Upcoming Events, Nov 2007

Not upcoming: Last night when I went to see Gone Baby Gone, the center channel speakers were buzzing. I thought it was going to be annoying, but then I sort of forgot about it over the course of the movie.

November should feature plenty of year-end lists, but Stylus Magazine, which has but one day of publishing left, got started early this week. On the music side of things they published the top reissues of 2007. Today the film section had the Top Films of the Millennium. I blurbed about Cruel Winter Blues. I believe I may have had the most appropriate list featuring, through no special obscurantist effort on my part, exactly zero selections from anyone else's list; appropriate given that Stylus is/was supposed to be about the interests of the individuals writing rather than the supposed broad (sub)cultural value of the object in question.

BAM is throwing some ridiculous kind of party on Saturday night. There are four concurrent programs in four of their movie theaters, DJs, and a lineup of bands including Be Your Own Pet and Heartless Bastards. This, of course, would be after the Grizzly Bear show. It's a lot for one evening, but we've got to use up that extra hour somehow.

Spirit of the Beehive is showing again at MoMA, maybe I'll catch it this time.* They're also co-hosting Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You with the Independent Feature Project.

MoMI has Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Meet Me in St. Louis; and Singin' in the Rain. BAM is showing Lulu and Persona. Ohio State will play Michigan, probably at least for the Big Ten title. Anthology is reviving Delmer Daves' original 3:10 to Yuma. I'm also very excited for both Southland Tales and No Country for Old Men.

I'll be visiting Providence, Rhode Island, for a weekend with Max, Summer, Anna & Neal.

And Ohio State will play Michigan.

*Just after initially posting this I found out that Ry Russo-Young's Orphans will be showing at Barbes in Park Slope that night, so Victor Erice's movie gets mown down by the mumblcore monster.

34th Five Films, 2007

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Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard) at MoMA. I've now seen more of the pre-1968 films than not. Around the end of the second act the group comes out of a cinema where Jack Palance has been scouting a mermaid for the film-within-a-film he's producing, Odysseus or something, and the marquee reads "Viaggio in Italia," which explains less flashy parts of the movie. The unhappy couple is constantly looking at statues, appearing tiny against the Mediterranean landscape, and exploring infidelity.

The things this film is most about, though? The colors blue and red, frequent and feverish flashbacks, a constantly swelling string section, Hollywood/America, European intellectualism, language and translation (Fritz Lang speaks English, French, German, and Italian within a single scene), the ridiculous villa built on a promontory at Capri. There's also a lot of contempt for one another among the characters, excepting Fritz Lang.
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The Assassination of Jesse James (Andrew Dominik) might be great but I had a hard time deciding with so many distractions. I didn't much care for the voiceover narration until the end; mostly it was, or should have been, pretty redundant. The film looked very good, with interesting long-held close-ups, and effective saturation of browns for an old west color scheme. I liked Casey Affleck a lot, wondering how much of the uncomfortable obsessive character was in the script and how much was his own contribution, so I'll almost certainly try to see Gone Baby Gone over the next several weeks. There are a lot of small touches, like with food, for example, that I think I could pick up on a second time through.
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The Mission (Johnnie To) at the Walter Reade Theater. This is my fifth Johnnie To movie in a theater this year. I rank it below Exiled but not terribly far.
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Lars and the Real Girl (Craig Gillespie) at Clearviews Chelsea. This multiplex is possibly my favorite in the city. The facilities aren't quite as nice as, say, Lincoln Square, but it's also never that full. It's comfortable in a way that's almost a little bit tacky, but not really. My other option was the Angelika, where the screens are small, the seats uncomfortable, and it's on a really gross stretch of Houston.

The cast is just really solid across the board. Probably my favorite part of the film is the way Lars' "real doll" eventually becomes more and more of a character, particularly when Gillespie makes use of carefully lit reaction shots, such as during an argument in Lars' beat-up Toyota Tercel. Like a lot of indie (romantic) comedies, this is a bit of a quirkfest, but for me it feels like a slightly odd version of one possible version of believable reality, rather than some bizarro world that shares only superficial similarities with our own. I suppose when arbitrating the artistic worth of stuff like this, personal taste is basically the final criterion. There are probably people out there who would wholeheartedly support, say, The Station Agent or Me You and Everyone We Know but not this movie.
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Hot Fuzz (Edgar Wright) at home on DVD. So, this was fun but I don't imagine I'll ever need to watch it again. I was pretty interested until Simon Pegg's character discovers the dark secret of the NWA. To me it felt like from that point forward Edgar Wright, who could have gambled by attempting to make a truly great cop movie, decided to cash in and go the easy route, by making the ultimate cop movie. Which was kind of weird, considering it was at least part splatterfest, though maybe that's just his own thing. Maybe this worked better in Shaun of the Dead because the genre he's deconstructing/memorializing there is in many ways just as outlandish as his own film. On the other hand, the best cop movies tend to maintain a certain sobriety. Maybe I've just been spoiled by the Hong Kong and Korean films I've been seeing lately, cf esp. Bong Joon-ho's Memories of Murder.
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Kick to the Throat

I'd been meaning to put up a final Summer Music Report post sooner or later, but I think tonight finally removed any need. That's because I went to see the Magik Markers, and those other shows don't even really belong in the same category. I'd heard vaguely nice things about them (great live, Lee Ranaldo produced the last record, they sound like Sonic Youth, etc.) but it was only eight bucks and I was curious to see openers Tall Firs as well.

I think among shows I've seen only My Morning Jacket and the White Stripes have rivaled them in sheer sustained intensity. With My Morning Jacket it's a very different type of intense experience, and the White Stripes play pretty traditional songs, even if they do kind of mash them all together. The Magik Markers for the most part did not bother with heavily structured songs or intelligible lyrics or really anything other than awesomely reckless abandon. That's not to say they don't have a pretty carefully planned show, but, well... here's a pretty apt live review from Dusted Magazine:

Although she started with barely a whisper, by the halfway point in the Magik Markers' set [singer and guitarist Elisa Ambrogio] was fully possessed, a kicking and screaming demon who kicked, scraped, dragged, and pummeled her guitar into emitting the types of thick, viscous noise that fit perfectly with her band mates. She perched at the edge of the crowd, grabbing heads and daring the audience to try and grab her six strings before she could settle on someone's head. She roared into the microphone, a sight of convulsing, barely containable energy that seemed to come only from the truest desire to spill everything on the stage for all to see. While it seemed at times that a lot of other bands that appeared at the fest were aiming for shock, high brow aesthetics, or the furthest reaches of tripped out drones, the Magik Markers came across as one of the best and most dangerous rock bands working right now. More than anything else, their sound was punk as fuck, not a lame parody of a once valid genre, but a full on kick to the throat of rock and noise in general - daring the formalists to open things up a bit and the noiseniks to make the crowd want to move it.

I should probably get out to more stuff very specifically like this, though what with live music always being a fairly iffy hit-or-miss proposition, the misses could be pretty devastatingly bad. I can recall moments at Neumo's (Junior Boys and Six Organs of Admittance) last year where short blasts of dissonance probably emerged as the highlight. I'm not sure if dabbling in (and really, really enjoying) this classifies me as a "noise dude," but I think Dan Savage would probably say no.

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Also music-related, Brice asked something about the largesse of music I currently have stockpiled in iTunes, and I told him it had shrunk considerably since last year, which is correct. I now have around 975 albums on there, maybe less. Given a random sampling of about 1/6 of that total, I'm probably familiar with something like 600 of those. That's just a number I've always wondered about. Probably bump that up to between 750 and 900 including stuff to which I am not currently paying any attention.

Evil Empire

Tonight at the AMC Empire 25, watching The Assassination of Jesse James, I sat next to two people who made quiet, inane comments to each other throughout the entire movie. Some guy several rows behind was actually responding loudly to the movie, though he was shut up for a while by an annoyed fellow patron. I think in the small front section of seats where I sat, at least six people got up to leave at various points during the screening, all walking in front of the screen.

Regarding the movie itself, it might be great but I had a hard time deciding with so many distractions. I didn't much care for the voiceover narration until the end; mostly it was, or should have been, pretty redundant. The film looked very good, with interesting long-held close-ups, and effective saturation of browns for an old west color scheme. I liked Casey Affleck a lot, wondering how much of the uncomfortable obsessive character was in the script and how much was his own contribution, so I'll almost certainly try to see Gone Baby Gone over the next several weeks. There are a lot of small touches, like with food, for example, that I think I could pick up on a second time through.

33rd Five Films, 2007

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Grapes of Wrath (John Ford) at MoMA. I was reminded of They Were Expendable by the somber mood. The shots are darker here, though; sometimes only silhouettes are visible, like when Tom and Casy enter the old Joad homestead to find no one there. Those two seemed to me like spectral figures, with haunted looks in their eyes and crazy ideas about social justice floating around in their heads. They'd both given up their earlier roles in the community and then floated back just in time to make the trip out with the Joad family to California.

Not having read the book, I wonder if Steinbeck compares the loaded-up jalopy to a covered wagon, since the connection seems very clear watching a John Ford film, particularly at moments like when they linger before crossing the border into California, gazing up at the desert hills.

An interesting sign of the times that the family finds refuge at a goverment-run camp, away from the brutal, capitalist landowners and taskmasters.

There's quite a bit of speechifying, probably most of the first reel and several again toward the end. Some of them are all right but it feels like kind of an awkward way to make your points in a film.
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Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas) at Rose Hall as part of the New York Film Festival. At times the framing and the long shots almost struck me as so conspicuous that they unbalanced the movie, but I suspect that had to do with my seat. (Near the lower left corner of the screen which was so large that it seemed a little distorted from my vantage point.) Though there isn't an exact correspondence, it's interesting how the sun figures as a kind of manifestation of God's presence. The natural elements are always very present: the clouds, the hills, the dust from the dirt road.

I'm intrigued by the idea of farms as visually rich settings for contemplative, "syrup-paced" art films like this (that pejorative is from The Onion AV Club), which of course brings Satantango to mind. Most of the time people talk about cinema as a largely urban art form, based on the particular kind of social dynamics you find in cities. There was even some ill-informed guy who attempted to ask why there weren't any urban scenes, although it's hard to see how that would make sense in a nature-centered film about an unworldly community of Mennonite farmers.

I had an idea after watching Fargo last month about a movie with similarities to this one and Satantango, Gus van Sant's Elephant and especially Last Days, and various other influences, with a couple of deadbeats on a rundown farm, with the present shot in black and white and recurring scenes, shot in color, of a more productive past on the same property. The soundtrack would be entirely diegetic, either performed or played on a radio, and would feature far too much pedal steel guitar.

The guy standing in front of me at the box office was perusing the entire festival schedule mentioning titles to the attendant as he found screenings he liked. He had already started when I got there and probably took ten more minutes to finish. The whole affair seemed pretty ostentatious to me, from the ticket prices to the people attending to the venue (inside the Time Warner building), etc. That's kind of sad in my opinion because the programmers and the films are really good, and it seems like the whole deal caters directly to residents of the Upper West Side rather than anyone who not already into these sorts of movies.

Quote from the women behind me: "Gus van Sant… where have I heard that name before?" Their conversation made me kind of wonder how they wound up paying twenty bucks for something like Silent Light in the first place.
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Lust, Caution (Ang Lee) at the Landmark Sunshine Cinema. The critical consensus is right: this movie is really boring except for the few scenes that earned the NC-17 rating. The prologue seems just peremptory, full of flat dialogue and uninteresting characters. Particularly the camera work indicates to me that not much attention is paid to the less integral moments in the movie, of which there are a lot over 158 minutes. Scenes are rarely well-conceived, shots mostly cut from one close-up to another, sometimes almost at random. Maybe Ang Lee knows things about these minor characters (the acting troupe, the mah jongg players) that he fails to reveal effectively, but it seems appalling that we spend so much time watching go-nowhere characters through an uninspired lens.

The few high points: there's one scene where the camera is set near the ceiling, craning down toward the couple, and it kind of circles around as one of them leaves, reframing around the other. It's not worldchanging by any means, but it reveals just how dull most of the other similar scenes are. Then you've got the sex scenes, and maybe even better, Joan Chen's monologue about what her role as a Mata Hari is doing too her emotionally, which is obviously much more than her supposedly tough intelligence liaisons can handle. In particular her description of the longed-for assassination of her target/lover as a kind of metaphysical and bloody Cronenberg-esque orgasm feels really inspired.

Tony Leung's character in 2046 was similar in many ways, but somehow his muted emotions in that film resonated whereas here they almost don't even register.
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Control at Film Forum for my final Stylus review.
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Baby Doll at home on DVD with Amy. Karl Malden mostly just yelled a lot. Eli Wallach was more interesting. The large cast of crazy Southerners, white and black, were memorable but not ultimately all that interesting. I suppose that since this is the first movie I've seen directed by Elia Kazan, I need to watch another with a bigger reputation pretty soon.
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2007: The Best Year in Sports Ever

Average game time for the Cleveland Indians in the postseason: four hours and six minutes. Tonight was 5:14. This is kind of a drag, but at least they evened the series up tonight.

Also, there's a pretty good chance that the Buckeyes will rise to No. 1 tomorrow night in the football polls. Maybe 2008 will be the year that all my favorite sports teams WIN the championship instead of playing for and losing it. There are five other undefeated teams right now, and three of those teams are Kansas, Hawaii, and the University of South Florida. That's all kind of weird.

Thirty Three and a Third

I'm thinking it's time I finally started digging into the 33 1/3 series. Their fall/winter lineup is outstanding.

Brian Eno's Another Green World by Geeta Dayal
Throbbing Gristle's Twenty Jazz Funk Greats by Drew Daniel
Nick Drake's Pink Moon by Amanda Petrusich
Belle & Sebastian's If You're Feeling Sinister by Scott Plagenhoef
Celine Dion's Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste by Carl Wilson

The List Dwindles

After finally seeing LCD Soundsystem play live yesterday (I liked everything except "Someone Great") I feel the need to compile a list of bands I'm excited to see live sooner or later.

1. Hot Chip
2. Liars
3. Grizzly Bear

I'm having trouble getting past this many. There are certainly a number of DJs and individuals I'd like to hear, but as far as actual bands currently putting out albums, this is really it. I guess that makes kind of a to-do list for next year, since none of them are coming to New York in the next few months.

UPDATE: Glancing at the Last.fm upcoming events for New York, I have found a number of things this fall including Grizzly Bear.

Oct 26 | Tall Firs, Magik Markers @ The Knitting Factory
Oct 28 | Boris, Damon & Naomi, Michio Kurihara @ The Bowery Ballroom
Nov 03 | Grizzly Bear, Michael Harrison @ The Society for Ethical Culture Concert Hall
Nov 09 | Múm, Torngat, Jihyun Kim @ Church of Saint Paul the Apostle
Nov 23 | Black Dice @ Highline Ballroom
Nov 28 | Max Richter, Cepia, Assaff Weisman @ Good-Shepherd Faith Church

The non-traditional venues are part of the Wordless Music Series.

Fall '07 Mix

Curiously Smooth
Size: 66.4 MB
Time: 57:55

00:00 | 01 Theme from Clark & Michael
00:34 | 02 New Young Pony Club "The Get Go" [Modular]
04:55 | 03 Simian Mobile Disco "I Believe" [Interscope]
07:50 | 04 Glass Candy "Computer Love" [Italians Do It Better]
12:53 | 05 Lindstrøm "Breakfast in Heaven" [Feedelity]
18:43 | 06 Animal Collective "#1" [Domino]
22:53 | 07 Caribou "Niobe" [Merge]
31:29 | 08 Christ. "Cordate" [Benbecula]
37:02 | 09 Grovesnor "Nitemoves" [Hi-Beat]
42:47 | 10 White Rainbow "Mystic Prism" [Kranky]
47:38 | 11 Chromatics "In the City" [Italians Do It Better]
54:17 | 12 Deerhunter "Red Ink" [Kranky]

Mixed like a radio show, i.e. quickly and unprofessionally. These tracks are all from 2007. The title refers to the synths present in most every track.

Upcoming Events, Oct 2007

I think number one here would be the baseball postseason; I'm listening to Indians/Yankees Game 1 right now on WCBS, although I can very nearly pull in WTAM from Cleveland. I'll probably watch one or two games this weekend, though I can't do so at home.

This weekend is Open House New York.

MoMI is showing four movies by Arnaud Desplechin, of which I've only seen Kings and Queen. I'd like to see Esther Kahn, but I'll be on Randall's Island for the big show this Saturday.

MoMA has a Michael Haneke retrospective, which I'll probably try to catch some of. I don't recall going crazy for Code Unknown and disliked Cache, but he is an interesting guy. They're also showing Contempt, Spirit of the Beehive, Viridiana, and Night of the Living Dead for Halloween.

There'll be a load of stuff to see in the theaters including The Assassination of Jesse James, The Darjeeling Limited, Control, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, and, after quite a long wait, Jia Zhang-ke's Still Life.

I just saw last night at Silent Light that Walter Reade Theater is having a series of recent Hong Kong cinema. I'm most excited about Johnnie To's The Mission, but there's also Happy Together and Triangle.