The Musicgoer: Mandy Moore's Amanda Leigh

MANDY MOORE
Amanda Leigh
(Storefront/Red Ink)
*** 1/2 (out of 5)

I became a Mandy Moore convert in 2003 after listening to her album Coverage, a thoroughly delightful, well-curated collection of covers of classic pop songs, including XTC’s “Senses Working Overtime,” Joan Armatrading’s “Drop the Pilot,” and Joe Jackson’s “Breaking Us in Two.” Now, on her new album Amanda Leigh, she’s written a classic pop song of her own: “I Could Break Your Heart Any Day of the Week,” whose effortless melody and witty lyrics even Stephin Merritt of The Magnetic Fields would be proud to claim as his own.

It’s probably important to say that Moore co-wrote the song; like every track on Amanda Leigh, she shares credit with Mike Viola, a prolific pop songwriter best known for composing all the “Dewey Cox” songs in the John C. Reilly comedy Walk Hard. But this disc is no joke: it’s a lovely piece of sunshiney California pop — Carole King by way of Norah Jones — and despite all the sexpot photos in the lyrics booklet, Moore convincingly sells every last “I’m just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her” lyric. Give the album a chance and, as Moore sings on “Merrimack River,” “Don’t say you’re not amazed when you know you are.”

Moviegoer Diary: Bigger Than Life, Outlander

BIGGER THAN LIFE

Plot In A Nutshell
Nicholas Ray’s 1956 drama about a mild-mannered schoolteacher (James Mason) who gradually turns into an arrogant psychotic when he begins taking cortisone pills to combat a rare muscular disease.

Thoughts
In honour of Father’s Day, which is coming up in a couple of weeks, here’s Bigger Than Life, one of the great scary-dad movies of all time. The scene late in the film, with James Mason, out of his mind on cortisone, keeping his son up way past his bedtime, refusing to even let him eat dinner until he correctly solves a math problem, does an especially uncanny job of captures the mood of those horrible moments from childhood when you simply cannot acquire the skill your parents are trying to teach you, and you can feel them turn the full glare of their anger and frustration and disappointment upon you. Nicholas Ray films the scene in a wildly expressionistic manner, with the lighting low and Mason’s huge shadow thrown against the wall behind him as if he were Nosferatu, but the intensity of the staging feels completely appropriate to the emotions involved. It’s a horror scene. (Bigger Than Life would make a great double bill with The Stepfather, the witty horror movie from the ’80s starring Terry O’Quinn that, like Bigger Than Life, remains tragically unavailable on DVD.)

Mason represents a bit of an odd casting choice in a movie that sets out to create such an all-American setting — his British accent is never explained, and it’s hard to imagine what set of circumstances could have transplanted this tweedy, bow-tied fellow to this Midwestern high school. (Actually, he’s apparently been living there since his teens — he was on the football team in his youth, and if you can picture a teenaged James Mason as a football player, you’re taking something a lot stronger than cortisone.) Still, I think the oddness of Mason’s presence, his undisguisable Englishness, works in the film’s favour, especially in the scenes where his character begins having delusions and grandeur and openly insults his students and their parents during open house night at the school — after all, haven’t those Brits always regarded Americans as yahoos?

Of course, Mason (who produced the film) winds up displaying a level of arrogance that goes far beyond mere British snootiness — most memorably in the scene where he attends church with his family, his arms folded in contempt as he listens to the sermon, even refusing — much to his wife’s horror — to obey the priest’s command to “bow your heads and pray.” Soon after, Mason really goes nuts and tries to sacrifice his son to God the way Abraham tried to sacrifice Isaac — and even though you know that there’s no way a Hollywood studio in 1956 would allow a character to actually follow through on such a plan, the fact that Bigger Than Life merely raises the possibility, that it merely shows Mason breaking off a scissor and making the attempt, is genuinely shocking and unsettling. (Thank God Walter Matthau, in one of his very first film roles, is there to stop him!)

And not even the happy ending can chase the dark clouds away from the implications of this story: Mason’s psychosis might not return, but the emotions that he revealed under the influence of his medication — his contempt for his wife, his disappointment in his son, his belief that he was cut out for something greater in life than a low-paying job as a glorified babysitter — seem rooted in truth. And there’s no pill that the doctors can describe that will make them go away.

Bigger Than Life was a revelation for me — like The Three Faces of Eve a year later, a vivid portrait of the madness lurking just under that Life magazine image of American suburban contentment. It’s the work of a master.

RATING: 5/5

* * * * *
OUTLANDER

Plot In A Nutshell
Howard McCain’s 2008 Vikings-vs.-aliens epic about a spaceman named Kainan (Jim Caviezel) whose ship crash-lands in eighth-century Norway, and who must then unite two warring Viking tribes to defeat the bloodthirsty creature that crashed along with him.

Thoughts
To be honest, I didn’t watch this one all that carefully — I put on the DVD as I was making dinner last night. (I had White Chicken Chili, and I added too much cayenne pepper.) But I have to admit: every time I looked up at the screen, something pretty entertaining seemed to be happening: either John Hurt was hamming it up as an aging Viking king, his grey beard gathered into a pair of majestic braids; or Jim Caviezel was running around a mead hall, stepping on top of the other men’s uplifted shields, like an ancient Norse variation of crowd-surfing; or Ron Perlman was showing up with a bushy beard and a shaved head, like a cross between Conan the Barbarian and Will Oldham, smashing two giant hammers against either side of someone’s skull and crushing his head like a grape. There’s really only one woman in the film, but she’s played by Sophie Myles, who is very pleasant to look at. And the production values look quite high — even the creature (which Kainan calls a “Moorwen”) has an interesting, unusual look, with a long, swishing tail, and veins all over its body that glow an intense, hellish red, like the coils in a really good electric space heater.

It’s too bad Outlander never got a proper theatrical release — it’s not anything special, but it certainly seemed a lot more spirited and entertaining than, say, Terminator Salvation. And I’ve long contended that there is almost no movie in existence that wouldn’t be improved by the addition of Vikings.

RATING: 3/5

The Voice Of Neurosis

Hey, comedy fans: here's an interview with Richard Lewis, the actor, comedian, and world-class neurotic, which I did for SEE Magazine here in Edmonton.

This was one of the more challenging interviews I've done in a while, just in the sense that Lewis is such a talker that it's hard to find places to jump in and steer the conversation, but he's so funny and candid that it's hard to complain. And he was extraordinarily generous with his time — he talked to me for a full hour, and probably would have been happy to talk for an hour more. Sadly, space constraints forced me to leave out the part of the interview where we talked about Curb Your Enthusiasm and his friendship with Larry David, which I figured has been well covered elsewhere. I asked him about David's upcoming collaboration with Woody Allen, Whatever Works, which Lewis hasn't seen, but he had a funny line about how he was forbidden from visiting the set since having Richard Lewis, Woody Allen, and Larry David in the same place at the same time could very well create a black hole of neurosis that would collapse the fabric of the universe.

Here's the article. I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out, so I hope you enjoy it.

* * * * *

“I’m an asshole. I’m an asshole. I am such an asshole.”

Richard Lewis has telephoned me 15 minutes later than he was supposed to, and before I can even say hello, he’s off and running. “I couldn’t get a cellphone signal! I have about 20 antique clocks in this living room alone,” he says, “and with every second that was ticking off, I was... I’ve been sober for almost 15 years, but I was going to go drink over this! I was going to blame Bush — and you! For having set up this appointment!”

It’s kind of an honour to have been added to the gallery of Richard Lewis’ neuroses. Not that it’s all that exclusive a club: fear of intimacy, fear of death, fear of women, feelings of sexual inadequacy, self-hatred, mother issues, father issues, God issues, anti-Semitism, struggles with alcoholism, drug addiction, career woes, money woes, worries about health, hypochondria, his agent, the president, that heckler in the fifth row... all of them have contributed to the hilarious, unceasing howl of torment that constitutes Lewis’ nearly 40-year career as a standup comic.

His trilogy of specials — I’m in Pain, I’m Exhausted, and I’m Doomed — along with his multiple guest spots on Carson, Letterman, and other talk shows, always dressed in black, his hand constantly reaching toward his forehead as if to keep his weary brains from spilling out of his skull as fast as his words were spilling from his mouth, cemented his image in the public mind: The Prince of Pain, they called him, and so they call him still. He once did a guest role on an episode of Disney’s Hercules — perfectly cast as the voice of Neurosis. But arguably Lewis’ best TV showcase are his numerous appearances as himself on HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, opposite his longtime friend Larry David. (The show is shooting its seventh season, and Lewis will once again be a needling presence in Larry’s life.)

There’s a serious side to Lewis’ art, though, if you know where to look for it. In 1995, when he was wrestling with a drinking problem that he freely admits nearly ruined his life, he appeared in two films about alcoholism: he had a small supporting role as Nicolas Cage’s agent friend in Leaving Las Vegas; and a larger, showier part in the well-reviewed indie Drunks as an AA member falling off the wagon. He’s written very articulately and insightfully about his battle with the bottle in his 2001 memoir The Other Great Depression. He's currently working on a new comedy/drama series with comedy pros David Steinberg and Alan Zweibel, and which he hopes will someday show up on one of the cable channels.

Richard Lewis spoke to me earlier this week about comedy, addiction, and his secret optimistic streak. It was a challenge to get a word in edgewise with him, but here’s our (highly condensed) conversation.

Q: You’ll be performing here in Edmonton next week—

Richard Lewis: That’s what they say! That’s what they tell me! I’m 61 — if I get out of bed and don’t have a stroke, I consider it a victory at this point.

Q: I was going to ask you what your morning routine is like. Do you get out of bed and greet the day?

RL: (incredulous) Greeting the day? I don’t think I’ve ever used that phrase. I’m warning the day! Listen — I’ve been in the arts for 40 years, man. I’ve been on the road for 38 years, I’m an actor, I’m an author, I got married for the first time four and a half years ago — my wife is up in the cabin, what she calls “the getaway house,” which is really just a getaway from me. The truth of the matter is, she told me after the fact, once she saw my three-storey house, which is just filled, every inch of it is antiques and artwork and memorabilia — it’s called the museum. It’s an insane asylum, really. Now she works for a charity, urbanfarming.org, which is an amazing thing — they grow gardens in inner cities. Anyway, she loves what she sees here, but the stimuli is so overwhelming to her that she said to herself a decade ago, “If I ever end up with this clown, I’m going to have to get my own house.” And she did!

Q: You’ve built a whole persona on being this “glass is half-empty” sort of guy, but it’s interesting to me that you’ve married this woman who does charity work. And Larry David is the same way — he married an environmental activist. Do you respond to that kind of idealism in others? Are you an idealist yourself?

RL: I am an idealist. Look, I’m not going to beat a dead horse about sobriety, because I wrote a book about it and I talk about it onstage, but I was ready to pretty much lose everything in the early ’90s. But a series of events led me to get sober, and I’ve remained so for 15 years. And the thing that I got out of it was that, other than saving my life — I mean, if I hadn’t wound up dead, I’d have been homeless, I was going down that path... I wish I could drink, I wish I could moderate, but I can’t. So what I’ve gotten from it is clarity — I joke about this, but I’ve got a microscope into my head that lets me despise myself more! But it’s true: I really didn’t have a great upbringing, I really did see humanity for what it was, I really did see the darkness and I was trying to run away from it. Now, I have far more acceptance. Now, I really do celebrate other people’s idealism. And I’m grateful I’m alive. I’m not suggesting there’s anything heroic about this, but when I go onstage and ramble about my life experiences, I know a lot of people in the audience share these fears and phobias, and I’m here to tell them I’m alive to tell the tale and that their life doesn’t have to spin out of control. You know what? Maybe I’m the messiah! I think I might be the messiah! [Laughs.] But you know, even Mother Teresa, they found some diaries of hers, and near the end, even she was not a happy camper. I think you’ve got to be some kind of psychotic to always be walking around in a haze saying everything’s beautiful.

Q: A lot of creative people can get very romantic about their neuroses and phobias and dysfunctions, and they think that if they ever got “healed” that they wouldn’t be funny or creative or interesting anymore. Did you ever worry about that? Is that just a romantic fiction? Or did you just turn out to have plenty of neuroses left over?

RL: Yeah, I had a few stuffed in the freezer. Fortunately for the planet, people like Eugene O’Neill, Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor — a lot of these guys are twisted and have horrible marriages and abuse alcohol throughout their life, but somehow they found the time to put their art on record or write their plays and then go back to these lives that were pretty dysfunctional. I don’t think every great piece of work or every great author or comedian necessarily had a screwed-up life, but it’s fair to say that a great many did. But saying that, I know a lot of great musicians who laid down a lot of amazing tracks while they were junkies and out of control in their own lives but managed to put down songs that will last forever. I’m not putting myself in that group, but I was lucky to be able to get sober and then go back onstage and still realize I had more clarity about how screwed up I was and still am. I have a great marriage, but I still get moody, I can still go to a dark place in my head, but I don’t drink or take drugs because of it. I guess what I’m trying to say is, I’m one of the lucky ones. A lot of people kill themselves or O.D. over these problems. I haven’t so far, and I don’t think I will. To see people make that transformation is such a gift — that’s one of the reasons I stay sober. I might be in a hotel in Edmonton about to do two shows and get a phone call from someone about to take a drink or do drugs, and I’ve got to call someone to tell them to get over there and help this person. I didn’t even know that lifestyle existed 15 years ago. When people ask if [sobriety] has affected my work, I say it’s never been better. I played Carnegie Hall 20 years ago and it was a great night, it was sold out, and I was good — but right now, I am much superior as a comedian. I know my dysfunctions much more clearly, and I can be much funnier about them.

Q: You use the word “clarity,” and I’m wondering what that means in terms of developing your act. My impression is that you’re not someone who takes their material and hones it night after night until you’ve arrived at some ideal version of your act. You seem like someone who’s more about energy and spontaneity, and being in the moment.

RL: When I started out as a young comic, you had to get on Carson. And to do that, you had producers come to see you and watch you do a couple of five-and-a-half-minute monologues. So even though I had a lot of material, I knew I had to get three of these five-and-a-half-minute monologues together to audition for these guys, or nothing was gonna happen. So I would certainly work and hone those routines. But I was always writing jokes — I had thousands of them, stacks and stacks and stacks. This was pre-computer — I’d put them in a security box in case there was a fire in my house. So fast-forward to now, after hundreds, thousands of TV appearances, and I’d never repeat anything on any show I’d do, whether it was Conan or Jay or Maher or Craig Ferguson.

Q: Is that a point of pride for you?

RL: How I work, 38 years into the game, I have about 30 hours of material in my computer. So before a show, I’ll print out the last two, three months of material, I sit in the hotel and just pore over these premises. I’m holed up like a prisoner of war — I hate to trivialize that phrase, but that’s how it is — all I’m thinking about all day is that night’s audience, scrolling through hours and hours of new material. In my act, I used to have a piano onstage and I’d bring this six-foot sheet of paper Scotch-taped together that would literally have all-new material on it. I’d take a quick glance at it and see “fear of intimacy” or whatever, and then I could pop up and do 15 minutes on that. But one agent told me, it looked too much like a work in progress. And it is! My life is a work in progress! If I have a funny argument with my wife today, and I have a show tonight, I’m going to be jotting down thoughts and I know I’m going to come onstage and talk about it. But what I do know — if you see me in Edmonton and then come see me a year later, you’re not going to hear the same act. Maybe remnants of the same topics, but that’s it. There are some comedians you can come back a year later and hear the same act verbatim. I’m not knocking those guys, but for me, that’s not being an artist in the purest sense. I need to tell people how I’m feeling in the moment. If I’m bored, I won’t be as good.

Q: I’m always wary of that cliché of comparing a non-musical performer to a jazz musician, but it sounds like it really does apply to you — just as a jazz artist will improvise over the chords to “I Got Rhythm” or “Tea for Two,” you’ll improvise over a theme like “fear of intimacy” or “fear of death.” Do you listen to a lot of jazz?

RL: Yeah, I do. Charlie Haden, the great upright bass player, is a very old friend of mine. If anyone listened to our conversations, they’d be clueless — we’re all over the joint. He’s said that he grooves on the way I do my standup — he actually wants to tour with me. But he’s such an iconic guy in jazz! I don’t know, though... I’m very flattered, but it would need to be a very special venue. He says he never knows where I’m going to go, and I don’t either.

Q: Are there any jazz musicians you feel a particular affinity with? I mean, you’re not exactly a Dave Brubeck type, are you?

RL: If I’m really on fire, I’ll go right to Miles Davis — except I won’t turn my back on the audience. God, I’d love that — if I had a really bad audience, to just turn my back on them and talk to myself. That’d be really hip. Actually, Miles Davis is maybe too easy a choice. I just sort of feel like I’m in the middle of someone who really respects the spoken word, but also wants the audience to know that if they laugh, if they’re really with me, I’m going to start doing material I’ve never done before. That is the highest of highs for any performer who works like this — to have the audience rolling with laughter over something that never existed before you went onstage... it doesn’t get better than that.

Hex And The Single Girl

Here’s why Sam Raimi is a genius.

There’s a scene in Drag Me to Hell where Alison Lohman is being attacked by a crazed elderly gypsy woman in a garden shed. They’re wrestling, trading blows, tearing out each other’s hair, and now it looks like the gypsy woman finally has the upper hand: she’s got Lohman pinned against the wall, her hand on Lohman’s throat, her bony fingers tightening their grip, choking off the last bit of air to Lohman’s lung. But then, Lohman notices a rope knotted around a wooden beam just within arm’s reach — and with just two or three efficient zip pans, Raimi shows us that the rope is holding up an anvil — an anvil! — hanging from the ceiling, right above the gypsy woman’s head. When I saw Drag Me to Hell, the entire audience laughed with delight at that shot. Sam Raimi must be the only live-action director who’ll actually show a character taking an anvil to the head.

But wait: that’s not the genius part. The genius part is that when the anvil hits the gypsy woman’s skull, her eyeballs fly out of their sockets, stretching out as far as their stalks will allow them, while a couple of gallons of black, foul-looking goop spews from the holes onto Lohman’s face. The audience roared.

And so it goes with Drag Me to Hell, a ridiculous, unabashedly entertaining horror romp in which the laughs and the screams are just about indistinguishable from one another. Aside from The Quick and the Dead, it’s Raimi’s only film with a female protagonist, loan officer Christine Brown (Lohman), who has forgotten one of the cardinal rules of horror movies: never get crazy old gypsy women mad at you — especially not crazy old gypsy women with one eye and snaggly teeth and a headful of malevolent hexes like Mrs. Ganush (Lorna Raver). When Christine refuses to extend her an extension on her mortgage, Mrs. Ganush lays the ancient gypsy curse of the lamia upon her: for the next three days, Christine will be tormented mercilessly by an evil spirit, after which the ground will open and she’ll be... well, read the title.

But that plot is merely a springboard for a series of rollicking setpieces in which Lohman is assaulted by invisible forces, has houseflies crawl up her nostrils, suffocated by a sentient handkerchief, and, in one memorable scene, insulted by a talking goat. Raimi stages these scenes with an impish showmanship that’s impossible to resist — you can practically hear him cackling behind the camera each time that damn gypsy woman leaps out at Lohman from some unexpected place and everyone in the theatre gets startled upright. That may sound no different from the sneak-up-behind-you-and-say-boo! tactics of dozens of hack horror directors, but Raimi’s scares are always staged with an extra bit of cinematic flair, some playful slapstick twist, that leaves you feeling giddy instead of merely tricked. Let me put it this way: Christine owns a pet kitten, but Raimi has a much better use in mind for it than a mere “cat scare.”

There’s certainly nothing deep about Drag Me to Hell (except for the grave that Christine winds up at the bottom of in one scene), but who wants their summer movies to be profound? See it with as big a crowd as you can round up, and watch out overhead for falling anvils.

"The God In Me Just... Evaporated!"

It took me a second viewing to warm up to John Hillcoat's The Proposition. Maybe I shouldn't have watched it on such a sweaty day when I was living in Florida, when the last thing I wanted to be reminded of was oppressive, murderous heat. But now that I'm back living in Edmonton, Alberta, a story set in the sunbaked Australian outback seems almost refreshing.

Not that I'd ever want to spend two minutes in the violent, terrifying world of The Proposition, mind you. Few recent movies have delivered such a convincing portrait of Hell on earth, which bodes well for Hillcoat's upcoming adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, due out later this year. The Proposition is my "Hidden Gem" DVD pick this week on CBC Radio: click here to listen to me try and convince you to watch it.

Even Call Girls Get The Blues

If there’s one lesson I learned from watching Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience, it’s this: if you’re an aspiring call girl, never sleep with a blogger — much less a blogger who reviews escorts under the name “The Erotic Connoisseur” and who tries to sell you on his scheme to fly a planeful of beautiful girls on a “junket” to Dubai by saying, “The great thing about the whole project is that it sounds like it’s a white slavery ring — but it’s not!”

Not being an erotic connoisseur, until reading about this film, I had never heard of Sasha Grey, the porn star Soderbergh has cast in The Girlfriend Experience’s lead role, an upwardly mobile prostitute named Chelsea (or sometimes Christine). Lithe, dark-haired, small-breasted, with luxuriant thick eyebrows and a wry, inscrutable cast to her face, there’s little about her that resembles the vapid sex-doll image of the stereotypical XXX star. Apparently, she’s a big fan of Jean-Luc Godard and once even considered adopting “Anna Karina” as her screen name, after the star of several of Godard’s best movies. She appears to have been cast in The Girlfriend Experience partly for the frisson that her porn career brings to a film whose talk-to-sex ratio is approximately 70:1, and partly for the flat, porn-trained line readings that she brings to the script.

It’s hard to tell, actually, the extent to which Grey’s lack of affect is a deliberate choice on her part, or a calculated effect on Soderbergh’s. Certainly in the film’s first few minutes, as we see snippets of Chelsea on a date with one of her many clients, she seems to barely have a personality at all. She’s not a bimbo, but her banal observations about movies and politics don’t exactly suggest there’s a vivacious sophisticate underneath all those designer clothes.

But is that blank performance part of the point? Chelsea tells a journalist interviewing her for some kind of magazine profile that her job trains her to keep her true self hidden away — if her clients really wanted to go out with the “real me,” she notes, they wouldn’t be paying her. Is Chelsea just one more commodity in this world of expensive hotel rooms and private jets? Nearly every scene in The Girlfriend Experience is some kind of negotiation or financial exchange — it’s set against the backdrop of the 2008 presidential election, and Chelsea’s clients are much more interested in talking about the economy than in sex.

Complicating matters is the fact that Grey’s performance is no flatter than any of her co-stars (save for Glenn Kenny, a film critic making his acting debut, who in his one scene makes The Erotic Connoisseur a sleazeball for the ages). The only other significant character is Chelsea’s boyfriend Chris (Chris Santos), a handsome personal trainer who seems to tolerate her unusual occupation — that is, until she capriciously breaks the rules of their relationship by agreeing to spend a weekend with one of her clients. Soderbergh, working from a script by Rounders/Ocean’s Thirteen screenwriters David Levien and Brian Koppelman, doesn’t provide many clues as to how Chris managed to sneak his way into Chelsea’s well-guarded heart, or what compromises he needed to make with himself to stay in love with her. As in Che, Soderbergh is content to stay in the present, to point his camera at his characters and let the audience come to their own conclusions about what’s going on in their mind.

The approach works better here than in Che, I think, if only because the characters are shallower and their behaviour easier to diagnose. It’s also one of Soderbergh’s handsomest-looking movies; as usual, he’s working as his own DP under the name “Peter Andrews,” and his lens expertly captures the seductive but ultimately cold luxury of Chelsea’s world — every frame of The Girlfriend Experience looks like it could be an ad for very expensive watches or sunglasses, the kind where the models look so sleek and gorgeous that touching them would be as scary as sticking your hand into an X-ray beam.

But you get the feeling that not even the most powerful X-ray machine ever invented could see inside Chelsea. Who is this woman? Does she see herself still having sex for money five years from now? Does she hate herself, or does she take professional pride in her ability to make her clients come just by embracing them? And, most importantly, does she plan on voting for McCain or Obama? I’m not sure even Soderbergh knows for sure.

The Musicgoer: Au Revoir Simone's Still Night, Still Light

AU REVOIR SIMONE
Still Night, Still Light
(Our Secret)
**** (out of 5)

Every time a song by Au Revoir Simone pops up on my iPod, the effect is instantly relaxing. But is “pops up” even the right way to describe the way the music of this all-female Brooklyn trio hits your ears? Perhaps “wafts” would be a better word: with their ultra-feminine, airier-than-Air harmonies, each Au Revoir Simone album seems borne on the backs of clouds. It’s the kind of music that the girls from Picnic at Hanging Rock might have sung, all assembled in their lacy summertime dresses, if their school choir had access to some ’80s synthesizers and drum machines.

Still Night, Still Light doesn’t fundamentally alter the sound they established on their first two albums, Verses of Assurance, Comfort & Salvation and The Bird of Music, so much as it refines it to new heights of dreamy yearning that makes The Postal Service sound like Queens of the Stone Age. Highlights include the hypnotic “Anywhere You Looked,” with its line about wavelengths magnetically pulling you toward your lover; and “All or Nothing,” which closes with the band resigning themselves to “gaze and daze and fall to dream something familiar.” Put this album on before you fall asleep and you might do the same.

Rage Against The Machines

Terminator Salvation is the first film in the Terminator series to take place in the future, and yet its solely obsessed with the past. The action takes place in 2018, when intelligent machines have nearly eradicated human beings from the planet. The only thing standing in their way is resistance fighter John Connor (Christian Bale), whose inspirational speeches and daring raids on robot strongholds are the human race’s sole source of hope. But the machines have an ace up their sleeve: if they can kill the human soldier Kyle Reese in 2018 before Connor can send him back in time (which he did in the first movie), then Reese won’t be able to impregnate Connor’s mother Sarah, which means Connor will never be born, which means the resistance will never exist either. Theoretically, anyway. As Sarah Connor remarks on one of the cassette tapes that John still obsessively listens to every night, “You could hurt your head thinking about this stuff.”

So... the mission of Terminator Salvation is to make sure that the first three movies — which clearly already exist and which we’ve already seen — still happen. In other words, the movie is deliberately designed to do nothing more than tread water; it’s like one of those filler episodes from the third season of Lost — one of the Sun/Jin episodes, perhaps — that do nothing but show you backstory that you’ve already pieced together on your own.

James Cameron has taken a lot of ribbing for the terrible dialogue filling the screenplay of Titanic, but there’s no denying his gift for writing instantly iconic action characters. In Cameron’s first two Terminator films, we got Sarah Connor, the T-800 Terminator played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, the liquid-metal T-1000 played by Robert Patrick — all of them vivid, larger-than-life characters with specific, unusual personalities, even the robots. But John D. Brancato and Michael Ferris, who took over writing the series after Terminator 2, have yet to come up with a single memorable character — and the only memorable lines in Terminator Salvation are the self-conscious reprises of Cameron catchphrases: “Come with me if you want to live,” “I’ll be back.”

The bit that got the biggest audience reaction the night I saw Terminator Salvation came during Arnold Schwarzenegger’s brief cameo as a T-800 prototype: Bale hits him, and Schwarzenegger, completely unhurt, cocks his head at him with that perfect mix of surprise, amusement, condescension, and menace. Schwarzenegger may not have had much range as an actor, but he had movie-star charisma to burn, and he strode through this kind of material with a marvelously unpretentious air of confidence that makes Christian Bale's grim, unrelenting intensity look ridiculous.

The problem is compounded by Bale’s co-star, Sam Worthington, who plays an android who may hold the key to defeating the robots, and whose performance is even more joyless than Bale’s. What this movie needed instead — this is going to sound crazy, but hear me out — is someone like Matthew McConaughey, who starred opposite Bale in the very similar post-apocalyptic dragon-fighting thriller Reign of Fire, and gave that movie a welcome jolt of good-ol’-boy energy.

I don’t suppose there’s a way for the two movies’ universes to cross over, is there? Some unexpected side effect of all that time travel? A Star Trek-style alternate universe, maybe? Aaah, forget it: you could hurt your head thinking about this stuff.

Not Well Curated

Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian marks a sad cinematic milestone: it’s the first film in which Amy Adams has failed to completely charm the pants off me. She plays Amelia Earhart, or at least a wax statue of her brought to life by the magical Tablet of Akmenrah, and the idea of Adams wearing skin-tight jodhpurs and spouting nonsensical 1930s slang while tagging along with Ben Stiller and helping him defeat an ancient Egyptian pharaoh from taking over the world sounds like the most delightful notion ever. Except... it isn’t. The running gag of Earhart’s nonstop slang never catches fire, Adams and Stiller are surrounded by too many CGI distractions to develop any chemistry, and as a character, Earhart seems weirdly out of sync with the situation surrounding her. For crying out loud, Amelia: an Egyptian pharaoh has teamed up with Al Capone and Ivan the Terrible to hold your friends hostage and destroy the world! This is no time to chatter!

I watched the original Night at the Museum a couple of hours before seeing the sequel. I had heard awful things about it, and the involvement of Robin Williams and director Shawn Levy (The Pink Panther, Cheaper by the Dozen) led me to expect the worst. In fact, it turned out to be a decent enough kids’ movie. Sure, it’s a little too noisy, and goes a little too heavy on the CGI, but Stiller makes a good straight man, cinematographer Guillermo Navarro (who also shot Pan’s Labyrinth), gives the images have a handsome, burnished glow, and every so often someone like Mickey Rooney or Ricky Gervais or Paul Rudd pops up to make you smile. I even liked Robin Williams in it.

The sequel offers more of the same, although, like the first film, it’s never quite as enchanting as it ought to be. Battle of the Smithsonian’s greatest asset is Hank Azaria, who plays the villainous Kahmunrah — he’s come up with a hilarious voice for the role, a perfect Boris Karloff imitation, save for the foppish lisp that keeps undercutting his attempts to appear fearsome. There’s also a funny extended cameo by Jonah Hill — his scene with Stiller feels like it was parachuted in from an old Abbott and Costello movie. Mindy Kaling (Kelly Kapoor from The Office) gets only two lines as a tour guide at the Air and Space Museum, but she made me laugh with both of them.

But for every simple, quiet, offhand comic moment in Battle of the Smithsonian, there are six that involve a squid roaming the museum corridors, the Lincoln Monument coming to life, rockets being launched, or an extended reprise of the monkey-slapping scene from the first film. You can’t help but feel the enormous effort it took to make this movie, and yet you also can’t help but see all the missed opportunities: the interactions between Kahmunrah, Ivan the Terrible, and Al Capone ought to be more colourful, too many of the best characters spend most of the film separated or imprisoned, and the big “famous paintings come to life” gag was done better in Looney Tunes: Back in Action.

Amy Adams does look fantastic in those jodhpurs, though.

"Count Your Knuckles." "All Of Them?"

This week, my "Hidden Gem" DVD pick for CBC Radio is the long-awaited Criterion release of The Friends of Eddie Coyle, starring Robert Mitchum, Peter Boyle, Richard Jordan, a bunch of guys in creepy see-through masks, some truly ugly ’70s automobiles, and "Number Four, Bobby Orr, greatest hockey player in the world!"

The film could look or sound more authentic, and I hope my admiration for it sounds equally sincere. Here's the link to click to listen to the segment.

You Got Spoofed

Even as someone who thought Scary Movie and Scary Movie 2 were two of the most loathsome filmgoing experiences of my life, I have to give the Wayans family credit: making a spoof of dance movies is a pretty good idea. And with Dance Flick, they’ve chosen the perfect film to form the spine of their screenplay: Save the Last Dance, starring Julia Stiles as the sheltered ballerina and Sean Patrick Thomas as the black classmate she falls for (and who teaches her some fresh new hip-hop moves along the way).

But what are all these other movies director Damien Dante Wayans — he’s Keenen Ivory Wayans’ nephew — decided to pile on top of it? Take Dance Flick’s recreation of one of Save the Last Dance’s campiest scenes, in which Stiles’ mother dies in a car crash on the way to watch her Juilliard tryout. In Dance Flick’s version, the mother has a bouquet of flowers on the seat next to her, with a tag reading “Megan’s Mom: 1965-2009.” (She’s delivering flowers to her own funeral?) Just as we see the Grim Reaper sitting in the backseat growling, “Die, bitch!” she plows into a Chevron gas truck — except the logo here reads “Cheney.” A few eyewitnesses to the crash appear, apparently to help her, but actually to steal some free gas. Finally, the mother gets free of the wreckage before it explodes, only to be run over by a car with a license plate that says “LINDSAY.” Then she’s run over by another car; the license plate of this one says “BRANDY.” Then a third one rams into her and sends her flying into an open grave. The third car’s license plate, we now see, says “HALLE” — and a black woman in Halle Berry’s Catwoman costume bursts out of it, shouting, “Oh no! Not again!”

Amidst all of this action, Wayans keeps cutting back to the daughter (played by Shoshana Bush) at her audition — she starts out dressed in a leotard, but then switches to Abigail Breslin’s Little Miss Sunshine getup and dances around to “Super Freak.” When her routine is over, she yells, “I’m Rick James, bitch!” and gets a pie in the face. Then she’s told her mom is dead.

The incoherence of this whole sequence is kind of breathtaking. And it doesn’t stop there: Dance Flick doesn’t just jump randomly from Save the Last Dance to You Got Served to Fame (all of which at least belong to roughly the same genre); for some reason, it even finds it necessary to throw in spoofs of Twilight and Black Snake Moan. One character is a lookalike for Hairspray’s Nikki Blonsky, but she never gets to dance a step. There’s a gay character, and Wayans apparently considers his sexual orientation so inherently hilarious that he doesn’t see the need to assign him any jokes beyond that. There’s a blind kid in the movie — he’s supposed to be the young Jamie Foxx from Ray — and even with five Wayanses working on the script, the only gag he gets to do is spill hot coffee into someone’s lap and then walk into an open manhole.

An open manhole! The creative poverty of that joke staggers the imagination. Someone should lose their WGA license over this movie. Isn't this a clear-cut case of comedy malpractice?

Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close

The documentary Anvil! The Story of Anvil was directed by Sacha Gervasi, who clearly realized very early into the filmmaking process that no one will be able to watch his movie — an affectionate profile of the aging also-ran Canadian metal band Anvil — and not be reminded of This Is Spinal Tap. There’s a disastrous tour that sees the band playing shows to nearly empty venues; there’s the girlfriend of one of the band members who’s also their (incompetent) tour manager; there’s the love-hate relationship between the band’s two core members; and there are the nostalgic memories of the first songs they wrote together. (Spinal Tap’s David St. Hubbins and Nigel Tufnel dreamed of doing a rock opera about Jack the Ripper; Anvil’s Lips Kudlow and Robb Reiner — yes, Robb Reiner — wrote a tune about the Spanish Inquisition called “Thumb Hang.”) The band even visits Stonehenge, for crying out loud, and Gervasi even throws in a winking shot of a dial getting turned up to 11.

But there’s a lot of differences between a documentary and a mockumentary — the absence of mockery, for one thing. It would be very easy to make Kudlow and Reiner look pathetic — the former heavy metal gods who once shared the stage with Bon Jovi, Scorpions, and Whitesnake now wearing their Anvil toques as they work crummy construction and food-service jobs in snowbound Toronto — but they don’t seem that way to Gervasi. The film makes it clear right from the outset that these are talented guys who would have been as successful as any of their peers if only they’d had a couple more breaks. (Maybe they should have held out for a deal with an American label instead of signing with Canada’s Attic Records.) To Gervasi, Kudlow and Reiner’s refusal to give up on their dreams of stardom, even as they turn 50, even as Kudlow borrows money from his older sister to make their 13th album, seems downright noble — inspiring, even. They’ve never sounded better, Kudlow says, and he’s probably right.

Kudlow is the heart and soul of Anvil (and Anvil): even at 50, he still looks like the overgrown kid with the goofy, crooked grin we see in old footage of the band in its prime, playing before gigantic crowds in Japan, using a dildo to play his flying V. When the present-day incarnation of Anvil plays a metal festival in England, you can’t help but be won over by Kudlow’s utterly guileless excitement over finding himself hobnobbing with members of bands like Vanilla Fudge and Black Oak Arkansas. And he’s still writing the exact same brand of Helix-style headbangers he was coming up with back in 1981 — and there’s a heartbreaking scene where a music-label executive listens to about 20 seconds of Anvil’s newest record, This Is Thirteen, and shuts it off, tactfully explaining to Kudlow and Reiner that it’ll be a tough sell in today’s marketplace. He’s right, but he’s missing the essence of Anvil’s appeal — Kudlow’s music may not be ambitious, but the band’s dreams definitely are.

Several times in the film, it looks like Kudlow and Reiner are ready to end the band for good: when a club owner in Prague refuses to pay them, when about 10 people show up to a gig in Germany, when 174 people come to see them play an arena that holds 10,000. Even late in the process of recording This Is Thirteen, the album into which they’ve sunk everything they have, an argument results in Reiner all but quitting the band. (A tearfully contrite Kudlow lures him back, though. Seldom have the words “I love you, man” been this touching — not even in I Love You, Man.)

I can’t say I have much interest in buying any of Anvil’s music — not even their forthcoming Juggernaut of Justice album, which contains the first recording of “Thumb Hang.” But I was certainly rooting for them to finally get the taste of glory they deserve. I won’t give away the ending, except to note that even at their lowest ebb, Spinal Tap always had a ton of fans in Japan.

The Musicgoer: Grizzly Bear's Veckatimest

GRIZZLY BEAR
Veckatimest
(Warp)
**** 1/2 (out of 5)

Sometimes you don’t figure out what bugged you about an album until a few months later when you hear another album doing the same thing, only better. Veckatimest, the new disc from Brooklyn freak-folk quartet Grizzly Bear, was recorded in much the same sorts of settings as Great Lake Swimmers’ Lost Channels — in old churches, in cottages near the water, places where you can imagine the band members passing a flask around the campfire every night, practising their harmonies for the next day’s recording session.

Both albums came out sounding lovely, but Grizzly Bear offers much more than the platitudinous prettiness of Great Lake Swimmers. There’s an unstable element underlying every song, whether it’s the shifting, undulating melody of “I Live With You” or the brilliantly arranged youth choir that pops up halfway through “Cheerleader.” The lyrics are hard to grasp at times — the band prefers to write around emotions rather than confront them head-on, repeatedly drifting into the first person plural POV instead of first person singular — and the melodies often feel unresolved as well. But it’s not that the band doesn’t know where they’re going; they just haven’t arrived there yet. And you feel like anything could still happen along the way. The opening line from “Dory” puts it best: Veckatimest is “wildly coherent.”

John Vanderslice Sings Tender Songs Of Gymnasts And Oblivion

Here's a profile of singer/songwriter John Vanderslice that I wrote for SEE Magazine here in Edmonton, pegged to the release of his new album Romanian Names. I've mentioned this interview to a few friends, and none of them have ever heard of Vanderslice before, which worries me that I'm devoting a lot of space in this week's issue to an artist no one in this city is aware of. Oh well — he's a tremendously cool fellow and spoke very articulately about intangibilities like the "sound" of an album and the difficulties of being in love. Plus, Romanian Names is an excellent disc that deserves the extra publicity. Hope you enjoy the interview!

* * * * *

Back in February, the music website Stereogum interviewed John Vanderslice about the progress he was making on his forthcoming album Romanian Names. At the time, Vanderslice said one of his big goals for the record — his seventh — was to make a complex but swift-moving pop record on which every song was less than three minutes long. (The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour was one of the reference points he kept coming back to.) Well, Romanian Names arrived in stores this Tuesday, and of the 12 tracks on the album only five of them come in under 180 seconds. What happened, John?

“I fucked up,” he says over the phone from his home base of San Francisco. “I think I’m just too much in love with intros and outros. If I’d just cut those, I’d have been safe. And the thing is, I really did want everything to be under three minutes! It was one of those constraints that you put yourself under as an artist to shake up your usual way of doing things and change the way you work.”

And it’s not like Romanian Names wound up as some sprawling exercise in self-indulgence either. If it’s not quite Magical Mystery Tour, there certainly aren’t any “Revolution 9”s on the album either. The lyrics are focused, the sound somehow full of texture but clean at the same time — when I tell Vanderslice it reminds me of Midlake’s The Trials of Van Occupanther, he agrees enthusiastically and goes me one better by comparing the track “C&O Canal” to Steely Dan. “I wanted to have that sense of very accomplished players playing very simple music,” he says.

Vanderslice has some of the most sensitive ears in indie rock — his San Francisco recording studio Tiny Telephone has hosted such bands as Okkervil River and Beulah, and he’s helped produce records for Spoon and The Mountain Goats. (He was the guy, in fact, who helped The Mountain Goats make the transition from their raw, primitively recorded early albums to more polished but no less urgent discs like We Shall All Be Healed and The Sunset Tree.)

“I definitely go into each record with strong ideas of how I want it to sound,” he says, “especially when it comes to the role of distortion. That’s almost the key designator of rock ’n’ roll energy: distorted instruments, distorted guitars. Distortion is almost a smearing device that changes the balance of every single instrument; it’s a very powerful tool as long as you know what you’re doing. Emerald City, the record I made before Romanian Names, was very, very distorted — we didn’t have to do many overdubs on it because the distortion kind of knocked out everything else. The record before that, Pixel Revolt, we set out to make a very harmonious, baroque orchestral pop record. And on this one, we knew we wanted to make it a very hi-fi recording. We wanted it to sound really precise.”

Ironically, though, the songs themselves are about disharmony, about pieces not fitting together: if Vanderslice had to slap a label on it, he’d call Romanian Names an album about the difficulties of being in love. “And not just in love,” he says. “It’s about the difficulties of being in human relationships in general. There are songs like ‘D.I.A.L.O.’ which is about a sort of disturbing mentor-like relationship. I do think it’s difficult to be in love, though. It’s a very valuable and sweet human construct, but it’s very problematic too!”

If people find love in Romanian Names, it’s a fleeting thing — the title track is a short, heartbreaking tale of an Olympic gymnast too dedicated to her training to allow romance into her life. Instead, music itself seems like a more reliable source of joy as far as Vanderslice is concerned: the harsh pulse of the nyckelharpa that runs through “Hard Times” or the West African-inspired percussion on “C&O Canal.”

“It’s like that Art Deco lamp you scored at the antique store,” he says, “and which makes you so happy every time you look at it — you think, ‘I’m so lucky to have found that.’ There are only so many chords to choose from and a finite number of melodic progressions you can make, but sometimes you find just the right combination, and it’s so easy, you didn’t suffer over them, you didn’t have to re-record them, it just happened. Those songs are maybe one out of 10. For some reason, on this record, ‘Oblivion’ really makes me happy.”

“Oblivion makes me happy”: in some ways, it’s the perfect Vanderslice lyric. Hell, I half-expect to see it inscribed on the family crest.

Liverpool, I Love You (But You're Bringing Me Down)

The first image we see in Of Time and City is the screen in a vintage movie palace, the curtains closed, the footlights bathing them in a pregnant red glow. The first sound we hear is director Terence Davies reciting A.E. Housman’s famous lines from A Shropshire Lad — the ones about “those blue remembered hills... those happy highways where I went, and cannot come again.” And then, as the melancholy strains of Liszt’s “Consolation No. 3” play on the soundtrack, the curtains part, and footage of Davies’ home town of Liverpool takes over the screen. You can travel those highways again, it seems, if you can call watching scratchy black-and-white newsreels traveling — and if you can call those grimy Liverpool streets “happy.” Later in the film, Davies mentions British building designers’ singular talent for the dismal; by that criterion, Liverpool is the architecture capital of the United Kingdom.

Of Time and the City was one of several projects commissioned by the City of Liverpool after it was named the first European Cultural Capital in 1998. But as anyone who’s seen his films Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes will know, if you want someone to write a love letter to Liverpool, Davies is emphatically not the man you want to hire. (He doesn’t even like The Beatles, for God’s sake — he dismisses their music as so much mindless “yeah yeah yeah.”) No, Davies’ chief memories of Liverpool are of the cheerless childhood he spent in grim row houses — although, as a homosexual living in a working-class Catholic neighbourhood, his adolescence wasn’t much happier. Occasionally the monotony would be relieved by trips to the beach (the meagre pleasures of which Davies describes here in witheringly precise detail), but his only real sources of joy were the poetry of Keats and Shelley (which his narration quotes at length), the music of Mahler and Bruckner, and the glorious Hollywood movies that he devoured at the local cinema.

But if Davies has little patience for Liverpool’s institutions — the church, the schools, the monarchy — he does find something to love in the faces of the people who inhabit it. One of the few contemporary pop songs he plays approvingly in the film is “Dirty Old Town” by The Pogues, with its lyrics about dreaming a dream by the old canal, kissing a girl by the factory wall, and smelling the spring on the smoky wind — in other words, glimpsing beauty even in the grimiest location. Of Time and the City’s most moving sections are Davies’ montages of children playing in the street or young people dressed up on Saturday night to hit the bars — he sets these sequences to some of Mahler and Sibelius’ most soaring melodies, in a way that ennobles his subjects instead of diminishing them.

The film Of Time and the City most resembles is Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg, another deeply personal film about a director’s relationship to the somewhat shabby town where he grew up. (Both films even open with rhyming shots of train travel.) Maddin’s film is more fanciful, more forgiving of his city’s faults, and ultimately more likable, Davies’ grouchy wit has much to recommend it too — I especially savoured his line about how The Beatles made the previous generation of pop songs sound “as antiquated as antimacassars or curling tongs.”

What a missed opportunity that Edmonton didn’t try commissioning a similar project during our stint as Canada’s official cultural capital! I doubt any director could have gotten away with producing something as acerbic and iconoclastic as Of Time and the City, but I would’ve liked to have seen someone like Trevor Anderson make the attempt. Care to try anyway, Trevor?

"You Can't Get A Job Without A Job."

It's true: the final scene of Wendy and Lucy brought me to tears... and Edmonton AM host Ron Wilson will not stop ribbing me about it. But come on: that ending is devastating!

Kelly Reichardt's superb exercise in homegrown American (neo-)(neo-?)realism is my "Hidden Gems" pick this week. Here's where to click to hear the segment.

Also, the link to last week's CBC segment (a review of Galaxy Quest pegged to the release of J.J. Abrams' Star Trek) is now working, so give that one a listen as well while you're here.

The Vatican Vs. The Large Hadron Collider

Angels & Demons contains my favourite onscreen caption of the year: “The Necropolis: 11:15 p.m.” It also contains my favourite location switch since, like, forever, when director Ron Howard whisks us from The Vatican, where the College of Cardinals is meeting to select a new pope, to — of all places! — the Large Hadron Collider, where scientists are about to whip up a cylindrical tube full of precious antimatter. But the scientists’ joy will be short-lived, because just minutes later, a thief breaks into the lab and steals the antimatter cylinder. Before we have time to even catch our breath, we’re off to Harvard University, where symbology professor Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) is doing laps in the pool.

How these three events will link up — and how they all relate to Raphael, Bernini, Galileo, the Illuminati, an orphaned Irish priest (Ewan McGregor), the oxygen-free rooms of the Vatican archives, a leggy “integumental physicist” (Israeli actress Ayulet Zurer), four kidnapped priests, five branding irons, several dozen cardinals, an exploding helicopter, an exploding car, a plot to murder the pope, a severed eyeball, and a whole lot of conveniently placed surveillance cameras — is the substance of Angels & Demons, which sounds a whole lot more exciting (and appealingly nutty) than it actually is.

In fact, the film really only sparks to life near the insane penultimate sequence, when Ewan McGregor’s character takes a more central role in the action — I don’t want to give anything away, but Angels & Demons contains the most memorable Catholic skydiving sequence since those nuns jumped out of the airplane without wearing parachutes in Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely.

For most of the rest of its running time, I’m sad to say, Angels & Demons takes itself way too seriously — Ron Howard, who also directed The Da Vinci Code, really seems to think Dan Brown’s pulpy thrillers deserve the classy prestige-picture treatment, and he doesn’t permit himself or Tom Hanks even a momentary wink to the camera. Give me Nicolas Cage’s National Treasure movies any day — they may be a shameless ripoff of the Dan Brown formula, but at least they have a healthy willingness to own up to their own ridiculousness. Let me tell you, it’s a whole lot more fun watching Helen Mirren jauntily slum her way through National Treasure: Book of Secrets than it is to see Armin Mueller-Stahl and Stellan Skarsgard grimly trotting out their stock performances in yet another big-budget international thriller. (Although it’s pretty amusing to hear Skarsgard greet Hanks by grumbling, “Oh good... the symbologist is here.”)

The underlying premise of Dan Brown’s books — there’s evidence of a massive, ancient conspiracy in our very midst, which you can detect if you only know how to decode the symbols — isn’t hard to understand. But when his stories are transferred to film, their ticking-timebomb scenarios are weighed down by pages of expository dialogue about ambigrams and Vatican history that not even a screen performer as natural as Tom Hanks can make dramatic.

The movie that Angels & Demons reminds me of most is, weirdly, the 1989 flop The January Man — in that one, it was Kevin Kline on the trail of a serial killer who was using some kind of code based on prime numbers and musical notation to determine where and when he’d strike next. I’m not sure why that was supposed to be dramatically interesting, anymore than why I’m supposed to get excited by all those statues pointing in the direction of the next clue in Angels & Demons.

Or were they pointing at the screening room next door? That’s where Star Trek was playing — and don’t think I wasn’t tempted to play symbologist and follow the clues to a livelier movie.

Moviegoer Diary: The Last Movie, Fatso

THE LAST MOVIE

Plot In A Nutshell
Dennis Hopper’s 1971 flop about a stuntman on a Western being filmed in Peru who stays behind after the shoot is over, and watches as the lingering influence of the Hollywood visitors corrupts the townspeople.

Thoughts
I suppose it says something about my contrarian streak that I’ve never been too interested in seeing Easy Rider but I’ve long been determined to track down The Last Movie — especially after reading the crazy stories about it in Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. My favourite involves a documentary about Hopper called American Dreamer that Kit Carson and Larry Schiller were making during the protracted editing process of The Last Movie; supposedly Carson and Schiller wanted to film Hopper walking naked through downtown Los Alamos, which Hopper agreed to do — provided that in return, they organized an orgy for him with “50 beautiful girls.” (Hilariously, it was during this party that Universal executive Ned Tanen arrived to talk to Hopper about his progress on The Last Movie.)

Sadly, despite some interesting quasi-Herzogian themes about the reckless inauthenticity of the filmmaking process and the battle between civilization and savagery (a battle that heavily favours savagery), The Last Movie is a formless mess. I’m not surprised that it took Hopper so long to edit the picture — when you’ve got a lot of vaguely expressed themes and no narrative whatsoever, your options when you arrive in the editing room are pretty much limitless. The movie is so casually structured that it’s 13 minutes into the film before the words “a film by Dennis Hopper” appear... and then another 13 before “THE LAST MOVIE” shows up onscreen. It takes even longer than that before we get a properly shaped scene — although the footage of Samuel Fuller, playing himself as the director of the movie-within-the-movie, barking orders left and right is fairly entertaining.

According to Biskind, Hopper originally wrote the part for Montgomery Clift, and indeed, the movie might have made more sense with an older actor in the lead — a man at the end of his career, looking to start over someplace unspoiled, only to find that his very presence corrupts everything he sees. With Hopper playing the role, the character never quite computes — sometimes the guy feels like a wide-eyed innocent, tongue-tied around his elders, and other times he’s a brute who doesn’t hesitate to beat up his Peruvian girlfriend when she fails to show him the proper respect.

The tone of the film keeps shifting as well: the shots of the Peruvian villagers “shooting” their own film with cameras made out of wicker but real violence, are like something out of Alejandro Jodorowsky. (In fact, Biskind says Hopper showed a rough cut of the film to Jodorowky, hoping for his approval, and was bitterly disappointed when the El Topo creator dismissed it as a conventional Hollywood product.) But Hopper also throws in a few Godardian touches: at a couple of points in the action, title cards reading “SCENE MISSING” are thrown up on the screen, and instead of the climax we’re expecting (an ending that bears a strong resemblance to The Wicker Man, released two years later), we get a protracted coda that seems to consist of outtakes and footage of the actors clowning around between takes. Hopper the actor seems to have lost interest in the film along with Hopper the director: “I wanna get this thing over with,” he mutters. “I got a lot of things I want to do.”

Me too — let’s move on.

RATING: 1.5/5

* * * * *
FATSO

Plot In A Nutshell
Bittersweet comedy/drama from 1980 — Anne Bancroft’s sole film as writer/director — starring Dom DeLuise as an overweight Italian man fighting a losing battle against his expanding waistline.

Thoughts
I had heard good things about Fatso, and decided to check it out following the death of Dom DeLuise last week. The film begins, ghoulishly enough, with a funeral — this one for DeLuise’s even more overweight cousin Sal. The entire sequence epitomizes the delicate tone Bancroft achieves throughout the film, a tricky balance of wild humour (not unlike what you’d find in the films of her husband Mel Brooks) and realistic, grounded performances. There’s a wonderful bit, for instance, where DeLuise goes into the kitchen during the wake; he’s weeping, but at the same time, he’s stirring the gigantic pot of sauce bubbling on the stove, tasting it and adding pepper in between sobs. The scene could easily have been played much more broadly — and God knows DeLuise is capable of going broad — but instead it feels both funny and convincingly in character. (Actually it’s Bancroft herself, playing DeLuise’s sister Antoinette, who goes broad in this sequence — she has a fearlessly funny bit where she starts screaming at the dead guy in the casket before collapsing in tears. Italians! They’re an emotional bunch!)

There are a couple of sequences where you can’t help but wonder if a few of Brooks’ suggestions found their way into the finished product. I’m thinking especially of a scene where DeLuise has put padlocks on the refrigerator and all the kitchen cupboards and told his brother (Ron Carey, a Brooks regular) not to open them, no matter how hard he begs. (Shades of Young Frankenstein, right?) An uproarious scene follows in which DeLuise wakes Carey up in the middle of the night and threatens him at knifepoint to cough up the keys. Carey is able to shame him into dropping the knife — whereupon he picks up the knife and starts chasing DeLuise around with it, outraged that he’d pull a knife on his kid brother. Then, when Carey calms down and drops the knife, DeLuise picks it right back up and starts demanding the keys again.

It should be said that Bancroft doesn’t direct this scene the way Brooks would — instead of shoving the camera in the actors’ faces, she keeps her distance and lets the action play out in a couple of long, unbroken takes. The same goes for the bit where DeLuise is visited by a couple of guys from “Chubby Checkers,” the weight-loss support group he’s joined. They’re supposed to talk him out of his urge to binge, but the three of them get so worked up talking about the food they want that they all wind up pigging out together. (“Get the honey!” the biggest one tells Carey, his bulk casting an eclipse-sized shadow over his face.)

Fatso may be the most humane American comedy ever made about being overweight. (Jeff Garlin’s I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With is another contender, but it’s not nearly as funny.) DeLuise is a revelation here, so disciplined in his performance, especially in a bitter, climactic monologue where he shouts at a picture of his dead mother, accusing her of turning him into a pathetic fatso. And his relationship with Lydia (Candice Azzara), the pretty proprietor of a neighbourhood antique store, is very sweet. She sells gemstones, and there’s a small pun in the fact that her favourite is apatite. But like everything else in this buried treasure, Bancroft doesn’t push the joke very hard.

RATING: 4.5/5

The Musicgoer: Akron/Family's Set ’Em Wild, Set ’Em Free

AKRON/FAMILY
Set ’Em Wild, Set ’Em Free
(Dead Oceans)
**** (out of 5)

“Akron/Family is neither from Akron nor a family: discuss.” Well, I’ll give it a shot — while it’s true that the members of this American freak-folk band live in New York and Pennsylvania, their new album Set ’Em Wild, Set ’Em Free sounds very much like the work of a family unit. But not some well-drilled showbiz family like the Jonases, the Jacksons, or the Osmonds; this album sounds like it emerged from some backwoods encampment of true believers, a commune where everyone works the land, eats their meals together, and calls each other “brother” and “sister” even if they’re not related by blood. And where they have access to excellent recording equipment.

As the title suggests, this is an unruly album, with homespun gospel harmonies frequently giving way to angular noise-rock. Occasionally, that approach results in patience-testers like the rambling “Gravelly Mountains of the Moon,” but more often you get songs like “River” or “Many Ghosts,” spiky hymns to the beautiful American landscape and the lost souls roaming through it. And “Last Year” — whose sole lyrics, repeated over and over are “Last year was a hard year for such a long time / This year’s gonna be ours” — is the most moving album-ender of 2009.

12 Exasperatingly Talkative Men

The 1957 film version of 12 Angry Men has one of my favourite movie endings ever. We’ve just spent about 90 minutes inside a cramped jury room as one lone man (Henry Fonda, in his quintessential “humble liberal crusader” role) convinced his fellow 11 jurors to change their votes from “guilty” to “not guilty.” It was a slow, painstaking process, full of exasperating arguments and emotional confrontations, but at the end of it, everyone in the room knows they’ve done the right thing and prevented a miscarriage of justice. Now Fonda is making his way down the courtroom steps, enjoying his first breath of fresh air, when the birdlike old man who was Fonda’s first ally in the jury room approaches him. “Hey, what’s your name?” he asks.

“Davis,” Fonda replies.

“My name’s McArdle.” An awkward pause. “Well... so long!”

After all the sweaty, dramatic angst that has preceded it, the quick, unpretentious, offhandedness of that exchange gets a laugh out of me every time. (And I’ve watched 12 Angry Men a lot, probably at least once for every juror.) But there’s very little that’s offhanded or unpretentious (or quick) about 12, a new Russian adaptation of 12 Angry Men directed by Nikita Mikhalkov, who also plays the quietly philosophical jury foreman. This version is two and a half hours — a full hour longer than Sidney Lumet’s original — and it has what feels like at least three endings, none of them an improvement on the one Lumet and screenwriter Reginald Rose came up with.

In Mikhalkov’s version, the young man accused of killing his father is Chechen, not Puerto Rican, and some of the occupations of the jurors has been changed — for instance, the glib Madison Avenue ad man is now a mama’s boy TV executive, the salesman with tickets to a baseball game burning a hole in his pocket is now a musician whose troupe is leaving on tour that night. The action in the Russian version also takes place in a school gymnasium. But the main story points are still here: the gradual winning over of the other jurors, some swayed by logic, some by emotion; the Dogville-style re-enactment of the crime; the Encyclopedia Brown dismantling of seemingly ironclad evidence of the defendant’s guilt.

So what’s that extra hour made of? Pretty unnecessary stuff, mostly. But while I was generally willing to put up with all the garrulous Russian crosstalk, with all the stagy business with the lights symbolically cutting out or the bird that somehow gets into the room and starts flying symbolically around, and even with the lengthy showpiece monologues that Mikhalkov gives to nearly every actor in the cast, Mikhalkov’s decision to repeatedly cut away to shots of the defendant in his cell and to flashbacks to his childhood seemed not just sentimental, not just redundant, but a blatant violation of the spirit of the material. 12 Angry Men is a story about deduction, about evaluating faces and piecing together bits of evidence to arrive at sound conclusions. It’s about thinking for yourself. No version of 12 Angry Men should begin the way this one does, with a dream sequence taking place in the defendant's imagination.

Still, the underlying architecture of this story is so sound that it remains gripping and entertaining, even in as protracted a form as we get here. Mikhalkov’s cast is highly watchable — he must have told his casting director to find him every pudgy, voluble, out-of-breath middle-aged actor in Russia — and every half hour or so, he throws in a memorable visual image (like a juror finding a piano stowed away in a metal cage and sticking his hands between the bars to play it). I’d say it’s worth seeing, but you wouldn’t need to be Henry Fonda to convince me to change my vote.

"Ducts. Why Is It Always Ducts?"

In honour of this weekend's release of J.J. Abrams' Star Trek prequel, I devoted this week's CBC Radio "Hidden Gems" segment to the wonderful 1999 comedy Galaxy Quest, which does the rare trick of both spoofing cheesy sci-fi TV shows like Star Trek, Space: 1999, Buck Rogers, and The Starlost, but also affectionately honouring the irresistible appeal of their flimsy plywood sets and the sometimes wooden actors who appeared in front of them.

Click here to listen to the segment on your computer... and don't feel obligated to repeat all my sentences after me. It's really not necessary.

Freed Enterprise

The script ticks off the obligatory Star Trek moments one by one. McCoy exclaims, “Dammit, I’m a doctor, not a physicist!” Spock murmurs, “Fascinating.” During a climactic crisis, Scotty tells the bridge that the ship is “giving everything she’s got!” Characters are transported out of trouble spots at the last possible moment, Kirk hangs by his fingertips from at least three different cliffs, ledges, and unprotected catwalks, and somewhere in there, he even finds time to sleep with a sexy green-skinned alien chick.

So why, this time, five TV series and 10 movies into the franchise, does this reboot of Star Trek feel so fresh and entertaining — entertaining for perhaps the first time since the scenes between Data and the Borg Queen in First Contact? It’s not just that the cast is younger and sexier, although that helps. It’s that the people behind the camera — director J.J. Abrams and screenwriters Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci — feel young as well. They respect the Star Trek universe, but except for the scenes where Leonard Nimoy turns up as a time-traveling future version of Spock, they aren’t weighed down by the stifling reverence for the past that’s been suffocating every incarnation of Star Trek for nearly a decade now. Their sense of humour is smarter and hipper — they even come up with a genuinely funny joke about Chekhov’s inability to pronounce his “V”s. Watching this new Star Trek is like feeling years of creakiness and talkiness fall away. During the closing credits, the camera whip-pans across light years in seconds, as if hyperactively searching where to take these characters next.

Ah yes, the characters. Abrams has always had an expert eye for casting unknown but incredibly charismatic young actors, and Chris Pine, who plays Kirk, is a terrific discovery. He’s ruggedly handsome without being a pretty boy, he has superb comic timing (even selling a dubious-on-paper bit where a reaction to some medication causes Kirk’s hands to swell to twice their normal size), and in the final few scenes on the bridge, he even gives an uncanny William Shatner inflection to the name “Bones.”

Zachary Quinto — Sylar from Heroes — finds the poignancy in Spock, a brilliant young man whose cool, logical composure always betrays barely susceptible hints of uncertainty lurking just below the surface. Karl Urban downplays the campier aspects of McCoy and makes him a figure of strength, a much-needed counterbalance to Kirk and Spock’s more extreme personalities. And Simon Pegg is a great scene-stealer as Scotty, entering the movie halfway through and providing it with a shot of energy just when it needs it most.

The film’s main weakness is the villain, a renegade Romulan named Nero (Eric Bana) who blames Spock and the Federation for allowing his home planet to be destroyed and who now is determined to destroy their planets in return so that they can share his pain. Bana’s not bad in the role, but there’s still something missing from this character — maybe we need to flashback to the moment where he experienced the pain he now wants his enemies to feel. Or maybe he needed a more satisfying demise, something that summed up his character better than having his ship blow up. Maybe the Star Trek franchise in general just needs to come up with a story once in a while that doesn’t end with a villain’s spaceship blowing up.

And this film makes me think Star Trek is now in the hands of people who can devise some fresh adventures for its crew. This film keeps things light-hearted — there’s a surprising amount of comedy in it, and a subplot about Enterprise commander Admiral Pike (Bruce Greenwood) getting brutally tortured by Nero is kept decorously offscreen — but that tone seems appropriate for the first adventure with this fresh-faced cast.

It’s the first Star Trek movie ever where the characters are genuinely young and sexy, and that feels like something very new for the series — Abrams even sets up a very interesting love triangle between three of the major characters. At the end of the film, after the Enterprise has made a narrow escape from seemingly certain destruction, and as Abrams’ camera shows us the relieved faces of Kirk, Sulu, Chekhov, Uhura, and all the rest, the first thought that went through my head was, “Man, as soon as they get off-duty, these people are going to be having a whole lot of amazing sex.” Star Trek has been in such an autumnal mood for so very long, it’s a pleasure to see its characters coming down with a little spring fever.

Moviegoer Diary: Tony Manero, Tyson

TONY MANERO

Plot In A Nutshell
Writer/director Pablo Larrain’s 2008 character study, set against the backdrop of Pinochet-era Chile, about a middle-aged man obsessed with the film Saturday Night Fever and determined to win a TV variety show’s “Tony Manero lookalike contest.”

Thoughts
I don’t know if the three films really have all that much in common, but I put Tony Manero in the same group as The Wrestler and JCVD. They all showed at last year’s Toronto Film Festival, and they all share a similar interest in exploring the tension between onscreen images of male power — images whose camp value in no way diminishes their sway over the popular imagination — and the aging real-life men struggling, with little success, to live up to those images in real life. And in each case, the directors resist the urge to score easy laughs at their characters’ expense — even when Jean-Claude Van Damme learns he’s losing a role in an upcoming film to Steven Seagal, even when Mickey Rourke heads off to the tanning salon to lay down a coat for the next weekend’s bout, even when Raúl Peralta (indelibly played by Alfredo Castro) struts through his grimy neighbourhood in his white disco suit, we never quite see these men as merely ridiculous. In the case of Raúl, we’re actually kind of terrified of him.

We have good reason to be alarmed. In a particularly horrifying scene earlier in the film, Raúl heads to the local movie theatre to go see Saturday Night Fever — something he’s been doing regularly for what we can only imagine has been several months, judging from his ability to recite Travolta’s dialogue along with him... in phonetic English! But the cashier has bad news for Raúl: Saturday Night Fever is no long playing. She assures him that the replacement film — Grease — stars “the same gentleman,” but Raúl only has to take one look at Travolta as Danny Zuko to know this movie’s not for him. And so he marches upstairs to the projection booth, grabs the elderly employee manning the equipment, and bashes his skull in against the projector. Then he robs the box office — he needs money to buy enough glass bricks from the local junkyard to build a see-through floor on the stage of the cantina where he performs a disco-dancing routine. He wants it to look like the floor of the discotheque in the movie. And he’ll kill as many people as necessary to make his dream a reality.

I’ve seen Tony Manero described as a movie about a serial killer, but that’s not really accurate; Raúl is more of a sociopath. When he kills people, he does so impulsively, sometimes even appearing to surprise himself, and certainly not obeying any pattern or ritual. Castro, whose resemblance to Al Pacino (ironically, the actor the fictional Tony Manero idolizes) has been widely remarked upon, plays Raúl with dead eyes, in which not a trace of joy or malevolence can be detected. There is no Hannibal Lecter gleam in Raúl’s eyes. Even when Raúl dances, he does so with a weirdly mechanical sort of passion, only showing emotion whenever he tries to duplicate Travolta’s Cossack-style squats and his knees give out.

There’s no sign the police are even investigating Raúl’s killings, either — the implication being that the authorities are too busy enforcing the regime of the much more prolific killer running the country to worry about a penny-ante murderer like Raúl. I don’t know enough about Chilean history to be able to tell if Raúl’s story is an allegory for Augusto Pinochet in other ways as well; to me, it played more like a showbiz satire, a South American version of The King of Comedy or To Die For, a movie in which the desire to be famous seems as pathological as the desire to bash a stranger’s head in with a hammer.

RATING: 3.5/5

* * * * *

TYSON

Plot In A Nutshell
James Toback’s 2009 documentary about Mike Tyson — essentially a 90-minute autobiographical monologue from the former heavyweight boxing champion.

Thoughts
Together, Tony Manero and Tyson make quite a tough-guy double feature — but whereas Raúl seems perfectly ready to go on killing at the end of Tony Manero, Tyson finds its subject becalmed. One of the most memorable pieces of archival footage Toback includes in the film is the interview Tyson gave moments after ignominiously losing his final professional bout to Kevin McBride — sweat still pouring off his body, the Maori tattoo decorating the left side of his face now seeming like a childish affectation instead of the fearsome mark of a warrior, Tyson tells the interviewer he just doesn’t “doesn’t have the fighting guts anymore” and that he saw this particular bout solely as a way to pay his bills.

The only time I’ve ever watched an entire boxing match from start to finish was about 10 years ago, when a girl I liked suggested we go to a bar where they had a satellite feed of a heavyweight title fight. “What the hell,” I figured — little did I know that we’d be seeing the infamous 1997 rematch between Tyson and Evander Holyfield, the one where Tyson bit Holyfield’s ear hard enough to draw blood. Most of my knowledge of Tyson came from jokes by late-night comedians, and his bizarre behaviour in the ring that night cemented his image in my mind as both a crazed thug, the scariest of “scary black men,” as well as, paradoxically, a pathetic victim of American celebrity culture.

I gained a great deal more sympathy for Tyson a few years later, after reading David Remnick’s insightful profile of him in The New Yorker, and the movie Tyson rehabilitates him even further in my eyes. I feel I’ve especially underestimated Tyson’s intelligence — I can still recall those news articles about his release from prison after serving three years on rape charges, many of them dripping with condescension at Tyson’s statement that he spent his time reading War and Peace and so on. With that tiny, lisping voice, the gap between his front teeth, and those wide, wary, hooded eyes, Tyson doesn’t have the demeanour of a scholar, but as I listened to him talk about strategizing during his fights, it seemed to me that Tyson’s level of physical genius is off the charts.

And he is a mesmerizing speaker — in his way, he’s as talented a phrasemaker as his idol, Muhammad Ali. “Every punch is thrown with bad intention and the speed of a devil,” he says at one point. “Bad intention and the speed of a devil” — what an amazing expression! Tyson peppers his sentences with unexpectedly florid vocabulary: “skullduggery” is a favourite word of his, and instead of using the word “rape,” he talks about “taking a woman’s chastity.” He calls Don King “a wretched, slimy, reptilian motherfucker,” and I defy anyone to improve upon that description. Even in his most out-of-control moments, he never expresses himself in a conventional way: when an audience member heckles him at a pre-fight press conference, Tyson unleashes a torrent of virtuoso, homophobic verbal abuse. “Come on, you bitch!” he shouts. “I’ll eat your ass! You couldn’t last two minutes in my world, bitch! I’ll fuck you ’til you love me, faggot!”

Of course, that tirade also hints at Tyson’s deeply twisted attitude toward women, who he seems unable to relate to except as either disposable conquests or as enemy combatants. At one point, he claims that his ideal partner would be a powerful woman, a corporate CEO, even, whom he could take into the bedroom and dominate her sexually. He continues to deny that he raped Desiree Washington, whom he refers to as “that wretched swine of a woman.” Toback has been criticized for not interrogating Tyson on this point, but given that the film has been conceived as a Tyson monologue, not a Tyson interview, I think Toback edits this section of the film in a way that suggests we’re merely getting Tyson’s skewed, self-serving view of the incident.

Tyson concludes with the boxer talking proudly about his six children and eagerly saying he looks forward to the rest of his life. But the man clearly still has demons plaguing him. Those are going to be some tough fights — I hope he scores a few victories.

RATING: 4/5

The Handsome Family's Second Honeymoon

Here's a profile of the wonderful alt-country duo The Handsome Family that I wrote for SEE Magazine. I spoke to Rennie Sparks, who was lovably unpretentious and full of laughter through our entire conversation; her personality seems like the perfect counterbalance to her husband Brett's more solemn tendencies. Their chemistry is definitely something special, and they're a band well worth delving into; my favourite is 2001's Twilight, but on a recent episode of Sound Opinions, Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot recommended 1998's Through the Trees, which I haven't heard, as their masterpiece.

Anyway, here's the piece. Enjoy!

* * * * *

Rennie Sparks doesn’t think the story of how she met her husband Brett is especially romantic. “He was waiting for another girl that he had a date with,” Rennie says with a laugh. “I’m not sure if he wasn’t sure what his real date looked like or what, but I saw him and sat down next to him and we started talking. By the time his real date showed up, it was too late! We never really spent much time apart after that. We’ve been together ever since.”

And what about the other girl? “Oh, the poor thing,” laughs Rennie. “We all went out to get a drink together, but it soon became clear that I wasn’t going anywhere. I offered to give her some of my tequila as a parting gift. I felt bad for her, but I wasn’t leaving!”

That was some 20 years ago, and no matter what Rennie says, it was the beginning of one of alt-country’s great romances. At the time, she was living in New York trying her hand writing fiction, and the idea of becoming a songwriter, much less being in a band, had never crossed her mind. But falling in love with a musician has a way of changing your career path: the couple married and began performing together and recording albums under the name The Handsome Family. Their first album, 1995’s Odessa, set the template: Rennie would write the lyrics, Brett would handle the music, with his distinctive baritone croon adding a mournful, out-of-the-past, Southern Gothic flavour to their alt-country arrangements.

“I’ve always loved the way bands like The Mills Brothers or The Ink Spots used to sing,” Rennie says. “It’s a very gentlemanly, polite way of singing about very emotional things. In rock music, people tend to think that to express emotion you have to go out of tune or say something crudely, but there are other ways to do it as well. If I sang some of these songs, they’d probably go over the line, but Brett has that deep voice that lends them some weird authority. It feels real. It’s hard to find that.”

Those influences have never been plainer than on the new Handsome Family album, Honey Moon. With their 20th wedding anniversary approaching, the Sparks decided to write an entire album’s worth of love songs, but with melodies that could have come from the pen of Stephen Foster or Hoagy Carmichael and the constant, rapturous images of plants, insects, trees, and animals (“I am the puddles in the street waiting for your falling leaves / Twine your vines around me, drop your branches in my path”), no one would ever mistake them for conventional Diane Warren-style power ballads.

“I live in a city,” Rennie says, “which is why I feel it’s important to write songs like this. It’s very easy to forget about the natural world when all you see are manmade things. Rocks, plants, sky — it’s a good feeling to be reminded of that stuff. But I didn’t want the album to be escapist; I wanted there to be a nod to the reality of parking lots and highways and garbage. That’s part of the landscape these days, no matter where you live. The song ‘A Thousand Diamond Rings’ [which describes smashed windshields and neon signs looking like jewels in the sunset] sort of sums up where we live. When the light hits it just right, even the ugliest parking lot looks interesting.”

In the hands of The Handsome Family, even the idea of a female insect devouring her mate can seem bottomlessly romantic: “Darling, My Darling,” Honey Moon’s strangest song, is sung from the point of view of a male praying mantis surrendering to his lover: “Darling, my darling,” Brett sings, his voice aching with sincerity, “your snapping fangs don’t scare me / I’ll leap on your spine and love you till you gnaw me down to my wings.”

“I was reading Darwin’s Origin of Species,” Rennie says, “and there’s a whole section in there about insects that’s really sexy. It was surprising to see the amazing lengths insects will go to in order to attract each other. It’s all they care about. Their whole lives, from the second they’re born, are devoted to these intricate mating rituals and dances and singing. They’re way more romantic than human beings, if you think about it. They will risk everything for that one little moment! In a lot of ways, I think it’s the most romantic song on the album.”

No Language In His Lungs

The scene is remarkable for its understatedness. It is 1952, and the government medical service boat has arrived in Baffin Island to examine the Inuit population. There, deep within the ship’s bowels, a hunter named Tiivii is told that he is sick — nonplussed, he says a brief goodbye to his wife and two daughters and watches them ascend the stairs as he remains behind in the hull. The next time we see him, Tiivii is being driven to a hospital in Quebec City where he will take up residence in the tuberculosis ward — a title card tells us that it took three months by ship just to get there. And when he asks a nurse how long it will be before he’s well enough to go home, she takes out a calendar and flips over page after page. He won’t see his family, or the familiar landscape of Baffin Island, for another two years.

The opening half hour of The Necessities of Life creates a profound sense of cultural dislocation. The shot of Tiivii in the back seat of that car, looking curiously through the window at his new surroundings, recall those scenes of Pocahontas arriving in England at the end of Terrence Malick’s The New World — how alien and peculiar all those quaint little houses, churches, and belltowers now appear! When he arrives at the hospital, he gets a new, short haircut and a fresh pair of striped pyjamas; as for his old coat and boots, the nun in charge tells one of the nurses to throw them out. His first meal in the ward is a plate of spaghetti, and the other patients are greatly amused by his awkward attempts at eating it. Tiivii doesn’t speak French, and his face falls when he realizes they’re laughing at him, not with him.

It’s to director Benoît Pilon and screenwriter Bernard Émond’s credit that none of this plays out as mawkishly or melodramatically as it easily could have. They convey a vivid sense of Tiivii’s profound loneliness and linguistic isolation, but there’s also very little outright villainy among the white characters. There’s plenty of callousness and condescension, sure, but also a sensitivity to Tiivii’s plight, especially on the part of Carole, a nurse (Éveline Gélinas) who makes an effort to keep Tiivii in touch with his family. She also finds an Inuit boy, Kaki (Paul-André Brasseur), and brings him to the ward, where his ability to speak both French and Inuktitut finally allows Tiivii to communicate with the world and regain some of his humanity.

Tiivii is beautifully played by Natar Ungalaaq, who also played the title role in Zacharias Kunuk’s Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner and is becoming to Canada’s Inuit community what Will Sampson or Chief Dan George were to the American Indian in the 1970s. Ungalaaq has such screen presence that he barely needs to speak to communicate Tiivii’s confusion and despair, but I think my favourite part of his performance are his two long monologues, in which he narrates a couple of eerie folktales.

The most haunting of the two stories is the one he tells Nurse Carole, about a woman who marries an invisible man. Clearly, Ungalaaq sees himself as the invisible man — a tragic figure whose beauty only becomes visible to the outside world after he dies. The solemn, soulful beauty of The Necessities of Life, on the other hand, is impossible to miss.