditates on the eternal soul. The making-of featurette with Vin Diesel is priceless, mainly because he's totally whacked out on something. A full bottle of cough syrup, maybe?

Duel [TV] **
Steven Spielberg, 1971

Pretty much awesome. A great example of what's possible with limited resources and a very focused vision. I think commercial breaks might have lessened the slightly repetitive nature of the action by breaking things up a bit, but still a great thriller. I was personally very disappointed at the end when the truck, auspiciously labeled "FLAMMABLE," does not explode after driving over the cliff. Maybe that had to do with the constraints of working on a TV-movie-of-the-week budget and timeframe. Spielberg says he shot it in twelve days.

The protagonist, whose masculinity is challenged everywhere he looks, is named David Mann. Just thought you should know.

Backyard *
Charleen **
Ross McElwee, 1976 & 1978

Charleen is overall the more compelling film because of the titular teacher/poet/lover's vivacious personality, but McElwee uses intertitles and very few voiceovers, which will disappoint any devotee of his work, and I can't imagine any other sort of person will be watching this DVD.

Film Roundup #3

Match Point **
Woody Allen, 2005

Some great scenes of suspense with kind of a herky-jerky end. I thought the timeworn opera records on the soundtrack did a great job of, besides providing beautiful music, enhancing the viewer's sense that this story was occurring out of time and out of space. Yes, it takes place in London, but not in any necessary way, except perhaps the slight class conflict between Chris (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) and the Hewett family. In that sense it's a little theatrical: although it's never overtly "stagy," in retrospect the action largely takes place on private property, if not always indoors. Then again, movies and television almost always do this. Caruso helps cast the cinematic spell on us, so that when the apparitions appear toward the end, it doesn't seem out of place. Simon Reynolds, among others, has been commenting recently on "hauntology" (here's a very detailed lineage), the way certain music (and television) seems to cast a spell around the listener, enveloping one inside the work for its duration. Kind of like "engrossing," but then again not really. Anyway, it seems to me that here Woody Allen is very much trying to haunt the viewer, although ultimately it's difficult to say why. Probably because Match Point is a fable of sorts, a meditation on luck and the possibility of justice in what seems to be a morally arbitrary universe. The viewer is asked very straightforwardly to consider this throughout the film from the opening shot which made me think it was going to be a lot more about tennis (see Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train) than it really was.

Eyes Wide Shut *
Stanley Kubrick, 1999

I liked Jonathan Rosenbaum's comment on the visual power of the orgy scene, which I did find quite striking, likening it to something out of silent film. Overall I'm not sure what I thought, but it's true for me as for others that a number of Kubrick's have required multiple viewings for the full effect, so I'll probably see this a couple more times.

If you're interested, Rosenbaum and J. Hoberman offer conflicting but equally convincing arguments in their respective reviews.

Stella Dallas *
King Vidor, 1937

Not so much a fan of Barbara Stanwyck as the whiny single mother, but her relationship with her daughter provides some really great scenes, including one of the most enduring moments in Hollywood history, that of Stanwyck outside in the rain, smiling through her tears as she's shooed away from her daughter's wedding.

Mad Max
George Miller, 1979

Unable to really hear the dialogue, partly due to volume and partly due to sometimes thick Australian accents. It seemed as if the film ended early--Mel Gibson hadn't exacted vengeance on all of his foes. I might watch this again just because I felt like I might be missing something due to the large gap between my enjoyment of it and the general approval it seems to receive elsewhere.

The New World **
Terence Malick, 2005

Dreamlike, serene, beautiful. The floating narrative rarely touches down at any one point for long before jumping ahead again a few days or a few years. Why is Pocahontas never named as such, called nothing in the first half of the film, and christened "Rebecca" by her English caretaker in the second half? Rarely have I seen a film that expects such familiarity with the story on the part of the viewer. This might have seemed difficult for someone completely ignorant of history.