Exit | Robert K. Headley, Jr. | University Park, MD: Self-published | 1974
About twice a year, John Waters graces our store with his generous, smart, and always witty presence. He is worthy of his reputation–he knows more about the fringe side of Baltimore’s colorful 20th century history than just about any living being, so when he talks I am always listening. Intently.
John walked into the rare book room one day years ago, zipped over to the oversize shelf and pulled out a book from among hundreds. It was a primitive but appealing object, bound with black electrical tape. He held it with both hands so that it was facing me, and said emphatically, “This book is a fucking miracle. That it exists is a miracle. If Robert K. Headley had never been born, this book would never have happened.”
In the late 1960s, with a prescience comparable to Steve Jobs, Headley saw the near future–that all of the great movie theatre palaces built in the early part of the twentieth century were going to give way to multiplexes. He decided to set about photographing and documenting the existing buildings, and researching the ones that were already gone or covered in formstone. Not only that, but he wrote essays about the context of a given theatre, in terms of Baltimore neighborhood history as well as the greater context of movie houses in general, zeitgeist, etc.
The result was an epic achievement that no one wanted to publish, so in 1974 Headley did it himself. As plain a production as you can imagine, but with a bright, colorful wrapper, bound in black tape, replete with a cornucopia of photographic and historical information.
Ten years after the book’s publication, most of the theatres it documented were boarded up or gone. Only the Senator Theatre in Baltimore is still in use as a movie house.
Look soon on this blog for an interview with Headley regarding the making of Exit, as well as his subsequent work.
“What he lacks in style or cinematic prowess, like Argento and Bava, he makes up for in sheer insanity. Some of his films just plain don’t make sense, but if you’re the type who rates a linear plot and rational conclusion high on your list of cinematic priorities, you and I have little in common anyway.”
I have little that I could possibly add to Severine’s inspired review of Lizard in a Woman’s Skin,Lucio Fulci‘s second giallo, released in 1971. At its core is a labyrinthine mystery that requires a 15-minute exposition at the film’s end, but as usual with Fulci, it’s the beautiful wrapping that makes all the difference.
I wonder if Shirley Jackson ever saw a giallo as good as this one, and what she might have thought. A dream: a woman in a full-length fur coat is in the narrow hallway of a sleeping car, pushing her way past a plethora of naked bodies, moving against each other and against her. She is terrified, lost, and though she is beckoned by the others, she seems weirdly unwelcome. She wakes, and we find that even though she is a member of a wealthy household with every imaginable amenity, things in the real world may be even worse.
There is no shortage of complex mysteries in twentieth century genre cinema. There are very few, however, that are soaked in hallucinogenic imagery, an entirely female perspective, Italo-Victorian conservatism, a whistling detective played by Stanley Baker, and an Ennio Morricone score.
Fulci’s films are uneven and almost determinedly odd in their pacing, but as Severine notes, the audacity of his imagery, and his unerring ability to bring seemingly unrelated, psychedelically-presented plot strands together into a satisfying conclusion make his crime films utterly memorable and re-watchable. Much of the genre cinema from the late 1960s and early 1970s borrowed from the look of his films, but few had the same ultimate impact.
For its region 2 DVD release, Optimum Home Entertainment released the highest quality version of the film to date, restoring the scenes cut in the US, and using the original negatives of the film, via the ownership of Studio Canal.
Fans of both John Abercrombie and John McLaughlin can rejoice. Both of these guitarists cast long shadows as composers and players, but Ben Monder is busily securing his place in the new generation, recording and performing as a leader since 1995, with a natural ability to write, shred, or ghost chord his way through any wall you put in front of him. He is a master of what he describes as “consecutive picking” (a blinding-speed blur of triads) but also loves composing and performing at extremely slow tempos (the entirety of his album Dust is marvelously down-paced). Originality, discipline, structure, and feeling permeates his already-extensive discography, which includes solo projects, his enduring presence with Maria Schneider’s orchestra, ambitious work with vocalist Theo Bleckmann, and a host of other projects.
What I sense more than anything else about Monder’s approach to composition and performance is that he is guided by something outside himself. I hear influences that range from progressive rock to Bach to Frisell-ian chordal washes and bends to post-bop, but he is moving toward a light that only he can see. I get the feeling that goal is more important to him than his own legacy–always a good sign, and always refreshing. A recent interview with Matt Warnock confirms the vibe that Monder puts across onstage, a seemingly simple and self-effacing conversation whose content, on reflection, reveals an artist who is not particularly interested in elaborating on the body of work he is creating. One might even conclude he is unfocused. But listening to his solo records–or any one of his live performances–will tell you a very different story indeed. I remember having the same reaction to Van Morrison interviews in the 1980s. These are artists who just want to get back to work.
I first saw Monder at the Village Vanguard a few years ago with the large ensemble Paul Motian formed to record the drummer’s 2006 classic, Garden of Eden. He impressed me then, but it was not until I saw him freed up with a trio this past year that I understood how monstrous he truly was.
I would recommend starting with any one of Monder’s projects as a leader (Oceana, Flux, and Excavation are a few of my favorites), but I have to say that as I branch out into projects he is a part of–my latest love being his work with Tony Malaby–I love it all equally well.
I must say, I have never really liked “indie pop” for its own sake. I’m not even sure I know what it means, except maybe “lack of production,” “college-educated misfits making music,” or “music driven by attitude.” You know, whatever. In the end I’m simply drawn to pop songcraft, melody, and musicianship. Looking at it another way, I’m put off by self-indulgence and turned on by self-evidence.
In the self-evident category, I have always had a thing for lyricists who can write outside the box and find new territory–then make that territory unforgettable and undeniable. There’s a sort of Candyland thread in my brain that runs merrily from Cole Porter to Mose Allison to Bob Dylan to Captain Beefheart to Leonard Cohen to Neil Young. Since a lot had been done by the 1970s in the introspection department, a new field of opportunity quietly opened up: songs about ordinary people. Songs dissociated from the problems and even the perspective of the songwriter. In other words, short stories.
For me, the pioneers of the musical short story were Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, known collectively as Steely Dan. For years critics have rightfully lauded their jazz-pop craft, but little is ever said about their astounding lyrics. Set mostly in Los Angeles and New York, their favorite topics include drug dealers, misfits, and deluded people of every variety. Songs that tell you just enough to get an impression, but always leaving room for your imagination to finish the picture.
The next major stop on the new Candyland path is Freedy Johnston, a songwriter from the Midwest who has for years now lived in New York City. Since the 1990s, he has quietly released a series of stellar recordings that are nothing less than the reincarnation of early Jimmy Webb and Harlan Howard. Like Becker and Fagen, Johnston avoids navel-gazing like the plague, instead turning out masterfully efficient short stories, told from both the male and female perspective, with an impeccable melodic sense lacing it all together. His characters of choice tend to be loners, drifters, hapless losers, and hopelessly disconnected people in general.
My most recent pop music love affair in this very specific tradition, now past the 10-year mark, is with a Washington, DC band called The Caribbean. The Caribbean is a collective of sorts, using the talents of a small stable of choice musicians and sound artists, but at its core, like Steely Dan, is the 3-man collaborative force of Michael Kentoff, Matthew Byars, and Dave Jones. Sonically the band has antecedents (The Blue Nile and American Music Club may come to mind), but what they deliver is a new thing altogether.
The Caribbean have released 5 albums and 2 EPs since 1999, as well as the occasional single. Kentoff generally writes the songs, then collaborates with founding member Byars and guitarist Dave Jones (who joined the band in 2003). They then record with a mind toward the basic elements of pop songcraft, but are in equal measure wicked sound deconstructionists, making music that is wondrous as much for what is there as it is for what has been subtracted. Sonically their recordings are full of tiny surprises, but none that draw attention to themselves. Experimentation is the means, the song is the goal. Kentoff’s vocal is typically almost a whisper, only occasionally coming out into full voice, and rather than being the focal point is just another instrument among the loops, beeps, acoustic guitars, and sonically layered electric guitar and keyboard textures.
The band’s approach takes the short story notion to a beautiful extreme. Powered by a lush musical engine, the resulting song-stories are populated by exceedingly normal people: married couples, office workers, teenagers, and travel agents are just a few of their favorite subjects. Drilling into said subject, they extract the extraordinary fears, hopes, and dreams that are always just behind the mundane facade of day-to-day life.
The Caribbean’s dogged pursuit of parasitic melody and minimized lyrical content is in a class by itself. Their records, which are albums in the finest sense, are not the kind that reach out and grab you on the first spin–they require repeated listening, and have a wonderful way of blooming sonically before your ears. A gift that keeps on giving. I tend to first absorb the ambience of a given album, then the stories begin to infect me. And despite said minimalism, the ultimate effect is a very emotional one.
[Today we inaugurate a new review category, Full Nelson, looking at directors and films that were a one-time blast of brilliance, never to be repeated. We couldn't think of a better candidate than Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter, and the long-awaited release of a significant 2002 documentary, Charles Laughton Directs The Night of the Hunter.]
Upon its initial release in 1955, Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter was a critical and commercial failure. Laughton’s nightmarish depression-era tale of a murderous preacher’s relentless pursuit of two orphans, John and Pearl Harper, who are hiding stolen bank money simply didn’t resonate with many critics or audiences at the time. Because of the film’s lack of success, Laughton, who died shortly afterwards in 1962, never directed another film.
Today The Night of the Hunter is widely regarded as a masterpiece, a unique combination of film noir and horror defined by stunning visuals and brilliant performances. In November of 2010, Laughton’s film received the deluxe reissue treatment it has long deserved when the Criterion Collection released the film in a two-disc set available on DVD and Blu-Ray. As one might expect, Criterion has included the usual high quality trove of extras as part of their edition of Laughton’s film, the centerpiece of which is a two-and-a-half hour documentary entitled Charles Laughton Directs The Night of the Hunter.
Painstakingly assembled over a 20-year period by UCLA film preservationist Robert Gitt, Charles Laughton Directs The Night of the Hunter might well be the most intimate look any of us will ever have into a director’s mind and craft. Because Laughton left the camera rolling between takes while filming The Night of the Hunter, over eight hours of rushes exist. Many of these show Laughton providing extensive coaching to his actors; others are alternate versions of key sequences. In shaping this marvelous footage into a watchable documentary, Gitt presents the rushes in the chronological order of the film’s narrative. Viewing Charles Laughton Directs The Night of the Hunter is akin to watching several versions of the film unfold at once, and the insight the documentary provides into Laughton’s methods as a director is staggering. It is a miracle that it exists at all, let alone that it is so beautifully edited.
Clearly, The Night of the Hunter was a labor of love for Laughton, and in take after take, we see the care with which he created his film. He works wonders with his child stars, Billy Chapin and Sally Jane Bruce, who were ages ten and five respectively at the time of filming. We hear Laughton running over scenes with both of them, providing them with valuable dramatic context for their lines and instructing them how to hold their heads or which way to cast their eyes in relation to the camera. Despite myths that Laughton loathed working with children while directing The Night of the Hunter, he comes across here as craftsman who is certainly demanding but also quite considerate.
With Shelly Winters, who plays the doomed widow Willa Harper, Laughton took a much firmer hand, often walking the actress through multiple takes of seemingly simple scenes in which she utters only a few lines as he attempts to capture the subtleties of her character’s emotional deterioration and humiliation on film. Even veteran actress Lillian Gish, who portrays Rachel Cooper, benefits from Laughton’s careful methodology.
Interestingly, Laughton offers little direction to Robert Mitchum, whose performance as the villainous Harry Powell remains perhaps the best of his long acting career. In every take, Mitchum is fully present, inhabiting his character effortlessly with a palpable charm–a quality that makes his rage-filled rants all the more terrifying.
Until the release of Criterion Collection’s edition of The Night of the Hunter, Charles Laughton Directs The Night of the Hunter could only be seen as part of film festivals and special screenings. Thankfully, this fascinating document of a director and his art can now be viewed by a much larger audience.
That Laughton never directed another film is a nearly unmeasurable loss. This fine documentary reveals him as an unparalleled craftsman, who surely would have been one of our great directors had he only been given the chance.
In 2008, the knight errant of his generation, Christian Slater, was put in the driver’s seat of a great show with a great concept, all in all pretty well executed. 9 espiodes, too smart, too weird, and after a huge push the network decided to cancel. A better plan might have been to plant the show as a dark horse and let it grow. But it was not to be.
Slater plays Henry Albright, a mild-mannered efficiency expert (you can’t get much more mild than that) who discovers that his entire existence was invented as a cover when he was 18, and that he is actually a cold-blooded contract killer named Edward Spivey. Spivey works for a super-secret government agency called Janus that deploys him on Alias-esque missions around the globe. When he’s all done, Janus flips the bit in his brain and he’s Henry again, with no knowledge whatsoever of his “office activities.” This would be a good premise all by itself, but thrown into the mix is a very serious problem wherein the bit starts flipping itself–in the middle of fistfights, lovemaking, and various other high-adrenaline activities. Slater amps the proceedings considerably, particularly when he’s Spivey, a hyper-pragmatic, egotistical, and ruthless spy who has none of Henry’s woman problems.
A fine setup, and for a network crime drama, played with a fair amount of sophistication, and with Slater firing on all cylinders as both characters. Laudable too is the rest of the cast (excepting the execrable Taylor Lautner, featured here in a mercifully small pre-Twilight role), including one of my favorite character actors, Mike O’Malley. O’Malley plays a fellow Janus agent who has a chip in his brain too, spending his days as Edward’s ice-cold shooter, and his evenings as Henry’s hapless next-door neighbor. Recommended, though you must be prepared for a cliffhanger that you will never see resolved.
A lot of listeners will go to their graves thinking of Paul Motian principally as the drummer from Bill Evan’s seminal trio between 1957 and 1961. But after his brief tenure with Evans, Motian went through an evolution in the 1960s and 1970s, emerging in the 1980s as a new kind of drummer, a non-drummer of sorts, approaching the instrument as an instrument rather than a means of beat-keeping.
In the early 1980s Motian founded a trio with tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano and guitarist Bill Frisell, both from the generation after his, and quietly pioneered a new sound. No bass in most instances, and even with a bass occasionally present, an approach that pretty much dismisses the idea of “rhythm section” in favor of “ensemble.” The propulsion of Motian’s recordings comes not from the drums, but from the sum of the parts present. He is as much a part of the melody as any player present. Recording mostly for ECM and Winter & Winter since that time, Motian has released a stunning series of records, with moods ranging from near-silence to volcanic intensity.
This approach is not unique in jazz, of course, but what makes Motian distinctive is a focus that is equal parts exploration and a zen devotion to song. His own compositions are as worthy as any in the past 40 years, abstract but grounded in melody and structure. At the same time, he has re-interpreted standards and the great composers of his generation–Monk and Mingus in particular–with great and consistent care, leaving a formidable canon of recordings in his wake.
Motian has also led larger groups, including his Electric Bebop Band and several one-off recordings with larger ensembles that include established giants such as Charlie Haden and Masabo Kikuchi, as well as bright young stars like Ben Monder and
Where do you start? For standards, I recommend On Broadway, Vol. 1(and if you like it, there are several volumes that follow). For Mingus and Monk, Monk in Motian and the recent large ensemble recording,Garden of Eden.
Like Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, Neil Young, or Carla Bley, Motian is always looking forward, absorbing along the way, not inclined to romance or lean on the past. Click on the photo above for a long and revealing interview from 1996. Some excerpts:
On Bill Evans:
Chuck: Do you think if you didn’t hook up with Evans your whole personality might have taken a different direction?
Paul: Maybe, maybe. Well no, I don’t think so, because eventually I would have hooked up with Paul Bley (laughs). Because in the ’60s there was a lot of shit goin’ on, and I wanted to be part of that. That was one of my main reasons why I quit Bill Evans in the first place. I mean, playin’ with Bill at that time out in California at Shelly’s Manne-hole, I thought the music sucked, man. It wasn’t happening for me. These cats had me playing so soft, I said “man, well what am I doing here?” Meanwhile back in New York there’s all this great shit going on. So I said “Hey Bill, later man, this is not happening for me anymore.” He begged me not to leave him, especially on the road like that, it’s a terrible thing to do. I wouldn’t want anybody to do that to me. But man, I had to leave. I left.
I know myself, man, I know that I’m not goin’ to sit still for nothin’, even today, I’m going to look for a creative way of playing, man, something that I’m going to feel is musical, so even if that hadn’t happened, I’m sure that I would have done something else. I wouldn’t have stayed in one place.
On influences:
Chuck: Another thing that strikes me about your playing is the way, when you’re playing time, that you’ll alternate different combinations of the components of your drum kit in order to change the texture of your sound. No other drummers I’ve ever heard use texture as an element of musical interest the way you do. For example, you’ll be keeping time, and then all of a sudden for a few beats you might leave out the ride cymbal. And it will have the effect of, for example, a painting where suddenly the backdrop changes, while the foreground stays the same. It will have a very dramatic effect, and then you’ll bring it back in and that creates another effect…
Paul: I’m sure you’ve heard the recording of Baby Dodds. That ten-inch record where he’s playing and demonstrating different beats and stuff? Check it out man. He’s playing a solo, and leaves out the bass drum, and then he brings it in. When he brings it in, that shit takes off like a motherfucker. Then he takes it out. That’s important, that shit. That really influenced me.
Chuck: Something else that reminded me of you on that recording was that his march beat is very similar to your march beat.
Paul: Well, I listen to him, man, I still listen to him. He was great. I wish I knew about him back when he was around. He was still around in the fifties, man. But I wasn’t aware of him that much.
Look at Art Blakey, sometimes he’s playing along, and all of a sudden, maybe at the bridge or in the top of the tune he hits a cymbal WHAM!, really hard, and then he chokes it. That’s beautiful, man. Art Blakey was a motherfucker, man, I appreciate him more now than I did back then. I heard him at Birdland when he had his first band with Horace Silver, and Lou Donaldson, Hark Mobley, Clifford Brown, and Kenny Dorham, man, that shit, he was smokin’ boy! How old was Art Blakey then, thirty maybe. He plays so fuckin’ great. That’s some great music.
On approach:
Chuck: What would you say is the central concept of how you approach the drums, that would distinguish you from everyone else?
Paul: Playing the drums like it’s not really drums, it’s just an instrument that’s an extension of you. The playing that’s coming out of me is coming from the music that I’m hearing, the people that I’m playing with, the music that I’m playing on the drums.
Chuck: I seem to remember you saying at a clinic that you gave at Pittsburgh that I went to, that every time you sit down you try to approach the drums as though you were playing them for the first time. Is my memory correct?
Paul: What you said is exactly right. Because sometimes I’m still playing stuff on the drumset that I’ve never played before, because I’m not thinking drumset, I’m not thinking of cymbals and drums. Hopefully, what’s coming out is an extension of me and what’s inside me. Sometimes I’m lucky my hands and arms and feet don’t get tangled up within one another! Because I’m not thinking technique, and I’m not thinking right hand, left hand, or right foot, left foot (laughs), or tom-tom or snare or whatever. A lot of times my eyes are closed and I’m just playing. I know in my head where the instrument is, all the different parts of the instrument. And I just go ahead and play, and whatever ideas are in my head, hopefully they’ll come out.
I remember a conversation I had with Red Garland, the piano player who played with Miles. He said if you hear the idea in your head, somehow you’ll get it out on your instrument, whether you have the technique for it or not. And I always believed that, man. Maybe it will be a little sloppy at times. (laughs) But if you hear that shit, it will come out. And, as recently as this record date I just did last week, we were playing some fours and eights, and I played some stuff that I never heard before. There are certain patterns and certain ideas that I’ve been playing over the years that I may fall back on…
Chuck: Do you consciously think when you are playing to not do some of those things?
Paul: No. No, I don’t think so. There may have been a time when I did. But not anymore.
Chuck: When was that time?
Paul: Well, just that I always wanted to play something different and something new, you know? But I don’t think that’s so important anymore.
Chuck: Why?
Paul: I don’t know, just from my experience of playing, the way I am now, you know? It’s not so important to be different and to be new. I mean, that shit’s going to happen because I’m me. That’s not such a conscious thing as it was years ago. Years ago it was always that thing about just wanting to be different, just to be new.
Chuck: It seems like you were one of the first guys, if not actually the first guy, who began to eliminate repetition in your timekeeping patterns.
Paul: Well, I don’t know man, Tony Williams was too, don’t you think?
Chuck: Well, you made those pivotal recordings with Bill Evans at the Village Vanguard in 1961, and Tony Williams joined Miles Davis in 1963. I think you were definitely among the first guys. You were also one of the first guys to phrase across the bar lines. Was that from listening to, and trying to complement, Evans’ phrases?
Paul: Could be, I don’t know. I mean I never thought about playing across the bar lines. I’m hearing melodies, I’m hearing what Bill is playing and what Scott is playing, and also I’m hearing the song that we’re playing, I’m following the structure.
Watch for Paul Motian at The Village Vanguard in New York City, where he performs with small and large ensembles several times a year.
Ten years ago, just after 911, I journeyed to New York City to take in an odd and pretty unforgettable McSweeney’s reading held in a big firehouse in lower Manhattan. Featured authors were David Byrne, Lydia Davis, and a guy I had never heard of named Chuck Klosterman.
The hall was packed with twentysomethings, which made my then-40-year-old heart beat faster, thinking, “wow, there are more young people reading books than I thought.” Of course, every single young reader in Manhattan was probably there. The real charge, however, was to be in New York City only a month after the September 11 bombings, standing in one of the main firehouses used during the attack. The charge had a depressive, frightened element to it, unique in my experience. I was in a big room full of New Yorkers trying to grapple with a reality that most of the world has been familiar with for a long time. I won’t ever forget it.
The performances were strange and wonderful. I’ll work my way backward. David Byrne headlined with a presentation of his book, The New Sins. It was literally that, a Powerpoint presentation. Before Byrne was Ms. Davis, who read with grace and wit from a book that I now consider her masterpiece, Samuel Johnson is Indignant. But the show’s opener, Mr. Klosterman, stole my heart.
Klosterman, who didn’t know what a big deal he would soon become for geeks everywhere, read confidently but humbly from his debut effort, a chronicle of growing up in North Dakota as a hair metal-loving kid in the 1990s. He had a style that reminded me of David Foster Wallace–deconstructing everything in his path–but his fanatical focus on pop culture, rock music, and sports made him something altogether different. He also gave the crowd one good laugh after another. Pretty much what we all needed more than anything else.
At the end of the evening, a funky brass band from New Orleans took the stage, and everyone in the room was dancing. David Byrne was standing behind a table, and in David Byrne fashion, was dancing and signing books at the same time. Lydia Davis stood to the side, quietly talking to fans. Klosterman sat at a table signing copies of Fargo Rock City with great inscriptions like the one in my copy, “May the sun never set on ROCK.” He was just a regular guy, super nice, and super earnest. North Dakota earnest. His line was the shortest, but the effect he had on me has lasted the longest.
It’s a rare thing when the opener takes you by surprise and wins you over. Isn’t it?
Since that debut, Klosterman has become an avatar for pop culture wing-nuts everywhere, writing essays that repeatedly make sense–for me, anyway–of the kaleidoscopic swirl we currently live in. I frequently read good essays about a particular record, or film, or even an analysis of entire decade. But Klosterman takes on the present in the context of itself and the past, and he does it with invention, perception, and a fearlessness that, to my mind, has already placed him in the pantheon of his predecessors Pauline Kael, Lester Bangs, Nick Tosches, and Roger Ebert. At the age of 39, he is one of the few giants of his kind walking the earth. Unashamed of his opinion, relentlessly informed, even more relentlessly perceptive, yet oddly not an egomaniac. Plus, he’s really fucking funny.
Two tastes of Klosterman as his deconstructivist best:
An AV Club interview with one of our greatest living songwriters and thinkers, Ryan Adams. Required reading for lovers of music or any other kind of art, and a welcome slapdown to the legions of self-appointed snarks on the internet who regard artists and their work as fodder for instant opinion.
An excerpt from the interview:
“What happens is, I make records, and people assassinate the record, usually, that I’m making. I made Love Is Hell,and people panned it really unnecessarily; there was harshness around it. Then, only a little bit of time passed, and people would fucking bring that record up as [evidence of what] I wasn’t doing, [proof of] why my current records were shit.
Then I did Cold Roses, and people said it was too long, and that it should’ve been condensed into one CD. But [from the group of people who said that], each person’s idea of what songs should be taken off of it were on the other person’s CD. And then that record “sucked,” and then I made more records, and they were like, “It’s not as good as Cold Roses.”
It’s always something. It’s a negative trend. It’s a trend of saying, “Of course the thing [is] he’s tapping out–[this] can’t be as good as the last thing.” What’s really happening is this: I’m making records, and people are fucking trying to have an instant emotional connection with something that’s bigger than them, bigger than their immediate response. Their seduction is to the Internet and to information, and it doesn’t have anything to do with albums that take six months to a year of consideration, and sometimes months to record, and then months to release.
The preparation of what I’m doing takes a shitload longer than a person to just listen to it through once, and then start jive-turkeying on the Internet. Because the Internet is an immediate thing, but you can’t fucking write an album on the Internet. So, to me, it’s a virtual meal, and you can’t virtually taste shit. It’s a false experience, when I see the reviews of something that I’ve done, to [only have had] the record for a day. [My back catalog is] always there; it’s like canned goods. When they’re hungry, they can go and get it, and there it is. It’s there for them.
It’s living information. Albums deserve to exist, and they deserve people to do to them as they like. It’s not fucking toxic, poisonous shit, you know? When I see people losing their minds over records and being hateful, I’m like, “Fuck, the shit you ate for breakfast is probably worse for you than [the] fucking album I put out.”
But by the same token, I gotta say, I make records because I love to write songs, because I love music, and because it feels good. When I finish a tune, it’s enough, as it is. It is meant to be what it is. I’m really, really happy to [know that there are] people who have been so fucking moved by what I do. I meet people and they’re so freaked out that they have the record, and I get a chance to talk to them, or I get these letters or [see] people reaching out, and that’s so fucking cool.
I have literally never finished a song and [said], “You know what? People are gonna look at this song and think that maybe the bridge isn’t as big as it could be.” Or, “People are gonna look at this record and say, ‘Oh, I like this record, but maybe the middle kinda drops in tempo. Maybe that song shouldn’t be there, because it needs more consistency.’” Fuck that. Fuck that and fuck everybody that thinks like that.
Seriously, what kinda fucking pussy-ass musician second-guesses their fucking creation because of the possibility that there’s somebody who has a contemporary idea of songwriting, who’s gonna have a fucking criticism that’s based on this conformist songwriter shit? I’ve seen it so much, and it’s so weird. I just think, “My God, there are Hüsker Dü records like Flip Your Wig with songs that don’t fucking have choruses, and they can destroy your mind.” “Divide And Conquer” barely has structure, and that song will fucking destroy your brain, man. I need records like that in my life. Just because I’m not making records that sound like punk records doesn’t mean that I don’t come to that from shit that I learned growing up with American hardcore and American punk ideals. I’m just doing what I do. If you don’t like it, fuck you.”
Last week I went to the Lyric Opera House in Baltimore to see Jackson Browne in a solo performance, something it is fair to say I have waited to experience most of my life. It was a wonderful show, but this is not a review of it. It is a self-intervention and a word for my fellow human beings, coming from someone who is not fond of using the word “should” except in times of crisis. But we are most definitely in crisis–our heads so far up our digital asses that I fear we may be past rescue.
In the 1990s, Wim Wenders made a strange, epic film called Until the End of the World. Without getting into specifics of the plot, the story ends in Australia, where a woman finds her father, a scientist and an inventor, living in a cave he has converted into a laboratory, along with a number of devotees. He has just completed a wild invention, a device that allows people to record their dreams.
One by one, the members of the small enclave begin to experiment with prototypes of the new invention, a device that straps onto the head kind of like those deluxe night goggles you see soldiers wearing in modern war films. Goggles on, they go to sleep. The device records their dreams, and the next day during waking hours they can use the same goggles to lie back and watch a playback.
Instantly, everyone in the cave society becomes obsessed with their dreams, lying around like crack addicts from morning until night with the goggles on playback, then going to sleep again to record more, then repeat.
I was fascinated and, of course, very disturbed by this idea in 1991. But I had no idea at that time, prior to the advent of cellphones and the internet in popular use, how prescient it was.
Today, I have a smartphone. Like everyone, I have become dependent on it in a lot of ways–it’s like a Swiss Army Knife on steroids. It’s useful, and truly makes my life more efficient and less complicated. But what I quickly realized after gaining that dependency, very much an extension of the dependency I already had on computers, was that I had a new problem. I had to somehow learn to manage the flood of information coming at me through these devices. Later I began to realize, ironically, that it was folly to think of the problem being as simple as information coming at me. It was a vortex sucking me in.
Since that realization, I have tried to build mental walls against the vortex. I try to discipline myself to only use my phone when absolutely necessary. I try to look at Facebook only 2-3 times per day, and keep my email correspondence mostly practical and to the point. When I surf the web, I try to always have a goal, and when that goal is reached, walk away from the computer. When I leave work, I force myself to turn everything off. I go home and pretend it’s 1985. I read a magazine. I talk to my wife about her day. I pat the dog. I watch a movie. I read a book and go to bed. I sleep well.
But the operative word here is try. The temptation to fall into the vortex is often too great, and I fall in. After I crawl back out, I feel much the same way I used to feel when I used to channel-surf. An hour or more has gone by, and I have learned nothing. I have gained nothing. I don’t feel better, just vaguely stressed and disoriented.
Because of my smartphone, I will never again need directions. I can always reach my wife and my friends, and I can send a text rather than having to bother anyone with a phone call. I can find the nearest Staples within seconds when visiting Duluth. I have no complaint against any of these features, because they have simplified my life. But just like the computer that came before it, I find myself having to make rules and practice disciplines that I would never have dreamt of before.
Making the list of rules is relatively easy, following them is a herculean challenge. And not just a challenge for me, obviously. All I have to do is look around me, everywhere I go. Four friends gathered at a restaurant, sitting at a table, all looking at their phones. Two people sitting on a park bench in Washington DC on a beautiful day, one talking earnestly, the other looking at his phone and going “uh-huh” or maybe saying nothing at all. Definitely not listening at all. People texting while they drive, endangering their lives and the lives of everyone around them. And the most common sight of all, my fellow pedestrians on my walk to work in Baltimore, always looking at their phones. Looking at their text messages. Looking at Facebook.
I think of the hapless characters in Wim Wenders’ fable. They are at least addicted to their dreams, something mildly interesting or maybe even revealing. So much of what we’re addicted to is bullshit. Seeing who liked our post. Reading a text that says, “U R so crazy.” The walking dead.
So I’m sitting in my seat last night, and Jackson Browne launches into a heartbreaking performance of “For Everyman.” The woman in the row in front of me looks, somehow, like a nice person. Her husband has his arm around her. They are both glad to be there, glad like me to be seeing a songwriter who defined their generation and lived to tell about it, singing like a bird. The vibe in the theater could not be more sublime–a grand opera house, intimate, pitch dark, warm inside on a cold night.
The woman picks up her phone and takes a picture of Mr. Browne onstage. A flash that could be mistaken for a nuclear detonation goes off in the concert hall, and it is actually about 30 seconds before my eyes can readjust to the light. When they do, I see this person staring dreamily at the blurry, unrecognizable image she has taken. She stares at it for a good minute, lighting up a 30-foot radius all around her, until finally a beleaguered usher comes down the aisle and points her tiny usher flashlight directly in her face. The woman continues to stare at the image, lost, unaware that she is lighting up the entire mezzanine or that she has a flashlight in her face. Finally, I lean forward and put my hand on her shoulder. She snaps out of it and looks around, as though someone had just woken her up.
She turns the phone off. The usher walks away to shut down the next of the dozens of perpetrators. The woman turns to her husband and says, “Bitch.” He gives her a little kiss.
Easily one of the best horror anthologies ever to air on cable television, Masters of Horror is a perfect example of a great idea achieving nearly great realization. Two seasons aired between 2005 and 2007 on Showtime. The following review is for the blu-ray DVD release of the first season.
Creator Mick Garris’ idea was to have all the best horror film directors from the 1970s-1990s each create one-hour “short stories,” some based on published stories by major authors. As my viewing of the first season confirmed, Showtime put no constraints on content, allowing the filmmakers pretty much the same creative freedom they would normally have in making a feature-length film.
I say “pretty much” here because there is one rub, and that is Garris’ insistence on imposing the same two cinematographers on nearly all the episodes, with some flashy stylistic tendencies (quick “hot flash” edits and needless montage being the worst) that run throughout. Only a handful of directors in the show’s first season completely avoided this kind of mediocrity, and those entries, unsurprisingly, are by far the best.
My favorite entries were as worthy as any of the best films made my their respective directors:
Cigarette Burns (John Carpenter). A film director gets caught up in a very Cronenberg-esque situation when he is hired to find the only known print of a famous horror film called La Fin Absolue du Monde, screenings of which apparently drive the viewer to homicidal insanity. Who could not watch something with this plot description? So compelling that I actually tried to find a DVD of the film-within-a-film. You may think I felt foolish when nothing turned up, but dude I just had to know.
Pick Me Up (Larry Cohen). A truck-driving serial killer in the wilds of upstate New York discovers that there is a poacher on his turf, and a cute blonde stuck in the middle. Completely down the rabbit hole, with a nice black comedy streak. Would we expect anything less from the great Mr. Cohen?
Jenifer (Dario Argento). A police detective saves a (very) strange young girl from being murdered by what appears to be a homicidal maniac. He takes her in, and discovers in short order that the guy trying to kill her had his reasons. As good as Argento’s best work, with more daytime scenes than you would expect.
Chocolate (Mick Garris). A lonely divorced man who works in a flavor development research laboratory (along with the great Matt Frewer of “Max Headroom” fame) starts getting weird visions at the weirdest times. He becomes obsessed with their origins, with bad results.
Imprint (Takashi Miike). Never aired as part of the series, as Showtime considered it too “disturbing.” And it is, of course, a typically insane Miike production in the Japanese gonzo horror style that he pretty much invented. Nearly impossible to describe, so I won’t try. If you enjoy geisha girls harshing out on each other in ways I guarantee you have never imagined, you will be entertained. I can’t say I enjoyed it, but I will say it is certainly uncompromised, and true to the spirit of Miike’s horror films (Ichi the Killer in particular came to mind here).
In the second category, which I will describe as “OK, but compromised in one way or another” are entries by some great directors not doing their best work:
Incident on and Off a Mountain Road (Don Coscarelli). Based on a story by Joe R. Lansdale. Compelling, but somehow forgettable.
Dreams in the Witch-House (Stuart Gordon). Based on the famous story by H.P. Lovecraft. Good, but with Mr. Gordon’s talents, should have been far better.
Sick Girl (Lucky McKee). Lesbian love affair interrupted by a bug with serious attitude. Black comedy to the hilt. Eminently watchable but plays out fairly predictably.
The remaining episodes I can’t really recommend. The most disappointing of all was Homecoming, directed by John Landis. The episode begins with all the great Landis touches, very reminiscent of his classic, An American Werewolf in London, but quickly loses its way, mired it useless political commentary and an unforgivably stupid ending. Landis has another entry, Deer Woman, that is only slightly better, and Tobe Hooper contributes a surprisingly awful effort, Dance of the Dead, which would have been much improved without the flashy, made-for-TV “flashbulb” edits that appear nauseatingly throughout the episode.
In the end, though, a very enjoyable viewing experience for the fan of late twentieth-century horror. I very much look forward to the blu-ray release of the second season.
Harry Brown is an arresting, daring, and surprisingly beautiful return by Michael Caine to the spirit of one of his most famous roles: Jack Carter.
Not a sequel to Get Carter, however, nor an homage. More a reflection on the violence, cultural atmosphere, and character of Mike Hodges‘ 1971 Brit classic. This is Harry, not Jack. But the two men would recognize one another.
The young man is now an old man. Elderly, actually, with Caine playing a part of a man a bit older than himself. The spread-around poverty of Jack Carter’s world is now focused onto a single tenement building where Harry Brown lives in retirement and as a recent widower. Jack’s past as a gangster is now Harry’s past as a decorated Marine. The inner peace, the demons, the soulless thugs, and the call for revenge are all the same.
Emily Mortimer, as radiant as ever even in the film’s muted tones, introduces a counter-element, and perhaps a heart, to an auspicious debut by British director Daniel Barber. She’s not a love interest, and she never sheds a tear. She’s a quiet, thorough police inspector surrounded by a proto-male bureacracy, and she conveys an intense sadness throughout that lends weight to the film as a whole. A key scene in Caine’s apartment gives both her and Caine the opportunity to quietly show some acting chops that you don’t see every day. Mortimer remains on the sideline, but gives Caine’s character a frame. Roger Ebert notes in his review of the film that Caine “builds his characters from the inside out.” Nicely put, and the building process takes its time here, rewarding the patient viewer with an unusual take on the revenge thriller.
Notable as well is the eerie and refreshing Tangerine Dream-esque score by Ruth Barrett, also a feature-length film debut, and carefully framed, beautifully half-lit cinematography by Martin Ruhe that would cause Kiyoshi Kurosawa to raise an eyebrow. Ruhe went on to do the impeccable camerawork on The American in 2010.
My only complaint was the sappy, mood-breaking acoustic guitar ballad that runs over the first half of the end credits. Surely not the director’s choice, but if it was what the studio required, a small sacrifice to make for one of the best crime dramas of 2009.
In the fall of 1982 I was a junior at Vanderbilt University. I had come to Nashville from Little Rock, 6 hours down the road, and felt I was about as well-trained in hipster music as a boy from Arkansas could be. I owed my schooling to a guy named “Gee” (pronounced like “geezer”) who hung around on the corner of West 33rd and Bryant in Little Rock, wearing a flannel coat and smoking cigarettes; and to Discount Jack, the overalls-wearing leader of the gang of potheads who ran Discount Records, the establishment where I spent most of my idle hours. Many an afternoon was whiled away in the crowded back room of “Discount,” as we used to call it, where there were four pinball machines and a whole lot of pot smoking going on. I was the tall one, short blonde hair, with a Coke in my hand. Never did care for pot, which is a shame, because there was plenty to be had.
The “Discount” years were junior high and high school, 1975-1980, and there I became steeped in the likes of Little Feat, ZZ Top, Uriah Heep, Todd Rundgren, and Shawn Phillips. I was out of the loop when it came to punk, which simply had not made it to Little Rock by that time. It may still be en route.
In 1980 I graduated high school, packed my bags and moved to Nashville for my higher learning. My first roommate’s name was Scotty, a redheaded sweetheart of a guy who hailed from the Midwest. I would spin my prog-rock records on our one beleaguered turntable, and Scotty would spin Devo and The Talking Heads. I don’t think he was aware of it, but Scotty decidedly dominated the turntable time, and worse, tended to play the same records over and over. Normally so much repetition would not meet with my approval, but Scotty was such an endearing guy that I didn’t complain (I remember, for example, that he had a heartbreaking problem where he had to drink a case of beer just to get a buzz). At first, I honestly didn’t understand what I was listening to as David Byrne warbled about being “happy to live in his building”–it just sounded contrived and weird. Then, at some point, I sort of began to like it. A little.
Before too long, I was liking it a lot. The rosetta moment came one night while I was crammed into an LTD with Scotty and a bunch of other people (likely no women), cruising down West End Avenue toward downtown, mighty drunk. Scotty turned to me and announced, with an instructive index finger, “Kevin, there is water at the bottom of the ocean!”
By the time 1982 rolled around, I was a full-fledged punk/new wave geek, routinely going to shows at the now-legendary Cantrell’s, located right at the edge of campus. Cantrell’s was pretty much Discount Records for me at that point. You could have spotted me then with no trouble: tall, short blonde hair, with a Coke in my hand. If a British or American band playing punk or New Wave toured the South, they stopped at Cantrell’s, tore the roof off, and moved on.
I was hanging around one afternoon in Vanderbilt’s Sarratt Student Center lobby–probably returning from a brisk round of studying my ass off just to maintain a “C” average in Engineering School–when a fellow geek said he thought we should go see a band called “R.E.M.” playing in the 250-seat Sarratt Student Cinema that night. I said sure.
(Later the same year, a new band called U2 played in our 275-seat law school auditorium, touring behind their second record, October. We saw them and agreed that they “had potential.”)
The R.E.M. show was discovery night, but only for me. Though they had only released one EP (Chronic Town), the band had been touring the Southern club circuit furiously, and it seemed as though every person in the 250-seat cinema, filled to capacity and jumping up and down in their seats, was pre-converted. How had I not heard of these guys and their great EP?
By the end of the evening, I was converted too. R.E.M. played like one magnificent being, with the bookish Mike Mills and the metronomic Bill Berry holding down the bottom, the kinetic Peter Buck bouncing around the stage while reinventing the use of arpeggio with his Rickenbacker, and Michael Stipe–definitely not yet photogenic–hanging ominously on his microphone stand, his hair so completely in his face that his eyes could not be seen. They were on fire, and riding on top of that fire were the most incredible melodies I’d heard in a long time.
Murmur came out a few months later, and was a rare example of a record that not only stood up to the wild evening of rock music I had heard, but captured and branded it. It was informed by punk, and then labeled as New Wave, but in the end it was nothing less than one of the greatest records I’d ever heard. I know every note of it today, and when I hear it I am still mesmerized and transported back to that riotous evening. In the wake of R.E.M.’s public farewell this past week, 30 years on, I’ve read many eulogies. The essays I’ve taken in confirm the impression I’ve developed over time: R.E.M. affected two generations of listeners, those that were inducted by way of Murmur and the amazing 4 albums that followed, and those for whom Automatic for the People (which I heard once and cared little for) was “the beginning.” I respect both generations, but I belong to the first.
Regardless of side of the line you were born on, R.E.M. was without question a band that struggled to maintain its integrity in the context of superstardom, not an easy thing, and impossible to do without making missteps. And their missteps, in context, were relatively small.
But for me, the essence of R.E.M. still begins and ends with Murmur. Stephen Thomas Erlewine at AllRovi puts it as equitably and as well as anyone: “R.E.M. may have made albums as good as Murmur in the years following its release, but they never again made anything that sounded quite like it.”
A third of the way through, Nicolas Winding Refn’sDrive explodes into some of the most chilling violence depicted on the screen in recent memory. Trapped in a hotel room by mobsters sent to kill him as the result of a botched pawn shop robbery, Drive‘s protagonist, a mechanic and Hollywood stunt car driver known only as “Driver,” shotguns one of his assailants and impales another. At the end of this sequence, the camera zooms in on Driver’s somewhat bemused face, his elfish grin covered in blood, a toothpick hanging loosely from the corner of his mouth. Driver seems to be pondering what he has done, almost as if he is astonished by his own sudden capacity for violence. As Drive proceeds from one gory set piece to another, however, the audience realizes that Driver’s violent behavior is not newfound but rather an integral part of who he is. Unlike David Cronenberg’s portrayal of Tom Stall in the similarly themed A History of Violence, Refn never explains Driver’s behavior. We get no glimpses into his past, and he remains a cipher right up to the film’s closing credits.
Drive is a slow burn in the best possible sense. Much of the film’s opening sequences establish Driver as tough, quiet, dependable, and self-sufficient. In addition to his work as mechanic and stunt car driver, he moonlights as a freelance getaway car driver, offering thieves five minutes of his time to ensure they successfully escape a crime scene before being left to their own devices. Refn also emphasizes Driver’s capacity for love and empathy as he gets involved with a neighbor, Irene, and her young son, Benicio. Driver even identifies with the plight of Irene’s husband, an ex-con named Standard who wants to do one final job for the mob so he can start over with a clean slate and focus on being a decent father and devoted husband. The quietness and calm of Drive’s first third only serves to make the violence that follows all the more shocking, and Drive’s final act is intense beyond words. Audiences at Cannes purportedly cheered Driver’s vicious acts of retribution, but at the film’s second screening at the Toronto International Film Festival, viewers sat in complete silence, the tension in the theater as palpable as the sound of bones crunching when Driver attacks a mob underling with a hammer.
Adapted from James Sallis’ 2005 novella of the same name, Drive wears its influences proudly on its sleeve. Refn has acknowledged his debt to neo-noirs like Bullitt, Point Blank, andTo Live and Die in L.A. But the film’s deepest influence is perhaps the work of French crime film auteur Jean-Pierre Melville, particularly Le Samourai. Like many of Melville’s anti-heroes, Driver rarely speaks throughout the entire film, and indeed, Drive is very sparse in terms of dialogue overall. Refn’s film conveys its emotions through tight visuals and is completely devoid of exposition.
Ryan Gosling’s performance as Driver has received a great deal of justly earned praise, and film critics have compared his work to early performances by Steve McQueen and Clint Eastwood. His boyish charm and clean good looks easily disarm the audience, and like some of the characters in the film, we tend to underestimate Driver at first. To Gosling’s credit, some of his best acting is done with his back to the camera. The tone of his voice, the angle of his shoulders, and the tilt of his head all suggest how tightly wound and dangerous he actually is. Like the golden scorpion that adorns the back of his driving jacket, Driver is not to be trifled with and is deadly when agitated. Refn’s use of sound also underscores Driver’s tense, violent nature. When Driver puts on his driving gloves to administer a beating, we hear the leather crackle and his fists tighten as they clinch and flex.
Equal credit for Drive‘s success must go to Albert Brooks and his stunning performance as Bernie Rose, a ruthless yet beleaguered mob boss who finds himself surrounded by bungling idiots. Cast completely against type, Brooks is hysterical and horrifying, effortlessly shifting gears whether he’s complaining about the pasta he’s eating or stabbing a cohort in the eyeball with a fork.
While its components are familiar, Drive is not a typical thriller, and may not be for everyone. While some will find its violence over-the-top and gratuitous, others will regard the film’s first third as too cloying and sentimental. For those who like smart, innovative crime films that ultimately ask us to consider the very nature and causes of the violence they put forth, Drive is a minor masterpiece that pushes the envelope right up to the edge.
Like his young American doppelgänger Wes Anderson, Aki Kaurismaki‘s cinematic fictions take place inside a snow globe. Each film is a different snow globe, with a different situation, though often with the same actors and characters (his Leningrad Cowboys always come to my mind, but there are many others). To enjoy Kaurismaki‘s movies, or Wes Anderson’s, you have to be fond of snow globes. I promise not to carry this metaphor much further, but when I talk to a person who has seen movies by either of these directors, I can tell you which side they’re on.
I like them. I like Woody Allen‘s New York. I like Alan Rudolph‘s Los Angeles. I like Mike Leigh‘s London. But Kaurismaki brings his own charm by keeping his stories very small and simple, always invoking music in unexpected ways, and unlike Leigh and Allen, employing an extreme application of style. Even the most casual viewer knows immediately that they have been placed inside the snow globe, and will be staying there for the next hour and a half.
The evolutions in Kaurismaki‘s films are tiny ones. Compared to the other films in his delightful canon, the leaps in Le Havre are fairly major: it’s his second film in French (the first was La Vie de Bohèmein 1992), and is the first of a planned trilogy of stories set in port cities–the next two are scheduled to be in Germany and Spain, using the respective local languages.
Kaurismäki notes in an interview with Christine Masson that he “drove through the whole seafront from Genoa to Holland” to scout locations, and eventually settled on Le Havre in northern France, which attracted him with its atmosphere and music scene. And of course, it had a port.
As usual, I am not a fan of plot revelation. I will say that the story combines Kaurismaki‘s trademark combination of sweetness, compassion, and intense love of character. The new element here is the somewhat political topic of illegal immigration is added to the mix, and from the perspective of a viewer who loathes overt political content in films, I have to say it was nicely done.
All of Kaurismaki‘s traditional elements are present in Le Havre, as comforting to me as a warm patchwork quilt on a chilly evening: tiny local pubs, cute little houses and shops, cobblestone streets, marginalized characters, elliptical conversation, and one breathtaking set piece after another. The characters are all equally charming, but the standout here, returning for his second performance in this entry (as the same character he played in La Vie de Bohème), is the inscrutable Andre Wilms. Wilms’ character Marcel, a supporting role in the previous film’s story, is here moved to the forefront, a man who finds himself with an unexpected mission. Once he knows what he must do, he moves through the story a quiet and mysterious dignity.
Introduced in the last act is a lovable surprise, the local Le Havre sensation “Little Bob,” an aging but extremely youthful rock singer who, as it turns out, was born to be in a Kaurismaki movie. Kaurismaki noted in his interview with Ms. Masson: “Le Havre is the Memphis, Tennessee of France and Little Bob is the Elvis of [that] Kingdom…as long as Johnny Hallyday stays in Paris. And even then it would be a nice fight.”
In a nice homage to the equally meticulous French directors Jacques Becker, Jean-Pierre Melville, and Henri-Georges Clouzot, Kaurismaki introduces the persistent Porfiry Petrovich-esque Inspector Monet, a role deftly handled by Jean-Pierre Darroussin. Monet hounds Marcel in a way that is today very familiar, but made more interesting by the fact that two men’s motivations are not quite clear until the end of the story.
The two women in the film, played by Kaurismaki regulars Kati Outinen and Elina Salo, are separate–and unacquainted–anchors for Marcel. They both dispense time-earned wisdom and concern, respectively as wife and local pub owner, patiently waiting for Marcel’s obsessions to run their course. The story of a million years.
Andre Wilms made an appearance at the North American debut screening of Le Havre at the Toronto festival, and despite his nearly complete inability to speak English (and even more complete inability to work with the supplied translator), conveyed some wonderful bits about the elusive Kaurismaki. “He knows what he wants,” said Wilms, “and he likes to shoot, you know, quick, and get it over with. So he can go to the pub.”
Out of nowhere, like a rifle crack across a wild mountain pass, comes The Hunter, Daniel Nettheim’s stark new film about the price we pay to remain alone, true to ourselves and to our nature. I say out of nowhere because it’s unexpected in terms of its depth, its nuances, and especially its characters, namely Willem Dafoe’s corporate mercenary. It’s a masterful portrayal, arguably his best work onscreen and a step in the right direction for actors charged with leading what are loosely labeled “issues” films. The Hunter doesn’t preach. It doesn’t have to.
Mr. Dafoe’s Martin David is a freelance tracker, a solo act charged with hunting down rare animals for the purpose of harvesting–their organs, their DNA, their by-products–for use in labs and beyond. When we meet him, he’s obviously been doing this job for a while. He has every aspect of his life down to a fine point, including his insistence that he work alone, and that his communications with his employer are kept to an absolute minimum. The impression is that he’s world-class in a secretive, highly illegal and completely objectionable field. But when he arrives on the island of Tasmania, in search of the believed-to-be extinct Tasmanian tiger (technically known as a thylacine), his resolve is challenged, and eventually overcome. What starts as an adventure story becomes a dark and haunting parable, and a hard break with other films that explore similar themes and narrative structures. It’s Apocalypse Now, but with the wiser heart of John Sayles’s Limbo. I haven’t stopped thinking about it since I saw it at the Toronto festival.
Based on a 1999 novel by Julia Leigh, The Hunter deserves praise not only because it is such a taut thriller, but also because it explores more than that one mood. For every scene that grabs you and won’t let go, there are many more that evoke the timelessness of the natural world, the lulling sensation that accompanies a long hike or a camping trip. I’ve never encountered a film that captured that feeling more effectively, or made me think more clearly about the place of humans in the physical world. What are we doing, trapping, killing, cutting down, changing, transforming–anything? What is our intent? And what are we doing to ourselves in the process?
As Martin David tracks his elusive and perhaps non-existent prey, he also tracks his existence, how it led him to where he is, and what he really cares about. It turns out he still has a heart to open, a mind to set free. He is not so different from the thing he relentlessly pursues.
The Hunteralso spends considerable time on the lives of those who are cause-driven, whether they are “greenies” (environmentalists and scientists) or pro-business (loggers, townspeople, corporate hustlers). It encourages us to understand the interstices of these groups, and how righteousness eludes us all when we decide to act on our impulses. It could be said that impulse is the key to understanding the film, especially its beautiful and gut-wrenching dénouement.
The Hunter was shot in several on location across Tasmania, including the Central Plateau, the Florentine Valley, and towns like Deloraine and Hobart, which you will probably never see otherwise. It reminds me of the lush climate of southern Alaska, with heavy brush and marsh country, wild vistas, and breathtaking but unforgiving settings. The traveler who makes a mistake in this part of the world can die and not be found. This undeniable fact, conveyed throughout the film, adds to both its tension and its sense of acceptance. The landscape captures The Hunter’s philosophy of the beauty of brutality, and our incessant need to try to manage that which is not in opposition.
It’s interesting to consider what the Tasmanian tiger represents in this film. It’s a legend, in reality a creature that has never been seen since 1936, a piece of the dusty past. But it’s also an object of obsession and compulsion. More than once, a rare piece of actual footage showing the last known surviving Tasmanian tiger, pacing in its cage in a zoo, shocks us into awareness: this is real, this was real. Maybe it’s more real than we are now, with our narrow-focus ideas about apex predators, nature vs. nurture, and so on. Martin David, walking through the otherworldly Tasmanian wilderness, setting his traps and checking his gear and his gun, is our guide through pain to clarity. And The Hunter is a message about a last chance for redemption. Final and forever.
In the Q & A session following the North American premiere of Headhunters at the Toronto International Film Festival, director Morten Tyldum referred to his high-octane thriller as “Nordic noir,” a term that evokes the novels of Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson, as well as Niels Arden Oplev’s successful film adaption of Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Headhuntersitself is adapted from a 2008 novel by Norwegian crime writer Jo Nesbø, who is well known in Europe and the UK as the author of the Harry Hole series, but little known in the US. Tyldum’s new film should soon rectify this situation.
Headhuntersis a startlingly refreshing take on the classic noir convention of the man-on-the-run. Roger Brown, a successful corporate headhunter, moonlights as an art thief to finance his lavish lifestyle and to keep his beautiful wife Diana swimming in expensive jewels. Despite always being on the verge of insolvency, Roger feels he has his life completely under control. All this changes, however, when Roger meets Clas Greve, a suave and sophisticated ex-CEO whom Roger feels would be the ideal candidate to run Pathfinder, an international firm that specializes in cutting edge GPS technology. When Roger also learns that Clas may in fact own a missing Rubens painting valued at 100 million dollars, he decides to break into Clas’s apartment to steal it, a decision that leads him to discover that his beloved wife is having an affair with Clas. From this point on, Headhunters immerses the audience in non-stop action and intrigue as Roger attempts to stay alive and discover who is responsible for turning his life upside down.
What puts Headhunters miles ahead of the average thriller is how smart it is both in terms of its characterization and its plotting. Roger Brown is an everyman with whom the audience can identify. Despite his seeming veneer of worldly success, he fears that his is completely inadequate in every way—as a husband, a lover, and a man. As his life spins further and further out of control, the viewer really feels for him and ultimately roots for him to prevail against forces seemingly beyond his ability to control. The entire film turns on the brilliant performance Aksel Hennie gives as Roger. Much like Steve Buscemi, whom he resembles in many ways, Hennie comes across as a lovable loser, someone with whom it’s easy to side. Equally important is Tyldum’s handling of numerous plot twists that could easily bog down a less skilled director. Headhuntersclips along at a brisk pace, and despite a virtual onslaught of action sequences, the audience is never lost, and by the film’s final shot, not a single plot strand has been left hanging loose.
Headhunters is equally noteworthy for its wicked sense of humor and its violent Grand Guignolset-pieces. In one sequence destined to become a classic of contemporary genre cinema, Roger literally immerses himself in a pool of shit beneath an outhouse in order to escape certain death, only to later face an attack from a Russian police dog dead set on tearing his throat out. The timing in this sequence is just marvelous, combining horror and intense pain laugh-out-loud dark humor. Quentin Tarentino should take note.
Headhunters is Morten Tyldum’s third feature film, and with it he has certainly established himself as one of the most exciting talents currently working in genre cinema. The film bears comparison to Hitchcock and Clouzot, and like the best works of these two masters, it does not disappoint on any level. It’s bloody good fun.
Headhunters has been picked up by Magnolia Pictures for US distribution later in 2011.
In cinema, there are a handful of genres and topics that have been worked over so much that they appear like beat-down, broken prizefighters. There among them, sprawled out on the canvas, is the worst of the bunch, the prison film. And specifically, the prison film that considers the death penalty. That’s not to say that good or even great films can’t be made about this subject (Dead Man Walking flirts with greatness, as does Monster’s Ball), but it seems as if nothing more can be said, or needs to be said, about what it means to commit a crime and then pay for that crime with a human life.
I had this in my mind right up until the moment that Werner Herzog‘s new documentary, Into the Abyss, came on the screen at the opening night of the Toronto International Film Festival. I’m an admirer of all Herzog’s films, particularly his most recent documentaries, Grizzly Man and the incomparable Caves of Forgotten Dreams–defining films made in what would normally be seen as the twilight of a director’s career. But I’ll admit my expectations were low, given the subject. Still…this is Herzog! He’s going to forge his own path, find his own way to respond to virtually anything or anyone he encounters. His intent, consistently, is to bring a kind of cosmic truth into the light.
And sure enough, he does just that in this brilliant, emotionally searing film. It’s not that the viewer follows some grand-scale argument for or against the death penalty. It’s not a complicated disquisition on the American system of justice, or some maudlin, day-in-the-life-on-death-row reality show, blown up for the movies. It doesn’t even spend much time on details of capital punishment. What it does–perhaps like no other film before it–is present violence, the law’s response to it, and the long-term damage that follows, as a sad and often bizarre symphony. Under Herzog’s penetrating yet gentle questioning (he narrates the film and acts as interviewer), a horrible inevitability comes through.
Into the Abyss unfolds as a procedural. You learn about a horrific and truly senseless crime in Conroe, Texas. Then you meet the police, the prison officials, the victims’ families, the perpetrators, the families and supporters. As the circle gradually expands, the facts of the case matter less and less. Like a juror, your impressions of these people and their circumstances become the real story. Herzog doesn’t instruct you on what to feel or think. He waits, patiently, for life to show through the harsh Texas sun or the washed-out fluorescents of the prison.
There are so many moments of authenticity–too many to describe, undeniable and unforgettable. The father of a young man awaiting execution, in prison himself across the street, offers up a broken handful of words and images that leave you wondering, “How did this man, as rotten as his life has been, ever learn so much?” His capacity for love and acceptance, and his guilt over being a bad father, seem limitless. In another scene, the stolen car that prompted the murderous crime, is slowly falling to pieces in an impound lot with a tree growing up through the floorboard. Staggering.
Herzog, who appeared both before and after the screening, joked, “I suppose any of my films could be called Into the Abyss.” If you know the director’s work, you may have some doubts about the film he decided to give such a title. He has been labeled a “mad genius” for so long that it seems as though a misstep is due, a documentary where Herzog explores the already-explored. Well, not yet, and not here. Prison films, death-row films, steer you to conclusions about the mistakes that others make. Into the Abyss shows how all of us are culpable–not guilty, exactly, but certainly part of a web of violence, poverty, inequality, broken families and broken trust that cuts life short for so many of us. This is the real abyss that Herzog explores, and the one he suggests we can escape only by allowing one another to live.
Adam Benzine at realscreen.com reports on Herzog’s live comments about Into the Abyss at the Toronto Film Festival.
My favorite film of the Toronto Festival this year was the one I expected to like the least. We picked it, quite honestly, because it filled a convenient space in Friday’s schedule in the absence of other candidates–a first film by a Russian director we had never heard of. But the story outline was compelling and outside the usual boundaries, so it made the list.
I enjoy asking film buffs about their “sentimental favorites,” meaning a movie that no one would call a masterpiece, but that they find eminently re-watchable. Twilight Portrait made me think of a new category: haunted favorites. A movie that takes you down the rabbit hole and leaves you there to find your own way back, after the credits have run. One you think about for days, weeks, or even years after seeing it. Maybe even a movie you wouldn’t want to see twice.
The film that left me down in the hole was Late Marriagein 2001. Before that, John Sayles’ Limboin 1999. Ms. Nikonova’s debut leaves no bread crumbs, takes no prisoners, and eventually finds hope–whatever that is–in a very new and strange place.
The rabbit hole journey here is so much a part of the experience that I am disinclined to talk about anything other than the story’s setup. At the beginning we are introduced to two separate and very different entities. The first is a trio of soulless, malevolent policemen who make the rounds luring women into their confidence, then raping them and literally leaving them lying on the side of the road, knowing they are protected by their official capacity and the general lack of concern about anything on the part of the city government.
The second story involves a lovely but, well, haunted young woman who is a social worker. She comes from an extremely wealthy family, and is discovering that the people around her–her husband especially–are basically parasites, living off her disposable largesse. She has a lover across town with whom she is engaged out of sheer boredom, and one day finds she is forced to make her way from his apartment to hers on foot after one of their dalliances.
I can’t bear to tell you more, because what follows is a story told from the heart that is very much not for the faint of heart. I was moved by it, though I suspect some will be disgusted. But from my perspective it is brave and beautiful to the last frame, and may be the best film I will see in 2011.
Twilight Portrait has the unusual distinction of having been co-produced and co-written by the director and the film’s star, Olga Dihovichnaya. Ms. Nikonova originates from Rostov-on-Don, Russia, graduated from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2001 and will, I very much hope, continue to make movies set in her homeland–a landscape and a people she clearly understands at every level.
An interview with Angelina Nikonova on the Cineuropa site, recorded at the Venice Film Festival, discussing the influences of Dogma, casting, the story’s origins, camerawork, and her method.
Midnight Madness at the Toronto International Film Festival is a rousing good time. TIFF’s official program describes Midnight Madness as “shocking and rocking, films for the witching hour.” As one might expect, neither TIFF’s late night programming nor the audiences attending them disappoint. At the world premiere of Bobcat Goldthwait’s God Bless America, audience members tossed a beach ball around the balcony and at one point threw an inflatable naked doll on stage that prompted Goldthwait to remark, “Does that inflatable doll have both tits and a cock?”
God Bless America is one hell of a ride. The film follows Frank, a divorced middle-aged insurance worker, and Roxy, an embittered hyperactive teenager, as they embark on a vicious killing spree. Among their targets are the stars of a reality TV show, a right-wing TV political commentator, and an evangelist who preaches “God hates fags.” For Frank and Roxy, American society has reached its nadir, celebrating cruelty and crudeness via every possible media outlet, and the only remedy, as the film’ plot suggests, is to put a bullet in America’s collective cultural brain.
Frank and Roxy’s bloody trek is simultaneously hysterical and horrifying. Goldthwait doesn’t shy away from the gore, but for the most part, these acts are portrayed in an over-the-top style reminiscent of old EC horror comics from the 1950s. Goldthwait’s use of music is also brilliant throughout the film, underscoring many of God Bless America’s best gags. Even the most saturnine of viewers won’t be able to keep himself or herself from laughing out loud when Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out” bursts out of the cinema speakers as Frank attempts to set a screaming teenager’s car on fire.
Much of God Bless America’s success rests on the performances of its two principle stars, Mad Men’s Joel Murray, who plays Frank, and newcomer Tara Lynne Barr, who plays Roxy. Murray (brother to the equally talented and laconic Bill Murray and Brian Murray) makes Frank an incredibly sympathetic character, and Barr invests Roxy with something more than just ordinary teenage angst. Their chemistry and charisma is undeniable, and rather than avoid the question of why Frank doesn’t sleep with Roxy, Goldthwait addresses this issue head on when he has Roxy ask Frank, “So it’s ok for you to kill a teenager but not to fuck one?” Frank’s response to Roxy’s outrage at his rejecting her is one of the film’s finest moments as he takes to task American males and the media for exploiting and preying on young girls. For all its violence, Goldthwait’s film has a real sweetness and tenderness at its heart.
To be sure, God Bless America is not without its flaws. Goldthwait joked with the audience that he had only finished editing the film three days prior to its screening, and in certain parts it displays some of the qualities of a first cut. Not all of Frank and Tara’s rants about American culture are as captivating as the others, and some of them are repetitive or simply run on much too long. In addition, Goldthwait’s attempt to introduce tension between Frank and Roxy late in the film doesn’t quite work.
God Bless America is not for everyone, and certainly its detractors will say that the film glorifies violence and is actually an example of the kind of media sensation that the film criticizes. Such readings of the film couldn’t be farther off the mark. During the Q & A session following the film’s premiere, Goldthwait described his film as a “fable,” a term that emphasizes the film cannot be taken as a work of realism. Instead, God Bless America is biting social satire that operates on the same level as Jonathan Swift’s classic “A Modest Proposal,” an 18th-century essay in which Swift suggested that the destitute Irish solve all their problems by selling their children as food for the rich. Goldthwait’s contempt for certain aspects of American culture may be evident in every frame, but his film certainly doesn’t suggest violence is the answer to the many contemporary social and political problems that plague America.
Like Goldthwait’s earlier films, Shakes the Clown,Sleeping Dogs Lie and World’s Greatest Dad, God Bless America is not to be missed. Put all your pre-conceptions about Goldthwait aside. Forget about his stand-up routines and his appearances in the Police Academy movies. He’s a director to be reckoned with.
Bobcat Goldthwait speaks regarding God Bless America.
Mark Cuban’s Magnet Releasing, the genre division of Magnolia Pictures, has acquired the rights to to God Bless America, and it will be available via video on demand and in a limited theatrical release in 2012.
What is it about the New South that flummoxes and eventually overwhelms film directors, even highly capable ones? There have been many attempts to bring to life the singular landscape and people of the modern south–Billy Bob Thornton’s Daddy and Themand Robert Duvall’s The Apostlecome to mind–but nearly without exception the story, the characters, and especially the setting eventually bring the production to a crash landing or, at best, a stuttering close. It’s as if the South itself refuses to hold still for its moment in the spotlight. And gee, isn’t that also in keeping with the clichés of some of these awful “southern pictures” of the past 20 years, like Steel Magnolias?
Derick Martini‘s Hick, showcased in a North American premiere at last week’s Toronto International Film Festival, falls victim to this unfortunate truism. And for the writer of the acclaimed Lymelife and the director of a handful of other films, Hick can’t even be called a noble failure. Call it, instead, one RC Cola and a Moon Pie too many. Call it what it is: a cliché, from concept to execution.
Take the lead character, Luli, played by Chloe Moretz, the show-stealing young star of last year’s Kick-Ass and Let Me In. Here’s an opportunity for the filmmaker to bring out something different and perhaps troubling about small-town adolescence. Ms. Moretz seems to have the chops to pull it off. But within minutes she’s providing narration, talking directly to the camera, and fiddling around with her character in ways that come off as disingenuous and distracted. Do teenagers anywhere talk like this?
Before we really know much about Luli or why she feels the need to run away from her ne’er-do-well mom and dad (mom played in an all-too-brief appearance by Juliette Lewis) to Las Vegas, she’s on the road, hitchhiking. Too soon she meets up with Eddie Kreezer, played by the promising newcomer Eddie Redmayne. Kreezer is a layabout, wannabe cowboy, with a pronounced limp and a weirdly charming but broken grin. Can you guess where this is going? Thelma and Louise would’ve driven off a cliff for this guy. Yes, of course, he turns out to be a psychopath.
It’s not long after Luli and Eddie begin their confused cross-country journey that the movie heads, well, south. People are beaten up or shot in bathrooms and grimy motels, pool tables are filmed in bad bar light, somebody pees in a drink. It’s fun to watch, like an episode of America’s Worst Driver, but after a while the subconscious begins to protest. Do the people involved in this movie really loathe the South (and their own audience) that much?
Films like Hick tend to never get traction because they refuse to delve deeply into their subject matter. You’re expected to be lightly entertained, but not enlightened. In this particular film, according to the director during his Q&A at the festival screening, there is apparently some recurring symbolism borrowed from The Wizard of Oz. OK, well, Blake Lively has a small but important role as Glenda. She’s a redhead, and she does rescue Luli in some notable ways. But then, what is Alec Baldwin doing in the final reel? Is he the Wizard?
Hick is based on a novel with the same title, by Andrea Portes, who also wrote the screenplay. It might work as a book, because it seems to be about a girl’s internal dialogue as she processes her woeful existence and her efforts to get away from it. But onscreen, it gives off few sparks and even less smoke. If this is the New South, then the New South needs some heart, some brains, and…you know the rest.
The star of Andrea Arnold‘s new film adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is, without question, the weather. No music. Very little dialogue. Mostly soil, storms, the stunning vistas of North Yorkshire, and a few unforgettable characters passing through them for the period of one lifetime.
Ms. Arnold’s third film moves the bar for nineteenth century literary adaptation about a mile above its previous position, and was for me a breakthrough in the way films can be made, as well as a triumph for women filmmakers of this century or the one before it. Its style, like any groundbreaking style, borrows from the best, including Tarkovsky, Bresson, and De Sica.
I went to see the film at the Toronto festival last week with no expectations. I have not seen the director’s first two features, and knew only that this adaptation was supposed to be “stark,” which struck me as a potentially intriguing contrast to William Wyler’s masterful but polished 1939 adaptation. In the new film, Heathcliff, Catherine, and the haunted moors that surround them are all effectively a unified entity. A good deal of time is spent in the days of their youth there, and once they are separated the perfection of that union is violated, leaving only emotional chaos and destruction. The story is told here from Heathcliff’s perspective, and we hear only what he hears (with one important exception, added after the film’s credits have rolled). Instead of music guiding your emotions, we hear what human beings normally hear–wind, rain, footsteps in the mud, doors slamming shut, the sound of grass bending. Wuthering Heights is a stuck-together house whose inhabitants dwell on the borderline of poverty. Words are secondary and almost unimportant, as sound and image tell the story. Pure cinema.
In the interview following the screening, Ms. Arnold made some interesting comments regarding her choices in the adaptation of what she describes (accurately, if you ask me) a “punk” novel from the nineteenth century. Tossing out Natalie Portman, Gemma Atherton, and Abbie Cornish, the director opted for a more age-appropriate newcomer for Catherine, and in a neo-realist move, cast many of the parts with non-actors or virtual unknowns, freeing the movie from the burden of star power. The film was shot in 4:3 ratio rather than widescreen, the director’s interesting and surprisingly effective preference for all her films. In her talk she also addressed my sole complaint, the addition of a song and a wholly unnecessary montage at the film’s end, an interruption that feels as though it were added at some producer’s behest, and one I fervently hope will be edited out by the time the film is distributed to theaters.
I anticipate that this movie that is going to be misunderstood by almost everyone. But from my perspective, world cinema has a new auteur of the first rank, and Wuthering Heights has never been more stunningly visualized. Leave your expectations at the door, and let Andrea Arnold get your attention.
What do Robert Bresson, David Mamet, Paul Henning, and Shirley Hazzard all have in common?
They’re all awesome? True, but there’s something else.
Their fiction has no concrete relationship to reality. They dwell in a land of pure style. Style incarnate. Style like a big black monolith that turns up in your backyard and refuses to explain itself. Immovable, impenetrable, not interested in what you want. A reality that is wholly invented as a means of interpreting, pondering, or mocking the one you’re living in.
Let’s begin with The Beverly Hillbillies. A binary proposition, to be sure–almost anyone you ask will tell you that it’s the dumbest thing they’ve ever seen or that it’s genius. Folks in the former category are wrong, of course, but it’s only because they’re so put off by bumpkins that they fail to see the monolith.
Producer-writer Paul Henning grew up in Independence, Missouri. He based The Beverly Hillbillies on rural folks he met when he was a young man, camping in the Ozarks near Branson. This was back before Branson was the scourge on the face of the earth it is today. Just forest, dirt roads, and people living their lives outside the mainstream. Way outside.
“Good folks,” he thought. “What would happen if I put them in the wildest context imaginable?”
This idea alone was genius, but Henning couldn’t stop himself. Before the show ever aired, he developed etched-in-stone characters, came up with countless references (and faux-references) to Southern rural life, and mastered what would be the hidden star of the show, its editing.
That’s right, I said editing. Check it out.
This clip is from the pilot episode of the show, which aired in the fall of 1962. After you watch it the first time and finish laughing your ass off, watch it again and understand why you laughed. The cuts, the timing, the pauses. Good-hearted folks trying desperately to understand one another, and failing. Never learning a thing. Every character carefully drawn and perfectly cast, every scene impeccably timed and framed, every nuance thought out in advance. No filler. Nothing borrowed. Completely surreal. Paul Henning didn’t just understand style, he breathed it.
Jed may have heard better jokes, but I can’t say I have.
In 1971 Latin music barely existed on the margins of American consciousness. But Mr. Barretto, who died in 2006 at 76, was prescient. If salsa is today a globally popular and influential dance music style, that is due in no small part to “Our Latin Thing,” which documents a concert by the Fania All-Stars at the Cheetah club on 53rd and Broadway in Manhattan on Aug. 26, 1971, and the chain of events it set in motion.
In the history of salsa music and Fania Records, which for many years were all but synonymous, “Our Latin Thing” and the Cheetah show occupy a singular position. It took another Fania All-Stars concert, this time for a crowd of more than 45,000 people at Yankee Stadium in 1973, to alert mainstream English-speaking America to the vast commercial potential of the Latin music market, but it was the Cheetah performance that may have been the ensemble’s artistic pinnacle.
“It was an absolutely magical show, or as we say in Spanish, una noche inolvidable,” an unforgettable night, said the pianist and bandleader Larry Harlow, who was part of the orchestra and one of the producers of the film. “Everybody was into it, and since the songs were basically jams, everybody had a chance to shine. There were no ego problems, and the audience couldn’t believe it, seeing all their heroes on the stage at the same time. We never played like that again.”
That sense of a magnificent musical machine firing on all cylinders — a dozen singers, each trying to outdo the other; a big, bold brass section; and a driving percussion section led by Mr. Barretto on congas and Orestes Vilató on timbales —has made “Our Latin Thing” a touchstone for salsa fans. Grainy segments pirated from the VHS version of the film have been floating around YouTube for years, but, because of complicated business reasons, there has never been an authorized DVD until now.
Just as important, “that night made the Fania All-Stars” commercially “and launched the careers of all the singers,” Mr. Harlow added. “We used to sell 25,000 copies of an album, and suddenly we’re now selling 100,000 copies individually, as bandleaders, and a million or more as the All-Stars. That was a big move for each of us. And the movie opened doors in South America, Europe and Japan. We were just playing around the ghetto, and all of a sudden we’re playing in soccer stadiums all over the world. It changed everything.”
“Our Latin Thing” was directed by Leon Gast and shot on 16 millimeter film for less than $100,000. Mr. Gast would go on to win an Academy Award in 1996 for “When We Were Kings,” but he retains a special affection for “Our Latin Thing,” which in addition to music includes somewhat exoticized snippets of barrio life as it was 40 years ago: domino games, a cockfight, a botánica and a Santeria ceremony.
“A lot of the stuff the band played that night they had played for the very first time during rehearsal, so with kids lined up around the block at the Cheetah waiting to get in, there was a lot of pressure to get it right,” he recalled. “It was all put together very quickly, shot in three or four days, and I have to admit that, because I was moving around the stage with a camera so much, I didn’t realize until later, when we were doing the edits, how extraordinary the performance was that night.”
Some songs in the film are strictly dance numbers, but others also document a nascent political and social consciousness. “Anacaona” is the story of a Caribbean Indian princess “from a captive race” whose “freedom never arrived,” and Mr. Gast has particularly fond memories of “Lamento de un Guajiro,” a Cuban folk song about a weary peasant returning from the fields, performed by Mr. Harlow’s band and the flutist Johnny Pacheco on the streets of the Lower East Side as the camera scans the tenements and the faces of the Caribbean immigrants who lived there.
The release of a remastered HD version of “Our Latin Thing ” (accompanied by a double CD soundtrack), is the culmination of a much broader and ambitious Fania program aimed at capitalizing on the label’s vast holdings. That effort began in 2009, when Fania was acquired by the Código Music group, and involves recordings originally issued on the Tico, Alegre, Inca and other Latin music labels that Fania acquired, a total of more than 3,000 albums from the late 1940s onward.
Recently Fania released a pair of four-CD sets, “Salsa: A Musical History” and “Ponte Duro: The Fania All-Stars Story,” with remastered versions of seminal recordings like Eddie Palmieri’s “Vamonos Pa’l Monte” and “Azúcar.” Other reissues include remastered double CD “A Man and His Music” sets devoted to Fania’s leading names and alternate versions, unreleased tracks and rarities like Stevie Wonder joining the All-Stars on an 18-minute medley of “Quitate Tú” and “Hang on Sloopy.”
“Even from the biggest names there are mono versions, seven-inch versions and so on that haven’t been released before,” said Andre Torres, editor in chief of the music magazine Wax Poetics who has helped oversee the rerelease program. “We’re trying to offer a nice, clean newly remastered package that isn’t digitally compressed. We know people are going to be listening on iPods, but we want to leave that brightness, those horns jumping and blaring at you, some of which had been lost.”
Several Fania songs have been sampled by currently popular artists, Christina Aguilera and Shakira among them, which has helped introduce Fania to younger audiences. But like other labels that want to wring more revenue from a fabled catalog and attract new listeners, Blue Note among them, Fania has not only begun issuing vinyl versions of albums like Tito Puente’s “Vaya,” but also opened its vaults to D.J.’s and allowing them to remix classic tunes.
The first such recording, called “Hammock House Africa Caribe,” by Joaquin Claussell, a Brooklyn-raised D.J. of Puerto Rican descent, was released in May. Recognizing that some fans and collectors may consider it sacrilege, Mr. Claussell has nonetheless reworked tracks like Ismael Miranda’s “Ahora Me Voy” and Celia Cruz’s “Changó.”
“I am a child of this music, Fania was an integral part of my upbringing, so it was very intimidating to deal with it,” said Mr. Claussell, who came to the label’s attention because of his remix of Nina Simone’s “Feelin’ Good.” “I decided to leave most of it intact, and try to add dance rhythms that are more related to today than yesterday, so what you get is a lot of Afro-Cuban rhythms, but with some house music, which is where I originally come from.”
That the master tapes still exist at all is something of a minor miracle, the result of a mixture of luck and diligent detective work. Fania Records was founded in 1964 by Jerry Masucci, an Italian-American lawyer and a former New York City police officer, and Mr. Pacheco, a Dominican-born horn player and arranger, with Mr. Masucci handling the business side and Mr. Pacheco focusing on the creative aspects.
But Fania’s business dealings were always chaotic and conflictive, with artists accusing Mr. Masucci of cheating them of royalties and claiming authorship of songs he hadn’t written, and when he died in Buenos Aires in 1997, the whereabouts of many of Fania’s master recordings were known only to him. As the company passed to new owners, the trail grew even colder.
Eventually, “as we were going through documentation, somebody stumbled across an invoice that led to records of payments to this storage facility in the Hudson Valley, and they called us back and said the multitrack tapes are here,” said Michael Rucker, Fania’s chief marketing officer. Mr. Torres was then brought in to assemble a database of Fania’s holdings, including, as he recalled it, “the master tapes, old vinyl, film reels, photos, posters, publishing information and slides, everything they had stockpiled.”
But even then a complete, usable print of “Our Latin Thing” still could not be found, just outtakes and a few scenes. Mr. Gast, who said he had surrendered his copies to Mr. Masucci, thought he had tracked one down in a warehouse in Utah. But when he inquired, he recalled, “the guy answering the phone said, ‘We don’t have it, it’s landfill.’ The bills hadn’t been paid.”
In the end, Mr. Rucker said, the label’s owners “came across a theater copy from back in the day, which they found for sale on eBay, and they went and got it.” After the print was digitized and updated to HD, he continued, “we decided to take it a step further and break out the audio and video and remaster the audio, which is now full and rich. There are still a couple of places where you get a split-second crack in the screen, but for the most part it came out awesome.”■
Thanks to the folks at Wax Poetics, one of the finest music magazines ever published. Long may they stay in print.
Ozzy Osbourne‘s solo career has had its ups and downs, I will admit. But there are many ups, and I have always found him vastly underrated as a master of arrangement, killer riffs, good melody, and turn of phrase (as well as being the master of reality). He is to metal guitar heroes what Art Blakey is to jazz musicians in terms of how many crazed rockers he’s birthed over the years. Those years have also proven that the best of his work with Black Sabbath is in the Pantheon–even if you’re not a Sabbath-head. And even though I’m on a roll here, I regret to say I can’t speak to his reality-TV show.
But I didn’t come to talk about any of that. I’ve come to talk about ownership.
Out of the blue on my iTunes shuffle the other day comes a cover by Ozzy of Joe Walsh‘s “Rocky Mountain Way.” It literally chased the clouds away. Click on the photo above and have a listen.
Break it down: to update the song to Ozzy, we have Alice in Chains’ Jerry Cantrell providing us with metal crunch rhythm guitar, dry as a bone, paired creatively with two warm, fat, analog, tube-screaming slide guitars battling for greatness. Cantrell also contributes the guitar talk-box solo, a sentimental ode to the young Joe Walsh. Wurlitzer electric piano woven in nicely. Inspired chicks belting out the backing vocals. Bass player locked up tight with drummer. And feel–the whole thing sounds like the aural equivalent of a really excellent Sloppy Joe.
Ozzy’s vocal has exactly the right tenor, high and thin, to capture the spirit of Joe’s original, but is not at all imitative. It’s Ozzy all the way. He also adds nice touches to the arrangement, as he does throughout the album this comes from, Under Cover, which Allrovi’s James Christopher Monger accurately describes as “essentially an amped-up karaoke night in the Osbournes’ basement lair.”
Judging from the reviews of this album on Amazon, my enthusiastic reaction to this song is not shared by most Ozzy fans, but for me his take on this well-worn classic rock staple does what a good cover should always do: reveal something new about the song to you. In this case, it was revealed to me that the lyrics are completely incoherent, even when heavy use of metaphor is employed by the listener. And you know what? I love it. The 1970s were all about big hit songs that sounded great and made absolutely no sense. All of us were walking around singing “the lion sleeps tonight,” “put the lime in the coconut,” and “I miss the rains down in Africa” and not giving it a second thought.
Anyway, Ozzy owns–or at very least co-owns–the new version, rocking it on the mainline, and demonstrating that he did in fact listen to something other than metal in the 1970s. I took a look at some of the other covers on the record, and must admit I will not approach them out of fear: “I Will” and “For What It’s Worth” bring out a response of “no” in my heart.
But this one, yes. I find myself hoping that somewhere in West, Walsh heard this in 2008 and thought, “you know what, I used to fucking rock. Why the hell did I join the Eagles?”
Crickets chirp a lonesome reply outside the Hotel California.
Ozzy. So much better.
Kevin Royal Johnson
Special thanks to my cousin Johnny Purcell for turning me on to Sabbath in 1970.
Robert Breer, an animator whose use of novel techniques to set lines and forms scrambling across the screen opened up a new language for film, died on Aug. 11 at his home in Tucson. He was 84.
Mr. Breer described his technique as “assault and battery on the retina.” A painter by training, turned to animation after making flip books and stop-action films based on the abstract paintings he produced while living and exhibiting in Paris in the 1950s. Early on, he saw the potential for breaking with the narrative sequences and anthropomorphic forms that defined the medium.
In films like “Recreation” (1956), “A Man and His Dog out for Air” (1957), “69″ (1968) and “Swiss Army Knife with Rats and Pigeons” (1980), viewers were bombarded with wiggling lines, letters, abstract shapes and live-action images that jumped and flashed, zoomed and receded, appeared and disappeared, inflicting what Mr. Breer once called “assault and battery on the retina.”
“He was a seminal figure in the new American cinema and the American avant-garde beginning in the 1950s and continuing right up to the present,” said Andrew Lampert, a filmmaker and archivist at the Anthology Film Archives in Manhattan. “He was a real pioneer in animation and short-form filmmaking.”
Robert Carlton Breer was born on Sept. 30, 1926, in Detroit. His father, Carl, was an automotive engineer who designed the Chrysler Airflow and, in his spare time, invented a 3-D camera to film family vacations.
Mr. Breer attended Stanford, where he started out as an engineering student but soon turned to art, producing figurative work but undergoing a conversion to abstraction after seeing paintings by Mondrian on a school trip. After earning a bachelor’s degree in 1949, he sailed to France.
In Paris he turned out large geometric abstract paintings, which he exhibited at the Denise René Gallery. One of his flip books and several of his films were included in the gallery’s influential 1955 exhibition “Le Mouvement,” which put kinetic art on the map by showcasing the motion-conscious work of artists like Jean Tinguely, Marcel Duchamp, Alexander Calder and Victor Vasarely.
Determined to introduce motion into painting, Mr. Breer had already begun making stop-action films, titled “Form Phases,” based on motifs from his paintings. He quickly began developing an idiosyncratic store of images in short animated films whose geometric forms and absurdist tendencies reflected his debt to Dadaism and Russian Constructivism.
In a 1971 interview with Jonas Mekas, Mr. Breer said, “In all my work I tried to amaze myself with something, and the only way you can amaze yourself is to create a situation in which an accident can happen.”
On returning to the United States in 1959, he encountered filmmakers like Stan Brakhage, Kenneth Anger and Mr. Mekas, who were developing a new avant-garde American cinema along lines congenial to his own. He also began collaborating with Pop artists like Claes Oldenburg, with whom he made the film “Pat’s Birthday” (1962), and the leading figures involved in happenings, multimedia art and performance art.
Billy Kluver, the Bell Labs scientist who was a founder of the organization Experiments in Art and Technology to bring engineers and artists together, invited Mr. Breer to contribute work for the Pepsi Pavilion at the world’s fair in Osaka, Japan, in 1970. Mr. Breer fashioned large dome-shaped versions of the motorized sculptures he called floats, which moved slowly and randomly.
Mr. Breer, who inscribed his images on 4-by-6-inch index cards, devoted considerable ingenuity to undermining traditional narrative structures and speeding up the delivery of images to the viewer’s eye. Rather than having one frame flow to the next, creating a seamless continuity, he made each frame as different as possible from the one that preceded it. A devotee of early cinema technology, he used rotoscopy, a technique devised by Max Fleischer for animating live-action scenes, in “Fuji” (1974), a quasitravelogue based on his experiences in Japan in 1970. He taught film at Cooper Union in Manhattan for 30 years, beginning in 1971.
In the early-mid 1960s, after making a baker’s dozen of Italian comedies that you may never see, director Lucio Fulci took a left turn into an alley and never looked back. And we’re all better for it.
Prior to this change of heart, Fulci worked with the likes of the Italian comedy team Franco and Ciccio, and made a few spaghetti Westerns (the most notable of which was Massacre Time in 1966). After his experience in Damascus Alley, newly inspired, he re-debuted in 1969 with the first of what would be a fine quartet of Giallo films, One on Top of the Other(or Una sull’altra, released in the US and now on DVD as Perversion Story). He chose to shoot the film on location in San Francisco, in English, with a bunch of Italian actors including the remarkable Marisa Mell. Carting a crew from Italy to San Francisco and making Italian actors speak English was, I think, Fulci’s attempt to overcome the fact that he was sort of beaten to the punch by Brits Richard Lester and Nicolas Roeg, who famously shot Petulia there during the Summer of Love. San Francisco period fanatics could have a field day attempting to identify what are literally dozens of locales used throughout.
Being that this was essentially Fulci’s first film out of the gate as an auteur, I set my expectations low. But while One on Top of the Other is no match for Petulia in terms of multi-layered, poetic storytelling, it’s a fascinating crime story in its own right, easily one of the best genre pictures of the late 1960s from Italy or anywhere else. Trading off for the viewer’s attention throughout are cinematographer Alejandro Ulloa and actress Mell. But to be honest, what makes it so great is that they’re not really competing as much as teaming up. And you know, I just love teamwork.
Throughout the film, when Ulloa is not dwelling (understandably) on Ms. Mell, he incorporates all kinds of wild–though never distracting–photographic stunts, such as shooting a lovemaking couple beneath a transparent, blood-red mattress, similarly transparent colored walls and floors, and an almost reckless use of deep focus. Equally inspired are the contributions of set designer Pier Luigi Basile and editor Ornella Micheli, the latter a frequent Fulci collaborator.
Finally, not to be ignored is Fulci’s story, wherein a perpetually depressed doctor, handsome as he is hapless, unexpectedly loses his wife to a mysterious overdose. Even more depressed now, he and his mistress try to cheer themselves up by going to a strip club, where they find the wife’s doppelgänger–very much alive–doing a stage routine with a golden motorcycle as her prop. Full of twists right down to the final frame, the story propels forward nicely toward a truly unexpected ending.
One on Top of the Other has a strong and uncommon theme explored similarly in Petulia, that of the lost generation that came into adulthood in the early 1960s, wandering around aimlessly in the explosion of change during 1967 and 1968. In his fanatical and definitive book on Fulci’s career, Beyond Terror: The Films of Lucio Fulci, senior obelist Stephen Thrower notes:
“The chosen setting is rather ‘square,’ given the time and place. San Francisco, at the height of ‘free-love,’ with its origastic revelry turning darker as the decade drew to a close, is ignored as such; the film instead focuses upon the way that more ‘reputable’ strata of society were taking advantage of the spirit of the times. The milieu depicted is wealthy, professional, and middle-aged, with little sign of any ‘swinging’ youth on the prowl…[presenting] us with a picture of men who are lost to themselves and of women who just couldn’t care less.”
Stephen Thrower’s Beyond Terror: The Films of Lucio Fulci, was published in a signed limited hardcover, a trade hardcover, and a trade softcover edition. All three are out of print, but can be purchased on the used and rare book market from The Advanced Book Exchange,
Reading about Alejandro Ulloa’s work has made me want to watch Exterminators of the Year 3000. How can you lose with a title like that?
Noun. 1. One who obsessively seeks to deconstruct and make sense of the past as it pertains to the arts and cultural history. 2. One who delights in sharing new knowledge, but who considers himself or herself of little or no importance. 3. One who is suspicious of existing cultural definitions. 4. Geek.
It’s nighttime in Charm City, the dirty old town that used to hold more people than Manhattan, and now holds fewer than Philadelphia. For better or worse, I cover the waterfront for rare books and paper. I dig cinema, music, literature, and pop culture. I dig the paper that is the lens. But it’s not the paper that I love the most–it’s the ride I take when I hold the paper in my hand. And getting there.
Speaking of getting there, honestly, I almost didn’t make it here. I’ve resisted starting a blog for years because I read so many I disliked, and have had a terrible fear of becoming the author of yet another one. Finally, after some pressure from all sides, I gave it some thought and decided to go ahead. But I made some ground rules.
In the 1980s and 1990s, a friend routinely sent me clipped music columns written by Scott McCaughey from the now-legendary Seattle newspaper, The Rocket. Scott was the leader of a terrific Seattle-based pop band called The Young Fresh Fellows, and today is a working singer-songwriter with many projects. When he’s not playing in one of his 8 or 9 bands, he can be found augmenting the likes of R.E.M. and Robyn Hitchcock when they are on tour. But more than all that, Scott has always been an avatar of good taste, sort of a pop-grunge west coast version of John Waters.
Scott’s column was culture fanatic writing at it’s best, always engaging and inspiring, and his implicit ground rules made for very entertaining reading. What I liked about Scott’s columns were that
they were about what Scott liked, not about Scott.
they were enthusiastic and fanatically detailed.
they were philosophical without being self-indulgent.
they made me want to learn more about the artists he described.
they were sometimes infused with a little sarcastic humor, but never snarky.
they never let extended metaphor or attitude wrest control from content.
they avoided mention of things he disliked–he was a fan, not a critic.
they made whatever day I was reading them a better day.
It was like reading gospel. Not the kind in the Bible, but the kind that made people want to put it in the Bible before there was a Bible. A gospel that gives the opposite effect of criticism or egocentric intellectual drivel. Maybe not a column that worked for everyone, but it worked for me. It was like a cool breeze made out of newsprint. So the Obelist En Route blog is affectionately dedicated to Mr. McCaughey. Long may he enthuse.
Note that Scott’s sunglasses closely match his beer. Don’t think that this was not planned in advance.
Nearly everything I’ve learned worth knowing in my life was not learned in school (though school teaches you how to think, I guess). It was learned along the way, school of life, etc. But it’s the people who made me want to learn–they are what counted. So the second and equally sincere dedication for this unholy thing goes to the precious people whose McCaughey-like enthusiasm gave me several lifetimes worth of gasoline to fuel my own. You know who you are, and you know when you see me coming we will always have more to talk about than time will possibly allow. We see life through the lens. We can’t see it any other way.
The title of this blog was merrily appropriated from an obscure crime novel from the 1930s by C. Daly King, pointed out to me by fellow obelist John McDonald. In a blog of his own, British crime fiction writer Martin Edwards lays it down:
“‘Obelist’ was a word that King made up. He defined it in Obelists at Sea as ‘a person of little or no value’ and then re-defined it in Obelists en Route as ‘one who harbours suspicion’. Why on earth would you invent a word, use it in your book titles, and then change your mind about what it means?”
Stay tuned, Martin.
Kevin Royal Johnson
Special thanks to Christophe Claessens at UniversalTrendsetter.org.
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