The Musicgoer: Sia's Some People Have Real Problems

SIA
Some People Have Real Problems
(Universal)
RATING: *** (out of 5)

The video for “Buttons,” a bouncy hidden track on the new disc by the Australian singer Sia, has a fun premise: it’s sort of a low-tech spoof of Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer” in which Sia distorts her face not with animation tricks but with Scotch tape, clothespins, pantyhose, and plastic bags. Except Sia isn’t quite charismatic enough, or enough of a natural clown, to make it work. She remains in closeup during the whole thing, and yet somehow her personality never registers.

The same problem dogs the entire album, which is very well-produced and contains some impressive singing from Sia on the more soulful tracks like “Electric Bird” and “The Girl You Lost to Cocaine”—but which ultimately feels a little anonymous. When Sia isn’t belting, she adopts a throaty Fiona Apple-style mumble, but her lyrics tend to have such low emotional stakes that all her “emotional” vocal tics seem mannered, distracting, and just out of proportion.

There’s definitely a voice here; now Sia needs to find something to sing about.

Silence of the LANs

“A cyber killer has finally found the perfect accomplice: YOU.”

That’s the tagline on the poster for Untraceable, and it appears above a picture of a computer with some kind of shiny foil rectangle where the screen should be—I guess the idea is that you’re supposed to see your reflection in the poster as you stand there in line at the multiplex and feel enough of a shudder of guilt to buy a ticket. Except the foil is too ripply and wrinkly to give you a clear reflection, and instead of being persuaded to see Diane Lane battle a “cyber killer,” you wind up thinking, “Hey, didn’t Time try this same gimmick on that lame cover declaring ‘You’ to be their Person of the Year in 2006? It didn’t work there either.”

Untraceable obviously wants very badly to be a cutting-edge technological thriller, what with all the references to “floating IPs” and “backdoor Trojans” and cellphone “spoof cards” in the scripts, but despite its best efforts, all it can muster is a glum Time magazine cluelessness, goosed occasionally by the script’s insistence, that everyone on the internet is either a loveless geek, a pervert, a con man, a thief, or a killer.

But maybe the fact that the story takes place in the cybercrime division of the FBI is skewing the sample. Our heroine is computer cop Jennifer Marsh (Diane Lane), who’s just wrapping up a hard day’s work arresting an eight-year-old hacker when an anonymous tipster alerts her to a sinister site called killwithme.com, which broadcasts streaming video of real-life people strapped into complicated torture machines designed so that the more people who visit the site, the faster the victim dies. The site is a sensation—maybe not as big as that YouTube clip of the Swedish baby giggling in its highchair, but it’s pretty damn huge. And the popularity of their fictional snuff-porn website dismays the makers of Untraceable to no end: “Can you believe how many nonexistent people our script claims are watching this disgusting footage we created? The made-up world our movie takes place in is completely going to hell!”

Hollywood churns out forgettable, contrived serial-killer thrillers all the time, but Untraceable’s tone of moral self-righteousness makes it a particularly ignominious entry in the genre. The director is Gregory Hoblit, a TV director who helmed several episodes of Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue before breaking into feature films with the gimmicky but enjoyable Richard Gere/Edward Norton legal thriller Primal Fear. He’s had a knack for attracting respectable actors to ridiculously contrived scripts ever since—he’s worked with Denzel Washington, Dennis Quaid, Andre Braugher, James Gandolfini, Bruce Willis, Colin Farrell, Terrence Howard, Anthony Hopkins, and Ryan Gosling... except he’s done so in movies like Fallen, Frequency, Hart’s War, and Fracture.

He doesn’t do Diane Lane, his first female lead, many favours here either. She winds up in a basement, suspended upside-down, about to be fed head-first into a roto-tiller. She also gets, by my count, three shower scenes! (One suspects this was not exactly a role Cate Blanchett was clamouring to play.) Lane seems glum and weary throughout the entire film, briefly perking to life during the speeches where she gets to spout off a stream of techhead gobbledygook. I can’t say as I blame her for her disinterest in Untraceable; this movie isn’t even worth the effort of downloading illegally.

All-Iranian Girl

Compared to most women who become the subjects of Oscar-nominated biopics, Marjane Satrapi is a pretty ordinary person. She wasn’t the key witness in an against-all-odds lawsuit against a soulless corporation; she never sacrificed her life so that someone else could live; she never invented a life-saving vaccine or nursed wounded soldiers back to health; she wasn’t an inspirational teacher and she never ruled a country; and while she loved rocking out to bootlegged Iron Maiden cassettes in her bedroom, she never became a chart-topping music star. As a young girl living in Tehran before and after the fall of the Shah, she was a witness to terrible violence and repression—including the imprisonment and execution of her beloved Uncle Anoosh—but Satrapi never pretends that there’s anything unusual about her story, and certainly nothing heroic. Any bright young Iranian girl probably would have equally sad and elegiac tales of her own to tell.

But it’s doubtful they could have told them as eloquently as Satrapi has, first in a pair of graphic novels and now in the beautifully animated feature film Persepolis. The film, co-directed by Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud, preserves Satrapi’s deceptively simple drawing style—charmingly childlike black-and-white images whose flatness seems inspired equally by Japanese woodcuts and Lynda Barry’s Ernie Pook’s Comeek. At a time when computer-animated films like Ratatouille and Surf’s Up strive towards photorealism, Persepolis is a bracing reminder of the expressiveness that can arise from a face composed of nothing more than a couple of ovals and a curved line.

The episodic plot begins with Marjane as a spunky, wide-eyed, Adidas-wearing seven-year-old, eagerly drinking in her intellectual, leftist parents’ dinner-table conversations about politics, and carrying on imaginary conversations with God as she lies in bed at night. (God’s only rival for Marjane’s affections is Bruce Lee.) When the Ayatollah comes to power, Marjane and her mother reluctantly start wearing veils, even as they continue to indulge in a few furtive pleasures, listening to Western pop music and attending clandestine parties, hoping the police don’t pull them over on their way home and smell the liquor on Marjane’s father’s breath.

Eventually, Marjane’s parents send her to school in Vienna—they rightfully fear that her outspoken nature will soon get her into serious trouble—and she spends an awkward few years bouncing from clique to clique and getting her heart broken by various teenage cads, all the while struggling with her ambivalence toward her Iranian heritage. When she ultimately decides to return home to Tehran, Marjane comes to a painful realization: while she loves her country, it’s become impossible for her to live there.

As I watched Persepolis, I almost wished I had a daughter so that I could take her to see it. If I had a son, he could probably get a lot out of the movie as well, but so few movies deal specifically with the moral education of a female character that Persepolis feels particularly precious. As a young female role model, Marjane ranks right up there with Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird—she has the same impetuousness, the same tendency toward hero worship, the same determination to speak her mind. And then Satrapi goes Mockingbird one better by taking Marjane into adulthood, still trying to make sense of the world and her place in it. (The sequence where Marjane goes through the horrifying transformations of puberty, her limbs and facial features stretching like taffy, is a classic bit of animated slapstick.)

And Satrapi isn’t afraid to expose her own flaws. There’s a great scene, for instance, where Marjane tells her grandmother (a superb vocal performance by French film icon Danielle Darrieux) how she avoided getting arrested for wearing makeup by telling the cops that a man looked at her salaciously—her grandmother furiously denounces her willingness to throw an innocent man to the police, and denounces her even more for blithely laughing about it.

Satrapi doesn’t forgive herself for her flaws, but she accepts them—and the flaws and contradictions of all the other characters she meets—as an unavoidable part of human nature. And in so doing, Persepolis provides a not-so-implicit rebuke to the intolerance of the men who seized control of her country.

When she was little, Satrapi says, she dreamed of growing up to become a prophet; instead, she became a humanist, a storyteller, an artist, and a visual magician. Close enough.

Moviegoer Diary: The Nines, Rocket Science, Battlefield Earth

THE NINES

Plot in a Nutshell:
Movie-industry mindbender containing three interlocking stories, and three different characters played by Ryan Reynolds

Thoughts:
I think this movie ends with Ryan Reynolds realizing that he’s not the drug-addicted star of a CSI-style cop show, or an ethically torn TV writer, or a big-wheel videogame designer—but God. I know: that sounds like the worst possible climax for a movie imaginable—if Ryan Reynolds is the Supreme Being, then the universe just became even more meaningless than I thought it was—but The Nines isn’t a bad little movie. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that even though the ultimate payoff was a little puzzling, the mystery of what the hell was going on was tantalizing enough to keep me intrigued for the 90 minutes leading up to it. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that I was intrigued for the 85 minutes leading up to it—the opening sequence, with Reynolds bouncing off the walls during a hallucinatory, drug-crazed freakout, is pretty dire.

Bonus perplexment points for casting Melissa McCarthy (Lauren Graham’s pal Sookie on Gilmore Girls) in a significant supporting role as herself. Which must surely qualify as one of the least iconic “playing yourself” casting stunts in Hollywood history.

RATING: 3/5



ROCKET SCIENCE

Plot in a Nutshell:
Stuttering teen joins his high school debate team.

Thoughts:
Reviews were generally lukewarm for this comedy from Jeffrey Blitz, best known for making the fantastic spelling-bee documentary Spellbound, but I found myself warming to its unassuming but genuinely odd comic sensibility (so much more preferable to Juno’s labourious sitcom wisecracks) and its quiet refusal to hit the plot points that its premise seems unavoidably aimed at. Romance doesn’t blossom between Hal, the film’s stuttering hero, and Ginny, the motormouthed girl who convinces him to take up debating; Hal doesn’t get to triumph at the big climactic debating tournament; in fact, he’s pretty much as tongue-tied at the end of the film as he is at the beginning.

But at the same time, I can see why this film didn’t catch on. The script surprises you by not giving you what you expect—but instead of giving you something else, it kind of settles for giving you nothing. And there’s a Rushmore vibe to the film, thanks to Eef Barzelay’s whimsical score and the retro-nerd high school setting, except Wes Anderson fans will probably wish Blitz’s overly passive main character had more of Max Fischer’s crazy-dreamer energy. (Then again, the scene where Hal gets drunk and tries to throw a cello through Ginny’s second-floor bedroom window is pure Fischer.) A painless sit, although perhaps not quite distinctive enough for a full-throttle recommendation.

RATING: 3.5/5



BATTLEFIELD EARTH

Plot in a Nutshell:
John Travolta’s notorious 2000 Scientological sci-fi stinkeroo.

Thoughts:
I caught this one at Metro Cinema here in Edmonton, with a live Mystery Science Theatre 3000-style commentary provided by local actors Dave Clarke and Jeff Page. Wow, is this a terrible movie, although there’s something oddly endearing about the amateurishness of the script, which resembles that handwritten “dream screenplay” that every 15-year-old sci-fi fan has stored somewhere in his desk drawer, full of hilariously retrograde sexual politics, nonsensical plot tangents (like the minutes of screentime devoted to the alien villains’ quest to figure out their human slaves’ favourite food), and half-baked comic-book dialogue.

For instance, I love the way the head villain (a nine-foot-tall slave-driver from the planet Psychlo, played by John Travolta) keeps calling humans “rat-brains”—which the screenwriters obviously felt was such a killer insult that they felt no need to come up with another one. I love the decision to give the Psychlos six fingers on each hand—a pointless “alien” detail that must have required an extra hour or two in the makeup chair every morning that only resulted in making every scene in which the Psychlos have to hold something look even more awkwardly staged than it did already. I love director Roger Christian’s decision to shoot every scene at a crooked angle—he might have been going for The Third Man, but instead he got something more akin to the scenes from the old Batman TV show set in the villains’ hideout. I love the fact that Forest Whitaker starred in this movie the year after he made Ghost Dog. I love that Marie-Josée Croze, from The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, is in the cast. And I love that this remains the most expensive movie ever shot in Canada. And yet I don’t love the movie. Weird how that happens, huh?

(By the way, Nathan Rabin did a hilarious takedown of this film as part of his wonderful My Year of Flops feature over at The Onion AV Club Blog. Like the 103 other entries in the series, it’s well worth reading!)

RATING: 1/5

The Musicgoer: Schmaltz Me to the End of Time

One of my favourite scenes in Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste—a book-length analysis of the mysterious appeal (mysterious to rock critics, anyway) of the multimillion-selling album by Céline Dion—comes near the end, when author Carl Wilson describes the difficult process of actually bringing himself to play the damn thing on his home stereo.

He lives in a very poorly soundproofed building, you see, which means that whenever his neighbours have sex or argue or play techno, he hears it. “And I know they hear me,” he writes. “It turns out that I am not so bothered by having strangers hear me have sex, compared to how embarrassed I am at having them hear me play Let’s Talk About Love over and over.... It took months before I could bring myself to play it at full volume, rather than through headphones or some other subterfuge.”

What is it about Céline Dion that provokes such an immediate, visceral reaction among music snobs? Is it something inherent in the quality of her voice—which, after all, is far more technically accomplished than most of the scratchy-voiced singers rock critics like to champion? Is it the unrestrained emotion she brings to bear on all her vocal performances? (But what’s wrong with unrestrained emotion?) Is it a question of “authenticity”—that Céline sounds fake and Vegas-y where other artists sound “honest”? (On the other hand, no one’s more Vegas-y than Frank Sinatra, and everybody thinks he’s great!)

Or is it a matter of cultural associations that have nothing to do with music? Is the problem that Céline tends to be popular with grandmothers, Wal-Mart shoppers, people with cat posters in their cubicles, people with at most maybe 20 albums in their entire record collection... the very type of terminally uncool people whom hipsters want absolutely nothing to do with, even in an ironic way?

Wilson tries all of those explanations on for size during the course of his book—and a few more for good measure. As a Canadian critic (he used to write for the Montreal alt-weekly Hour), Wilson also does a sensitive, insightful job of placing Céline in her proper cultural context within Quebec’s fascinating pop-music tradition. He offers a few thoughts on the long and surprisingly durable American tradition of “schmaltz” music, and interviews a few Céline fans to get their thoughts on her appeal. He pines to hear the “lost” studio sessions Céline recorded with producer Phil Spector. He ponders Céline’s bizarrely emotional post-Katrina interview on Larry King Live (“Let them touch those things!”), and he even sheds a tear at Céline’s blockbuster show in Las Vegas. (He’d recently broken up with his girlfriend, so he was in a vulnerable frame of mind.) And, of course, he listens repeatedly to Let’s Talk About Love, even the tracks produced by David Foster. Remember: this is the disc with “My Heart Will Go On” on it. You can’t say Wilson didn’t suffer for his art.

Damn! There I go again with the snide remarks! Why is it so hard for us professional music writers to talk about Céline without insulting her, without going out of our way to insulate ourselves from her music lest we be confused with one of those no-taste, tone-deaf record-buyers who’ve committed the capital crime of actually liking her?

That’s part of what’s so admirable about Wilson’s book. While he acknowledges his own instinctive dislike for Céline’s sentimental music and while he dutifully cites several hilarious examples of Céline-bashing in pop culture (my favourite is the joke about the Céline Dion sex doll being taken off the market because it sucked too hard), he scrupulously avoids taking cheap shots at her or her fans. And he doesn’t take the irony escape hatch, either. No, Wilson genuinely wants to get to the bottom of why people have the tastes they do, and why differences in taste can provoke such a violent reaction. He reads everyone from Kant to Céline message boards for insight, and he even tries to locate his own inner Céline fan.

I won’t say whether he finds it, but I can say that after reading A Journey to the End of Taste—kudos to Wilson, by the way, for the Louis-Ferdinand Céline allusion in the title—I’ll never look at Céline the same way again. But do I plan on playing her albums in my apartment, loud enough for the neighbours to hear?

Oh come on. As if. Get real.

The Musicgoer: Damien Rice's Live From the Union Chapel

DAMIEN RICE
Live From the Union Chapel
(DRM/Vector)
*** (out of five)

“Among the afflictions/With which I’ve been marked/I’m not so pretentious/And not quite so dark.”

Those are the opening lyrics of Damien Rice’s song “Then Go,” but he does little to back up his claim on Live From the Union Chapel, a previously unreleased recording of a concert the earnest Irish singer/songwriter gave in London in 2003, flush with the success of his 2002 album O, the disappointing reviews of his followup 9 still three years in the future. The songs are moody, monotonous tales of shattered romances and abused women, usually in minor keys and featuring lots of keening vocals and mournful cello.

If you already own O, there’s not much of a compelling reason to pick this disc up—five of the eight tracks are O carryovers, basically unchanged aside from a little more breathy fervour. The three new tracks are unremarkable, except for the way the cover version of Nina Simone’s “Be My Husband,” with its simple, pithy lyrics, makes Rice’s songwriting seem even more maddeningly vague by comparison.

Moviegoer Diary: Control, Smiley Face

Most of the posts on this blog consist of reviews and interviews I've written for the Edmonton alt-weekly SEE Magazine. But in an effort to give all of you faithful Moviegoer readers—who surely must number in the double digits by now—some original, web-only content, as well as to weigh in on more movies, I'm going to start posting some short pieces about movies I've happened to watch during the week but which I didn't have to review for SEE.

These could be current movies, DVD releases, or just older films I happened to rent or catch on television. I'll put a star rating on each film, but I don't really intend to approach these posts as reviews—they're more like diary entries. Except instead of revealing my secret crush on that cute girl I set next to in my Grade 10 history class, I reveal my secret crush on Anna Faris.

Enjoy!

****


CONTROL
Plot in a Nutshell:
Biopic about the short life of Joy Division lead singer Ian Curtis

Thoughts:
It rarely happens that the so-called “likability” of the lead character has any effect on my enjoyment of the movie, but it sure happened here. I admired how director Anton Corbijn and screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh refuse to mythologize Ian Curtis or paint him as a martyr or a misunderstood genius, and I appreciated their willingness to frustrate the Joy Division fans in the audience by focusing on the messy, mundane details of his unhappy, impulsive marriage to his wife Deborah (the excellent Samantha Morton)... But at the same time, Curtis’ treatment of Deborah struck me as so callous and irresponsible, his feelings of being “trapped” in his marriage so self-absorbed, that for the first time, I found myself reacting to Joy Division’s music not as dark, haunting, angular hymns of urban alienation but as the whines of a spoiled child. Sam Riley’s much-lauded impersonation of Curtis lives up to the hype, at least in the performance sequences (his rendition of “Transmission” is genuinely thrilling), but it wasn’t enough to get me on Curtis’ side.

Rating: 2.5/5



SMILEY FACE
Plot in a Nutshell:
A stoner comedy for girls—from Gregg Araki, of all people

Thoughts:
Anna Faris’ face looks a little rounder than usual in this movie, and not only does it suit the character she’s playing—a shiftless, junk food-munching pothead named Jane—but it suits Faris as well. It gives her face a dose of character that she didn’t have when she played those bland pretty-girl roles in movies like Scary Movie and The Hot Chick. She accidentally eats a plateful of pot-laced cupcakes in the film’s very first scene, and goes through the rest of the movie in a blissful, heavy-lidded haze, about 10 or 12 steps behind every one else she talks to—she’s like a sexy Droopy Dawg. (John Krasinski plays her roommate’s best friend, who has a nerd-crush on her—whenever he sees her shuffling through the living room in her slippers and pyjama bottoms, REO Speedwagon’s “Keep On Loving You” plays in his head.) And whenever Jane succumbs to a bout of pot-induced paranoia—which is often—Faris comes up with the funniest “uh-oh” face since Leslie Nielsen in the Naked Gun movies. I wish Jane’s shaggy-dog quest had a bigger plot payoff at the end, but I did like the closing montage, in which the pages from the original manuscript of The Communist Manifesto flutter down upon every character we’ve met, like the snow falling at the end of James Joyce’s “The Dead.”

Rating: 3.5/5

Godzilla vs. YouTube

J.J. Abrams has been a major force in TV and movies for 10 years now, but even with three hit series to his credit (Felicity, Alias, and Lost) and a hit movie (Mission: Impossible 3), I still can’t decide if he’s a genius or a charlatan. He’s amazingly good at arranging familiar pop-culture tropes—desert-island castaways, international superspies—into fresh new patterns, and amazingly bad at carrying those ideas across the finish line. Take Lost, for instance: it’s a show that, during its dazzling first season and a half, seemed to contain metaphors for practically everything, but which now seems so tangled up in subplots and arbitrary “mysteries” that it no longer seems like it’s ever going to amount to anything.

Abrams didn’t write or direct Cloverfield (like last year’s “Judd Apatow comedy” Superbad, it’s a movie people attribute to its superstar producer instead of the people who actually created it)—but the writer, Drew Goddard, and the director, Matt Reeves, have both worked extensively on Abrams’ TV shows, and Cloverfield has all the hallmarks of the Abrams brand.

The young, no-name cast—all of them TV-trained, albeit not on shows you probably watched—is ridiculously good-looking, even by Hollywood standards. The characters live in places that are ridiculously expensive but still youthful and “funky”—the kind of New York loft a hip 25-year-old lawyer would live in if he were making the salary of a successful 60-year-old lawyer. The premise—a monster movie about a giant creature attacking New York filmed from the point of view of a single digital camera—is smart, snappy, and was probably a breeze to pitch to the studios. Like all of Abrams’ projects, it’s highly commercial but with enough of a twist to make you think, “Now that could be interesting.”

And for the first 45 minutes or so, Cloverfield is very interesting indeed. We start out at the going-away party for Rob Hawkins (Michael Stahl-David), who is set to take on a vice-president position at his company’s office in Japan. As his friend Hud (T.J. Miller) circulates around the party with a digital camera, collecting farewell messages for Rob, we learn that a romance has quietly arisen between Rob and a girl named Beth (Odette Yustman), who is devastated at the prospect of him leaving the country. But this soap opera is interrupted by a gigantic tremor that shakes the building and temporarily knocks out the power. When the guests climb up to the roof to see what’s happening, they see a hail of fire raining down around them—and then the head of the Statue of Liberty flying through the air and landing on the street.

This section of the film shamelessly but effectively invokes the imagery of 9/11: buildings collapsing, crowds clogging the Brooklyn Bridge, people covered in ash staggering along the sidewalk, normal, everyday life joltingly interrupted. And by only giving us the information that Hud gets through his camera lens, Reeves shrewdly captures the mood of 9/11 too: the panic of knowing something cataclysmic has happened but being unable to tell exactly what it is, or where to go that will be safe. (Disaster movies, 9/11, photography—Cloverfield is a checklist of Susan Sontag’s favourite themes.)

It turns out that some kind of giant creature—less a Godzilla-style lizard than a humongous orc—is on the loose. And it’s somewhere around here, as Rob and a handful of surviving partygoers try to get across Manhattan to rescue Beth, who’s trapped under a collapsed wall in her apartment, that the movie gets less interesting. It becomes clear that the filmmakers don’t have much interest in developing their 9/11 allegory and the film turns into nothing more ambitious than an escape-the-monster amusement park ride.

And I think Cloverfield works on that rock-’em-sock-’em level. There are some genuine jolts here, the combination of CGI monsters and handheld camerawork is seamless, and the youthful filmmakers demonstrate an effortless, playful familiarity with the grammar of digital video that the older Brian De Palma couldn’t quite pull off in Redacted. For instance, when Hud occasionally stops filming, we get glimpses of the footage he’s taping over: home movies taken weeks earlier of Rob and Beth during happier times, when they weren’t running for their lives.

If only these moments were more resonant or poetic, and the two characters weren’t such blandly attractive nothings! And if only the movie didn’t build to such an anticlimax! Cloverfield is ample proof that J.J. Abrams knows how to tickle the public’s imagination; but he still hasn’t quite figured out how to haunt our dreams.

The Arcade Fire

Billy Mitchell walks with a swagger. With his black beard and mane of dark black hair, he has the mien of a medieval prince—or at least the synth player for a really bitchin’ ’80s cover band. He runs his own successful businesses (the Rickey’s restaurant chain, as well as a company that makes hot sauce), and his belief in the American capitalist system is so strong that he’s rarely seen without his red-white-and-blue tie. Self-doubt appears to be an alien concept to him, and he knows that can rub some people the wrong way: “I’m like the abortion issue,” he says. “No matter what I say, it draws controversy.” One of the interviewees in Seth Gordon’s documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters even says there’s no reason why Billy Mitchell shouldn’t get his face on a Wheaties box, although the Wheaties people would probably disagree—they tend to reserve that spot for actual athletes.

Mitchell is not an athlete. But he is one of the great videogame players of all time. He was the first person ever to achieve a perfect score in Pac-Man. And back in the early ’80s, he ran up a Donkey Kong score so high that for two decades no one even came close to surpassing it—it was the video arcade equivalent of Bob Beamon’s long jump in the 1968 Olympics.

Enter Steve Wiebe, a mild-mannered family man from Redmond, Washington. After getting laid off from his job at Boeing, Wiebe needed a project to fill his days—and after reading about Mitchell’s Donkey Kong score on the Internet, he found one. He installed a Donkey Kong machine in his garage, and began practising. He got so good, in fact, that even with his seven-year-son Derek yelling at him to “Wipe my butt!,” he smashed Mitchell’s high score, and he sent in a videotape of the game to Twin Galaxies, the videogame world’s official recordkeeping organization. Suffice it to say that Mitchell, whose identity is based, on large part, on his status as the world Donkey Kong champion, is not pleased by Wiebe’s success.

The King of Kong is a story about a rivalry over a ridiculous title that seemingly only the most hardcore nerd could care about. But it’s hard to imagine any nerds more hardcore than the characters in the film: besides the pompous Mitchell (who at one point answers his phone with the words, “Hello—World Record Headquarters!”), there’s an elderly Q-Bert champion, the head of Twin Galaxies (who never seems to remove his referee shirt), and a pudgy videogame player who also stars in a series of homemade “how to pick up chicks” videotapes under the alias “Mr. Awesome.”

But Gordon, who must have a will of iron, never resorts to cheap mockery. Perhaps he was inspired by the example of Steve Wiebe, who is so humble, so sweet-natured, so fundamentally decent, and so deserving of some kind of victory in his life, that the prospect of a douche like Billy Mitchell snatching his world record away from him is almost too horrible to contemplate. The gap between their personalities is so great that it immediately raises the stakes of the entire movie: The King of Kong isn’t just about a competition to set the high score in a videogame; it’s about whether a good person can ever catch a break in this world, or if mean people will always find some way to come out on top.

With its bargain-basement cinematography, The King of Kong may not look like much, but Gordon’s camera is always where it needs to be, catching every key moment of the story. At once funny and sad, pathetic and inspiring, it’s one of the great pop documentaries of recent years. If it were a round of Donkey Kong, it would be a million-point game.

There Will Be Spoilers

What you’ve heard is true: Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood is a very, very good movie—even if you don’t think this journey deep inside the blackening heart of turn-of-the-century oilman Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) is the best film in Anderson’s oeuvre, you can’t deny that it’s the most controlled, the most austere, the least film-bratty and self-indulgent. With the unusual, dissonant orchestral score by Jonny Greenwood, Robert Elswit’s resourceful cinematography, and the towering central performance by Daniel Day-Lewis, it’s a Paul Thomas Anderson movie for people who hate Paul Thomas Anderson movies.

But one aspect of There Will Be Blood has starkly divided critics: the final scene, in which Plainview has a violent confrontation with Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), the young preacher who has been a thorn in Plainview’s side throughout the film. And so, instead of adding to the gusher of superlatives the film has already inspired, I got together after a screening of There Will Be Blood with my fellow SEE editor Matthew Halliday to compare reactions to the ending.

You read that right: this article will be discussing the final scene of this movie in great detail. So DO NOT READ THIS ARTICLE until you have already seen There Will Be Blood.

Here’s our discussion.

Paul Matwychuk: Considering all the controversy surrounding the ending of this movie, I have to say, I was a little surprised by how not-completely-insane it turned out to be. I had read enough ahead of time to know that the film ended with Daniel Day-Lewis beating up Paul Dano in a bowling alley, but the way people were talking, I was expecting some kind of 10-minute long brawl—I was expecting the second coming of the alley fight from They Live.

Matthew Halliday: I guess I can understand where people would find it a little over-the-top and even comic—people were certainly laughing in the theatre. But what happens seemed in keeping with the character of Daniel Plainview and in keeping with the rest of the film.

PM: I’ve read a few critics who say there were really thrown out of the movie by the radical tone shift at the end—it bothered some of them enough that they even took it off their top 10 lists. But I’m not sure where they’re coming from; to me, it seems perfectly in keeping with this escalating war of humiliations that these characters wage throughout the film. Maybe it’s more a function of the way Day-Lewis’ performance, which has been so centred and contained for most of the movie suddenly goes way off the leash. He literally drools at one point.

MH: Well, he’s drunk and he was waking up. [Laughs.] It’s interesting: the scene where Eli humiliates Plainview while baptizing him is the only other moment where we really see Plainview lose control and where he doesn’t seem in complete mastery of the situation. And in that last scene, he seems like such a pathetic figure, but this perverse, misanthropic dignity still comes through.

PM: It’s fascinating, because it’s not enough for these two guys just to get what they want; they have to rub the other person’s nose in their victory.

MH: They’re approaching their business from completely different points of view. Plainview is concerned solely with making money, while Eli—at least in the beginning—is concerned solely with saving souls. Both are willing to sacrifice something that means a great deal to them to achieve their goals, but it doesn’t seem as hypocritical somehow for Plainview to abandon his son, than it does for Eli to disavow his faith in hopes of getting Plainview to give him some money.

PM: Did you think Eli was the “false prophet” that Plainview forces him to confess to being? At first, I really thought he was a charlatan—I thought he was a sharp young guy who was using religion as a way of gaining power and influence in the community. But in that final scene, when the stock market crash has made all his investments worthless, he seems genuinely distraught at how God seems to have deserted him.

MH: Well, that’s why he’s a more complex character than Plainview. Plainview is a straightforward capitalist—any so-called “dishonesty” he might commit is sort of beside the point. But at the end of the movie, Eli is willing to repudiate God. He’s not happy about it, but he still does it.

PM: What did you think of Paul Dano’s performance? I’m kind of on the fence about it—in his big emotional scenes, his voice hits this strident pitch, almost as if he’s not completely in control of his performance the way Day-Lewis is. And Day-Lewis’ wrath has such power in that final scene—I was sort of led to expect a real clash of the titans, but Dano seems a little overmatched.

MH: But that’s what makes it even more humiliating for Plainview to get his comeuppance at Eli’s hands. I don’t know: I think Dano is pretty compelling in those scenes where he’s chasing evil spirits out of his church.

PM: I know you’ve been rewatching all of Paul Thomas Anderson’s films to prepare for this one. Did you notice any similarities between those movies and There Will Be Blood or any commonalities in theme?

MH: Not really—you could watch this entire movie and not realize you’re watching a Paul Thomas Anderson film. There are none of the fast pans or the tight zooms. There’s not the huge cast of characters...

PM: It’s like the Coen Brothers with No Country for Old Men, where they avoided using any familiar actors from their stock company. John C. Reilly is nowhere to be found here.

MH: I think I probably should have been watching Daniel Day-Lewis’ old movies instead. This movie has more to do with Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York than anything in Boogie Nights.

PM: One thing this movie has in common with Anderson’s other films is the idea of an older professional taking an adoptive son under his wing—I’m thinking of Philip Baker Hall and John C. Reilly in Hard Eight or Burt Reynolds and Mark Wahlberg in Boogie Nights. And then the son often betrays or disappoints the father figure in some way, or breaks away from him.

MH: Like Hard Eight and Magnolia, this one also has these scenes of hard-luck losers seeking advice seeking redemption. Of course, in this one, there’s no redemption—everyone is scum.

PM: What did you make of the last line of the film: “I’m finished.” Does Plainview mean that he’s killed someone and so is probably going to be executed? Or does he mean he’s reached the end of some kind of mission now that he’s gotten rid of his lifelong rival?

MH: Could it have something to do with Plainview’s belief that God is a lie—a “superstition,” as he makes Eli say? Throughout the movie he meets people who say they only want to sell their land to a man of God. And so, maybe killing Eli is the culmination of a battle he’s been waging his entire life. Or maybe the meaning is more limited than that: his battle with Eli is over, and he’s won. He’s beaten his head in with a bowling pin!

PM: It’s certainly the first Paul Thomas Anderson movie where it ends and you go, “What? That’s it? It’s over already?”

MH: I think we’re done here too.

PM: Are we finished?

MH: I’m finished.

The Musicgoer: Radiohead's In Rainbows CD Package

RADIOHEAD
In Rainbows
(TBD)
MUSIC: **** (out of five)
PACKAGING: *** (out of five)

You people do realize you could have legally gotten this album months ago for free, right?

It’s hard to know what to make of the fact that the “conventional” available-in-stores version of Radiohead’s In Rainbows was last week’s top-selling album. Is it a testament to Radiohead’s massive popularity—that even after essentially giving their disc away online, they still had more fans left over than any other band on the planet? Is Radiohead’s fanbase so old-fashioned that they still feel uneasy about buying music over the Internet? (“Computers are so not OK!”) Or do people just really, really like getting a nice, “archival” CD package to add to their shelves?

If it’s the last one, then the hard-copy package of In Rainbows comes as kind of a perverse joke: you don’t actually get a CD case with it! Instead you get a flimsy fold-out cardboard dossier containing all the materials you’ll need to assemble your own CD case, including a couple of peel-and-stick labels to slap on the cover. (Beck used a similar gimmick with The Information—why are all these sophisticated alt-rock guys taking this Rainy Day Fun for Boys and Girls approach to CD design?)

The main advantage to buying this package is the lyrics booklet, which deciphers all of Thom Yorke’s often-muddy vocals. As is so often the case with CDs, even ones from major artists, the printed lyrics are strewn with misspellings and typos—doesn’t anybody ever proofread these things? Radiohead makes such meticulously produced music—couldn’t they have at least taken the trouble to run their booklet through a spellcheck?

A Little Ditty About Cash and Diane

Bridget Cardigan (Diane Keaton) might clean toilets for a living, but she’s no ordinary janitor. You can tell by the way she shows up to work in pearls, a prim white blouse, and a sweater tied around her neck, and how she drives home each night to a large, beautiful Martha Stewart house in the suburbs. Indeed, she hasn’t held down a paying job in years, but when her husband Don (Ted Danson) gets laid off, she needs to start bringing in money somehow—and this lowly job scrubbing porcelain and Windexing security monitors at the Federal Reserve in Kansas City is the only position she’s qualified for.

But Bridget’s a wily one: she soon notices a loophole in the Fed’s supposedly airtight security measures—a loophole that her menial status makes her uniquely qualified to exploit.

And that’s the setup of Mad Money, an amiable heist comedy (based on a 2001 British TV-movie) co-starring Queen Latifah and Katie Holmes as Keaton’s partners in crime. I won’t get into how their plan works—suffice it to say that it involves a couple of padlock switcheroos, a wastebasket, the ladies’ room, and vast sums of untraceable currency earmarked for the incinerator.

There’s something nicely satirical about the way that Bridget feels absolutely entitled to all this money—as if no jury in the world would possibly convict her of doing everything she can to avoid giving up her cushy upper-middle-class lifestyle. I’m not sure the movie notices the joke, though—when Bridget and Don are almost brought to tears by the thought of having to live in an apartment and smell other people’s cooking, director Callie Khouri shoots the scene in a way that suggests she’s on their side.

It’s kind of screwy: its three heroines are robbing a federal bank, but even though Khouri is the woman who once wrote Thelma and Louise, there’s not even a trace of subversive “stick it to the man” sentiment to Mad Money—these women just want to buy new motor homes, send their kids to private school, and redo their bathrooms. The boss (Stephen Root, a welcome presence in any movie) isn’t even that bad a guy—sure, he’s a hardass, but it’s not like he’s some kind of douchebag just begging to get his comeuppance.

The movie is just enough better than it looks to make you wish it had done what it needed to actually be good. I strongly doubt whether Bridget’s plan would actually work in real life, but it’s detailed and coherent enough for me to buy it within the world of the movie. The three female leads are likable and have a nice chemistry together—even when they have to do a bunch of those dumb post-robbery movie scenes where the characters are so happy their plan worked that they start throwing big fistfuls of money into the air.

The government wastes so much money that the idea of a few clever, downtrodden people getting rich by literally picking up the sweepings from the floor is an appealing one. But Mad Money wastes its premise on dumb, sitcommy gags—e.g., Keaton, newly flush with cash, finding herself unable to resist buying a $60,000 diamond ring... and then wearing it to work!—and a cheap, crowd-pleasing happy ending. It’s mildly entertaining, but like the money its heroines steal, it’s totally disposable. No one would ever miss it if it weren’t there.

The Musicgoer: The Magnetic Fields' Distortion

In my offline incarnation as an editor at the Edmonton alt-weekly SEE Magazine, I don't just cover film; I also write about theatre and music. I'm sure none of you out there care about the Edmonton live theatre scene (although it's actually pretty lively!), but if you're enough of a fan of my laser-sharp insights into the world of cinema, I thought you might be interested in reading my reviews of new CDs.

So let's kick off this new sideshow feature of The Moviegoer with one of 2008's most anticipated musical releases—well, anticipated by anyone like me who lavished a significant portion of their iPod space upon 1999's mammoth 69 Love Songs: The Magnetic Fields' new album Distortion.

Is the album another masterpiece? Or is it wholly without Merritt? (Ugh... sorry, everyone. I don't know what came over me there.) Read on!

THE MAGNETIC FIELDS
Distortion
(Nonesuch)
*** (out of five)

The new album by The Magnetic Fields begins with a song called “Three-Way”—but instead of living up to the promise of “Let’s Pretend We’re Bunny Rabbits,” from their classic 1999 triple album 69 Love Songs, it turns out to be an instrumental that appears designed to get their fans used to their unexpected new sound. Much of the appeal of the Fields’ previous albums was the combination of Stephin Merritt’s witty, whimsical, intricately rhymed lyrics and the unpretentious, almost amateurish arrangements (heavy on easy-to-play instruments like synthesizers, ukuleles, and xylophones). But Distortion drowns the band in an ocean of shoegazey guitar noise—an approach that doesn’t just seem at odds with the band’s playful spirit, but which, perversely, makes many of the lyrics impossible to understand.

The songs featuring Merritt on lead vocals probably fare the best; even when you can’t make out what he’s singing, there’s no mistaking the melancholy in his familiar Eeyore-like baritone on a track like “Mr. Mistletoe.”

The lyrics you can make out, like “I hate California girls” (from the chorus of “California Girls”) or “I want to be a topless waitress” (from a song called “The Nun’s Litany”), suggest there’s a classic Magnetic Fields in here somewhere. I hope one day we get to hear it.

Bob Dylan's 116th Dream

In his memoir Chronicles: Volume One, Bob Dylan describes going to see the movie The Mighty Quinn in New Orleans during a break in the recording of his album Oh Mercy. “Years earlier I had written a song called ‘The Mighty Quinn,’” Dylan writes, “and I wondered what the movie was about. It was a mystery, suspense, Jamaican thriller with Denzel Washington as the mighty Xavier Quinn, a detective who solves crimes. Funny, that’s just the way I imagined him when I wrote the song.” After that (I think) facetious remark, Dylan notes that Washington would go on to play Hurricane Carter, someone else he wrote a song about. “I wondered if Denzel could play Woody Guthrie,” he muses. “In my dimension of reality, he certainly could have.”

Todd Haynes’ new film I’m Not There takes place within that dimension of reality. As an opening title explains, the movie was inspired by “the music and many lives of Bob Dylan,” and it stars six actors who each play... well, not Bob Dylan, exactly, but figures representing Dylan (some more elliptically than others) at various stages of his career or, in some cases, ideas within his music. Denzel Washington is nowhere to be found in the cast list, but there is a terrific African-American kid actor named Marcus Carl Franklin who almost steals the movie as a quick-witted, guitar-playing, train-hopping hobo who tells everyone he meets that his name is “Woody Guthrie.”

The kid behaves as if it’s still the Great Depression, even when he wanders into a perfectly ’50s suburban neighbourhood straight out of Haynes’ previous film, Far From Heaven. But the film is crammed full of these sorts of temporal dislocations: in one heart-stopping scene, Billy the Kid (Richard Gere) gazes down at a turn-of-the-century forest, whereupon the landscape crackles and briefly dissolves into a grainy ’60s-era TV newscast from Vietnam. The filmmaking style jumps around unpredictably too: at any given moment, Haynes might give us a segment from a talking-heads documentary about a legendary Greenwich Village coffeehouse folksinger named Jack Rollins (Christian Bale); a Godard-style relationship drama about an actor (Heath Ledger) who played Rollins in a hit movie; or a riff on Don’t Look Back starring Cate Blanchett as the interviewer-baiting, frizzy-haired, electric-guitar version of Dylan (here called “Jude Quinn”), only shot in the style of Fellini’s 8 ½.

What does it all add up to? I’m not sure—but then again, I’ve never been able to pin down the meaning of any of Dylan’s greatest songs. One of the great things about Greil Marcus’ recent book-length essay about the song “Like a Rolling Stone” is the way he captures the slipperiness of Dylan—how that song can sound like a sarcastic kissoff to a haughty ex-girlfriend the first time you hear it, and then a call to action for an entire generation of young people when you go to the stereo and play it again immediately afterward. Even with six different actors playing him, I’m Not There may not be the definitive statement about Dylan, but it does an excellent job of capturing his elusiveness. And yes, I’m aware of the paradox—Dylan loves paradoxes too. And like a Dylan song, I’m Not There full of startling images, unexpected connections, and impish outbursts of humour. It’s self-indulgent too, like one of those Dylan songs that goes on for four or five verses after you expect it to end. You get the feeling it will reveal new meanings to you every time you watch it—and that’s enough to excuse its more cryptic moments.

Cate Blanchett has received most of the critical praise among the cast, but to be honest, I found her segments the least interesting ones in the film—I didn’t find her Dylan impression to be all that uncanny, and since I’ve seen Don’t Look Back, these scenes didn’t seem to me to be taking the imaginative leaps that the rest of the film was.

Instead, I really loved the much-maligned Richard Gere segments, which are set in a decaying, Felliniesque frontier town named Riddle, which we’re told celebrates Halloween every day of the year. This vein of Dylan’s art—the wandering minstrels with painted faces, the Old West-by-way-of-El Topo iconography—has always given critics problems when it shows up in movies like Renaldo and Clara or the underrated Masked and Anonymous, but to me it seems essential to his vision of America. It’s the “weird old America,” as Greil Marcus puts it, which keeps bubbling up into the culture no matter how hard the corporations and the government try to repress it.

It almost doesn’t matter that not all of it works. The originality and ambition of Haynes’ approach (and the unfailing invention of Ed Lachman’s cinematography) are more than enough to get you through the Ledger-heavy slow patches.

I wouldn’t have minded a few scenes with a crime-solving Jamaican detective, though.

Faded Greenaway

Is Peter Greenaway due for a revival? Ages and ages ago, when I was working at a repertory arthouse cinema in Hamilton, Ontario, Greenaway’s films were some of the most reliable box-office attractions around—whenever we had a leftover day on the calendar to fill, we’d book The Draughtsman’s Contract or The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover and watch the crowds pack the place full. Even Greenaway’s 1988 film Drowning by Numbers—one of his more impenetrable exercises—was a big hit, thanks in large part to the play-along diner-placemat gimmick of hiding the numbers 1 to 100 in the background of the film.

But Greenaway’s reputation has fallen on hard times with the new century. He’s still making movies, but the last one to receive any significant distribution was 1999’s tedious 8 ½ Women. His work is not widely available on home video, and even though his films contain the sort of hidden jokes and intellectual games that would seem to make them perfect grist for the age of DVDs and fan websites, few people seem interested in plumbing their mysteries, and Greenaway’s name rarely gets mentioned anymore as a stylistic influence on younger directors. The Greenaway cult has shrunk... well, to nought.

Which makes it an interesting time to revisit two of Greenaway’s earliest critical successes: The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982) and A Zed & Two Noughts (1985), which will be screening all this weekend here in Edmonton at Metro Cinema. Greenaway had already spent some 15 years as a documentary filmmaker before creating his first fiction feature, which perhaps helps to explain the remarkable self-assurance of his clean, mannered visual style, which seemed equally influenced by 17th-century Dutch painters and late-period Stanley Kubrick.

Greenaway’s chilly misanthropy recalled Kubrick as well: The Draughtsman’s Contract begins with the wealthy Mrs. Herbert (Janet Suzman) hiring an ambitious young artist named Mr. Neville (Anthony Higgins) to execute 12 drawings of her husband’s country house—Neville agrees, but only on the condition that Mrs. Herbert allow him the hospitality of her bed as well. At first, Neville seems to have free rein over the property, making one demand after another to ensure the immaculate perfection of his drawings, but soon it becomes apparent that he is merely a pawn in a much larger scheme to kill Mr. Herbert—and that the details in his drawings could be used to frame him for the crime.

It’s easy to see why The Draughtsman’s Contract captured people’s imagination. It remains Greenaway’s most accessible film, one where his highly structured style of storytelling (the creation of each of Mr. Neville’s 12 drawings function more or less as chapter stops) hadn’t yet reached the obsessive-compulsive levels of his later films, which pretty much do away with stories altogether and are basically just lists and catalogues of various objects. The film comes off as an agreeably nasty contribution to the British tradition of country-house murder mysteries, not an arid avant-garde experiment; but at the same time, Curtis Clark’s elegant photography, Michael Nyman’s neo-Purcell score, and Greenaway’s sophisticated, epigrammatic screenplay give the whole thing a satisfying high-art twist.

However, Greenaway would follow this success with A Zed & Two Noughts, a film which unfortunately suggests the path he’d choose to follow in the future, one that led towards beautiful-looking, occasionally provocative, but increasingly arid and hermetic puzzle-movies that have all the passion of a mathematical equation.

Zed is the story of two identical twins, Oliver and Oswald Deuce, whose wives are killed in a freak car accident outside the Rotterdam Zoo. The woman who was driving the other car—Alba is her name—survives, minus one of her legs... but she eventually has the other one amputated as well on the advice of her doctor. (And you get the feeling that the doctor is interested less in the woman’s health than in symmetry.) The Deuces both become sexually involved with Alba—that is, when they’re not pursuing their obsessive inquiry into the nature of death, which consists primarily of making time-lapse movies of various animals decomposing.

Greenaway is clearly more interested here in juggling symbols (twins, zebras, the alphabet) than in telling a story, and the results exert an odd fascination for about an hour, after which you start to hunger for something more emotionally involving to take place. But Greenaway has never seemed to care much for his characters—and if the movies he made over the next two decades are any indication, he doesn’t have much empathy for his audiences either.