Clem De La Clem

I know, I know: for a blog called "The Moviegoer," I've been putting up an awful lot of music posts lately. Well, I recently started editing the music section of SEE Magazine as well as the film and arts sections, so I'm doing a few more CD reviews and artist interviews these days. It's more work, but it's also allowed me to talk to people like Robyn Hitchcock and, just the other day, Eef Barzelay, the songwriter and lead singer for the band Clem Snide. He was fun to talk to, although it was a couple of days after a fairly negative review of his new album Hungry Bird appeared on Pitchfork, and I got the sense he was feeling a little touchy and defensive when it came to criticisms of the disc.

Not that any of that was significant enough to make it into the final article. Here's how the interview went...

* * * * *

“I think a lot about death,” says Eef Barzelay over the phone from Nashville — and so that’s what we mainly talk about for the next half hour.

First we talk about the death of his band Clem Snide, who recorded five dryly witty indie rock/alt-country albums between 1998 and 2005 before disbanding in the wake of a tense tour in support of the album End of Love. “We came back from this long tour,” Barzelay says, “and things weren’t looking too good. I was really disappointed with the manager we’d had for a long time, our label spinART was in the process of dissolving, so in defiance of everything falling apart around us, we decided, ‘Okay, let’s make an immense enormous conceptual album like Dark Side of the Moon.’”

The initial sessions went well, but when it came time for band members (and cousins) Pete and Brandan Fitzpatrick to take those recordings to Brooklyn and flesh them out... well, to use Barzelay’s phrase, “That’s when interband tension manifested itself.” The fact that, while the band had never been especially profitable for any of its members, Barzelay, as sole songwriter, was the only one eking out a living from it, did not exactly make things any more harmonious. Long story short: the band dissolved, Barzelay recorded a couple of solo albums, and eventually tempers cooled enough not just for those songs from 2006 to make it onto a new Clem Snide disc entitled Hungry Bird but also for the band to reunite for a tour. (“I still haven’t made up with Pete, though,” Barzelay confesses. “There’s been tension between us for years — a competitiveness. He’s Irish Catholic and I’m Jewish — those two different forms of guilt are always a volatile mix.”)

But you know what? The delay may have been a good thing for Hungry Bird, whose brooding fixation on apocalypses both global and personal (many of the songs were inspired by Barzelay watching his mother slowly die of cancer) feels more in tune with the mood of 2009 than 2006. “Death is hard to talk about,” he says. “There’s no conscious point or agenda I’m trying to get to — it’s more of a subconscious thing. The way I started thinking about my mother dying was to think about her molecules; that she was now going to return to the earth and the soil, and how we’re all just molecules — we’re all just stardust, you know? And if you really examine a molecule, everything is made up of atoms, and atoms are 99.9 per cent empty space. That blows my mind — I don’t know why it doesn’t blow everybody’s mind.”

Barzelay doesn’t entirely abandon his sense of humour on Hungry Bird, but there’s definitely a sombre quality to the disc — especially tracks like “Me No” and “Our Time Will Come,” which tap into the same end-of-the-line resignation as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road or Werner Herzog’s documentary Encounters at the End of the World. “It’s not a political thing,” Barzelay says. “And it’s not some 2012, doomsday, Rapture shit either. It’s this feeling... Okay, I mean, people talk about the apocalypse, but there are apocalypses going on right now, all over the world. If you live in Sudan, and some fucking mujahadeen rides by on horseback to slaughter your village, you’ve just had an apocalypse! This idea that the apocalypse means blanketing the planet with nuclear warheads — it’s just seems arrogant to me to think that the apocalypse has to include the entire world.”

The album climaxes with the epic, eight-minute “Pray,” whose repeated lyric “Pray for the non-believer” ends the world on an ambiguous note of salvation. “The groove is kind of hokey, and it’s got this stiffness to it too,” Barzelay says, “but I wanted it that way. I wanted it to sound like a Methodist choir somewhere in Kansas singing this song where they genuinely want to help the non-believer, but there’s also a resentment of him too.

“That stiffness is important to me. It can be a little frustrating, because the kind of indie rock that’s popular now, generally speaking, is so exquisitely done. There’s a level of sophistication in the performing and the arranging and the production that you never saw even 10 years ago. And that’s great, but I don’t subscribe to that. I’m not trying to make garage rock — I’m not Pussy Galore or Royal Trux — but music is supposed to be a little challenging to listen to. It’s not supposed to hit your ears like a big bowl of honey. I don’t know — I’m just an imperfectionist, I guess.”

* * * * *

I couldn't find any material from Hungry Bird on YouTube, so instead here's the video for "I Love the Unknown," a song Barzelay wrote for the soundtrack to Jeffrey Blitz's charming indie comedy Rocket Science, and which I've always loved.

Moviegoer Diary: Le Deuxième Souffle, C'Était Un Rendezvous

LE DEUXIÈME SOUFFLE

Plot In A Nutshell
Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1966 crime drama revolving around Gustave “Gu” Minda (Lino Ventura), a middle-aged professional criminal who, after escaping from prison, joins a scheme to rob an armoured van of a priceless shipment of platinum — all while keeping two steps ahead of the dogged, intelligent Commissaire Blot (Paul Meurisse).

Thoughts
Why is Gustave Minda — I guess I’ll call him “Gu” from here on in, like everyone else does, even though the nickname is incongruously babyish — such a sympathetic figure? Or at least a figure you find yourself rooting for? He’s more than just a hard, hard man, after all; he’s a killer equally capable of killing people from a distance (like the guys on the motorcycles guarding the van full of platinum) or close up. (Gu has a thing for taking people on drive through the countryside and killing them while the car is still moving — it’s unclear whether this is a way of ensuring he’ll have fewer witnesses to the crime or if the gun, the victim, the highway, and the moving car are a peculiar constellation of elements that satisfy some inchoate psychopathic compulsion deep inside his brain.)

Maybe it’s that shot early in the film of Gu clumsily climbing aboard a train car shortly after climbing over the prison wall, barely able to run fast enough to keep up with the car, and then barely able to swing his leg up into the open cabin. (According to Ginette Vincendeau’s audio commentary on the Criterion DVD of the film, Melville instructed the engineer to make the train go faster than Lino Ventura was expecting in order to achieve precisely this level of unathletic awkwardness.) Maybe it’s the sight of Gu later in the film trying to keep a low profile as he travels to Marseilles: he’s grown a fussy little mustache and wears a pair of glasses as he rides a seemingly endless series of buses to his destination, looking like a dumpy office manager who can’t afford a car and has to take public transit on his business trips. Is it the shot of Gu showing up at his old flame Manouche’s apartment, his head bizarrely appearing at the bottom of the half-open door, like a five-year-old cautiously spying on his parents? Is it the little domestic glimpses we get of Gu holed up in various cramped hideouts, briskly shaving in anticipation of a dinner with Manouche, or enjoying a cozy solitary dinner on New Year’s Eve, smearing a thick coating of pâté onto a piece of toast? Or is it the genuine agony he displays when Commissaire Blot tricks him into identifying his partner in the platinum heist, branding him forever as a police informant?

Gu is the character we get to know best in Le Deuxième Souffle, and yet by the end of it, we feel as though we barely know him at all, or why his inevitable doom affects us the way it does. Except for Blot, the characters don’t speak much, and they operate according to obscure motives and codes of criminal conduct. (It was reassuring to listen to the DVD commentary and hear Vincendeau and fellow Melville expert Geoff Andrew admit that the plot is kind of confusing the first time through — I was starting to think I was just slow.) The characters have a certain glamour, thanks to the charisma of the movie stars playing them, but they live drab, joyless, sexless lives that no one watching them would envy.

Maybe it’s Melville who I truly envy: the restraint of his storytelling, his treatment of violence as a grubby, matter-of-fact reality instead of an occasional for spectacle, his ability to take this complicated set of criminal plots and counterplots and transform it into a nearly abstract meditation on loyalty, honour, and age. Strange that a director so austere and grown-up — it’s impossible to imagine any of Melville’s characters ever being children — should have been such an inspiration to a filmmaker as exuberantly adolescent as Quentin Tarantino.

Stray Observation: As in Le Doulos and Le Cercle Rouge, Melville stages a couple of scenes in a nightclub and pauses the action so we can enjoy the kooky floorshow — this time, it’s a bunch of girls in black cocktail dresses and cigarette holders striking poses together to cool jazz music. I love these scenes, although I’m always amazed at how these little clubs can afford to keep a team of 10 dancers on staff every night along with all those waiters and bartenders.

RATING: 4.5/5

* * * * *

C’ÉTAIT UN RENDEZVOUS

Plot In A Nutshell
Claude Lelouch’s notorious 1976 short film — a single, unedited, unfaked headlight’s-eye view of a sportscar driving at top speed through the early morning streets of Paris.

Thoughts
Horror movies don’t scare me much anymore, but as a fairly timid driver, I found the nine minutes of C’était un Rendezvous absolutely agonizing. The film has a cult reputation among car buffs — many of whom were happy to plunk down upwards of $30 for it when it came out on DVD just so they could experience the thrill of it over and over again in the privacy of their homes — but I have to confess, I had a hard time sharing their adrenaline rush. The sheer recklessness of this project — the car zooming through red lights, turning blindly down narrow streets, whizzing past startled pedestrians and into clouds of pigeons — is too appalling for me to connect with its spirit of outlaw exhilaration. This says more about me than the film, perhaps, but I just feel anxiety and dread through the whole thing. Even the relentless sound of the engine revving and shifting gears (the only “music” in the entire film) keeps me on edge.

But I am fascinated by the way no one seems able to agree on even the most basic facts of this film. Some say Claude Lelouch himself drove the car; others say it was his friend, racecar driver Jacques Lafitte; and others say the driver was a different professional racer named Jacky Ickx. Some say the drive was performed with the assistance of the Parisian police to clear the way; others say it was a purely rogue venture. I’ve read reviews that claim the car was driving at speeds of 200 km/h, with the driver’s foot flat on the accelerator — others think the insane apparent speed of the trip is an optical illusion created by the camera’s proximity to the ground. Some say the car was a Ferrari, some say it was a Mercedes, some say a Le Mans, and some speculate that Lelouch was actually zipping down the streets on a motorcycle and only claiming he was in a car. People can’t even agree on whether the engine noises were recorded during the trip or dubbed in later, possibly by a different make of automobile.

Fittingly, it seems that this ultimate cinematic celebration of traveling at high speeds has reduced every detail of its creation to an undifferentiated blur.

Fun Fact: According to the IMDb, C’était un Rendezvous’ original American release was as a short film preceding Woody Allen’s Interiors — a severe tonal shift that might actually have carried an even greater threat of whiplash than Lelouch’s entire car ride.



RATING: 3/5

A Perfect Match

I wrote about it at length a few posts ago, but I'm still not finished spreading the word about Eagle Pennell's 1978 indie-film landmark The Whole Shootin' Match: it was this week's pick for my regular Thursday morning "Hidden Gems" DVD segment for CBC Radio. Am I repeating myself? I sure am, but I don't care — I absolutely adore this movie, and this terrific DVD set deserves abundant attention.

I don't know if I say much that I didn't say already in my review, but the segment does contain a couple of tasty sound clips from the film, which give you a better idea of Pennell's wonderful ear for Texas dialogue. Click here for an earful.

Have You Heard The Latest From SS Experiment Camp?

I'm usually not one to hop on the latest Internet meme, but something about this one appealed to someone like me, who would much rather imagine the covers of books I'd like to write than to actually write them... and who'd rather ponder possible band names than actually sit down and learn to play an instrument.

You've probably heard the rules already on some other blog, but here's a recap if you want to play along. Go to Wikipedia and click on random. That's the name of your band. Now, go to Quotations Page's Random Quotations feature. The last four or five words of the last quote on the page shall be your album title. Finally, go to Flickr's exploration of interesting photos from the last seven days. The third photo there is your album cover.

Here are the first four releases from that hot new label, Moviegoer Records. I think the one by SS Experiment Camp looks most plausibly like an actual album, but there's something to be said about a band named Thumbelina — even if their CD art seems to indicate they're some kind of electronica jam band from the late ’90s.

The Musicgoer: The BPA's I Think We're Gonna Need A Bigger Boat

THE BPA
I Think We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Boat
(Southern Fried)
** 1/2 (out of 5)

Back when he was calling himself Fatboy Slim, Norman Cook made records that sounded like a smart guy’s impression of the kind of dance music that dumb people like to listen to. Now, with his new album I Think We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Boat — which comes with a cumbersome title, a new recording alias, a whole lot of guest stars, and a needlessly coy fake backstory (the sleeve claims all the track were produced by Cook and Simon Thornton “sometime during the ’70s”) — Cook may have outsmarted even himself.

Except for the covers that bookend the disc (Iggy Pop doing The Monochrome Set’s “He’s Frank” and Olly Hite doing Nick Lowe’s “So It Goes”), each track was co-written with a different performer. At best, the results are glossy Britpop like Justin Robertson’s “Island” or Emmy the Great’s “Seattle”; at worst you get misfires like “Spade” (a gracelessly titled attempt at rocksteady from Martha Wainwright) or “Toe Jam” (an ungainly collaboration with Dizzee Rascal that may be the worst song David Byrne has ever recorded). The title of Ashley Beedle’s contribution — “Should I Stay Or Should I Blow” — gives you an idea of the album’s level of wit.

(Too bad the disc couldn't be as fun and clever — or as full of nudity! — as the Gondryesque video that director Keith Schofield created for "Toe Jam." Check it out below...)

"I Should Be Driving A Chinchilla Cadillac By Now!": The Whole Shootin' Match On DVD

What movie deserves credit for kickstarting the modern indie-film movement? According to conventional wisdom, it’s John Sayles’ 1980 ensemble drama Return of the Secaucus Seven, although many cinema historians would argue the case for Jim Jarmsuch’s Stranger Than Paradise (1984), Susan Seidelman’s Smithereens (1982), or even Steven Soderbergh’s 1989 Cannes sensation Sex, Lies and Videotape instead.

But a lovingly assembled new DVD set puts forward a candidate that predates all of them: The Whole Shootin’ Match, shot in 1978 in and around Austin, Texas on a budget of roughly $20,000 by a self-styled writer/director who called himself Eagle Pennell. (His real name was Glenn Pinnell, but he changed it as a joint tribute to Bonnie and Clyde director Arthur Penn and Ross Pennel, the character Harry Carey Jr. played in John Ford’s cavalry drama She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.) Not only was Pennell’s film an artistic success on its own merits, but it also pointed the way toward a viable regional American cinema taking root in places other than the urban centres of Los Angeles and New York. Apparently, it was a screening of The Whole Shootin’ Match that gave Robert Redford the idea of starting up a film institute and an associated film festival that would foster voices like Pennell. Pennell may not have started the Sundance Festival, but he was one of the artists who made Sundance seem necessary.

Amusingly, one of the funniest scenes in The Whole Shootin’ Match takes place at a drive-in where working stiff Frank (Sonny Carl Davis) and his wife Paulette (Doris Hargrave) have come to see the latest picture by a heartthrob named “Robert Newman” — clearly an amalgam of Robert Redford and Paul Newman. But Frank isn’t paying much attention to the movie — he’s too busy complaining about Paulette spraying him with bug repellent, hooting at the couple making out a few cars over, or telling Paulette with a grin that Robert Newman is actually no taller than 5’2” and “as bald as a billiard ball.” (It was that dopey grin that finally reminded me where I’d seen Davis before — I’m embarrassed to say the movie was Trancers II, in which he plays a simple-minded security guard.)

Pennell stages the whole scene in a single five- or six-minute take, his camera planted by the driver’s side window of Frank’s pickup truck like a drive-in speaker, a decision that seems dictated more by technical limitations than a conscious effort at directorial minimalism. (I wouldn’t be surprised to learn Pennell shot the entire scene indoors in front of a black curtain with an offscreen floor lamp simulating the light from the drive-in movie screen.) But there isn’t a single dead moment in the entire scene — the two actors fill every second with such squabbling, joking vitality that you don’t need to see anything else. Not even Robert Newman.

The film’s other major character is Loyd (Lou Perryman), Frank’s friend and his partner on a long series of ill-fated business ventures, which include everything from raising chinchillas to selling flying squirrels to sealing windows with polyurethane. (Loyd, a tireless schemer and dreamer who spends every spare hour he can grab hunched over his workbench in his garage coming up with inventions, is like Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton merged into a single personality.) The two fellows will probably always be losers — the one time Loyd actually creates a marketable product (a miracle floor mop), he gets swindled into signing away all the rights for a measly $1,000 — but it’s impossible not to root for them as they try to convince themselves that better times are just ahead of them. Even when their mop scheme falls through, it’s only a matter of days before Frank shows up with a 100-year-old treasure map that supposedly leads to a trove of Indian gold buried in the nearby mountains.

The Whole Shootin’ Match (and its followup, 1983’s Last Night at the Alamo) seemed to mark the beginning of a great career for Eagle Pennell, either working for Hollywood studios or remaining independently creative in Texas, but like Frank and Loyd, he never did strike gold. As we learn from the feature-length documentary The King of Texas (one of the abundant special features in this three-disc set), Pennell responded to his early success by developing an epic alcohol addiction. Unreliable, temperamental, creatively diminished, at times practically homeless, Pennell would squeeze out three more feature films, none of them particularly distinguished, before his death in 2002 at the age of 50.

Perhaps that’s why Pennell shows such affection for the lovable losers at the centre of The Whole Shootin’ Match; maybe he had some vague presentiment that in this world, everybody loses, and that even at their lowest point, Frank and Loyd could never lose in as spectacular and solitary a fashion as he himself someday would.

Robyn Hitchcock: "Essentially I'm Rational"

“This is the most upbeat song I’ve ever written. It’s about death by cancer.” —Robyn Hitchcock, introducing “The Yip Song” in the 1998 concert film Storefront Hitchcock

The curious thing is, “The Yip Song” (which Hitchcock dedicates to his late father) really is one heck of a toe-tapper, especially for a song that contains the line “Septicemia always wins.” By the time Hitchcock gets through the final chorus — the word “yip” repeated over and over again, Hitchcock insistently rattling off the syllables like an auctioneer seeking the next bidder — the audience rewards him with the biggest round of applause of the entire show.

And yet it’s kind of hard to decide just what the song means. Is it a celebration of his father’s life, his ability to escape from the pain of his final moments on earth within memories of his late wife? Is it about Hitchcock’s sorrow over seeing his father die? (“This old man, he was gone / He was gone and I was sorry.”) Or are all those seizure-like nonsense syllables simply Hitchcock’s way of acknowledging human beings’ inability to express our emotions in the face of death? Is it all of these things at once, or none of them?

I don’t think there’s a single song in Robyn Hitchcock’s back catalogue — one that stretches all the way back to his work in the late ’70s with psychedelic punk band The Soft Boys — that I haven’t puzzled over in much the same way. The man seems constitutionally incapable of writing a conventional lyric — perhaps the closest thing he’s come to a heartfelt love song is “Television,” from his 2004 album Spooked, a gorgeous serenade directed toward an anthropomorphized cathode ray tube. (“Television, murmur to me / Deep inside my room tonight / You’re the devil’s fishbowl, honey / I undress before your light.”)

Where other singers write about flowers, rainbows, and fast cars, Hitchcock returns, album after album, to surreal images of plants, vines, insects, frogs, flesh. “Veins of the Queen,” for instance, is an extended daydream about traveling through Queen Elizabeth’s bloodstream, “tunneling down their beauteous sheen.” He’s interested in sex and death, but more as biological functions than emotional events. His songs are frequently funny — “My Wife and My Dead Wife” is about a man haunted by the ghost of his dead wife as he putters around the house — but there’s always an undercurrent of pain or yearning that keeps them from seeming merely like jokey novelty songs. Those who think of Hitchcock as merely “eccentric” just aren’t listening closely enough.

And there’s arguably never been a better time to start listening to Robyn Hitchcock. He’s just released a solid new album, Goodnight Oslo, with his all-star backing band The Venus 3 (which features R.E.M.’s Peter Buck, Scott McCaughey of Young Fresh Fellows, and Bill Rieflin of Ministry) — one of the disc’s highlights is “Up to Our Nex,” the song Hitchcock wrote and performed especially for the reception scene in Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married. Meanwhile, Yep Roc Records has been conducting a massive Hitchcock archaeology project, reissuing his old CDs as well as new collections of rarities and early material.

I spoke with Hitchcock last week from his home in London, England, during a brief break in his European tour. As you’ll see, he more than lived up to his reputation as one of the rock world’s virtuoso conversationalists.

Q: What was the inspiration for Goodnight Oslo? Was it a theme? A sound? Or is there even such a thing as “having an idea for an album”? Is an album just what happens when you have 10 or 12 songs that you like?

Robyn Hitchcock: There may be such a thing, but I think that process happened more or less backwards with Goodnight Oslo. It began with the usual impulse, the instinct to record, in much the same way that a hen goes onto the straw to lay its eggs or a cat treads down the blanket before lying down — “making biscuits,” I think they call it in the States — or any other animal settles down into its rooting place before going into one of its essential activities. I’ll find I’ve written some songs and have some musicians coming around, and I’ll know that some gigs or a record will come out of that, because that’s what we do. But that’s simply how the album came to be. In terms of themes, I think there is a theme to the record, but I only noticed it when it was done — it seems to be about celebrating and mourning saying goodbye to certain habits, certain ways of seeing things, certain ways of doing things. It’s about how it’s exciting to go somewhere else, but very sad to have to go where you are or what you’ve been or what you know.

Q: Do you think you were responding to something in the outer world that was turning your mind in this direction, or was there something going on in your personal life?

RH: They probably echo each other. You have global crises and weather conditions, and then you have your own small microcosmic ones. My own emotional weather was probably responding to the great noises of life around me.

Q: Do you think your younger self would have been surprised to hear the music you’re making nowadays?

RH: I imagine my 20-year-old self would have been quite disappointed to hear what I’m doing now. I assumed that I would probably mellow out, even though the idea of mellowing out was not something I liked the idea of at all. I was not a fan of laid-back, West Coast, Waste Coast music. I didn’t like easy-groovin’ funk and soulful country rock and all the rest of it. I liked The Beatles and The Velvet Underground — I liked something that had some spark and didn’t feel too sorry for itself.

Q: Is that really how you’d describe what you’re doing now? Do you feel it lacks some kind of spark?

RH: Well, I mean that in the sense of being feisty. I don’t think my stuff is uninspired, and it’s not wasted. It’s not the product of being worn out by drugs or alcohol abuse. That’s not to say I haven’t had involvement with those things, but I don’t think I’ve flattened my batteries by doing too much of certain things. It’s just that there was a sort of supernova when I was growing up in the late ’60s. I was 14 when Sgt. Pepper and Are You Experienced? and Piper at the Gates of Dawn came out, and the reaction from that supernova was the beginning of a long hangover, a long period of people who “just couldn’t get it together, man.” And punk came along in the late ’70s to kick through that — this new generation who didn’t want that hangover.

I didn’t want that hangover either, but I was too far along the trail of what I wanted to do to embrace punk. I couldn’t pretend to be musically illiterate — I was trying to work out three-part harmonies and I was working with musicians who were much better than me in an attempt to produce my version of the way I thought music should have gone in the late ’60s, which was to carry on doing psychedelically intricate pop. The world wasn’t quite ready for it, though, and The Soft Boys weren’t strong enough to cut through that barrier, but that’s what we were trying to do. The wind was against us, and we capsized. But we washed ashore and founded our little colonies here and there and married local people and spawned and grew our yams and sold them in the big city under different guises in the ’80s and ’90s.

Q: Do you remember the first song you heard that you recognized as a created thing, as something someone had sat down and chosen a melody and invented the rhymes?

RH: No, I don’t think I realized people wrote them! I remember walking around, trying to make up a guitar instrumental in my head and realizing I didn’t know how you did it. I didn’t think about songwriting until I was 15 or 16, and was being saturated in Bob Dylan. About then, I started to write words, but I was probably 25 before I wrote anything good. Most of my heroes in the ’60s were past it by then, but I didn’t hit my stride until my late 20s or early 30s.

Q: Do you abandon a lot of songs?

RH: I think so. Looking at the notebooks, I think most of them don’t get very far. I sort of wish I abandoned more, in a way. You know, it’s quite easy to write a song that isn’t bad but isn’t good. I’ve probably recorded about 400 songs and there are probably 50 of them that are clearly better than the rest. I wouldn’t mind just losing the other 350 and trading them for another 25 really good ones. And then I would leave this legacy of songs that was high-grade, if not high in number, and then people wouldn’t have to kind of pan for the good stuff. But that’s the trouble: when you’re writing a song, you don’t know how good it is, or if it’s going to last.

Q: Is there any aspect of songwriting that you wish you were more skilled at?

RH: It’s quite easy for me to start something; it’s harder to finish it. I would probably rather write three songs and then not really arrange them properly than sit down and write one really good one. Ideas proliferate for me pretty fast. Ideas are easier than realities — of course they are, because they don’t have to be concrete. An idea can live in a vacuum, really. It’ll get out one day. [Pause.] I think a great ability to have as a songwriter would be to accelerate the process of maturing the song so that as you write it, you arrange it. And as you write it, you know how it will sound to other people’s ears and how it will run off your tongue the easiest when you’re singing it. I’ll often realize 10 years down the line that I have rearranged a song and streamlined it and edited it, and I’ll wonder why I didn’t do that back then. I could have shaved 20 seconds off it and made it a stronger song. I suppose what I’m saying is that I wish I had instant hindsight! Of course, that doesn’t apply just to songwriting.

Q: So much of your work — and I don’t know if this is conscious or unconscious on your part — strikes me as an effort to avoid writing songs on conventional topics. There are very few conventional expressions of love on your albums, very few overtly political songs, very few “come on, let’s rock” rave-ups. They’re more about startling images, strange juxtapositions of words — they remind me more of poetry than pop song lyrics in that way.

RH: I’m glad, because that was one of my driving forces: to avoid writing clichés. I didn’t want to write the kind of default lyrics you always found in pop songs. I was a bit of a snob, I suppose, but there was so much crap around to sneer at. Now there were also excellent, brilliant, inspiring, beautiful, living, jewelled, divine, starry, exotic, erotic, palpable lyrics — lyrics to live for and die for — from people like Captain Beefheart, Syd Barrett, Lou Reed. They really could write great lyrics. They were the floodgate that Bob Dylan opened. Maybe a lot of garbage spewed out as well, but that was the school I wanted to belong to. I didn’t want to write the kind of song that people could drink Bud Lite to, or girls who use lots of depilatories and deodorants to undulate to, or that the silent majority could copulate to, or “Here’s one for driving to church” or “Here’s one for going to the bathroom,” or “Here’s one for a hangover.” I suppose I’m being snobbish, but I just did not want to do that.

Q: If you had to, would you rather write a children’s album or a Christmas album?

RH: I like the idea of what you could do to a Christmas album, but I think my stuff would probably be more suited to a children’s album. People often come up to me and say, “I play your songs to my daughter all the time! Her favourite song is...” And it’ll be something really unsuitable, something I wouldn’t dream of exposing a kid to. People try to encourage me — “Why don’t you do a record for children?” But the point that they miss is that I make music for adults as children. That’s one of my markets, and sadly it’s a rather limited one. Or at least a very specialized one. I’m writing about the adult with the eye of a child — I react to life with the camera lens of a child, albeit a rather world-weary one at times. Or I did. I’m not sure if I still do; I thought for a long time that my songs were about the shock of existence. You’re this speck of life, this spirit, and then you’re in this strange flesh machine and dealing with these bizarre demands it makes of you. Humans do really quite unreasonable and cruel or sordid or disgusting things, but it’s all part of being. To answer your question, though, I think my stuff is more likely to be put on a children’s album, but I could have a lot of fun fucking around with a Christmas album. [Laughs.]

Q: Would you say you’re more scientifically minded or more superstitious?

RH: Essentially I’m rational. But superstition has a lot of poetry in it, and science tends to be put in a jargon-y, dry way — which you need to understand it. I like science, but you need to be good at math to pursue science. So I wound up in arts at school because I was better at words. In my parallel life, I would have been a scientist rather than an artist. When I was a kid, I used to see myself as being a sort of mad scientist when I grew up.



Q: Have you ever gone into analysis? Does that world hold any appeal for you?

RH: No, I haven’t been in analysis. I’ve talked to people from time to time when it seemed good simply to talk to someone who you don’t know, who isn’t a professional. Like everybody, I need to know myself a certain amount, but I’m not sure I need to know too much about it. To some extent, that’s what my songs are doing for me — they’re giving me an overview of my life that I’m only getting 10 or 20 years later. They’re a kind of map or snapshot or warning that I usually don’t heed at the time, but which I look back on and think, “Oh God, I was telling myself that!” I think my songs are wiser than I am. They know a lot more than I do.

Q: What would you say your influence has been on the music scene? Would you be surprised if a young musician told you that you had been an inspiration to him the way, say, Syd Barrett had been to you?

RH: I’d be really pleased! I know I have influenced some people — I know that I am part of a chain. That’s what culture is — we live and die but no one death finishes our culture off. Now, it’s possible we will finish our culture off if we cause enough of a global catastrophe and all that will be left are confusing myths about life before the flood. But in the meantime, the culture is what does live, and as an artist, even if your specific art is forgotten or your name is forgotten, you’ve still been part of that process whereby people think and feel and have some kind of wisdom. What is the culture? Is it a dream, is it the unconscious, or is it some kind of river that flows through all our lives? I am part of that. As an artist, you know that you’re not going to last, but you want to shake hands with the future in some way. You want to be one of those hands thrusting something out, like hands through bars, reaching out to a free person in the street. You know — “Here I am! Touch me!” You want to communicate with the future, whoever they are. And not even communicate — you want to just hand them a fortune cookie.

So I’m part of that, as all artists are. Pretty soon, the language will have changed so much that even Shakespeare will be incomprehensible — no one artist is proof against time. I really hope my stuff will last, but I won’t be there to find out, and I don’t expect it to be around for that long, even if I do cast a posthumous shadow. But that doesn’t matter; what I’m happy about is being part of the process, being part of the stream of human culture.

The Heartbreak Kid

I'm of two minds about director Kurt Kuenne's documentary Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father. On the one hand, I admire the swiftness of its storytelling, the efficiency with which it condenses all the tedious details about an unconscionably long legal procedure into a 90-minute film, and of course, the sheer horror of its story. But especially in its final half-hour, I found myself resisting Kuenne's highly manipulative storytelling approach and began to wonder if he was simply too close to these events to make a film about them instead of a polemic.

But it's still a film worth seeing and grappling with, and that's why I chose it as the subject of my "Hidden Gems" DVD segment this week for CBC Radio. Here's the place to click; you know what to do after that.

(By the way, isn't that a gorgeous DVD cover? A tip of the hat to whatever designer at Oscilloscope Films resisted the impulse to package this film like a tabloid news report.)

Naïve Choreography (This Must Be The Place)

I have no idea if this will work in the blog format, but here's an article I co-created for this week's issue of SEE Magazine that I was particularly proud of. David Byrne is playing a concert in town this weekend, and since we couldn't get an interview with him, I decided instead to run a page providing Arthur Murray-style instructions for performing three of Byrne's signature dance moves from the Talking Heads rockumentary Stop Making Sense.

The details probably aren't visible in the thumbnail, but if you download it, you should hopefully be able to make them out more clearly. The artwork, by the way, is by Jill Stanton, an excellent illustrator who also co-writes our weekly visual arts column. She did a cool job, right?

Moviegoer Diary: Two Mules For Sister Sara, Smorgasbord

TWO MULES FOR SISTER SARA

Plot In A Nutshell
Don Siegel’s lighthearted 1970 Western starring Clint Eastwood as a taciturn gun for hire and Shirley MacLaine as the nun who becomes his unlikely ally in attempts to sabotage the French forces occupying Mexico.

Thoughts
Clint Eastwood’s discomfort around women is one of the most appealingly vulnerable aspects of his onscreen persona — The Bridges of Madison County is just about the only film I can think of where his character seems fully at ease in female company — and so the idea of putting his trademark cheroot-smoking, poncho-wearing lone-drifter character of the 1960s in the middle of an unofficial remake of The African Queen is an inspired idea. (The story is credited to Budd Boetticher, the screenplay to Albert Maltz, whose credits include This Gun for Hire, Destination Tokyo, and The Beguiled — another of Eastwood’s most interesting early films.)

Of course, in this version of The African Queen, the woman is not the God-fearing virgin she appears to be. And despite the Ennio Morricone score and the sunbaked Panavision landscapes, Eastwood isn’t really playing This Man With No Name this time out either. For one, thing, he’s got a name —Hogan, he calls himself — and while he’s not above robbing the men he’s just killed, his character is clearly a softie and his squinty-eyed reactions to the events around him are played for laughs, not menace. Even the Morricone music is clearly in a mock-heroic mode, complete with a hee-hawing kazoo leitmotif for Shirley MacLaine’s Sister Sara, who cuts a dainty figure riding briskly alongside Eastwood on her burro.

In no way is it a deep film, but it’s highly satisfying in the way the script makes the effort, time and again, to devise clever but convincing ways for the two heroes to prevail over opponents who seem to have all the strategic advantages. (The solution Eastwood comes up with in the opening sequence to rescue MacLaine from the guy holding a gun to her head is particularly elegant... if a solution that involves lobbing a stick of dynamite at him can be called elegant.)

One question the movie left me with: when did white America first become aware of piñatas? A piñata plays a key role in the climactic attack on a French-held garrison, and the characters spend so much time explaining just what a piñata is — there are actually two separate piñata discussions in this movie — that I wondered if the filmmakers were genuinely worried that their audiences would not be familiar with this obscure aspect of Mexican culture.



RATING: 3.5/5

* * * * *

SMORGASBORD

Plot In A Nutshell
Jerry Lewis’ 1983 comedy grab bag about self-proclaimed “misfit” Warren Nefron, who undergoes psychoanalysis after several unsuccessful suicide attempts.

Thoughts
With the Academy’s announcement that Jerry Lewis will be the recipient of the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at Sunday’s Oscar ceremony, it seemed like a good time to visit Lewis’ final directorial effort to date, a 1983 curiosity that has two official titles — sometimes it’s called Smorgasbord, sometimes it’s called Cracking Up — but never got a proper North American theatrical release under either of them. It was made in the ’80s, following the unexpected box-office success of 1979’s Hardly Working, but it’s got a swinging big-band score that’s pure 1962 and its idea of “special guest stars” are Sammy Davis Jr. playing himself and Milton Berle in drag.

The film is a formless, cheap-looking piece of work, with way too high a percentage of the humour coming from pee-pee jokes, Lewis speaking in gibberish to his co-stars, and characters looking wearily into the camera. There’s an excruciating scene with Lewis playing himself as a first-grader in which a crossing guard halts traffic while he keeps dropping his schoolbooks, then his lunchbox, then his backpack... for minutes on end until one of the cars, for some reason, starts smoking under the hood before it falls apart.

But these scenes sit cheek-by-jowl with some inspired setpieces: the sequence that plays under the titles, where Lewis tries to navigate his psychiatrist’s office in which every surface has been waxed, polished, and buffed until they’re as slippery as an ice rink; a bank heist which turns into a “New York, New York” dance number; a Papillon parody in which Lewis’ lookalike dummy winds up escaping in his place; a restaurant scene in which a screechy-voiced waitress takes Lewis’ order and spends so much time reciting his options that the place closes before he can get any food. These scenes aren’t funny, in the sense that they’re likely to make you laugh — Lewis’ presence is too off-putting, the makeup and set design too oily, the rhythms of the scenes too alien. It’s like Asperger’s slapstick. And the recurring scenes of Lewis attempting suicide (at one point, he empties a can of gasoline onto himself, only to find he doesn't have a match) give the whole movie an air of morbidity and self-loathing that the juvenile comedy never quite dispels. I wonder — did the crew laugh at all when Lewis was making this film? Or did they watch him recite pidgin French in that flashback scene set in 18th-century France for a couple of minutes with the same gamely baffled expression as the actress sharing the scene with him?

Stray Observation: A bunch of outtakes and deleted scenes run underneath Smorgasbord’s closing credits, including a bit where Lewis lifts Sammy Davis Jr. off the ground as if he were a statuette and remarks, “I’d like to accept this award from the NAACP.” Is it purely a coincidence that Mike Myers pulled the same gag with Verne Troyer in The Love Guru?



RATING: 2/5

The Musicgoer: Two Tongues' Two Tongues

TWO TONGUES
Two Tongues
(Vagrant)
*** (out of 5)

“I saw you standing there alone with your guitar / Like I was staring into the mirror, seeing the same sad scar.” If that lyric from “Tremors” is anything to go by, when Chris Conley from Saves the Day met Max Bemis from Say Anything, it was emo-love at first sight: the pair immediately joined forces on a side project called Two Tongues. And while there are occasional references to girlfriends in the songs they collaborated on, the most important relationship on the album is the one they share with each other.

I’m trying to avoid the idiotic word “bromance” here, or to snicker homophobically at two male friends who aren’t embarrassed to put their feelings on display, but it’s hard not to listen to them duet on “Wowee Zowee” (“Hey there boy, you’re beautiful / I told you so but you still don’t know / Will you shut me out? / I won’t let you go!”) and not picture them tenderly embracing like Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush in the video for “Don’t Give Up.” Anyhow, the production is crisp, Bemis’ yowl harmonizes nicely with Conley’s whine, and if the results aren’t quite transcendent, they at least feel satsifactorily cathartic.

Anna Faris For Best Actress!

Here's a quick Oscar-preview article I wrote for this week's issue of SEE Magazine, the alt-weekly I work for here in Edmonton. The tone has a little more of that snappy-snarky Entertainment Weekly tone than I usually like my pieces to have, but if nothing else, I thought readers of this blog might be amused by some of my choices... and perhaps inspired to offer their own picks in the comments. (I'm not sure why I chose to use the "royal we" throughout this thing... maybe I was unconsciously distancing myself from it even while I was writing it?)

* * * * *

You want Oscar predictions? Here’s some Oscar predictions: Slumdog Millionaire, Mickey Rourke, Kate Winslet, Heath Ledger, Penélope Cruz. Boom! Oscar predictions are easy — and, truth be told, a little boring.

What’s more interesting is to talk about Oscar’s shadow self, the negative image of the glitzy ceremony that will take place this Sunday evening in Los Angeles, the nominees that should have been and shouldn’t have been. Accordingly, here’s our roundup of the five major categories in what you might call the Alternative Oscars — our choices for the most undeserving actual nominee, the most obvious snub, and the nominees who we’d like the Academy to have recognized, although we know they would have only gotten nominated in the Bizarro-World Oscars.

BEST PICTURE

Most Undeserving Nominee: Like a grotesque affirmation of the old axiom that any Holocaust-themed movie is sure to score big with Academy voters, THE READER tells the story of a Nazi prison guard whose soul is redeemed when she learns to read while serving a life sentence for allowing a barnful of Jews to burn to death.

Most Obvious Snub: Jonathan Demme’s rich, humane, technically daring RACHEL GETTING MARRIED. The dialogue seems so effortlessly naturalistic that screenwriter Jenny Lumet probably got cheated out of a Best Screenplay nod too.

In Our Dreams: WENDY AND LUCY, starring Michelle Williams as a young woman standing on the very precipice of poverty, is heartbreaking antidote to the (admittedly enjoyable) feel-goodisms of Slumdog Millionaire. And who says a documentary can’t be nominated for Best Picture, especially one as thrilling as MAN ON WIRE?

BEST ACTRESS

Most Undeserving Nominee: ANGELINA JOLIE’s character in Changeling has been conceived as a saint, the very embodiment of virtuous motherhood — and that’s the only level on which she seems interested in playing her.

Most Obvious Snub: Why so serious, indeed! Did any actor, male or female, create a more original, impish characterization in all of 2008 than SALLY HAWKINS did as the unfailingly upbeat Poppy Cross in Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky?

In Our Dreams: Between Gregg Araki’s straight-to-DVD pot comedy Smiley Face and the watered-down crowd-pleaser The House Bunny, ANNA FARIS established herself as arguably the most inventive, irrepressible female comic in movies today.

BEST ACTOR

Most Undeserving Nominee: It’s not just that BRAD PITT’s performance in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button relies so much on CGI effects for its impact; it’s that he makes the character such a dull, opaque blank even when he’s not wearing any makeup at all.

Most Obvious Snub: CLINT EASTWOOD’s shamelessly entertaining work as a grouchy, racist retired auto worker in Gran Torino is the kind of career-capping turn that the Oscars were made to honour.

In Our Dreams: Shouldn’t the various blurps and bleeps that BEN BURTT devised for the title character in Wall•E — so lovable, so amazingly expressive, despite their seemingly limited range — count as acting too?

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Most Undeserving Nominee: Actually, these five performances are all pretty terrific. But if we had to boot someone out of the category, we’ll go with Doubt’s PHILIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN — if only to give someone who hasn’t won an Oscar already a chance.

Most Obvious Snub: Well, it’s obvious to us, anyway, that the best BRAD PITT performance of the year was not as Benjamin Button, but as the chowderheaded gym rat and would-be blackmailer Chad Feldheimer in the Coen Brothers’ Burn After Reading.

In Our Dreams: Our sentimental choice is THE INSANE PENGUIN from Werner Herzog’s Antarctica documentary Encounters at the End of the World, but if we’re restricted to human choices, we’ll go with DAVID STRATHAIRN as the self-pitying alcoholic cop (but excellent tipper) from Wong Kar-Wai’s underrated romantic fantasy My Blueberry Nights.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Most Undeserving Nominee: TARAJI P. HENSON, a likable performer saddled with a one-note role as Brad Pitt’s adoptive mother in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

Most Obvious Snub: Anne Hathaway has all the flashy breakdown scenes in Rachel Getting Married, but ROSEMARIE DEWITT's subtle work as her exasperated (and exasperating) older sister is the key to understanding her behaviour.

In Our Dreams: Two terrifying maternal figures: JANE LYNCH, as the demented founder of a Big Brothers-style charity in Role Models, never missing an opportunity to work her former cocaine addiction into the conversation; and ANN SAVAGE in My Winnipeg, a figure to haunt Guy Maddin’s nightmares... and our own.

* * * * *

UPDATE!

In a wacky screwball-comedy blogosphere coincidence, the proprietors of one of my very favourite film blogs — Dennis Cozzalio, of Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule fame — wrote an enthusiastically pro-Faris post for his site at pretty much precisely the same time I was concocting mine.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised to find myself echoing Dennis' opinions; his passionate, engaged essays have certainly coloured a lot of my reactions to films over the last few years. You can certainly see Dennis' influence in my rave review of Speed Racer this summer. So even though I technically posted my Anna-Faris-for-Best-Actress argument a couple of hours earlier, I think in a truer sense, Dennis really got there first. If you're not regularly visiting SLIFR already, it's time to get on the case!

Memoirs Of An Amnesiac

When the former Israeli soldiers in Waltz With Bashir talk about the Lebanese civil war, they seem to remember their dreams more vividly than their waking hours. Boaz Rein-Buskila, now an accountant, is plagued by nightmares of a pack of wild, slavering dogs charging down the street, surrounding his house, and demanding he give himself up. Carmi Cna’an, now the wealthy owner of a chain of Dutch falafel stands, recalls sitting, terrified and nauseous, in the boat taking him to Beirut and having a vision of a giant naked woman climbing on board, taking him gently in her arms, and swimming away with him, far away from combat. (The image is simultaneously erotic, sad, creepy, and comforting.) And Ari Folman, now a filmmaker, has the most puzzling dream of all — his only memory of his entire tour of duty in Beirut is of him and his fellow soldiers walking naked out of the water, putting on their clothes, and walking down the eerily quiet streets, through a sea of black-clad women.

It’s obviously a dream — and since Waltz With Bashir is an animated film, it’s rendered in stark hues of yellow and black that make it seem even more sulphurously stylized — but what does it mean? Why has it taken Folman 25 years to even realize that he has practically no recollection of what was obviously one of the most dramatic periods of his life? He knows, logically, that he must have been present at the infamous 1982 massacre at the Palestinian refugee camps at Sabra and Shatila — killings technically carried out by the Lebanese Phalangist militia, but with the aid and tacit approval of the Israeli Defense Forces — but as to what function he played in those events... well, as Folman says, “That's not stored in my system.”

Waltz With Bashir follows Folman as he interviews old friends, fellow soldiers, and eyewitnesses to the massacre in an attempt to excavate his memories of that day. It bills itself as an “animated documentary,” but since it mixes in fabricated conversations, dream sequences, and musical montages (many set to Max Richter’s superb score) in with its talking-heads interviews, perhaps it’s more accurate to think of it more as an autobiographical cartoon in the same vein as Persepolis. Whatever you want to call it, it’s a singularly gripping experience — Full Metal Jacket meets Waking Life.

Folman’s investigation into his own amnesiac past (which recalls David Carr’s recent book The Night of the Gun) gives Waltz With Bashir its spine, but its real strength is its evocation of the amoral life of a young soldier — 19-year-old boys, gangly virgins most of them, hitting the beach and immediately shooting at nothing at all; driving a tank down a narrow street, crushing all the parked cars under their treads as they go; blowing up beer bottles, frying eggs on abandoned cars, wandering through empty airports, seemingly with few superior officers in sight. It’s all fun and adventure — until the sniper fire starts raining down on you.

The choice of animation as the medium in which to tell this gritty story seems unlikely, but it works beautifully. First of all, Folman uses animation to maintain full control of the film’s mood, subtly shifting the drawing style from the almost courtroom-sketch look of his present-day interviews to the more cartoonish look of the blackly funny montage of young soldiers inexpertly wielding hugely destructive weaponry (set to a raucous Warren Zevon-learns-Hebrew rock tune). But second, the animated images can be said to stand for the reconstructed, aestheticized impressions of past events that Folman has in his head where the real memories should be. The film’s final moments, when reality abruptly crashes onto the screen, are all the more powerful for having been preceded by 80 minutes of artifice.

No, not artifice. That’s not right. What’s the word I’m looking for? Oh yes — art.

Freeze! Police!

Last week, I picked up a bare-bones used DVD of Miami Blues, George Armitage's underrated film version of Charles Willeford's wonderful crime novel, and was delighted to see that it was just as delightful and unpredictable as I remembered it being when I first saw it in 1990. It made a perfect pick for this week's "Hidden Gem" segment for CBC Radio — just click to listen.

I didn't have time to get into this tangent on the air, but can I just say here how much I love Jennifer Jason Leigh's innocent, blithe delivery of that line in the second clip about the best way to run a Burger World fast-food franchise: "You hire kids so you can pay ’em nothing, and you watch ’em like a hawk because they'll steal you blind!" Isn't that the capitalist system in a nutshell right there?

The Musicgoer: Lily Allen's It's Not Me, It's You

LILY ALLEN
It’s Not Me, It’s You
(EMI)
**** (out of 5)

If we have to have overexposed pop stars in the world, then why can’t more of them be like Lily Allen, who has a wicked sense of humour, a candour that never crosses over into exhibitionism, a great eye for fashion, and a bubbly personality that practically spills over the edges of her new disc It’s Not Me, It’s You.

This one is as full of funny couplets as her 2006 breakthrough Alright, Still — “I’m not a saint, I’m not a sinner / Everything’s cool, as long as I’m getting thinner,” she chirps on “The Fear” — and “Not Fair” shows she’s still willing to take her boyfriends down a peg or two for their failings in the bedroom. But there are also songs here like “Chinese” and “Who’d Have Known,” two of the loveliest odes to cozy, dull domesticity since “Tea for Two.” She even gets away with addressing a song to George W. Bush and calling it “Fuck You” — it’s such a jaunty, upbeat sendoff to a small-minded era that even Dick Cheney might tap his toes along with it while he arranges for her phone to be wiretapped.

The Musicgoer: Napster Killed The Radio Star

The first surprise in Steve Knopper’s book Appetite for Self-Destruction, a lively account of the stunning collapse of the record industry, is that it begins a whole lot earlier than you expect it to — in 1979, to be exact, when Knopper argues that Chicago DJ Steve Dahl nearly put the major labels out of business. Dahl, you see, was the man who spearheaded the “disco sucks” movement and organized the famous mass burning of disco records at Comiskey Park. In the massive disco backlash that followed, record sales dried up practically overnight, stores returned millions of unsold LPs, and the major labels (which had invested heavily in the disco craze) either cut back on staff or went out of business entirely.

“This business model based on selling pieces of plastic has been on its last legs for nearly 30 years,” says Knopper, who has been covering the music industry for Rolling Stone since 2002. The labels have just been lucky enough to have gotten bailed out a couple of times by one fluky phenomenon or another: Michael Jackson and MTV came along in the early ’80s, the CD rescued them again in the late ’80s, and the boy band craze kept them afloat into the new century. But with online musical downloads (both legal and illegal) taking over, it doesn’t look like the cavalry is riding to the rescue this time.

“Back in 1991, It seemed like CDs were going to be around forever,” Knopper says, “but in retrospect, it seems like CDs were an artificial extension of a model that was on its way out. It was almost an accidental rescue — it certainly wasn’t as if the labels were being high-tech visionaries.”

That’s putting it mildly: while there were a few forward-thinking junior executives at the labels who recognized the implications of the rise of file-sharing services like Napster, the people making the decisions tended to be too technologically backward to understand the nature of the Napster threat, and too unimaginative to turn the power of the internet to their own advantage. Indeed, there seems to be something deep in the DNA of label execs from a certain generation that absolutely resists the idea of giving anything away for free — or even for cheap.

“The history of music retail over the last 10 years has been an endless demand from consumers for labels to lower their prices,” Knopper says. “You see it now at Best Buy or on Amazon, of course — just a couple of weeks ago, Amazon’s ‘deal of the day’ was Elvis Costello’s My Aim Is True, one of my favourite records ever, for $1.98. And I don’t think the labels are very enthusiastically marching down that road, but they’re certainly being driven there.

“There are a lot anecdotes that reveal the thinking at the major labels — for instance, I tell the story of Syd Schwartz, who helped break Creed online for the independent Wind-Up Records by releasing MP3s online. He then moved to EMI, which is a major label, where he was told, ‘We don’t do that stuff around here.’”

Knopper periodically interrupts the book with his list of “Big Music’s Big Mistakes” — it’s a roll call of infamous blunders and PR disasters that includes the CD longbox, the rise of the big-box stores, and, perhaps most destructive of all, Sony BMG’s “rootkit” software, the files embedded on several of their CDs that were supposed to prevent online piracy but which often merely destroyed people’s computers instead. Knopper even pinpoints the exact date when, in his view, the record industry bungled their last chance to survive the online era: July 15, 2000, when the major labels failed to reach a deal to merge with Napster.

We’re still living with the fallout from that decision, Knopper says: with the labels unable to get on top of online music distribution, the bulk of music downloads were done either through iTunes (which makes a tidy profit for Steve Jobs, but not so much for the labels) or illegally.

“I actually think the future of music looks very good for consumers and artists, both big and small,” Knopper says. “It doesn’t look so good for major record labels. I do like the record industry and feel some sympathy for them, but having lived through the ’90s just as a consumer, I was also incredibly frustrated that the labels weren’t seeing what everyone else was seeing. In 2001, when you wanted to download a song, just purely for convenience, not even as a thief, the only way to do it was illegally!

“I hope it comes across in the book that I am anti-copyright infringement. It’s not right to be able to basically break all the locks off the record stores and steal all the music. It’s not moral. But it’s hard — I recently bought that book, The Pitchfork 500, which is a list of the 500 greatest songs of the last 30 years, and because I’m an obsessive collector guy, I’m trying to get them all. I’ve been scouring iTunes and eMusic and records stores and I’ve got about half. Then I went to [the online filesharing hub] The Pirate Bay and did a search for ‘Pitchfork 500’ — just to see. And of course, there they all are, in one torrent. I swear to God, I had this moment where I literally had to pull my hand off the mouse, to not make that one click.”

He chuckles ruefully, perhaps picturing the same lopsided moral struggle taking place in front of laptops all over the world. “The record industry has a big problem.”

Moviegoer Diary: The Last Dragon, Mr. Arkadin

THE LAST DRAGON

Plot In A Nutshell
Director Michael Schultz’s 1985 martial-arts action comedy about an unworldly young kung fu expert (Taimak) who must protect the hostess (Vanity) of a TV dance party/music video program from the megalomaniac video arcade king who is trying to strongarm her into putting a video by his bimbo girlfriend on the air.

Thoughts
There are probably better, more important, more intellectually edifying movies out there that I could be watching as I improve my cinematic education, but I doubt there are many more giddily enjoyable than this one, one of only four theatrical features that Motown founder Berry Gordy personally produced, and the only one to have his name in the title. (The film is technically called Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon.) It’s not even a musical, although the story does stop cold at one point so that we can watch the video for Debarge’s hit “Rhythm of the Night.” It’s a campy throwaway of a film, but I like to think Gordy was charmed by it anyway — by its unnecessarily large cast of outsize characters and its eagerness to keep the audience entertained.

This is a movie with not just one but two crazed, sputtering villains, both of them separately pursuing the same obsessive goal of destroying pure-hearted, pacifist Leroy Green. The more dangerous of the two appears to be Sho Nuff, the self-proclaimed “shogun of Harlem” (Julius J. Carry III), who walks through the film in a perpetual state of fury — and who is driven to new heights of rage by Leroy’s refusal to rise to his bait and fight him. (Carry’s performance is equal parts Toshiro Mifune and Gene Simmons.)

But the real threat to Leroy is posed by the brilliantly named Eddie Arkadian, who Christopher Murney plays as sort of a comic spin on James Cagney’s Martin Snyder from Love Me or Leave Me — he’s a little thug who’s willing to do anything, up to and including cold-blooded murder, to make his girlfriend a star. If there were any justice in the world, this role would have made Murney a star as well, or at least a busy character actor, but the only notable role he seems to have landed since The Last Dragon was as the cop who John Goodman shoots in the head at the climax of Barton Fink. Eddie Arkadian is a wonderful pipsqueak villain — he even keeps a tank of piranhas in his office. I suspect he got the idea from a movie — he actually seems a little bit terrified of them.

Eddie’s girlfriend is played by Faith Prince, who would go on to play the similarly hapless, squeaky voiced showgirl Adelaide in the Broadway revival of Guys and Dolls. Here, she gets to sing a couple of funny bubblegum New Wave songs — including one called “Test Drive” that requires her to wear a license plate on her butt and a bra made of headlights — and while she doesn’t quite look the part of a music-video bimbo, her kiss-off scene with Eddie is worthy of Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday. (She has a great exit line: as she marches out of the room, Eddie demands to know where she’s going. “Elocution lessons!” she says, tears streaming from her eyes.)

Ironically, the film’s only weak spot is the main character, who I wish hadn’t been conceived as such a virginal, goody-goody naif. (This kid is so uptight, he doesn’t even use contractions.) Buster Keaton was a genius at playing this kind of role — the innocent who turns out to have unexpected reserves of courage and physical grace. Obviously, it’s unfair to compare a first-time actor like Taimak to a genius like Buster Keaton, but something’s gone wrong when all the qualities that are supposed to make your main character seem heroic actually come off as annoyances.

Luckily, the film has such a large cast that Taimak’s deficiencies don’t seem too serious. Director Michael Schultz also made the wonderful comedy Car Wash, and like that film, The Last Dragon has the feel of a movie that tried give good parts to as many actors as possible, even if they only pop in for a single scene. William H. Macy (billed as W.H. Macy) gets one of his earliest screen roles as a flunky on Vanity’s TV show, and Chazz Palminteri shows up for a few seconds as one of Eddie Arkadian’s flunkies — he’s recognizable even wearing a thick black mustache that makes him look like Dennis Hopper in his “well-dressed man” disguise from Blue Velvet.

It turns out that practically the entire movie has been uploaded to YouTube; here’s Sho Nuff’s entrance scene, which gives you an idea of the film’s... er... heightened sense of reality:



RATING: 4/5

* * * * *

MR. ARKADIN

Plot In A Nutshell
Orson Welles’ 1955 lark, in which he plays a mysterious, sinister billionaire who hires a two-bit shakedown artist (Robert Arden) to investigate his past and the origins of his vast wealth, which he claims to be unable to remember.

Thoughts
Mr. Arkadin is often referred to as the film that Citizen Kane might have become without Herman J. Mankiewicz’s help on the script. But it struck me more as the film Citizen Kane might have become without RKO. Shot piecemeal on unpredictable locations with too little money, Arkadin lacks the polish that Welles was able to achieve with unlimited access to studio resources on Kane — many of the scenes feel like inspired solutions to technical shortcomings, the work of a director doing the best with what he had, a spell cast by a diminished wizard.

Still, there are wonders here amidst the confusing story — I particularly liked a scene where Welles menaces Patricia Medina in a cabin on a boat, with the camera and Medina rocking back and forth in the waves and only Welles able to stand still. The party scenes are also terrific, especially the masquerade ball that the uncouth Robert Arden attends at Arkadin’s castle in Spain, hoping to worm his way into Arkadin’s inner circle, obviously not fitting in even while wearing a mask. (There’s a good joke when someone tries to explain the symbolism of the masks to him: “You know Goya,” he says, whereupon Arden shakes the hand of a passing reveler and says, “No — good to meet ya!”) Arden’s Guy Stratten is a little like Ralph Meeker’s Mike Hammer in Kiss Me Deadly: a brash, uncultured American thoughtlessly punching his way to the heart of a secret he’s unequipped to comprehend.

“A shallow masterpiece”: that’s what Pauline Kael called Citizen Kane, with its final revelation about Rosebud that even Welles, a little defensively, dismissed as “dollar-book Freud.” I can see where she’s coming from, especially watching a film like Mr. Arkadin, which seems to rely so much on directorial capework to get over with audiences — masks, beards, disguises, false names, shaggy-dog stories. Welles fills the script with those wry little parables he loved so much — the tale of the frog and the scorpion, the tale of the old man in the graveyard, the parable about the king and the poet that provides the film with its opening aphorism — and which, to him, explained all of human nature. Paradoxes, magic tricks, “now you see me, now you don’t”: Welles lets you think he’s let you in on a great secret, but with one twirl of his handkerchief, he vanishes it away.

As Gregory Arkadin, Welles wears a beautiful beard that, as one character remarks, makes him look like Neptune. It’s a fitting description: Welles, Arkadin, and Arkadin are all as difficult to grasp as water.



RATING: 3/5

Push: Nudge Not, Lest Ye Be Nudged

Is there some Jungian undertow in the imagination of Hollywood screenwriters that causes every movie about people with superpowers to climax with the heroes facing off against the villains and getting repeatedly hurled against the wall? No matter if they’re vampires (Twilight), supermuscular mutants (The Incredible Hulk), or human beings with amazing psychic powers (the new thriller Push), they all wind up settling their differences in exactly the same way: throwing each other against the wall hard enough to make the building buckle and the ceiling crumble but not hard enough to break anybody’s bones. Push tries to introduce a bit of visual flair into its climactic hurl-off by staging it in a construction site where the tiles on the wall explode into colourful clouds of smoke whenever one of the combatants smashes into them — but there’s nothing interesting at stake in the fight, just possession of a syringe that will...

Well, the movie is a little hazy on just why the syringe is so important, or what will happen to you if you inject yourself with it, or exactly how finding it will bring the bad guys down, as the young clairvoyant heroine Cassie (Dakota Fanning) claims it will.

Cassie is one of apparently dozens of humans who have been born with amazing psychic talents. Practically everybody in Push has some unusual ability, some can move objects with your mind, some can cloak people or objects so that other people can’t see them, some can tell you everything you’ve done over the last few weeks merely by smelling one of your possessions, some can scream loud enough to make your head explode, and some can do Obi-Wan Kenobi’s “these are not the droids you’re looking for” trick just by wiggling their eyeballs and making their eyes go all black. Push is getting compared to things like X-Men and Heroes, but its real antecedent, it seems to me, is Stephen King’s Firestarter, which employs the same dramatic triangle of young girl who’s barely begun to tap her potential power/flawed older protector/sinister ethnic dude working for evil organization. (He’s played by Djimon Hounsou, essentially reprising his implacable-enforcer role from The Island.)

Push at least has an original look; where most movies of this type favour that crisp, slate-blue cinematography that blends in so well with the CGI effects they add during post-production, Push has a grimy, slightly oversaturated yellow look. It’s set in Hong Kong, and the camera spends a lot of time peering through the grimy, smudgy windows of restaurants and markets — it may be the first comic-book movie whose visual style was influenced by Chungking Express.

The film also handles the clairvoyance angle in a way I don’t think I’ve ever quite seen before. Cassie (and a couple of the other characters) can see the future, but as she explains, it can be tricky to know how to use that information since the future keeps changing from moment to moment based on people’s behaviour. At one point, Hounsou is in a position to kill Fanning, but decides not to because, as he explains, he likes the way the future currently stands, so why jeopardize that by shooting her and introducing a new variable?

But those touches aren’t enough to disguise the routine story at the heart of Push — another bunch of misfits on the run from evil guys in suits. It always comes down to that, doesn’t it? Some McGuffin or other in one of those suitcases with the foam inside. Screenwriter David Bourla spends a lot of time trying to wow us with all the characters’ kooky psychic abilities, but there’s no human story here, no emotional stakes, that would really tickle our imaginations.

If anyone remembers Push 10 years from now, it may be as a key transitional film in Dakota Fanning’s career. She was maybe 12 or 13 when she made Push and she spends the entire film wearing tall boots and an alarmingly short skirt, and while the film doesn’t sexualize her exactly, the audience I saw it with was palpably uneasy at how much thigh she was showing. Fanning even does a drunk scene, at the end of which she flops sideways onto a chair, her legs apart, and you’re so freaked out at what seems like a very real possibility of seeing up her skirt that you can barely concentrate on anything else the other actors are saying.

Fanning’s clearly a talented actress who has a lot more going for her than mere cute-kid precociousness. She’ll probably also be a very lovely young women in a few years. Meanwhile, in Push, you can see her straining at the reins of her youth, practically screaming for the day to come when she can finally play grownup roles.

Wide River, Doublewide Trailer

I live in Edmonton, Alberta, a second-tier urban centre (at least as far as film distribution is concerned), and as such, it's impossible to predict which indie films will play theatrically and which ones we'll have to wait to catch up with on DVD. This week, for instance, Kent McKenzie's 1961 vérité gem about urban aboriginal life The Exiles is getting a brief run at Metro Cinema, and next week, Lance Hammer's Ballast shows up at the same venue. So it's not like the more "marginal" releases bypass us completely. On the other hand, Courtney Hunt's Frozen River, which is nominated this year for two major Oscars, never played here theatrically.

Frozen River isn't a perfect movie by any means, but I am thrilled to see the always-compelling Melissa Leo finally getting some popular attention, and I give her some due praise in my latest "Hidden Gems" DVD segment for CBC Radio. Here's the place to click!

The Musicgoer: K-The-I???'s Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow

K-THE-I???
Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow
(Mush)
*** 1/2 (out of 5)

“Sometimes I can get a little vicious when it comes to the beat break,” says K-The-I??? on Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow’s opening track “400 to the BPM,” but there’s nothing sheepish about his admission — it’s more a warning than an apology. YT&T hurtles by at breakneck speed, and a lot of the beats even sound like you’re hearing them played on a CD with someone’s finger on the fast-forward button. K spits out his lyrics too fast for any human brain to make sense of them, but that’s okay — he’s more interested in the sound of words than the sense of them. (Sample line: “You play laser tag with sudden envelopes and candid cameras cantaloupe / Frontal lobe microbes until it’s dissolved.”) He may look like Barry White, but K isn’t interested in seducing women into bed — he’s the guy who’s wide awake at 3 a.m., too full of caffeine to even get to sleep.

Still, it’s “Sabbath Faster” guest vocalist Busdriver who delivers the album’s best line: “They will beautify their pork plumbing with their boob jobs / Turning the cheap whores and Igors to Jude Laws.” If there's a more disgusting slang term for plastic surgeons than "pork plumbers," I don't want to hear it.

Everybody Loves Gaiman

“Ah, the terrific, wonderful, magical, delightful thrill of being scared!”

Neil Gaiman is describing the experience of seeing the 1939 MGM version of The Wizard of Oz when he was five years old, and hiding beneath his seat whenever the Wicked Witch of the West came onscreen. A new generation of young moviegoers may experience that same sensation when they see Coraline, writer/director Henry Selick’s new animated film version of Gaiman’s award-winning children’s novel. The Wicked Witch of the West is plenty scary, but she has nothing on The Other Mother, the spidery maternal figure who lures the film’s young heroine into a candy-coloured alternate universe... and who might never let her leave.

Gaiman, a 48-year-old Englishman who now makes his home in Minneapolis, is a revered figure in the world of comic books and fantasy — a recent encyclopedic guide to his work is called Prince of Stories — but Coraline could be the film that finally establishes his name with the non-geek audience. It looks like there’ll be plenty of stuff for his new fans to look forward to, including an adaptation of his Newbery Medal-winning The Graveyard Book to be directed by Neil Jordan, and an off-Broadway musical version of Coraline with songs by The Magnetic Fields’ Stephin Merritt. Who knows — maybe that long-delayed movie version of his comic book Death: The High Cost of Living will finally get off the ground as well.

Those projects are still taking shape, and no doubt Gaiman will be filling his blog with more information about them as they develop. Right now, he’s busy promoting Coraline — and even though it’s his second major round of interviews in as many weeks, coming right on the heels of his Newbery win, he does a fine job of disguising the frazzled state of his brain. He spoke last Monday to myself and two other reporters about animation, motherly love, and picking out a proper babysitter.

Q: I was talking about Coraline with a friend who’s a fan of yours, and his comment was — and nothing against your other film and TV projects — “This one really gets it right.” What is the hardest thing to get right when you’re making a movie? Casting? Atmosphere?

Neil Gaiman: Sometimes it’s just tone of voice. I happen to love Matthew Vaughn’s version of [my novel] Stardust, but I’m always aware that it’s Matthew Vaughn’s Stardust movie. Some people who loved the book couldn’t stand the movie, while others saw the movie, went out and bought the book, and were terribly disappointed because whatever they got out of the movie wasn’t there in the book. I don’t think that is going to happen with Coraline. Even though there are differences in location, even though Henry Selick has taken these characters who in the book were life-size and made them bigger, I think this is probably the first time I’ve seen something and thought, “Yes!” It sort of maps topographically onto the book.

Q: Henry Selick is one of the more underappreciated directors in Hollywood — in no small part because his most famous film is called Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas. Was there any worry that your name might overshadow his all over again with Coraline?

NG: While I’m very happy to go on the road and plug it, I’m also making sure that everybody knows that Coraline is Henry’s film. We’re talking about a handmade film. Everything you see onscreen was made by hand, by Henry or a member of his team. This is a film where if something moves, it’s because one of 40 animators moved it just a tiny bit. You’re talking about the single most ambitious stop-motion film that’s ever been made — and possibly that ever will be made. And it would be a bad thing if people assumed it was my movie. I would not want to do to Henry what happened on A Nightmare Before Christmas. I want Henry to get the glory — the 400 people who made Coraline to get the glory as well.

Q: You’ve always taken a hands-off approach to adaptations of your stories. Do you think people tend to be overprotective of their work when they get adapted into other mediums?

NG: I think it’s like babysitting. There are people with whom I’m happy to leave my children. I don’t want to stay there going, “Don’t do that. He doesn’t like that. No, don’t dress him that way.” I’d much rather find people I like, who I feel I can trust my baby with and know I’m not going to come back and say, “You know, I really didn’t expect him to have a tattoo on his cheek.”

Q: While we’re on the topic of people minding children who aren’t actually theirs, the character in Coraline who fascinates me the most is The Other Mother. I’m not sure if I’m even meant to be thinking this way, but this alternate world she creates is so full of delightful objects and songs and food — her plans may be sinister, but all this stuff did come out of her imagination, right? So can she really be all bad? Could you talk a little about this character’s psychology and how the idea for her arose?

NG: The character began with the English language —just with the idea that “Other Mother” rhymes, and sounds right somehow, but with the most disturbing connotation. It was just a lovely little thing that I played with in my mind. I remember when I was kid, I would sit there during boring geography lessons and think to myself, “What would happen if my parents moved house today and forgot to mention it to me? And what if another family moved in that looked so much like mine that I wouldn’t know the difference?” Those are the sorts of things I used to worry myself with when I was eight. Now, when I wrote Coraline, The Other Mother became, to my mind, everything that’s wrong with the word “love.” Parental love is a really interesting thing. It’s a protective thing, but it carries with it some odd burdens, one of which is that if you do your job, they go away. Children are not things you get to keep. But The Other Mother is the opposite of that — it’s all about possession with her. There’s a line from the book that made it into the film, where the Cat says, “She wants something to love. She may want something to eat as well.”

Q: You’ve said in other interviews that adults tend to be more scared by the story, while kids see it more as an adventure. What do you think it is that allows kids to sort of go along for the ride while adults tend to linger on the horrifying imagery?

NG: I think partly it’s that, for some reason that I cannot identify, from Page One, kids have no more doubt that Coraline is going to get into any real trouble than you picking up a James Bond book would worry that Goldfinger is actually going to kill him in a deathtrap. Kids have that certainty; adults don’t. Adults wind up sort of beset by tanglefoot in the thicket. Also, kids read a story about someone like them going up against something bad that they will defeat; adults read a story about a child in danger — and that idea disturbs adults in weird, vulnerable places. Kids tend to find button-eyed people kind of cool — it’s a goosey, silly thing. But adults tend to find button-eyed people really, really disturbing.

Q: You’ve had great success as an author of children’s books, and of course just last week The Graveyard Book won the Newbery Medal. Do you think any differently when you’re writing something for younger audiences? Is there a mental switch that gets flicked on, even it’s something as basic as keeping your vocabulary a little simpler?

NG: I actually don’t worry about vocabulary. I figure vocabulary will take care of itself — I actually sometimes have little arguments with copy editors on that point. It’s really fun as a kid to run across a word you don’t know and to find out what it means. I used to like doing that when I was a kid, so I enjoy throwing in a word that the reader might not have encountered before. The main difference [between the two types of books] may be that when I’m writing for adults, I tend to write without much regard to length. I’ll put in stuff that’s there simply to please myself. American Gods is 200,000 words long, and I couldn’t possibly justify every word. Coraline is 30,000 words, and I bet I could probably justify every one of them. With a book for children, I try to pare everything down to the absolute minimum. I don't want to waste their time. And you know, if kids like a book, they’ll go back and read it again and again. It’s that idea of books as places and books as friends, which seems very specific to childhood. Coraline was published in 2002. It’s now 2009, and I am fascinated by the number of 18- and 19-year-olds who sidle up to me and tell me that was the most important book of their childhood. It’s very odd to be told by someone of breeding age that you wrote the most important book of their childhood.

The Musicgoer: The Bird And The Bee's Ray Guns Are Not Just The Future

THE BIRD AND THE BEE
Ray Guns Are Not Just the Future
(Blue Note)
** (out of 5)

For a band whose name is a euphemism for sex, The Bird and the Bee have a decidedly arch and chilly sound — sort of what you might get if you figured out a way for The Cardigans to reproduce asexually with Lily Allen and gave their offspring some vintage synthesizers for its 18th birthday. The production (courtesy of programmer and co-songwriter Greg Kurstin) is glossy and George’s vocals are breathy and girlish, but the melodies just lie there, and the imagery in the lyrics doesn’t exactly caper around the room either — at one point, George sings that she’s “stuck inside the walls of all this inner strife,” and I’m still having a hard time understanding how she got inside her own inner walls.

There’s an ode to David Lee Roth on the album called “Diamond Dave” — I think the song is intended ironically, but Roth could teach George and Kurstin something about how to grab listeners within a song’s first 15 seconds... and probably tell them a thing or two about the birds and the bees as well.

(Can't say I'm crazy about this Eric Wareheim-directed video, either...)

Two Family Household

Young Coraline Jones has made a wondrous discovery. In an unused room in her family’s new home in the remote, dreary, very inaccurately named Pink Palace Apartments, there is a strange, papered-over half-door built into the wall. The previous afternoon, when Coraline peeled away the wallpaper and opened the door, all she found was a brick wall. But now, in the middle of the night, those bricks have vanished, replaced by a mysterious Being John Malkovich tunnel that leads into some kind of magical alternate reality. In this world, it’s sunny instead of grey, and her distracted, impatient parents (who spend the whole day writing how-to books about gardening mulch) have been replaced by fun-loving lookalikes who serve cake and pizza for dinner instead of vegetarian casseroles and always seem to have time for her. When Coraline asks the female of the pair who she is, this beaming impostor with gleaming black buttons for eyes gives her a simple, vaguely disturbing reply: “I’m your other mother.”

That’s the moment in Coraline where it becomes clear that you’re in the hands of storytellers who understand how fantasy works — that four tantalizing words can do more to stimulate the imagination than pages and pages of backstory. Or at least it would be the moment if you hadn’t been thoroughly enchanted by everything leading up to it. Let’s say it plainly: Coraline — adapted from Neil Gaiman’s children’s book by Henry Selick, the genius of stop-motion animation whose previous films include The Nightmare Before Christmas and The Corpse Bride — is an absolutely transporting piece of entertainment. Some of the imagery near the end of the film may be a little too intense for younger viewers, but otherwise, I can’t imagine any moviegoer, young or old, watching Coraline and not being delighted by the story or enraptured by the wit and craftsmanship on display in every single frame. I don’t think I stopped grinning for the entire 100 minutes.

And I laughed out loud a lot of the time too, especially at every scene involving Coraline’s downstairs neighbours Miss Spink and Miss Forcible, two dotty retired actresses (voiced by the British comedy duo Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders) who share their apartment with about a dozen Scottish terriers — two dozen if you count all the dead ones they’ve had stuffed.

At the same time, if there’s one thing Gaiman and Selick are careful to always take seriously, it’s the perspective of their main character. As voiced by Dakota Fanning, Coraline is smart, brave, and resourceful, but she’s far from flawless — she can be as surly and resentful as any kid, with a default facial expression of skeptical scorn, and she’s definitely tempted by the selfish notion of abandoning her real parents and moving in permanently with her Other Mother. (Who can blame her, though? Trained mice put on a circus show every night, her father sings They Might Be Giants songs to her at the drop of a hat, and — most miraculous of all — nobody ever calls her “Caroline.”)

Coraline is, in some ways, a film about the limits of fantasy — the magical world the Other Mother creates turns out, of course, to be merely a façade propped up to hide something dark and sinister. And yet, paradoxically, the creativity that went into making this movie feels practically infinite. “Be careful what you wish for,” warns the tagline on the Coraline poster... but when the lights go down in the theatre auditorium, experiences like Coraline are what we all hope we’re about to get, and so seldom do.

Moviegoer Diary: Judex, Into The Night

JUDEX

Plot In A Nutshell
Directed Georges Franju’s 1963 remake of Louis Feuillade’s 1916 serial, in which a mysterious caped hero known only as “Judex” helps protect a banker’s daughter from the family governess — and her father’s former lover — who has an evil scheme to acquire the family fortune for herself.

Thoughts
An elaborate ball in which all the guests wear either masks or birds’ heads. A magician, also wearing a bird’s head, who strides silently through the party, takes the stage, and deftly produces a seemingly endless supply of snow-white pigeons out of thin air. A nun who removes her habit to reveal a skin-tight black cat-burglar’s leotard underneath. An elderly family friend who turns out to be a handsome young man in a false beard, spectacles, and a grey wig. A man in a subterranean prison cell who notices the mirror mounted high in one corner of the ceiling is following his every move. A beautiful circus acrobat who finds herself on a rooftop, fighting off a dagger attack. A child gazing with puzzlement at the body of a dead woman who has fallen from the top of a building into a garden.

It’s lucky that the images in Judex are so striking, because the plot makes almost no sense whatsoever. Or maybe it only seems disconnected because of the way director Georges Franju has remained faithful to the... well, maybe “decentred” is the best way to describe the storytelling style of Louis Feuillade, who directed the original 1916 version. Judex can make a modern moviegoer a little uneasy, simply because it never makes clear just whose story we’re supposed to be following: the banker Favraux, who’s received an ominous blackmail letter? The detective Cocantin, who he hires to investigate (and who spends most of the film reading pulp novels and relating the plot of Alice in Wonderland to Favraux’s grandchildren)? Favraux’s daughter Jacqueline? Judex, the caped crusader who we expect to emerge as the hero and yet who never quite takes centre stage? Or Diana, the villainess who morphs throughout the film from prim governess to seductress to nun to slinky superthief?

I haven’t seen Feuillade’s original Judex, but I have seen Les Vampires, his most celebrated other film, which has an equally murky, random plot, full of narrow escapes and impenetrable disguises, and with a similar fetish for women in catsuits prowling the roofs of Paris. Francine Bergé, who plays the lithe but evil Diana, completes her ensemble with an alluring mask whose purpose (judging from how easily it gets ripped off her face during a fight) appears to be more decorative than functional.

I don’t know if I ever quite got a handle on Judex or latched onto any of the characters (it’s a little like The Dark Knight in the sense that the ostensible hero feels like a bit player in his own movie, while the mercurial villain steals the picture), and I had a hard time figuring out the tone Franju was aiming for — I found myself wishing he hadn’t allowed so many scenes to play out in dead silence and made greater use of his composer, Maurice Jarre. Just look at what a great combination Jarre’s music and Franju’s images are in this scene:



Were you like me and felt disappointed that the giant bird magician didn't produce tiny people from his handkerchief?

RATING: 3.5/5

* * * * *

INTO THE NIGHT

Plot In A Nutshell
John Landis’ 1985 offbeat thriller about an insomniac office drone (Jeff Goldblum) who gets pulled into a world of danger and intrigue when he helps a beautiful woman (Michelle Pfeiffer) escape from a gang of Iranian killers at the Los Angeles Airport.

Thoughts
I was about halfway through watching Into the Night when I suddenly remembered that even though I never saw the movie, for some reason I still went out and bought this movie’s soundtrack album on vinyl when I was 16. I think I was on some kind of soundtrack kick at the time — I recall shelling out a hefty price for the Mona Lisa soundtrack around the same time. I hardly ever played the Mona Lisa album, but Into the Night was in pretty heavy rotation on my bedroom stereo — Side Two opened with a new version of “In the Midnight Hour” by B.B. King that I really loved and which I would listen to over and over while I studied the picture on the cover of Jeff Goldblum and Michelle Pfeiffer caught in the headlights of an unseen car, the nighttime L.A. cityscape spread out behind them, tinted a tantalizing shade of purple.

Well, eventually I got a CD player and like most people, I forgot about Into the Night, which was a rare ’80s flop for director John Landis, nestled between the box-office successes Trading Places, Spies Like Us, and Three Amigos, not to mention Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video. It feels like his attempt to reinvent himself as a more “adult” director — the film is sort of a hip L.A. spin on The 39 Steps, with two strangers unexpectedly thrust together as they flee a gang of international criminals. But those criminals — a bumbling, babbling bunch of Iranians in cheap suits, one of them played by Landis himself (one of the Iranians, not one of the suits) — are the film’s worst element, a source of both inappropriate slapstick and inappropriate violence. (The movie never entirely recovers from the scene where they kill off a likable minor character — there’s just no going back to the breezy tone after that.)

Into the Night isn’t bad: like most up-all-night movies, it has a loose, jazzy rhythm that Goldblum especially is perfect for. Goldblum is usually thought of mainly as a verbal actor, but Landis gives him a couple of wonderful extended sequences where he speaks no dialogue at all: in one (which feels like an outtake from a silent comedy), Goldblum wanders awkwardly around a film shoot where everything he touches turns out to be fake; and in the other, he explores a suspiciously empty apartment while Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein jabbers away on the TV set. I also like a couple of small, throwaway moments: a shot of Goldblum and Pfeiffer driving under an overpass while an airplane gets towed along the road above them; the way Paul Mazursky, playing a vulgar TV director, sheds a silent tear as the Iranians ransack his house and uncaringly destroy the Emmy on his mantelpiece.

Still, it’s hard not to watch Into the Night today and see it as anything other than a dry run for Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild, which would come out just one year later, and which surpasses Landis’ film in almost every way. The straitlaced guy/free-spirited gal relationship between Jeff Daniels and Melanie Griffith would have more sexual spark to it; Demme would bring a fresher, more observant eye for the quirks of the American landscape; Ray Liotta would prove a much more fascinating, three-dimensional source of menace to the two lovers; and sorry, B.B. King, but Something Wild would have a better soundtrack too.

And like Into the Night, Demme’s film contains cameo appearances by some well-known film directors — John Waters as a used-car salesman and John Sayles as a motorcycle cop. The director cameos in Into the Night are just as amusing: Roger Vadim plays a French gangster, David Cronenberg is Goldblum’s boss at his engineering firm, Don Siegel is as an old man caught boinking some bimbo in a men’s room stall at a fancy casino; Jim Henson, Lawrence Kasdan, David Bowie, and Waldo Salt also make appearances... as does Jonathan Demme himself, who turns up in the film’s climactic airport shootout as a hardnosed FBI agent. It would be perfect symbolism if Demme’s character was the one who killed Landis, but alas, no — Landis gets gunned down instead by a bunch of anonymous cops at the airport magazine stand, toppling over an entire rack of Playboys as he expires.



RATING: 3/5