Spring Training

I adore this picture, and will probably continue to treasure it either until opening day or my first successful spring excursion to the park.

Fourth Five Movies, 2007

Well, this digest will include #16-21, if that's all right by you.

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They Drive By Night (Raoul Walsh) at MoMA. I liked both Bogart and George Raft here, but didn't go for Ida Lupino. The dialogue was as great as advertised, and you don't get too many good movies about truck drivers.
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The Wrong Man (Alfred Hitchcock) at home on DVD. Hitchcock creates a palpable sense of discomfort as the titular character (Henry Fonda) continues to slip improbably through the cracks in the legal system toward his doom. I didn't really enjoy it that much, though.
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Climates (Nuri Bilge Ceylan) at the Museum of the Moving Image. Another great theater, though smaller than MoMA or the Walter Reade. Ceylan builds the film mostly with good shots of landscape, weather, and the characters brooding. He also stars along with his wife and includes cameos by his real parents--a rather emotionally difficult project in which to involve the family, I think.
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The Astronaut Farmer (Michael Polish) at the AMC Loews Kips Bay for a Stylus review.
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Bong Joon-ho's Barking Dogs Never Bite and Memories of Murder at the IFC Center. After being turned away from a sold-out Robert Altman double-feature, this was my first visit to the IFC. Theater 1 is a strikingly high and shallow room, with loft-style exposed brick and appropriate accessories. The space felt a little too tight (seats leaned back to gaze way up at a high screen), but the sound system seems like a point of pride.

The first film was fun and quirky in a dark and twisted way. The second was a gripping tale of feuding cops ineffectively trying to catch a serial killer. Tunnels seem to be a key both visually and plot-wise. Oddly enough the opening sequence in the second film contains a shot of light reflecting toward the camera off of a piece of glass, which is exactly what the first film ends with over the credits. I don't think this would be noticeable without watching them back to back, and also don't think it has much significance to the story.
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Album of the Year?

It is, of course, really early yet, but I'll be surprised to hear anything much better this year than Pantha Du Prince's This Bliss. It's the sort of stuff people like to call "minimal" or "minimal techno" even though that doesn't feel very accurate upon listening; "tech house" makes more sense to me. From Wikipedia:

Tech house is a subgenre of house music. Although it uses the same basic structure as house, Tech substitutes typical booming house kick drums with shorter, often distorted kicks, smaller hi-hats, and noisier snares. House's funky jazz loops are replaced with techno-sounding synth lines.

Listen at their MySpace page.

Five Years

This is my five-year anniversary/birthday of posting things on the internet. Here, then, is a post celebrating the oddity-enshrining power of the internet, specifically a news story I happened upon from the Seattle Times.

The main story, that of a misbehaving cop, is sort of weird, enough to pull you in, and then every three to five paragraphs they up the ante with something even weirder and only tangentially related. Then, finally, after it seems like all of the possible strange angles of this story have been covered, they close with this totally unexpected bombshell:

"In August 2000, Graichen [the amateur videographer] was there when a fellow officer shot and killed a 71-year-old man following the man's confrontation with a cable TV worker who was trying to disconnect his service."

Surreal.

Upcoming Events, Mar 2007

Well, we have a few left in February as well.

• Missed Damnation last night as I was exhausted after being at work for 23.5 hours Thursday & Friday. I'll have to catch it on DVD and see it along with Werckmeister Harmonies next time they're playing at a festival or something.
• I'll be seeing The Astronaut Farmer tomorrow for a review. Somehow I'd forgotten about AMC's $6 before noon deal, but it's effective in Manhattan as well as Seattle, so I'll make sure to take advantage of it.
• The IFC Center is putting on a miniature retrospective of Korean director Bong Joon-ho February 26 & 27. I'll see Barking Dogs Never Bite and Memories of Murder, which I think are his first two features. I'm skipping The Host since that will be more widely released later in March.
• MoMA is hosting an Abbas Kiarostami retrospective in March, starting with an appearance by the director at The Taste of Cherry on Thursday, one of two of his films I've seen. I'll try to catch as much as I can, depending on my schedule, probably including at least The Wind Will Carry Us, Ten, and Close-Up.
• Film Forum is showing Zhang Yimou's Raise the Red Lantern during the first half of March.
• I can't imagine I'll have too many opportunities to see Out 1, but I'm not sure I feel like paying $20 and spending all weekend in the theater March 3 & 4
• Not sure how I feel about Rossellini yet, but I like Ingrid Bergman and love George Sanders, so I'll be seeing Voyage in Italy at MoMA on March 9
• I'd like to see Tian Zhuangzhuang's The Blue Kite and Springtime in a Small Town at the Walter Reade Theater. I think China/Taiwan/Hong Kong is probably my second biggest area of foreign interest, with Korea in the lead, and France a less exotic but pretty obvious third.
• Booka Shade will be at Studio B on Thursday, March 15. I would love to hear a set of mostly their stuff, but expect a more wide-ranging seleciton.
• The Museum of the Moving Image has a "Fashion in Film" exhibition in March, and will be the silent Howard Hawks film Fig Leaves along with Bunuel's Diary of a Chambermaid on March 18.
• Fujiya & Miyagi play the Mercury Lounge that evening.
• Ellen Allien will be at Studio B on March 24.
• Cavs@Knicks, March 28?
• Ugetsu is playing at the IFC Center on March 30. I recall this as one of my favorite films of all time, but haven't seen it for four years, and expect some sort of reappraisal this time around.

Of course, I'm not sure about income for March, depending on work, so maybe I will stick more to free stuff (movies at MoMI and AMMI) or perhaps I will earn a lot and feel inclined to hear more live music like Diplo, The Pipettes, Do Make Say Think, Bloc Party, Antony & The Johnsons, etc. I will certainly not be attending the LCD Soundsystem shows at the end of the month since those are sold out. There's another scheduled for mid-May at Studio B, though.

Third Five Movies, 2007

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Old Joy (Kelly Reichhardt) at Film Forum. I thought the first act or so felt obligatory, but the scenes in the woods, particularly at the hot springs, were enthralling.
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The Situation (Philip Haas) for a Stylus review (up soon) at the Angelika Film Center. It started about fifteen minutes late while we were treated an extra few rounds of the particularly bland musical selections being marketed to us.
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Mister Roberts (John Ford, Joshua Logan) at home on DVD. With a cast like this (Henry Fonda, Jack Lemmon, William Powell, James Cagney) it would be really tough to go wrong. It's a surprisingly lighthearted Technicolor comedy about male comradery that just happens to involve the Navy and John Ford.
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My Darling Clementine (John Ford) at home on DVD. Perhaps my favorite of the handful of the not-many westerns I've seen. The third Henry Fonda film I've seen this year, and my appreciation grows each time. I didn't understand his style in The Lady Eve, but he seems to be kind of like Jimmy Stewart in that he's an oddly reserved choice for a leading man, but so darn likable that the audience and supporting cast supply him with the determination needed to accomplish his narrative task, where the typical leading man would have enough ego/willpower to do so on his own.
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Colossal Youth (Pedro Costa) at the Walter Reade Theater as part of the Film Comment Selects series; "Solemn, entrancing, and ultimately undeniable." I, like many others, found this film a challenge to sit through, but then sometimes important moments in life can be much the same. Even a few hours later, I can feel the image and the atmosphere (of poor Cape Verdean immigrants in Portugal) growing like a seed in my mind. See this blog post on boredom in art/filmmaking.
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Second Five Movies, 2007

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Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón) for a Saturday matinee at Cobble Hill Cinema. In addition to the literally stunning camerawork, I enjoyed the story, setting, etc. and Clive Owen as always
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Shock Corridor (Samuel Fuller) at home on DVD
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Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis) on Groundhog Day at the Two Boots Pioneer in the East Village with a terrifically enthusiastic crowd. This is one of those movies that I was glad to cross my list of things I haven't seen, but also loved every minute
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Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone) at MoMA. My favorite movie of the year so far. It's astonishing just how long Sergio Leone spends introducing the characters, particularly the ones that get killed off instantaneously. I'm really glad I saw this in a good theater (it's in extreme widescreen full of unbelievably tight close-ups) and really feel the need to see The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly in such a setting.
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The Third Man (Carol Reed) at home on DVD. I'd been going to watch Inside Man, but it was in fullscreen, so I went to this, and lo and behold was as bored as the first time I'd seen it. The characters aren't funny or interesting enough, and I really do not care one bit about Harry Lime despite the entire first hour the other characters spend discussing him
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Music to Get Excited About

I would say these are roughly in order.

1. Pantha Du Prince "Saturn Strobe" - String-heavy, dark, sleek-sounding techno
2. Panda Bear "Comfy in Nautica" - Like the first album (mostly voices, lots of reverb), but louder and happier
3. Minilogue "Elephant's Parade" - Swirling, disorienting minimal; I can't find where I originally got this so I suspect the original post has been taken down
4. Latex "The Porcupine" - Light, multi-layered techno
5. Tomboy "Murky Jerky" - Bright, full of synthesizer lines, bongos, everything

Let's add to this XTC's Drums and Wires which I've been enjoying for the past several months, but today it seemed to emerge from the speakers as an old favorite. I never got all that excited over the later period stuff I paid attention to because of the World Cafe or something or other, but Drums and Wires really does it for me.

Bonus

Mmm, yes, that IS the first part of the final mix for 2006 up in the sidebar. There will probably be three halves in all. I was lucky enough to get internet access tonigh right as I finished. Wireless has been spotty lately, though according to Verizon we will be hooked up to DSL in eight days or less.

Anyway, here's what we have for this final installment of scattershot synthesizer sounds:

1-01a Crowdpleaser & St Plomb "Early"
1-01b Delia & Gavin "Relevee (Carl Craig Remix)"
1-02 Jan Jelinek "A Concept for Television"
1-03 The Knife "Forest Families"
1-04 Swayzak "Mike Up Your Mind"
1-05 Tim Hecker "Rainbow Blood"
1-06 Burial "Forgive"

2-01 Loscil "Bellows"
2-02 Luciano & Thomas Melchior "Father"
2-03 LB Dub Corp "Rhythm Division"
2-04 Ricardo Villalobos "Fizheuer Zieheuer"
2-05 Melchior Productions "In the Shadow"
2-06 Melchior Productions "Different Places"
2-07 Burial "Southern Comfort"

3-01 Audion "Mouth to Mouth"
3-02 Ricardo Villalobos "Duso"
3-03 Alex Smoke "Snider"
3-04 Depeche Mode "The Sinner in Me (Ricardo Villalobos Conclave Remix)"
3-05 Kode 9 & The Spaceape "Glass"

• Bonus Mix 2006, First Half
• Bonus Mix 2006, Second Half
• Bonus Mix 2006, Third Half
• Rock/Pop 2006, Side 1
• Rock/Pop 2006, Side 2
• Dance (Lite), Side 1
• Dance (Lite), Side 2
• Dance (Hard), Side 1
• Dance (Hard), Side 2