If You Seek Amy

When we get our first glimpse of Amy Adams in Sunshine Cleaning, she’s standing in the cluttered kitchen of a big house while a pool party carries on outside. She’s not a guest of the party — she’s there as a cleaning woman, the pink polo shirt with the “PRETTY CLEAN” logo on it making her skin seem even more wan and colourless than usual. Soon, a teenaged girl comes into the kitchen from the pool to get something to drink, and Adams makes an awkward stab at conversation: “It’s a real rager out there, huh?” The girl doesn’t say anything in response; she just shoots Adams a quick, contemptuous glance and heads back outside. It’s here that director Christine Jeffs and editor Heather Persons do a smart thing: instead of cutting away from the scene, they let the camera sit there and register the look of hurt that crosses Adams’ face, which she then quickly covers up with a brave little smile. Soldiering onward!

That willingness to seem innocent, vulnerable, and maybe even a little ridiculous has always been one of Adams’ great strengths as an actor. She may not have displayed the widest range so far in her career, but if you want to be a movie star, range is a lot less important than sheer likability. (If range were all that mattered, Vera Farmiga would be making $5 million a picture by now.) Philip Seymour Hoffman has a scene in Doubt where he tells Adams’ wide-eyed nun Sister James that he can tell she’s a kind, gentle person just from looking at her — and that line could apply to every character Adams plays. It’s one of the rules of moviegoing: you root for Amy Adams to be happy. Her eyes get so red when she cries, after all.

In Sunshine Cleaning, Adams plays Rose Lorkowski, a single mom scraping by on the cash she makes working for a maid service in Albuquerque. (Rhymes with “quirky”!) In need of some quick cash to send her son to private school, her cop boyfriend (Steve Zahn) tips her off about a lucrative line of work: cleaning up crime scenes. She hires her fuck-up kid sister Norah (Emily Blunt), prints up some business cards, takes out an ad in the local Penny Saver, and soon Sunshine Cleaning is in business.

The obvious movie to compare Sunshine Cleaning to is Little Miss Sunshine; besides the similar title and the general air of Sundance-friendly indie quirk, both movies feature Alan Arkin as an irascible senior who knows how to talk to grandkids, a broken-down van, and characters who recite motivational speeches to themselves in a futile attempt to convince themselves that everything will turn out fine with just a little positive thinking. But it reminded me more strongly of Adrienne Shelly’s Waitress — another charming little dramedy that, despite its occasionally arch comic moments, took a sincere interest in its heroine’s attempts to carve out an independent life for herself. (It’s probably no coincidence that the creative team on both films was predominantly female.)

Not that being compared to Little Miss Sunshine is anything to be embarrassed by, in my opinion. I realize it’s not a film that tougher-minded critics have much respect for, and I don’t blame them for rolling their eyes at some of its bigger plot contrivances. But there are plenty of classic comedies from the ’30s and ’40s filled with just as many convenient coincidences and self-consciously quirky characters. I mean, come on: if You Can’t Take It With You can win Best Picture, why can’t we cut the much superior Little Miss Sunshine or Sunshine Cleaning a little slack?

Am I sounding defensive? Maybe I am — I guess I know it would be very easy for someone to point to the scene in Sunshine Cleaning where Amy Adams uses a CB radio to have an imaginary conversation with her dead mother, or to the use of the beyond-clichéd “Spirit in the Sky” over the closing montage and ask me how I could possibly defend them. I picture myself sitting awkwardly, like Rose Lorkowski at the baby shower of an old high school friend, describing how she spends her day cleaning up biohazards and mopping up blood. The more sensible critics wrinkle their noses in disgust, just like the women talking to Rose. “You like that stuff?” they ask incredulously. And, like Rose, I get a daffy look on my face as it occurs to me that yes, yes, I do like that stuff.

The Musicgoer: Röyksopp's Junior

RÖYKSOPP
Junior
(Wall of Sound)
**** (out of 5)

There were three things I especially liked about Röyksopp’s 2001 debut album Melody A.M.: their ability to craft bouncy melodies that somehow left a sad and lonely echo lingering in your head; their fondness for female vocalists with high, breathy voices; and this artificial, frictiony sound that popped up everywhere on their songs, halfway between a Moog synthesizer and someone sitting in a vinyl chair.

All those virtues are present on Junior, their third full-length album, along with a bigger, bassier sound than the occasionally thin, tinny Melody A.M. Just listen to the strings that swoop down in the middle of “Röyksopp Forever” — it’s as if Roy Hobbs just hit that game-running homer at the end of The Natural. Robyn and Lykke Li, the reigning darlings of indie-friendly Swedish bubblegum pop, both make welcome guest appearances — Robyn’s track, “The Girl and the Robot,” has pretty much the ultimate Röyksopp title. But it’s Anneli Drecker (who sang “Sparks” on Melody A.M.) who may be the duo’s perfect vocal collaborator: “You Don’t Have a Clue” and “True to Life” take Junior into new, thrillingly adult territory.

The Importance Of Being Ernesto

I don’t know if Che, Steven Soderbergh’s epic film about the life of the iconic guerrilla leader Ernesto Guevara, is as radical or revolutionary as its subject, but in terms of its visual and narrative style, it certainly represents a defiant departure from Hollywood biopic conventions.

For one thing, it’s been structured as two complementary films: Part One, subtitled The Argentine, deals mainly with the Cuban revolution and the eventual overthrow of the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, and opens in Edmonton this week. Part Two, a.k.a. Guerrilla, covers Guevara’s unsuccessful 1967 to foment a similar revolution in Bolivia, will open next week, and will be reviewed separately then.

More significant, though, is the sparseness of the film’s storytelling. It’s as though Soderbergh started out with a “normal” biopic screenplay, and then simply subtracted every bit of expository dialogue. Any speeches where Guevara reveals his fears, his hopes, his dreams? Gone. Any conversations that neatly and digestibly lay out the origins of the revolution or Castro’s overall strategy for defeating the Cuban army? Absent. Any snappy, colourful dialogue exchanges to help you easily label the large cast of supporting characters? Nowhere to be found. Incidents that a normal movie would linger on — Guevara breaking his arm, Guevara doling out harsh punishment to deserters and spies, even the rebels’ 1959 victory — are underplayed, as if they were no more important than anything else that happened during the campaign. Has there ever been a film about an underdog victory less exultant than Che?

It’s not surprising to learn that Terrence Malick was originally attached to direct this project; like Malick’s The Thin Red Line, Che is less interested in establishing plot points, glorifying Guevara, or condemning him than in immersing the viewer in an overall experience that’s larger than any single character — larger, even, than Guevara himself. Various supporting characters do emerge from the tapestry here and there, but it’s not like Soderbergh makes any special effort to draw your attention to them or identify them by name — you take notice of the pretty soldier, played by Maria Full of Grace’s Catalina Sandino Moreno, who fights alongside Guevara in the climactic Battle of Santa Clara, but Soderbergh doesn’t give any indication that this woman is Aleida March, who’d marry Guevara just six months later. True, Soderbergh does occasionally use exchanges from a 1964 interview Guevara gave to newswoman Lisa Howard (Julia Ormond) as occasional voiceover narration — but unlike, say, Sean Penn’s boilerplate biopic narration in Milk, Guevara’s comments are much more slippery and in fact are frequently contradicted by the images accompanying them.

Soderbergh has said in interviews that Che is a film about “process,” which seems like a perplexing way to approach a subject as dynamic and controversial as Guevara. But it’s a tipoff that Che finds Soderbergh in one of his periodic formalist moods — like The Good German (shot in black and white on studio sets under studio lights using 1940s technology) or Bubble (shot on high-definition video with a non-professional cast), it’s one of those movies where he’s more interested in how to tell his story than in the story itself. In Che, he even avoids close-ups in order to emphasize the collective, democratic spirit of the Cuban revolution. I admire Soderbergh’s restraint and his refusal to commodify Guevara’s image, the way so many poster-makers and T-shirt manufacturers have been eager to do, but it doesn’t make this film easy to like.

That I’ve gotten this far into this review without even mentioning Benicio Del Toro’s performance as Guevara is itself an indication of how anti-dramatic Soderbergh’s approach to its subject really is — Del Toro appears in pretty much every scene, but he’s just one more element of an overall revolutionary process. It’s a performance that manages to seem modest even as he conveys Guevara’s incredible charisma. But I’m reluctant to say anything more definitive than that until seeing Che’s second half.

The Hazards Of Being Colin Meloy

Few bands leave themselves more vulnerable to mockery and outright hatred than The Decemberists. This is a band that named their first EP 5 Songs and then, perversely, went ahead and put six songs on it; a band that has written rambling, showoffily erudite story-songs about 19th-century sailors, Shakespearean plays, rogue Irish paramilitary killers, Tom Courtenay movie characters, Spanish royalty, and Victorian “chimbley sweeps”; a band that has aggressively tasted the patience of listeners by recording numerous epic song suites, including the 18-minute mini-opera “The Tain,” based on a story from Celtic mythology; a band that couldn’t stick to a single normal time signature for more than two minutes if you held a gun to their heads; a band whose unabashed anglophilia can’t help but seem a little affected in a band from Portland, Oregon. Coming in for the brunt of the mockery is their lead singer and songwriter, Colin Meloy, whose voice as been described variously as “strange,” “plaintive,” “quavery,” “irritating,” “thin,” “reedy,” “whiny,” “horrible,” “nasal, needling, nerd-like,” and “sounding like a muted mellophone.”

And yet, somehow, against all rational predictions, whether by accident or design, The Decemberists' defiantly uncommercial formula has translated into significant commercial success. Their well-reviewed 2006 album The Crane Wife, their first for a major label, has sold nearly 300,000 copies, their song “The Infanta” was featured prominently, albeit anachronistically, on a recent episode of the TV show Mad Men, and they appeared on a much-hyped 2006 episode of The Colbert Report, when Stephen Colbert challenged them to an on-air guitar “shred-off.” (They lost when an allegedly “injured” Colbert brought in Peter Frampton to act as his pinch-guitarist, but sales of The Crane Wife seem to have enjoyed the fabled “Colbert bump” anyway.) Meloy seems to be one of those rare art-rockers, along with artists like Björk, Radiohead, and Wilco, whose audience gets bigger and bigger the weirder and more self-indulgent and outré his music becomes.

Of course, that theory will be tested with the release of The Decemberists’ latest disc, The Hazards of Love, an hour-long concept album, highly influenced by the British folktale tradition, telling the story of a pregnant woman and her shape-shifting, forest-dwelling lover whose efforts to be together are hampered by a vengeful nature goddess and a child-murdering rapist. The disc is big, melodramatic, and bombastic in the best prog-rock tradition, and while it lacks the pop appeal of The Crane Wife (for my money, their best, most accessible album), you have to admire Meloy’s crazy ambition — not to mention his willingness to carry such a potentially ridiculous-looking project all the way to completion.

I spoke to Meloy last week over the phone from Los Angeles. His voice was perfectly pleasant.

Q: I feel like I should apologize to you — I’ve been listening to The Hazards of Love on a little iPod station with these minuscule speakers, which hardly seems like the appropriate way to experience an album as epic as this one. How should I be listening to it? How big should my speakers actually be?

Colin Meloy: [Laughs.] They should be Kenwoods from 1972, 150 pounds each at the very least. No, seriously though, I’m so not precious about how people should listen to this record. I realize that people have busy lives and we come at music in a different way these days. Unfortunately, it does often involve listening to music thought tiny speakers and poorly compressed digital files, but what can you do, you know? Ideally you’d listen to it in some lossless way on gigantic speakers, but not everybody can afford that kind of luxury.

Q: Well, it’s interesting, because as I was thinking about what questions to ask you about this album, it occurred to me that a lot of them were about that tension between the modern and the historic. But let’s begin with the origins of the album. As I understand it, you were inspired in part by an album from the 1960s called The Hazards of Love by the British folksinger Anne Briggs, and you wanted to write a song with that title.

CM: That’s right.

Q: So how did that impulse develop into this massive concept album you wound up with? Do you like that phrase, “concept album,” by the way, or do you prefer something else?

CM: Well, I fluctuate between “folk opera” and “fake musical.” But the germ of the idea was really a confluence of a few things. It was sort of the apotheosis of my fascination with the British folk revival of the 1960s. I’d managed to get my hands on the 45 of Anne Briggs’ debut album The Hazards of Love, for an ungodly sum of money on eBay. I played it once and then put it on my shelf and sat there looking at it and letting my mind wander. And at the same time, I’d been approached by a director and producer from New York about doing a stage musical. So these ideas swirling around in my head all kind of came together: I wrote a song called “The Hazards of Love,” but it seemed that after those five minutes were over, there was still more story to tell.

Q: Is it based on an actual folk legend, or did you make it all up yourself?

CM: Well, I’m not sure how clear all this is on the album — maybe it’s not clear at all. The idea was to take common, archetypal folk song events and characters and place them together on some kind of stage, assuming that their trundled narrative, the aura orbiting about them, would connect once they were all placed in line into some sort of story, with as little of my own invention needed as possible.

Q: I hope this question doesn’t sound as stupid as I think it might, but what does this story mean to you? Not that I want you to explain every last image, but is there some message that you hope listeners will take away from it, some lesson about love or the cruelty of the world?

CM: Sure. Hopefully people come away from it learning something about love, or understanding something deeper about love. The thing is, a lot of those common elements I was talking about were drawn from artists I was listening to from the British folk revival of the ’60s and ’70s. And by and large, if you listen to them a lot, you’ll discover they have a penchant for arranging songs that deal with romantic love but which also have a very dark and violent streak to them. I think that’s partly because they’re from a younger generation, and when they come to these folk songs, that’s a way in to them, to say, “Wow, these songs are really dark and scary! But they’re also pretty sweet and sentimental.” That’s what drew me to them as well. So my album is about love, but it’s about the hazards, the danger of love as well — and especially the danger of love in a time that’s not our own time, when the balance of power between the sexes was a bit uneven.

Q: There’s something about setting a song in a long-ago historical period that gives you access to grander emotions.

CM: Definitely. I think you can get away with a little bit more galloping sentimentality — in fact, I think people kind of expect it. But also, one of the things I find so appealing about this kind of song is that they deal with archetypes. We need those archetypes in our stories — just as you can’t have an action movie without a car chase, you can’t have a romantic folk song without a tragic drowning, you know?

Q: Did you have a hard time deciding whether to give the album a happy ending?

CM: Yeah, I think I did! I maybe had an inkling initially that there would be a marriage instead of a double drowning. But I ended up going with the latter. It just seemed to make more sense. [Laughs.]

Q: What is it about the British folk tradition that seems to appeal to you more powerfully than the American folk tradition? Is it the storytelling aspect? My impression is that British folk is less about the singer and more about the story, whereas post-Woody Guthrie American folk puts more focus on the personality of the singer.

CM: I think the British folk revival and the American folk revival kind of started out the same, taking these old songs and playing them for people in the present. But when American singers like Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Phil Ochs took off, there were different things happening — there was civil strife that inspired them to write original, more topical material. Meanwhile, the British folk revival was just getting farther and farther back towards the source, to the point where it was kind of anathema to do new original material. Mike and Lal Waterson did a brilliant album in 1972 called Bright Phoebus that was just shunned by the British folk revival community because it was entirely new material, and I don’t think that would have been the case in America. On the other hand, people in England really discovered the width and breadth of traditional folk songs in a way that America didn’t.

Q: What are the challenges of writing an album-length musical story as opposed to a collection of self-contained songs? Were you at all worried about whether these songs would stand on their own?

CM: No, that wasn’t too much of an issue. I kind of had to throw that idea out the window, along with the idea of writing choruses and so on. Which was kind of freeing, in a way, being able to mess around with songs that were essentially bridges between two other songs, and things like that. Whether I sacrificed some “real” songs as a result... well, you can’t sit around and think about things like that because you’ll just go crazy.

Q: People always marvel at the complexity of your songs, all the esoteric vocabulary and the unusual time signatures, and so on. But I wonder if there’s an extent to which these kinds of songs are easy for you to write — this is just the way your mind works.

CM: It’s certainly was an easier record to make than if I were to sit down and just write a bunch of pop songs.

Q: Well, I was curious about that. If someone forced you to write a bunch of songs for a more conventional band like, say, Maroon 5, would you be able to do it?

CM: I think I would do a terrible, terrible job and would be racking my brain the whole time. Now, there was certainly some labour involved with The Hazards of Love, but there were a lot of times where the songs and melodies were coming to me pretty thick and fast. Once you feel comfortable working in a certain mode, it does come fairly naturally.

Q: Would you have been capable of making this album 10 years ago when The Decemberists were just starting out?

CM: No. Ten years ago, I was still figuring out how to write, you know? What was interesting to me as a songwriter? I was still kind of struggling to develop a voice. In some ways, I needed to get a lot of songs under my belt before attacking something like this. I don’t know this project would even have been interesting to me 10 years ago; I would have balked at it and said, “I just want to write pop songs.” You know?

Q: What do you take the most pleasure in — coming up with a neat lyrical turn of phrase, or creating a melody that has just the right emotional quality to it or builds to a nice crescendo?

CM: I always find that melodies are the easiest and the funnest things to write. I feel like you use such a different part of your brain for that — you’re just listening for musicality, for tone, and it’s something that can’t be workshopped or learned. You just have to recognize, “Oh — that interval sounds good.” But when it comes down to filling in and writing the words, it becomes more of an academic exercise. That said, there’s some happenstance there as well — often I don’t realize I’ve written a good turn of phrase until I’ve come back to it later. I do like language with some musicality or cadence to it. It’s not like I’m out to impress people by using certain words, but I do take pleasure in peppering my songs with words that you don’t hear in everyday speech. I would hate to hamper myself by not using those words.

Q: So much of your music is sung in the voice of invented characters. Would someone listening to your records learn much about Colin Meloy?

CM: No, other than my weird penchants and fascinations. But none of it is very autobiographical, if at all.

Q: Do you ever have moments of self-doubt as an artist? Especially with a project like The Hazards of Love, it seems like there’s an increased likelihood of, well, falling on your face in public. Or are you able to soldier through those moments and think, “No, I know how this is all going to sound when I’m done, and it’s going to be great”?

CM: There are definitely moments of self-doubt involved in any project. But I guess you just have to trust your first instinct. And taking risks is essential if you’re going to create something real. With this project, there were plenty of moments where I was thinking, “What are we doing?” You know, “It’s our second record for a major label. Why are we on a major label? Do we want to make something more difficult for our audience?” But the pushback to that, I think, is our belief that it’s not difficult music — that it’s actually really inviting music, and accessible in its own right. I did know this record was going to be polarizing. Some people are not going to like it, and I totally understand that. The vast percentage of records coming out are “normal,” with normal songs on them. In some ways, making this record was an exercise in free will — “You’re going to give us complete creative control. Okay... we’ll do this.” That kind of thinking can give birth to a lot of great ideas, but also a lot of terrible ideas. But hopefully even the terrible ideas are interesting ones.

Q: I was listening to music critic Jim DeRogatis review your album on his radio show this week, and he argued that your true influence was not the British folk revival, but Jethro Tull’s Thick as a Brick.

CM: You know, I own Thick as a Brick, but I can’t say I know it that well. At the risk of sounding like a total impostor, I didn’t grow up listening to Jethro Tull; I grew up listening to The Smiths and The Replacements and Hüsker Dü — the bands that were kind of working in reaction to everything Jethro Tull had built up. But I do have a newfound love for that kind of music, if only for its ambition, which I still find interesting and exciting.

Q: There’s a lot of dark characters who populate your songs, and The Rake in The Hazards of Love is just the latest example. Do you have faith in humanity?

CM: I do have faith in the world and in human beings as being, in their essence, very kind and loving. But I do find people who are violent, who have dark histories and dark fascinations, to be endlessly interesting. So I’ll probably continue writing about them.

"It's Dungeons And Dragons Plus Renaissance Faire... Squared!"

Give me a documentary about nerds, apparently, and I'm sure to make it my "Hidden Gem" DVD pick of the week for CBC Radio. Previously, I've used the airwaves to praise such films as The King of Kong and Billy the Kid, and this week I talk about Darkon, Luke Meyer and Andrew Neel's terrific documentary about a community of armour-clad LARPers in Baltimore, Maryland. I didn't mention this on the air because it's such a minor tangential observation, but for what it's worth, I suspect the film was a big inspiration for Paul Rudd when he was writing the script for Role Models. Anyhow, here's the link to click to give the segment a listen.

The Musicgoer: Great Lake Swimmers' Lost Channels

GREAT LAKE SWIMMERS
Lost Channels
(Nettwerk)
*** 1/2 (out of 5)

Lost Channels, the new disc from Ontario folk-rockers Great Lake Swimmers, contains one beautiful song after another, and yet I resisted the album pretty much all the way. Why? Maybe it’s the self-seriousness of singer/songwriter Tony Dekker, with his insistence on recording in old churches and abandoned grain silos. (Would you like this review better if I told you I was writing it in the basement of a condemned schoolhouse? What, you mean you can’t hear the historic textures seeping into my words?) Or maybe it’s the achingly sensitive, immaculately produced hush that coats every song on the album, the musical equivalent of those Canadian novels, so full of tasteful, slightly dull descriptions of natural landscapes, that keep winning the Giller Prize year after year.

But you can only resist beauty for so long — and by the time I heard the shivery, uncanny harmonies that open “River’s Edge,” as eerie and yet oddly comforting as a lullaby sung by a grandmother's ghost, I was swooning pretty hard. There’s no denying that the Swimmers have a stupendous sound, if not much more, and I’m sure the acoustics in McDougall United Church here in Edmonton will only amplify it when they play there this Friday.

Step Right Up

It’s hard to imagine a place with fewer prospects for adventure than Adventureland, the decrepit amusement park that gives the new film from writer/director Greg Mottola its title. As new employee James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg) gets his orientation tour, we share his dismay at the crudely rigged midway games (the basketball hoop hammered into an oval, the hats glued onto the mannequin heads, making it impossible to knock them off), the misspelled, crudely handpainted signs, the loudspeakers blasting “Rock Me Amadeus” 20 times a day (it’s 1987), the grotesque plastic clown heads on top of all the garbage cans. And the patrons’ refusal to throw their trash into the clown’s mouth is a daily source of irritation to the park’s owner (Bill Hader).

Adventureland is one of those dreary regional institutions that managed to stay in business in that pre-internet era not because they offered much in the way of fun or stimulation, but simply because they were a convenient gathering place for anybody younger than 25 looking to kill some time, eat some corn dogs, ogle the hot girls hired to dance in front of the “Disco Inferno” ride, and maybe finally get up the nerve to talk to that cute girl you’ve had a crush on all summer. James, for his part, would rather be pretty much anywhere else; he had plans to spend the summer in Europe, but those plans fell through when his father got demoted and no longer had the money to kick into his travel budget. Forced to find a job, James learns to his dismay that the only job his B.A. qualifies him for is to hand out stuffed animals and clean puke off the guns in the shooting gallery.

James is both overqualified for the job and underqualified for it, and the same is true for his relationship with sex — he’s a virgin, but he’s currently reading Henry Miller’s Quiet Days in Clichy. That’s just one of the hundreds of spot-on details Mottola includes in Adventureland, which I think is the funniest, smartest, most achingly accurate time-capsule evocation of being young and awkward since Freaks and Geeks went off the air. There’s even a great role for Martin Starr, who is probably the finest actor of any of the Freaks and Geeks regulars but who’s also had the least visible post-show career. (I get the impression from the audio commentaries on the F&G DVDs that that’s largely by choice, but it’s still a shame.)

Starr plays James’ co-worker Joel, a bespectacled intellectual for whom every moment spent at work and at home is utter torture. He smokes a pipe — he admits it’s a ridiculous, pretentious affectation, but you get the sense that it’s the kind of small symbol of nonconformity that he needs to cling to. In one beautifully acted scene, he approaches a cute, not exactly brainy girl he spent a drunken night with and gives her a copy of The Overcoat by Nikolai Gogol, his favourite author. It’s a wonderful, crazy gesture bestowed upon exactly the wrong girl.

James has better luck with his girlfriend, Em (Kristen Stewart) — the moment this pale, long-haired beauty shows up onscreen wearing a Hüsker Dü T-shirt, you can practically hear thousands of aging indie-boy hearts breaking in movie theatres across North America. Some of Mottola’s best writing consists of his portrayal of James and Em’s exceedingly bumpy courtship — James is so tactless and callow and Em is so ashamed of her ongoing affair with an older married man (Ryan Reynolds) that it’s amazing the two of them ever get their signals uncrossed long enough to go out with each other at all. Eisenberg, who played Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney’s oldest son in The Squid and the Whale, builds on that performance here — is there another actor around so good at capturing that mix of clumsy selfishness and youthful idealism that comes with being in your early 20s? And Stewart is surprisingly soulful and subtle as Em — I say surprisingly, because she was such a dull lump playing a similar character in last year’s Twilight.

Because Adventureland was directed by the guy whose previous film was Superbad, I fear it’ll be marketed as another outrageous, raunchy teen comedy. Not that it isn’t consistently funny — Kristen Wiig in particular is hilarious as Hader’s wife, one of those normal-looking but quietly insane middle-aged women she plays so well. But what lingers with you after the film is over are the dramatic moments, like the long, silent, ashamed look on the face of James’ father (the great Jack Gilpin) when his son discovers his secret stash of booze. It’s a laugh-filled comedy in which the characters experience real hurt and real moments of self-revelation. It's a movie that knows that the summers you waste can be the most important summers of your life. And God, does it remember the ’80s, a time when a song like “Bastards of Young” or “Unsatisfied” could help the whole fucked-up world make a little bit of sense — but also when the opening riff of Animotion’s “Obsession” could cause a joyous cheer to erupt on the dancefloor.

I can’t say enough good things about Adventureland. I don’t care if we’re running low on them — give Greg Mottola a giant-ass panda right this minute.

"You're Surprised When I Eat Ya"

I thought I couldn't love Neko Case more than I do already, but this video for "People Got A Lotta Nerve," from her new disc Middle Cyclone, did the trick. Turns out the only thing better than Neko Case is cartoon teenage Neko Case escaping from the belly of a whale to go baboon hunting.

Mutant Enemies

This is going to sound absurd, but I think one of the big problems with the animated sci-fi spoof Monsters vs. Aliens is that the characters do too much mugging for the camera. I know, I know: they’re cartoon characters; isn’t that part of the point? Okay, but when you’ve gone to the trouble of hiring people like Will Arnett, Seth Rogen, John Krasinski, Kiefer Sutherland, Paul Rudd, Hugh Laurie, and Stephen Colbert — all of whom are famous for their mastery of dry, deadpan comedy — it’s jarring to see their voices applied to characters who underscore every joke by bugging out their eyes, exaggerating their body language, and contorting their faces into assorted winces, grimaces, and skeptical eyebrow-raises that you could read from 50 feet away.

Although maybe that’s appropriate, given the film’s heroine: an ordinary woman named Susan Murphy (Reese Witherspoon) who, moments before her wedding, gets hit by a meteorite whose high “quantonium” content causes her to grow into a 50-foot-tall giant right there at the altar. In the ensuing panic, she’s captured by the military and imprisoned in a secret hangar along with a motley assortment of other monsters they’ve captured through the years: a girl-crazy half-human, half-fish called The Missing Link (Arnett); Dr. Cockroach (Laurie), an insectoid mad scientist; Bob (Rogen), a blue, gelatinous blob who’s somehow able to function without a brain (“Turns out you don’t need one!” he says cheerfully); and Insectosaurus, an irradiated grub that’s seven times bigger than even Susan — er, I mean, “Ginormica,” the new name the government assigns her.

The gang is part Hellboy, part Fantastic Four; and Gallaxhar, the egomaniacal, incredibly well-armed, but essentially ineffectual alien who arrives halfway through the film to extract the quantonium from Susan’s body and enslave the Earth owes an awful lot to Marvin the Martian from the old Bugs Bunny cartoon. (He’s voiced by Rainn Wilson, Jon Lovitz apparently being unavailable.) Indeed, despite the shiny images, everything about Monsters vs. Aliens has an air of secondhand, sub-Pixar inspiration about it. Directors Rob Letterman (one of the guys who made Shark Tale) and Conrad Vernon (part of the directorial team on Shrek 2) fill the movie with too many familiar character types — shallow TV newsmen, tough-as-nails generals, nerdy scientists — and hacky pop culture gags. At the screening I attended, a bit where Stephen Colbert’s Tek Jansen-esque President Hathaway attempts to greet the alien ship by playing the Close Encounters of the Third Kind theme on a keyboard, only to segue into an extended performance of “Axel F,” fell particularly flat. Even the female-empowerment theme, with Susan rejecting her self-involved fiancé and embracing her new life as a “monster,” feels generic.

Maybe that’s because the movie itself is so reluctant to try out any truly strange jokes or even mutate its animated-comedy formula by so much as a chromosome. It’s a movie with a Ginormica-sized comic premise that secretly wants to be plain old Susan Murphy.

Deceit's The Purpose

There’s a scene in Duplicity where corporate spies Clive Owen and Julia Roberts duck into a bar to talk. Five years ago, she was with the CIA, he was with MI6, and after a one-night rendezvous in a Dubai hotel room, she drugged him, stole some top-secret information, and was on a flight out of the country before he even woke up. Now they’re both corporate spies surprised to learn they’re working together again, and writer/director Tony Gilroy (who also made Michael Clayton) supplies them with some especially juicy movie-movie dialogue with which to express their sexy, sexy mutual distrust. Owen gets to deliver the capper: “Maybe you’re so used to having your legs in the air,” he says, “that you don’t really know when you’re upside down, sister. I own you.”

Here’s some of the stuff I love about Duplicity. I love that later on in the film, a bunch of other characters listen to a recording of this conversation, and they take even more delight in Owen’s snappy dialogue as we in the audience did. I love that the plot revolves around a mysterious, earth-shattering product that corporate CEO Tom Wilkinson plans to unveil in a couple of weeks, and that just when you think Gilroy is going to take the easy way out, like David Mamet did in The Spanish Prisoner, and never tell you want the product actually is, he goes ahead and tells you. He names the McGuffin! (I don't want to spoil it here, but it’s such a delicious joke that it's all I can do not to blurt it out anyway.) I love that Gilroy hired Robert Elswit, Paul Thomas Anderson’s regular cinematographer, to shoot the picture — everything from the immaculate corporate office furniture to the luxury hotel rooms to Paul Giamatti’s face looks so soft and creamy you practically want to reach into the screen. And I love that the credits play under a hilarious scene of Giamatti and Wilkinson wrestling each other in the rain on the tarmac of an airport, the sequence shot in luxurious slow motion that extends every wobble of their middle-aged cheeks.

And of course, I loved Clive Owen, who’s one of those lucky actors whose uninflected, effortless, it-is-what-it-is acting style makes it practically impossible for him to ever give a bad performance. Gilroy also makes shrewd use of Julia Roberts, an actress who (to me, anyway) always seemed a little cold and calculating, even in her heyday as America’s romantic comedy sweetheart. I was very pleased that in Duplicity, when Roberts lets loose with that trademark Pretty Woman horse laugh, her character is really just playing a part in an elaborate con. The film’s running gag, in fact, is that Owen and Roberts are partners in a scam that could net them each millions of dollars if everything goes right — and yet their every instinct tells them that the other person can’t be trusted. They're sleeping with a scorpion; surely it's only a matter of time before they get stung, right?

Yes, it’s one of those movies where everyone is running a scam on everyone else and the director pulls the rug out from under you so many times you wonder if you’re ever going to see the floor. I’ve read reviews complaining that the plot is too hard to follow, but I kept up with it fine — and I still didn’t see any of the twists coming. I wish all Hollywood movies would show me this good a time while they pick my pocket.

You Say Psychosis, I Say Sychosis

Just as the cold weather in Edmonton lets up, here I go giving everyone in town a fresh source of depression by making Charlie Kaufman's postmodern superbummer Synecdoche, New York this week's "Hidden Gem" in my weekly DVD segment on CBC Radio. Maybe I overdid it a little with the warnings about how bleak and depressing this thing is — but then again, the mood of the second half of this thing is pretty darn toxic. I did get a kick out of starting the segment with a clip of Philip Seymour Hoffman talking to a child about the pustules on his face, though.

Raise The Rudd Lantern

I Love You, Man takes a while to get going, but even during its first 20 minutes or so while its comic engine is still revving up, there’s a poignancy to the scenes of real estate agent Peter Klaven (Paul Rudd) failing to connect with the men around him. He’s genuinely appalled by the X-rated video clip his obnoxious co-worker loudly savours in his cubicle, he enrages his opponents when he attends his first-ever neighbourhood poker night and keeps winning dumb-luck pots, and when he tries to ingratiate himself with some guys he knows at the gym, there’s an invisible social wall between them that they’re only too happy to keep him on the other side of. What masculine physical cues is he not picking up on? Why is he so bad at inventing spontaneous nicknames? Can other men instinctively sense that he’d rather watch Chocolat with his fiancée Zooey (Rashida Jones) than go out for drinks after work? Whatever Peter’s affliction may be, he’s going to have to make a male friend fast, or he won’t have anybody to be his best man at his upcoming wedding.

As many reviewers have pointed out, the premise of I Love You, Man ignores the fact that Peter has a brother, Robbie (Andy Samberg), who could obviously stand beside him at the altar. And there is something a little off-pitch about being asked to believe that such an obviously likable, cool, funny guy could have gone through life without accumulating any kind of male posse. (Doesn’t every guy want to be Paul Rudd’s best friend?) There are even a couple of scenes where it’s half-suggested that Peter is some kind of closet case, as when he blurts out how much he loves The Devil Wears Prada or spontaneously fixes his wife’s friends a tray of root beer floats, but none of these suggestions lead anywhere, except to the muffled joke that Peter, who’s straight, seems gayer than Robbie, who actually is homosexual.

The film finds its groove, however, when Peter befriends Sydney Fife (Jason Segel), a Lebowski-esque investment broker who spends his days walking his dog on the boardwalk of Venice Beach and loafing around his “man cave” — that’s his name for the den he’s built in the back of his house, complete with drum set, Rush posters, bong, and “masturbation station.” Sydney may not be entirely socialized, but his brand of shaggy, self-confident masculinity proves irresistible to Peter, who drinks up Sydney’s lessons in the mysteries of male bonding rituals. Peter still loves Zooey, but when you find someone you can jam with to “Tom Sawyer”... well, isn’t that love, too?

Much like the episode of Seinfeld where Jerry becomes friends with Keith Hernandez — which I believe is the earliest example of the so-called “bromantic comedy” — I Love You, Man gets laughs by portraying the friendship between its two male heroes as a coded love affair. Peter and Sydney meet cute, Peter agonizes about calling Sydney back, they have a magical first “date” and get to know each other via a lyrical musical montage, they have a fight and decide to “spend some time apart,” after which Sydney races to the church to join Peter at his wedding.

But I Love You, Man is much more sweet and sincere in its outlook than “gay panic” movies like Wild Hogs and I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry. While Judd Apatow (surprisingly) was not involved in the making of this movie, I Love You, Man espouses the classic Apatow theme: namely, that for many North American men, their male friendships are deeper and more emotionally meaningful than anything they’ve ever experienced with a woman, even the ones they’re married to.

There’s a lot of truth to that notion, and Peter’s desire to achieve that kind of closeness with another man (okay, stop snickering) is something I have to admit I connected with. Paul Rudd, as always, barely seems to break a sweat with this performance — although that shtick he does throughout this movie, of getting laughs out of Peter’s repeated failed attempts at telling jokes, has got to be a lot harder than it looks. Jason Segel excels at playing pathetic, needy losers, so it’s nice to see that he can dial back the energy and still be funny. (I love the way he insists on pronouncing the title of Chocolat as "Chocolate," as if only a pretentious asshole would say it otherwise. He also refers to Rudd at one point as "Tycho Bro-he," a reference so wonderfully random and esoteric that I can't believe it made it into the final film.)

Like so many recent comedies, I Love You, Man is so full of notably funny people that it gets to be kind of a distraction. Why go through the trouble, for instance, of casting Larry Wilmore as a justice of the peace and then give him nothing funny to say? What happened in the editing room to give character actor Joe Lo Truglio more comic opportunities than the much higher-profile Andy Samberg? (Or Lou Ferrigno, for that matter?) And did I spot SNL cast member Bobby Moynihan for literally half a second in the wedding scene? I can only assume there will be tons of deleted scenes on the DVD.

I’d be up for watching them. Any guys out there want to come over and join me?

It Ain't Easy Being Jean-Claude Van Damme

JCVD opens with a flourish: as Curtis Mayfield’s “Hard Times” plays on the soundtrack, we see Jean-Claude Van Damme slowly making his way through some kind of urban battleground, dispatching enemy soldiers with a few swift punches, some well-aimed hand grenades, and a repurposed flamethrower, all in a single unbroken shot that covers what seem like several action-packed city blocks. Sure, it’s obviously just a scene from a movie-within-a-movie, full of faked punches and carefully timed explosions, but that doesn’t make it any less a feat of physical stamina and mental concentration on Van Damme’s part — and you can see the exhaustion on his face when a stupid mistake ruins the entire shot and the director tells him to get ready to do it all over again. “I’m 47 years old,” Van Damme says. “It’s very difficult for me to do everything in one shot.”

Jean-Claude Van Damme is 47 years old? Yes he is. He plays himself in JCVD, and while he is still obviously in enviable shape, his body, his career, and his dignity have all taken enough of a battering for the former action movie star and kickboxing champ to resemble Randy “The Ram” Robinson, the broken-down former wrestler Mickey Rourke plays in The Wrestler. Both men found fame under assumed names as invincible fighters; now, in middle age, their real selves are getting harder to deny. They’re both broke but still determined to cling to their former glory — Robinson in grueling fights at neighbourhood halls, Van Damme in cruddy straight-to-DVD action movies. They both have estranged daughters who no longer speak to them too — in a scene from JCVD inspired by his real-life divorce trial, Van Damme’s daughter testifies that she’d rather go live with her mother because her classmates make fun of her whenever he appears on television. He can’t even afford to pay his lawyer; he thought the fee would be covered by his salary for an upcoming movie, but the producers decided to cast Steven Seagal instead when he offered to cut off his ponytail.

But where The Wrestler is a grueling drama modelled on the work of Van Damme’s countrymen the Dardennes brothers, JCVD is a more playfully meta affair. The film begins with Van Damme wandering into the middle of an attempted holdup of a post office, only to have the police erroneously believe he’s the mastermind of the robbery instead of an innocent bystander. Writer/director Mebrouk El Mechri borrows liberally from the Quentin Tarantino playbook, presenting the scenes out of chronological order and allowing the supporting characters to chime in with memorable pieces of pop-culture criticism (as when one of the robbers tells Van Damme that if it weren’t for him, John Woo would still be shooting pigeons in Hong Kong). JCVD is also very much aware of itself as a comeback vehicle for Van Damme, much like Pulp Fiction was for John Travolta.

What’s kind of awesome about JCVD is the way Van Damme refuses to treat the goings-on in this movie as a joke. Which is not to say that he gives a humourless performance (which is what Steven Seagal would doubtlessly have done); there’s a very funny scene, for instance, where he endures the nonstop chatter of a talkative cabbie as he rides home from the airport.

But Van Damme does more than just “poke fun at himself” or “show he’s a good sport” with his performance; it’s as if he realized JCVD was the only chance he’d ever get to tell the world about all the pain and shame and humiliation of being Jean-Claude Van Damme. Late in the film, the action stops dead as Van Damme faces the camera and delivers a long, rambling, tearful, half-improvised monologue about the price of fame, the wreckage of his love life, his drug use, and his belief that he has done absolutely nothing of value in his entire shitty life. Even if it’s occasionally difficult to follow Van Damme’s train of thought, the whole thing is never less than mesmerizing. It’s more than eight minutes long, and he delivers it in a single, unbroken take that covers emotional terrain far more treacherous than anything he faced in that opening action scene.

Jean-Claude Van Damme: great actor? He’s pretty amazing in JCVD, and I hope he takes some comfort in that when he arrived on the set of Universal Soldier III... or watched Mickey Rourke attending the Oscars halfway around the world in Los Angeles.

The Musicgoer: Eleni Mandell's Teenage Kicks

Hey, music fans: here's a profile I recently wrote of Eleni Mandell, the very cool L.A. singer/songwriter whose new album Artificial Fire came out last week on the Zedtone label. It comes highly recommended.

* * * * *

Picture Eleni Mandell dead.

Go ahead — don’t feel self-conscious about it. Whatever scenario you just imagined leading up to the singer/songwriter’s demise, she probably thought about it before you. For instance, “I Love Planet Earth,” from her new disc Artificial Fire, begins with Mandell picturing herself getting wiped out by a semi on a blasted-out stretch of desert highway.

“I think about all the horrible ways that I might die — like, constantly,” laughs Mandell over the phone from her home in Los Angeles. “It is a burden that I have to live with and which drives me crazy. My boyfriend was telling me about that museum exhibit of the bodies — you know, with all the skin taken off?”

You mean Body Worlds?

“Yeah, that’s the one. I hadn’t seen it and he was talking about how it’s interesting because people don’t think about death that much. And I said, ‘Who doesn’t think about death that much? It’s all I think about!’”

Well, she’s not dead yet. In fact, Artificial Fire, Mandell’s seventh album, is one of her liveliest releases to date. She describes it as her “teenage” album, a throwback to her days as a restless 15-year-old, wearing black T-shirts in the California sunshine, buying her first X record, and experiencing her first kiss from a boy. She’s never been in better voice, either — on smart, sexy tracks like “In the Doorway” and “Tiny Waist,” she blends country, rock, and jazz in a way that recalls fellow MILF-rocker Neko Case.

“I haven’t changed much thematically since I was a teenager,” she says. “I started out playing electric guitar, which was the present I got for my 15th birthday. And I really wanted to be in a punk band. But then I discovered Tom Waits and realized I didn’t need to be in a band — I could write my own songs and perform them myself and do it that way. So with this album, I’ve kind of come full circle — I feel very locked into these musicians. My bass player’s wife is having twins right now, and now I’m finding out what life is like without him.”

Stories about Mandell always mention her early discovery of Tom Waits and X (supposedly her first-ever musical purchase was a copy of Los Angeles autographed by John Doe himself), not to mention her days hanging out with legendary L.A. music scenester Chuck E. Weiss. So it’s reassuring to hear Mandell admit that not all of her adolescent musical tastes were quite so impeccably precocious. “My dad was always buying records and reading about music,” she says, “so I think that’s where my eclectic tastes come from. But I confess that I did ask him once to buy me a Barry Manilow record. I was also really into Diana Ross around the time of the movie Mahogany. And I know that I was caught disco dancing by myself in the living room many times.

"But it is interesting to go from my dad’s collection of The Beatles, Bob Dylan, and The Rolling Stones and everything that’s in the Top 40 and selling records, and suddenly hear X and go, ‘Oh my God’ and really connect to it, even as a 13-year-old. There’s some condition that Oliver Sacks once wrote about that makes symphonies sound like clattering pots and pans. I think I might have the opposite of that — the first time I heard Tom Waits was around the time of Rain Dogs, and I was like, ‘Whoa! This man sounds like a car! And I love it!’”

Perhaps that’s Mandell’s greatest strength as a songwriter: the ability to see beauty even in things that seem superficially ugly, whether it’s a sunbaked highway, a shag-carpeted living room, or Tom Waits’ sandpaper-scoured voice. Some would call that perversity, some would call it open-mindedness, and still others would call it spirituality. There’s even a song on Artificial Fire called “God Is Love.”

“I’m agnostic Jewish,” Mandell says. “For me, that song is about being completely amazed by this life, and conscience, and the beauty in the world. And what else can you call it but ‘God’? Maybe God doesn’t really exist, but it’s the word we've decided to use to mean love and appreciation. There’s a line in the chorus, ‘Don’t miss the mark,’ which is from Judaism. I’m not religious, and I don’t know that much about Judaism either, but I remember growing up and hearing rabbis use that phrase — there’s not really a word for sinning in Hebrew or in the Torah, but the word that comes closest translates as ‘missing the mark.’ ‘Get it right’ — I like that idea. I think it’s really cool.”

She’s on target so far.

Moviegoer Diary: Freebie and the Bean, 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance

FREEBIE AND THE BEAN

Plot In A Nutshell
James Caan and Alan Arkin play feuding San Francisco cops trying to bring down a local crime boss while also preventing him from being killed by an out-of-town hitman in Richard Rush’s 1974 buddy comedy.

Thoughts
I don’t know why I remember this, but in the first film reference book I ever owned — a copy of Steven H. Scheuer’s once-seminal TV room staple Movies on TV — Freebie and the Bean was one of the few movies in that entire 800-page paperback to earn the “BOMB” rating. I don’t know if there’s any significance to that, except as a sign of just how disreputable this movie was considered to be — in his recent review of the film, blogger and ’70s cinema archaeologist Mr. Peel remarked, “Rarely have I seen a film from a major studio that could be considered truly socially irresponsible.”

But Freebie and the Bean kind of qualifies — the amount of wanton destruction of property in this movie is equaled only by the its level of racism, sexism, and homophobia. And yet Caan and Arkin have such chemistry together and the whole thing is executed with such dirty high spirits that the damn thing is kind of a blast. Who could take any of this shit seriously? In one breathtakingly silly scene, Caan and Arkin even drive their car off the road and crash into an old couple’s apartment — the capper comes when Caan gets out of the car, picks up the phone, and tells the precinct to send out a tow truck. “Apartment 304,” he says, after giving the address. “It’s on the third floor.”

Freebie and the Bean is, for me, a classic case of a film where the plot truly does not matter. I barely followed any of it, anyway — perhaps because I was concentrating too hard on Caan and Arkin’s hilarious nonstop bickering. They’re like feuding brothers in the back seat of the car who can’t stop wrestling each other... except they’re grown men, and they’re in the front of the car, trying to strangle each other while conducting a high-speed chase down the San Francisco freeway. Like most ’70s car chases, the chases in Freebie and the Bean are wild and sloppy and callously destructive in a way that you hardly ever see these days — I’m not sure if CGI is the culprit, or if stuntmen have just gotten a lot more sane in the last couple of decades. You get a sense of real damage being left in the cars’ wake in this movie — blocks and blocks of crumpled fenders, destroyed sidewalk stands, and injured pedestrians. They remind me, of all things, of the climax of W.C. Fields’ The Bank Dick, only with the obviously phony back projection replaced by genuine chaos and carnage. I made a snooty point of avoiding Michael Bay’s obviously trashy Bad Boys 2, but it sounds like it’s actually very much in the Freebie and the Bean tradition. Am I missing out on another guilty pleasure?

Stray Observation
I can’t decide if the climactic face-off between James Caan and a skinny guy disguised (very convincingly!) as a woman is homophobic or not. The character is portrayed as an object of disgust; but on the other hand, he nearly beats up Caan without thinking twice — and in high heels to boot.


RATING: 3.5/5

* * * * *

71 FRAGMENTS OF A CHRONOLOGY OF CHANCE

Plot In A Nutshell
Michael Haneke’s 1994 ensemble drama, inspired by a true incident, about several unrelated people whose paths all converge at the scene of a violent incident in a Vienna bank.

Thoughts
There’s a massive Michael Haneke retrospective going on here in Edmonton right now, which is giving me the opportunity to catch up with some of his films which I haven’t been able to see until now. First up: the off-puttingly titled 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, which I must confess to finding the most opaque of the Hanekes I’ve seen.

The film is sort of a cross between two other Haneke pictures, The Seventh Continent and Code Unknown. Like The Seventh Continent, it shows us a series of banal scenes of middle-class Austrian life before delivering a climactic sequence of shocking, seemingly unmotivated violence. (Unlike The Seventh Continent, though, the violence does not come as a surprise: Haneke opens the film with a card describing the violent act in question.) And like Code Unknown, 71 Fragments paints a tapestry of life in a large European city, contrasting the lives of its comparatively comfortable citizens with the poor and the immigrants living on the margins. (71 Fragments’ most memorable character is a young Romanian boy living on the streets and forced to steal everything he needs to survive.)

I must confess, though, to being a little baffled by what statement Haneke is making with this picture. Is it that you never know when violence will touch your life? (I rewatched JCVD shortly after seeing 71 Fragments, and now I’m terrified to ever set foot in a European financial institution.) But what does the story of the Romanian kid eating food out of dumpsters and shoplifting comic books have to do with that theme? Or the old man and his estranged daughter? Or all the news reports about Somalia, Haiti, and the former Yugoslavia, which serve as kind of a Greek chorus on the action? Am I just being obtusely bourgeois here? Why does Haneke repeat the reports about Christmas in Sarajevo and Michael Jackson’s child abuse accusations at the end of the film? (For some reason, it always seems startling when garish pieces pop culture find their way into Haneke’s cerebral universe — the Michael Jackson stuff here is almost as incongruous as that long clip from a televised Meat Loaf concert that you get at the end of The Seventh Continent.)

Still, 71 Fragments contains at least two scenes that I’ll always remember, both of them unbroken single shots, and which rank among Haneke’s best. One is a dinner scene between a husband and a wife — he tells her he loves her, she reacts with suspicion at this out-of-the-blue expression of tenderness, he’s so annoyed with her that he slaps her, she puts her hand on his wrist in a brief, awkward (and guilty?) gesture of apology, and they silently keep on eating. The other is a hilariously protracted shot of a young man (the only who will later shoot up the bank, as it happens) practising for a Ping Pong tournament with the help of a machine that shoots balls at him in rapid succession. He must whack at least 200 balls before Haneke finally cuts away. Like the very long scene in The Seventh Continent of the couple tearing up tens of thousands of dollars and flushing it down the toilet, the scene demonstrates Haneke’s unusual ability to take incredibly (some would say agonizingly) repetitive actions and sustain the viewers' interest in them far past when any rational director would consider the breaking point.

There’s also a strangely beautiful sustained shot of a Vienna highway in early evening: the sight of the blurry white circles of the headlights of the oncoming cars piercing the blue-black light may be one of the few instances of Haneke lingering on an image simply because of its beauty.

RATING: 2.5/5

The Musicgoer: Serge Gainsbourg's Histoire De Melody Nelson

SERGE GAINSBOURG
Histoire de Melody Nelson
(Universal)
**** 1/2 (out of 5)

An audacious mixture of pretension, sleaze, and indefinable cool that’s uniquely French, Serge Gainsbourg’s 1971 concept album is now available in a new CD edition — and while the music may be digitally remastered, the content is as skeevy as ever. Gainsbourg talk-sings us through the story: one day he’s driving his Rolls Royce through Paris when he collides with 15-year-old nymphet Melody Nelson on her bicycle. (The first thing he notices when he hits her is how her skirt rides up and reveals her panties; the second is that she’s a natural redhead.) They fall in love, they go to a fancy clandestine hotel to have sex, soon after which Melody dies in a plane crash over New Guinea, leaving Gainsbourg behind to soliloquize about their relationship over a series of slow, jazzy grooves. You can practically smell the cologne and Gaulois smoke wafting off them.

It’s the perfect makeout album — provided the girl you’re with doesn’t speak French well enough to detect the outrageous male fantasy it’s espousing. Even if you don’t buy the album, be sure to check out the videos on YouTube featuring the irresistibly homely, middle-aged Gainsbourg squiring the teenaged Jane Birkin around a museum filled with paintings of reclining odalisques.

Make The Number Big, And A Little Bit Crooked

Poppy's Smile Vs. The Eye Of Enraha

I prepared my script for my weekly CBC "DVD Hidden Gems" segment on Wednesday night, after a somewhat stressful, vexing day at the office. The film I planned to talk about was Mike Leigh's brilliant Happy-Go-Lucky, and I felt a little bit ashamed of my inability that day to deal with the minor annoyances of life with the good cheer of Sally Hawkins' Poppy Cross. I've got a strong impulse to behave more like Scott, the driving instructor played by Eddie Marsan, but at least I'm a Scott who genuinely wants to be more like Poppy.

In any case, here's where to click to give the segment a listen.

Moviegoer Diary: The Seventh Continent, Shotgun Stories

THE SEVENTH CONTINENT

Plot In A Nutshell
Michael Haneke’s 1989 drama, which begins as an icy depiction of the routinized life of a middle-class Austrian family — and ends with the family escaping from that life in the most shocking way imaginable.

Thoughts
After talking to Bill Beard about Metro Cinema’s upcoming Michael Haneke retrospective (see the post below this one), I decided to finally watch Haneke’s first theatrical feature, which Bill described as close to a perfect film and which has been sitting for months in a tall pile of movies I’ve been meaning to watch but which I seem to keep passing over in favour of junk like The Last Dragon and Lisztomania.

Now I feel doubly ashamed for having waited so long: this is a stone cold masterpiece, and easily my favourite of all the Hanekes I’ve watched — although I seem to have a slightly different interpretation of it from most of the critics I’ve seen write about it. (And if you haven’t seen it, stop reading now, because there’s really no way to talk about it without spoiling the ending.)

Okay: nothing but spoilers lie ahead. Haneke is utterly scrupulous about not providing any psychological explanation whatsoever for the family’s decision to kill themselves, but most critics seem to interpret their actions as the natural culmination of their numbed-out capitalist lifestyle. In other words, in a world that consists of nothing but empty, routine consumption, what point is there in going on? Aren’t they dead already?

But I think it’s important to note that the family doesn’t merely kill themselves; before they do so, they make a point of systematically destroying all of their possessions first. They sell their car, they smash up their furniture, they rip up their shirts, they tear up their photo albums and snap all their record albums in two, they take a sledgehammer to their aquarium, and — in a scene that Haneke says audiences tend to find especially shocking — they rip up all their money and flush it down the toilet. The scene plays out like a slow, meticulously handcrafted version of the final scene of Zabriskie Point, a thoroughgoing demolition of all the trappings of bourgeois life.

In this sense, I think Haneke sees the actions of the family as heroic as well as horrific. In Haneke’s world, the members of the middle class are guilty by definition and deserving of punishment, no matter how loving or cultured they happen to be — Funny Games is probably the purest expression of this idea. By this logic, the only way for a family like Georg, Anna, and Eve to atone for the original sin blotting their bourgeois souls is to annihilate themselves completely. It’s grim, exhausting work — they feel no exhilaration as they reduce their home to smithereens, and there’s a terrifying callousness to the way they smash up their aquarium and simply let the fish gradually expire on the floor. (Eve’s tearful reaction to this sight is the only moment of emotion in this very long sequence.)

I have a suspicion that David Cronenberg saw this film and was deeply impressed by it: the final sequence of Dead Ringers, which the two twins stumbling around their filthy, ravaged apartment, has much the same mood as the last half hour of The Seventh Continent; and the scene in Haneke’s film where the family witnesses the aftermath of a car accident and then drives through a car wash is echoed closely by a similar sequence in Crash. Actually, I don’t know why more directors don’t stage scenes in car washes, which are some of the most hypnotic locations known to man. Haneke even has the family in The Seventh Continent go through a car wash twice, and you never get tired of it. His first film, and already as shrewd as they come.

RATING: 5/5

* * * * *

SHOTGUN STORIES

Plot In A Nutshell
Writer/director Jeff Nichols’ Texas-set drama, about three brothers who get caught up in an escalating cycle of violence and revenge with the family their late father took up with after abandoning them.

Thoughts
There’s very little of interest in theatres right now, which gives me time to pick off a few more notable titles from 2008. (Be patient, Ballast, The Class, Flight of the Red Balloon, Che, and A Christmas Tale — I’ll get to you guys soon!)

I let Shotgun Stories slip through my fingers when it briefly played Edmonton back in July, even though it starred Michael Shannon, whose performance in William Friedkin’s Bug had knocked me on my heels. I’d liked him in Revolutionary Road too, despite the fairly trite conception of the character, looming over Leonardo DiCaprio in his ill-fitting suit like Lurch the butler, and after seeing Christopher Walken pay tribute to him at the Oscar ceremony, as if symbolically passing the torch to the next generation’s favourite charismatic, dead-eyed weirdo, I figured I should catch up with Shotgun Stories on DVD.

As Son Hayes (his brothers are named Kid and Boy), Shannon underplays things — his outward show of calm creating a nice tension with his character’s poor impulse control. The stereo in Boy’s van has something wrong with it — it’ll be silent for long stretches of time, and then suddenly turn on and blast 15 seconds of music before switching off again. And that’s a good metaphor for Shannon’s performance, and the mood of Shotgun Stories as a whole. It’s a revenge drama, but plotting bloody revenge on their half-brothers is something that takes up only a small part of its characters’ days. Jeff Nichols devotes just as much time to Son, Boy, and Kid aimlessly hanging out, going on fishing trips, and sitting around drinking — it’s like a David Gordon Green film that unexpectedly gets invaded by a Charles Bronson flick every 15 minutes or so.

But then, just as it looks like he’s building up to a climax in which every character in the movie ends up with a shotgun blast through his chest, Nichols pulls the deftest trick of all — that inevitable-seeming conclusion turns out to be not so inevitable after all, and the film ends on a note of unexpected grace.

Nichols’ next film is apparently an adaptation, co-written with none other than David Gordon Green, of Goat, Brad Land’s memoir of the brutal assault he suffered as a teenager, the almost equally traumatic hazing he endured when he joined the Kappa Sigma fraternity at Clemson University, and his relationship with his popular, athletic older brother. Sibling relationships, cycles of violence, all ending in a place of inner peace — I usually don’t like stories about fraternities, but this sounds like Nichols’ kind of material.

RATING: 3.5/5

Can You Survive Two Weeks With Michael Haneke?

Since 1989, Austria’s Michael Haneke has directed 10 feature films, all of them characterized by an icy visual style, frequently shocking images of sudden violence and emotional torture, a laserlike intelligence, a stern, unforgiving moral code, a Hitchcockian talent for manipulating the emotional responses of his audience, and a uniquely democratic talent for enraging populist and highbrow critics alike. It’s hard to imagine a less cuddly filmmaker — and yet University of Alberta professor Bill Beard has spent the last few months in Haneke’s chilly embrace without seeming any the worse for wear.

Along with Marsh Murphy, Beard’s been organizing a complete two-week retrospective of Haneke’s films at Metro Cinema, as well as editing a handy companion volume of essays that will be distributed for free at each screening. (Full disclosure: I wrote the essay about Funny Games, both the 1997 German original and the shot-for-shot 2007 English-language remake.) Complete with hard-to-find titles like Time of the Wolf, 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, and his adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Castle, it’s one of the largest Haneke retrospectives ever in North America. Here's the schedule.

“He was one of those guys I’d been meaning to catch up with for some time,” Beard says, “and I hadn’t really seen a lot of his films until the idea [of a retrospective] came up, although I was certainly aware of his reputation. I had seen The Seventh Continent, his first theatrical feature, and I loved that film. Well, maybe it’s not possible to ‘love’ Haneke’s cinema, but I was certainly strongly affected by it and admired it greatly. I would go so far as to say it’s a perfect film. You’ve got a filmmaker who already seems fully formed, who’s in complete command of his instrument — it’s full of static shots of people going about mundane daily activities, a lot of it without much dialogue, so that it’s almost like a silent film. Which is something only a very skilled director can pull off. It seems like a very cool, detached film in its depiction of bourgeois life, and when you get to where it’s going, it’s devastating.”

Beard suggests The Seventh Continent as a good entry point for Haneke neophytes, or perhaps The Piano Teacher, his intense 2002 character study of a psychologically troubled music professor (Isabelle Huppert) and her twisted relationship with a handsome male student. (Just be warned: there’s a scene involving Huppert and a razor blade that is not for the squeamish.) Perhaps his 2005 thriller Caché would be a more accessible pick — it combines Haneke’s usual indictment of the middle class with a few technically dazzling visual flourishes that must have left Brian De Palma green with envy.

But the truth is, whatever entry point you choose in Haneke’s filmography, you’re in for a challenging, unconventional moviegoing experience. “He’s like Bresson,” Beard says, “in that he has this extremely pure ethical code that makes high demands on people. And this is good, right?, for the very middle-class guilt-ridden art-film viewers who are often the subject of his films! You go there to be punished for all the sins you’ve committed, like having enjoyed the last Bourne movie. There’s a kind of missionary zealotry in Haneke, and a lot of people hate Michael Haneke films because of it.”

Benny’s Video, from 1992, is the one Beard has the biggest problem watching — he has an aversion to seeing animals killed on camera. “But even hating Michael Haneke films is more enlivening than your reaction to most movies,” he says. “You feel engaged by them; you might even find yourself sitting there in the theatre wanting to argue out loud with the movie! Now, I imagine that most of the people who come to this event will be cinephiles who have seen a couple of Haneke films and are excited by the idea of catching up with the ones they haven’t. But even the people who’ve never seen a Haneke film — if I can just drag those guys through the door, I have some confidence they’d be back for more.”

What If Leonard Cohen Wrote Jumprope Chants?

Look out, readers: here comes another installment in my series of Quirky Songwriters On Parade! This week, it's an interview with Justin Rice from Brooklyn's kings of blog-friendly quirk-pop, Bishop Allen.

* * * * *

From its whimsical title (Grrr...) to the colourful block letters spelling out the band’s name to the way the capital G in Grrr... is drawn to look like a cat, Bishop Allen’s new disc looks like something you’d file in the children’s section of the record store. (Record stores still exist, right?) The songs have an innocent, playful pep that one associates with the Grade 3 classroom — the image I’ve been using to describe the songs to friends is that it sounds like the band members all ate an extra bowl of Frosted Flakes before heading into the studio. Even a slower song like “The Magpie” has the feel of a timeless nursery rhyme: “Call him a thief / Call him a crook / You’ll never get back what the magpie took.”

“There’s definitely something in me that’s drawn to schoolyard melodies and chants,” says singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Justin Rice over the phone from Brooklyn, where the band is taking a break from rehearsing for their upcoming tour. (You can get a very brief taste of their live show in the film Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist — they’re the guys Michael Cera’s band is opening for.) “There were certain places on Grrr... where we said to each other, ‘It would be great to have a song here that you could double-dutch to.’ I like songs that feel natural.”

Yeah, maybe “natural” is a more accurate word than “childlike.” Kids would probably get a kick out of Bishop Allen’s bright-eyed melodies, full of handclaps and marimbas and mandolins, but it might take an adult to appreciate the craftsmanship of the songs, their sure sense of structure, and the wit of their wordplay. This is a band that doesn’t waste a lot of time goofing around on the monkey bars: they released 12 EPs in 2006 alone, one for each month of the year. It takes a whole lot of practice, a whole lot of effort to make music that sounds this offhand and effortless.

“We knew we wanted the album to have a lot of energy,” Rice says, “but we didn’t want it to feel overwrought. I think we were trying to give the songs the life they deserved, but not to manipulate them until they felt dead to us. If you work on a recording for too long, you can definitely polish away all the humanity. And I like lyrics that are easy to understand. Or at least, I like songs that are structurally complete — where you can understand the logic of the song without needing some kind of decoder ring.”

But ask Rice to name his idea of a perfect song, and he picks something by an artist who it’s hard to imagine ever was a child. “I’ll give you an example of something I was listening to yesterday,” he says, “and that’s ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’ by Leonard Cohen. It has these lines in them with unusual rhymes, but they’re not awkward: ‘The last time I saw you, you looked so much older / Your famous blue raincoat was torn at the shoulder.’ I can imagine that being the starting point of the song, and then he works around that rhyme and that image, and it ends up being this amazing song that’s about his brother and his lover. And it also takes the form of a letter, so there’s a certain conceit to it that I like, that he’s writing a letter to a specific person. I like the way that song thinks out loud. And having this image of the famous blue raincoat — there are mysteries to that image, but they don’t leave you scratching your head.

“Of course, Lester Bangs once said, ‘All the best rock ’n’ roll lyrics are vacuous’ and it’s best to make your lyrics bullshit, or just empty air. But then I realize that the songs I really like and that we write in Bishop Allen aren’t really rock songs anyway. We’re not exactly AC/DC.”

Moviegoer Diary: Surveillance, Smile

SURVEILLANCE

Plot In A Nutshell
Jennifer Lynch’s offbeat thriller about a pair of FBI agents interrogating the survivors of a bloody roadside encounter with a serial killer.

Thoughts
I have only dim memories of Boxing Helena, the only other film directed by Jennifer (daughter of David) Lynch. What I recall is being aware of its many shortcomings, but also kind of admiring the openness of its fetishistic imagery, and the masochistic bravery with which Jennifer Lynch made a film that she must have known would be compared to the work of her father — probably unfavourably. It’s the same head-shaking admiration I feel for Frank Sinatra Jr.’s decision to become a big-band crooner or Ravi Coltrane’s picking up the tenor sax.

Jennifer has admitted in interviews that she could not get Surveillance financed until her father volunteered to add his name to it as a producer. I’m a little surprised that she had more trouble getting this film set up than Boxing Helena; it's got a much more conventional setup I’d have thought would have made it pretty easy to market as a straight-to-DVD thriller. (Plus, it only has two basic locations, which must have kept the budget down.) I guess Boxing Helena’s reputation remains pretty noxious, even 15 years after it was made.

Make no mistake: Surveillance is a thoroughly ridiculous, pretty terrible movie, but it held my interest all the way through, if only to find out what the hell happened out there on that lonely stretch of prairie road. (The film was shot in Saskatchewan, and makes good use of the province’s featureless landscape and its long stretches of empty wheatfield-flanked highway.) Maybe the knowledge that the film was made by a member of the Lynch family gave it an extra layer of suspense: Surveillance is nominally set in the real world, but who knew what kind of crazy supernatural demonic force from an alternate dimension would turn out to be at the centre of it, right?

Actually, the resolution is much more mundane — and pretty easy to figure out. But even that didn’t bother me, if only because of the way the reveal allowed a couple of the actors to suddenly cut loose in an entertainingly hammy way. I think Lynch errs in making so many of the characters so unlikable — especially a pair of psychopathic cops played by co-screenwriter Kent Harper and sitcom actor French Stewart (!) who spend their days pulling over innocent motorists and subjecting them to mind games that even Matt Dillon’s character in Crash would find a little sick — and the casting of Stewart and former SNL regular Cheri Oteri in thoroughly non-comedic roles is, I think, more distracting than Lynch intended it to be. Lynch seems to have taken a lot of time plotting out the violent roadside incident, and where all the passengers in the three different cars involved are in relation to each other at any given moment, but some scattershot editing in a couple of crucial moments renders some important moments needlessly confusing. (It looks like she wasn’t quite able to get all the shots she needed during filming and had to make the best of things in the editing room.)

I can’t really recommend Surveillance, but it’s certainly a step up technically from Boxing Helena and I find myself really rooting for Jennifer Lynch to find a project that will allow her to step out from her father’s shadow. She apparently has another film in the can called Hisss, which appears to be set in India and is based on an ancient legend about a snake that can turn itself into a woman. My heart’s sinking already at that title, but my fingers are crossed.



RATING: 2/5

* * * * *

SMILE

Plot In A Nutshell
Director Michael Ritchie’s 1975 satire about the contestants and organizers of a “Young American Miss” beauty pageant in California.

Thoughts
I’ve never had strong opinions about Annette O’Toole one way or the other — I think I was just too young to see or appreciate the films she was making in the early ’80s, and even after I got older, I sort of lumped her in with a lot of also-ran actresses of that era like Lisa Eichhorn, Kate Capshaw, and Anne Archer. I remember being intrigued, when A Mighty Wind came out, to learn that she was married to Michael McKean and co-wrote a bunch of songs in the film, including the Oscar-nominated “A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow.” And after seeing her performance in Smile — she was 23 at the time, but she reads as at least five years younger — I’m even more fascinated by her. She seems so much slyer and funnier than I ever gave her credit for being. Or Hollywood, which seemed to write her off around 1987, when she was given the impossible task of making audiences buy Martin Short as a romantic lead in Cross My Heart.

But back to Smile, in which she plays sweetly cynical pageant contestant Doria Houston — she keeps telling the fellow contestant she’s rooming with to cry more and to tell the judges how her father died when she was two, only to smile shyly and say, “That was a horrible thing to say, wasn’t it?” I think her shock at the things that come out of her mouth is genuine, though; she’s smart enough to feel a little thrill of scandal at how she’s unconsciously internalized the pageant’s phony, corrupt values.

O’Toole’s finest moment (and perhaps the most audacious scene in the entire film) comes when Doria gets her turn in the talent competition — in a brilliantly conceived bit, she performs what it essentially a striptease, but disguises it as a morally uplifting speech on the importance of simple, natural beauty. O’Toole never tips her hand once during the entire scene, but you can still sense the delicious calculation behind Doria’s act, which appeals to the D.A.R. types in the audience and their dirty-minded husbands at the very same time.

Director Michael Ritchie walks a very thin line in Smile between satirizing beauty pageants and small-town American boosterism and sneering at them. A montage of pageant contestants demonstrating their talents — which includes a memorably strange, deep-voiced rendition of “Delta Dawn” and a girl whose talent is demonstrating the proper way to pack a suitcase — is probably the closest he comes to outright mockery of the girls. But even in the film’s cruelest moments, you get the sense that Ritchie sympathizes with the characters, or at least recognizes that they’re all doing their best.

Bruce Dern, this blog’s patron saint, has the trickiest role, as car salesman Big Bob Freelander, who’s also one of the pageant’s main organizers. He’s not a very deep or reflective guy — he’s the kind of guy who buys dirty plastic novelty items and joins asinine fraternal orders — and he has no idea what to do when his son or his best friend need help sorting out their personal problems. But Dern imbues this guy with a surprising amount of soul. He doesn’t want to see any of the girls embarrassed or humiliated. But he doesn’t quite seem even to believe in the pageant the way he used to, either, even if the salesman within him keeps him from voicing such thoughts out loud. He’s a guy who’s always selling, selling, selling, perhaps as a way of keeping the emptiness of his life at bay. And when he tries to talk about his own wartime experiences to a couple of soldiers who helped out with the pageant, only to realize they have no interest in anything he’s saying, that emptiness nearly swallows him up for a few minutes there.

A young Melanie Griffith shows up as another pageant contestant, speaking in the same kittenish adolescent rhythms she’d still be using 30 years later. Michael Kidd is very good as the high-priced pageant choreographer brought in to help run the show; he brings just the right mix of matter-of-factness and self-loathing to the line where he observes that his job is to take fresh-faced teenagers and turn them into Vegas showgirls. George Wyner, a familiar face from hundreds of sitcom guest appearances, is a welcome sight as one of the initiates into Big Bob’s secret fraternity — as part of the hazing ritual, he has to kiss a dead chicken’s asshole, which he eagerly does, proclaiming, “I love it! I love it!”

Well, that moment made me smile, anyway.



RATING: 4/5

The Saviour Of A Damsel

Boy, do I love Jennifer Venditti's documentary Billy the Kid, her intimate, funny, and simultaneously heartbreaking and inspiring portrait of young "Billy P," a misfit teenager experiencing first love in a small town in Maine. It was my "Hidden Gems" pick this week on CBC Radio; sadly, the show was running long and my segment had to be a little bit truncated, but I hope the sound clips give you enough of a sense of the flavour of the film to inspire you to check it out.

Not On My Watch

The original Watchmen graphic novel was a landmark achievement, a thoughtful, formally innovative, complexly plotted meditation on heroism, humanity, myths, mortality, and the nature of gods. Director Zack Snyder’s faithful yet inert film version of Watchmen seems destined to be a landmark achievement in the realm of superhero nudity, but anything more than that seems unlikely.

Don’t get me wrong: it’s about time we got a superhero movie in which the sexual content is more than merely metaphorical — my preference is still to see Superman taking Lois Lane on a nighttime flight over Metropolis, but it’s certainly refreshing to see Malin Akerman’s Silk Spectre and Patrick Wilson’s Nite Owl doffing their ridiculous costumes and acting on their obvious attraction for each other. (Too bad Snyder sees fit to punctuate the scene with a juvenile visual gag.) There’s actually a surprising amount of male nudity in Watchmen, most of it courtesy of Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup), a nuclear scientist who gets transformed into a giant, indestructible, glowing blue demigod whose disregard for clothing reflects his growing alienation from the human race. We’re told Dr. Manhattan has the power to “bend matter to his will,” and you can’t help but notice that one of his first orders of business seems to have been to give himself a really tremendous cock.

I’m getting ahead of myself, but the plot of Watchmen is so complicated that there’s really no easy place to jump in. We’re in an alternate version of 1985 where Richard Nixon is still president, and where anonymous crimefighting “costumed heroes” were a common sight in the larger cities — although a law banning their activities eventually drove them underground. One of the most notorious of the bunch, a right-wing psychopath known as The Comedian (who apparently earned his nickname by the same logic that hulking linebacker types get called “Tiny” and bald guys get called “Curly”), became a black-ops mercenary type, and when an intruder tosses him out of his apartment window to splatter on the street below, a psychopathic vigilante who calls himself Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley) suspects a plot to eliminate all costumed heroes is underfoot. That’s two psychopaths already, and we’re just getting started.

As Rorschach follows the clues, we meet other superheroes as well: the superintelligent Ozymandias (Matthew Goode), now a trillionaire industrialist; Nite Owl, a shlub who put crimefighting aside years ago but never found anything to replace it in his life; and The Silk Spectre, whose dissatisfaction with the emotionally frigid Dr. Manhattan steers her into Nite Owl’s arms. There are all sorts of subplots and tangents too — including stuff like The Comedian’s attempted rape of Silk Spectre’s mother and Rorschach’s stint in prison after getting framed for murder, which provide the film with some of its most truly unpleasant moments.

Indeed, I can’t think of another director who can be trusted less with violence than Zack Snyder. On the evidence of Watchmen and his previous film, 300, he seems to have absolutely no sense of scale when it comes to the impact of violent scenes, no talent for making restraint count for more than explicitness, no adult empathy for characters’ pain or suffering, no awareness that his aestheticization of violence makes even the moments that are supposed to be repulsive seem exultant. (He doesn’t even care if the violence makes thematic sense — his mortal characters seem as superhumanly strong and impervious to injury as Dr. Manhattan.) Snyder stages the near-rape of The Silk Spectre’s mother in the same way as his sick jokes about prison inmates getting their hands removed with a circular saw, or criminals exploding, leaving their entrails splattered over the ceiling. He even seems to get a kick out of showing The Comedian shoot a pregnant Vietnamese woman — “That Comedian! What a sicko!”

Snyder and his collaborators probably faced an impossible task with this film. Just to pare Watchmen down into even a three-hour movie required them to take out pages and pages of material — but with Watchmen, density is kind of the point. Density of imagery, density of backstory, density of character, density of theme. Take all that stuff away — all the metatextual stories-within-stories, all the obsessive backstory and alternate history, all the obsessive recurring images and organizing metaphors — and you take away the very thing that makes Watchmen Watchmen.

What you’re left with is a film that hits all the same plot points (minus the ending) as the graphic novel it’s based on, but without seeming anywhere near as challenging or profound or moving. Jackie Earle Haley gives the most memorable performance, but also the most gratuitously graphic scenes and the worst dialogue. Patrick Wilson isn’t bad either — not many actors are as good as he is at playing hesitancy. A lot of reviewers are dumping on Malin Akerman; she’s not great, but then, Watchmen doesn’t exactly traffic in what you’d call progressive female characterizations. And what a miserable experience making this movie must have been for Billy Crudup — months and months of serving as nothing more than a blueprint for a CGI effect, permitted to speak only in a deliberately uninflected voice.

Alan Moore has said that Watchmen grew out of his desire to explore the idea of putting superheroes into the real world. But the world of Watchmen the movie — full of slow-motion, physics-defying fights, CGI-enhanced visual flourishes, and a design team preoccupied with creating living tableaux that duplicate two-dimensional comics panels — is as airless and artificial as they come.

Moviegoer Diary: Black Christmas, Wind Chill

BLACK CHRISTMAS

Plot In A Nutshell
Director Bob Clark’s 1974 proto-slasher flick about a mysterious killer known only as “Billy” who wreaks holiday havoc on a sorority house, slowly picking off the residents and making threatening phone calls to the survivors.

Thoughts
I didn’t plan it this way, but I’ve watched a whole string of winter-themed horror movies over the last week or so — not just Black Christmas and Wind Chill, but also Bruce McDonald’s innovative Pontypool as well as the bizarre but highly entertaining 19th-century cannibals-versus-the-Army picture Ravenous. You’d think I’d want something to take my mind off the ungodly temperature drop we’re suffering through here in Edmonton, but you’d be wrong.

As it happens, Black Christmas is a Canadian production — there’s even a quick shot of Margot Kidder cracking open a can of Labatt’s 50, and it doesn’t get more Canadian than that — and according to Wikipedia, it was inspired by a series of murders that took place in Montreal during the Christmas season. Black Christmas, meanwhile, seems to have inspired almost every fictional slasher killing that has taken place in the movies since then. Here, four years before Halloween, we have all the familiar slasher tropes: the holiday setting, the faceless killer who compulsively re-enacts a childhood trauma, the stalking sequences filmed from the killer’s point of view, the house of horny students, the children singing spooky nursery rhymes on the soundtrack, the girlfriend who keeps getting startled when her boyfriend suddenly appears behind her, the women whose search for a missing animal leads them straight to the killer, the call that’s coming from inside the house. There’s even a shot of a guy in a hockey mask, but since this is a Canadian film, perhaps an absence of goalies would be more remarkable.

What’s missing is the inhumanly sustained suspense that John Carpenter brought to Halloween and the extreme gore of Friday the 13th. Black Christmas, which had a reputation when I was growing up as an absolutely terrifying movie, seems almost chaste these days. The gruesomest scene is probably the one where Billy repeatedly stabs Margot Kidder in the stomach with a glass unicorn statue with an improbably long horn. (Even more improbably, the horn doesn’t snap off after the first plunge into her belly.) But even this scene is staged more suggestively than explicitly — you never see Kidder getting stabbed, just the horn being lifted up and getting bloodier and bloodier. This is not the scariest moment, however — that would be the moment where “final girl” Olivia Hussey sees Billy staring at her through a crack in the door, his eye as huge and inhuman as a ventriloquist dummy’s. She screams and runs away, and there’s a delicious moment where Billy grabs her hair and pulls her back to him that I’ll admit sent a genuine shudder through me.

On the other hand, the fuzziness of Billy’s motivations is frustrating — especially since it was based on a real-life crime. You keep expecting John Saxon’s police officer to stumble across some veteran cop or university professor whose memory will be jogged by the name “Billy” and tell him the whole lurid story about how some kid by that name killed his sister or his mother 25 years ago on Christmas Day but who somehow never got caught. Maybe screenwriter Roy Moore was trying to honour the spirit of the urban legends that this film seems intended to evoke. Black Christmas belongs as much to the tradition of spooky stories about babysitters and hook-handed lunatics, of “Have you checked on the children?” and “Humans can lick too!” as to cinematic predecessors like Psycho and Dementia 13.

I sure was sorry to see Andrea Martin get killed, though.

Stray Observation: The film contains a scene in which the cops try to trace the calls coming into the sorority that’s fascinating from a historical perspective — the guy has to go down to the phone company and wander through long banks of machinery to locate the proper... uh... exchange? Router? Someone help me out here — I don’t know exactly what all this pre-digital technology is called, but in any case, the scene has a lot more visual interest than their 2009 equivalents, with tech nerds sitting around looking at computer readouts.

RATING: 3/5

* * * * *

WIND CHILL

Plot In A Nutshell
Gregory Jacobs’ barely-released 2007 horror movie about two university students sharing a ride home for Christmas holidays — and who must fight off more than just frostbite when they venture off the main highway and their car swerves off the road and into a snowbank.

Thoughts
For the first half of its 90-minute running time, Wind Chill is kind of suspenseful — not because of what’s happening onscreen, exactly, but because you, the viewer, know that you’re watching a horror movie but can’t figure out exactly what kind of horror movie it’s going to be. Will it be a psychological thriller in which the shy guy sharing a car ride with the beautiful girl turns out to be a crazed lovestruck stalker, à la P2? But then comes a scene where the two of them stop off at a gas station where all the creepy-looking locals eye them strangely — maybe we’re in for something like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre or Vacancy, where a couple of city kids wind up in the clutches of a whole backwoods community of homicidal maniacs.

Well, Wind Chill winds up picking a third option, which I probably shouldn’t spoil in case any of you are tempted to rent it. Indeed, for a straight-to-DVD thriller, it boasts an impressive pedigree: it was executive produced by George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh (director Gregory Jacobs is Soderbergh’s regular assistant director), and co-stars Emily Blunt, who’s turned in excellent performances in films as varied as My Summer of Love and The Devil Wears Prada and seems perpetually one breakthrough film away from stardom.

But Wind Chill and Prada make me wonder if Blunt’s true calling is as a romantic lead; there’s an intimidating prickliness to her onscreen presence that reminds me more of a young Catherine Keener. It not like I wanted her to be some kind of dewy ingenue, but her character is so needlessly unfriendly to the guy whose car she’s riding in — a guy who admittedly seems a little on the sketchy side — that she presented a big obstacle in the way of my getting into the film.

Then again, none of this bothered blogger Mr. Peel (whose recommendation inspired me to check the film out in the first place); he argues that Jacobs’ willingness to make Blunt a little unlikable sets the scene for a more satisfying character arc in the final third. Maybe he’s got a point — this last stretch, in which Blunt takes centre stage, the supernatural elements take over and Martin Donovan adds another character to his gallery of sinister law enforcement figures, is probably the most satisfying part of the film.

Well, “satisfying” in the sense of “glad I saw it, not quite good enough to recommend renting it, but hey, if it pops up on cable, why not give it a try?” Dress warm, though.

RATING: 2.5/5

The Musicgoer: Bishop Allen's Grrr...

BISHOP ALLEN
Grrr...
(Dead Oceans)
**** (out of 5)

Bishop Allen have always been known for their facility with bright, upbeat melodies and cleverly crafted lyrics, but the songs on their latest disc, Grrr..., are so catchy, so bubbly, so packed with snappy rhymes and melodic earworms that I imagine a lot of listeners will view it only with suspicion — as an album too easy to like, from a band too eager to give pleasure, too ready to break out the mandolins, the marimbas, the handclaps, too lightweight, too sugary, too funny, too fun.

Maybe Bishop Allen could stand to undercut their lyrics with a little more melancholy, the way Stephin Merritt’s Eeyore voice tempers the playfulness of the songs he writes for The Magnetic Fields. But why shouldn’t they play to their strengths? That effortless tunefulness is part of what I love most about this band, along with their knack for witty turns of phrase like “You know I'm going to write you a letter / Every day, like you were a debtor” or “Book to shelf / And foot to shoe / And likewise I belong to you” that ride merrily on top of the tunes like a rubber duck in a bathtub. That one’s not quite up to Bishop Allen’s standards, but you get the idea.

None of the songs from Grrr... seem to have hit YouTube yet, but here's the video for "Click, Click, Click, Click," from Bishop Allen's previous disc, The Broken String. It's darned infectious!

Verbiage Killed The Radio Star

The film begins, fittingly, not with a face but a voice. The voice — sandpapery yet musical, with the measured storytelling cadences of Ken Nordine — belongs to grizzled radio talk-show host Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie), who starts off talking about a sign he saw that morning about a lost pet, but that’s just a jumping-off point to talk about coincidences and conspiracies, and the way ominous signs and portents seem to cluster around any major world tragedy. As he talks, we see a closeup of the screen of an oscilloscope measuring Mazzy’s voice, the readout looking oddly like the spiky outline of a mouth. Mazzy’s monologue concludes with him repeating the same word over and over again, savouring it in his mouth: “Pontypool... Pontypool... Pontypool.” Pontypool: that’s the film’s title, but director Bruce McDonald (Highway 61, Hard Core Logo) teases you with it, revealing letter by random letter so that the word TYPO hangs there playfully onscreen for a couple of extra seconds.

It’s a cryptic opening, but one that lets us know we’re in for an unusual sort of horror movie, one where sound and language are more important than blood and violence. Except for a brief, eerie roadside encounter at the top of the film, the entire thing takes place one freezing February morning within the basement of a small radio station (actually a converted church) in Pontypool in northern Ontario, where Mazzy, the morning man, is doling out his usual mix of birthday greetings, local gossip, traffic updates, and school closure announcements, injecting as much sardonic commentary as he can convince his producer Sydney (Lisa Houle) to let him get away with.

But all is not well in Pontypool: Mazzy starts getting news of a riot inexplicably breaking out at a doctor’s office, of townspeople tearing each other to shreds with their bare hands. A reporter from BBC Radio calls a bewildered Mazzy to confirm reports that armed forces from Quebec have surrounded the town and placed it under martial law. Eventually, the radio station becomes surrounded by the townspeople (or at least they used to be the townspeople), apparently drawn there by the speakers mounted outside the building. And they want inside.

Pontypool pulls off a clever bit of moviemaking sleight of hand: it’s a zombie movie in which the zombies spend pretty much the entire movie offscreen. Actually, I’m not sure you can even call it a zombie movie, since the people in it are still alive and are therefore not technically zombies — they’re the victims of a virus that get transmitted not through blood or the air, but through language, through certain words that have somehow become “infected.” (Many of the infected words are terms of endearment — too bad it’s Valentine’s Day.) The film becomes surprisingly cerebral in its final 15 or 20 minutes, when Mazzy figures out that the virus takes effect not when you hear an infected word but when you understand it, and so frantically begins inventing new definitions for all the words in his vocabulary. Pontypool has got to be the first zombie movie to namecheck Roland Barthes — I couldn’t quite keep up with the logic of those last few sequences, but it’s definitely refreshing to see a horror movie that concludes with the hero deconstructing the English language instead of dismembering some monsters.

McDonald, working from a script by novelist Tony Burgess, builds suspense expertly, slowly doling out information, sticking resolutely to Mazzy’s point of view so that we’re as puzzled and disturbed by what’s going on as he is. Stephen McHattie (whose lean, weathered face can also be seen in Watchmen as Nite Owl) is absolutely magnetic as Mazzy, whose years of spinning conspiracy theories haven’t quite prepared him to fight off a town full of language zombies.

With its skillful execution of an unusual, provocative premise, Pontypool is a treat for horror fans — how appropriate it would be if they turned it into a word-of-mouth hit.