hi guys. i'm hear.
11.14.2009
11.13.2009
11.10.2009
11.08.2009
While I like being alone.....
One of these is a trailer for the movie Tulpan (2008) and one is a still showing Kazakhstan's tree... or it could be the other way around too. I'm not sure. Sorry, the tree one is the trailer. I'm pretty sure I saw it move. My mistake.
A critically lauded ethnographic drama set on the Kazakhstan Steppe – a godforsaken landscape of wind, dust, camels, goats and 8 people, all of whom are in the movie. This is a beautifully realized epic landscape film, a sweetly comic coming-of-age story and a lyrical work of social realism... just like every single other ethnographic drama I've ever seen.
No wonder the Mongol hordes swept across Asia and conquered half the known world. The other choice was staying put in that arid shithole without a gun to blow your brains out. Based on Tulpan, I'd have to bet that Mars has more going on than the Southern Kazakhstan Steppe.
Strike one highly acclaimed movie from the year end review list...
Mars, incidently...
A critically lauded ethnographic drama set on the Kazakhstan Steppe – a godforsaken landscape of wind, dust, camels, goats and 8 people, all of whom are in the movie. This is a beautifully realized epic landscape film, a sweetly comic coming-of-age story and a lyrical work of social realism... just like every single other ethnographic drama I've ever seen.No wonder the Mongol hordes swept across Asia and conquered half the known world. The other choice was staying put in that arid shithole without a gun to blow your brains out. Based on Tulpan, I'd have to bet that Mars has more going on than the Southern Kazakhstan Steppe.
Strike one highly acclaimed movie from the year end review list...
Mars, incidently...
Sporgey
11.07.2009
Eddie and the Losers
The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973) has long been one of my favourite films, but for some reason, it was never released on video until Criterion (bless their souls) dusted it off and quietly issued it earlier this year. Director Peter Yates and screenwriter Paul Monash adapt a very fine novel by George V. Higgins and hand it off to one of the best casts in cinematic history. Everyone in this film is pitch perfect.The Friends of Eddie Coyle is the story of a small-time, hard-luck Boston crook due to start serving time in a few weeks. A hangdog Robert Mitchum underplays the role with such precision that you quickly forget that you're watching one of cinema's most iconic actors... no mean feat and a testament to Mitchum's acting prowess. A palpable sense of doom hangs over Eddie from the opening frame – he just isn't going to be able to cut it in prison and this fact compels his every move. The clock is ticking and his remaining hours of freedom are quickly melting away. In this regard, the film's plot structure shares some thematic similarities with Rudolph Maté's excellent 1950 Noir, D.O.A. but whereas the central character in Maté's film is racing against time to save himself, Eddie Coyle is resigned to his fate. The result is a unique look at the inevitable - the audience quickly comes to understand that Coyle can't escape this fate and his actions aren't the central focus of the story. What The Friends of Eddie Coyle offers instead, is a rare, unflinching and realistic glimpse deep into a flawed character's soul. Coyle is a protagonist whose past choices have led him to this point in time and one assumes, if given the opportunity to do it all over again, he'd likely end up in exactly the same place.
This is a hard film to label with anything other than the Noir moniker, but at its core The Friends of Eddie Coyle has more in common with John Huston's Alphabet City or Robert Mulligan's tragically under-appreciated The Nickle Ride than it does with say, Chinatown. It's a gritty '70s loser-drama mired in realism rather than existentialism like most films in the Noir canon. As a result, it stands nearly alone amongst films in the neo-Noir tradition, at once similar and yet distinctly removed from the Noir style.
It's an overused noun but The Friends of Eddie Coyle is a true masterpiece, a work of extraordinary skill and an artistic achievement of the highest order. The cast is filled with stellar character actors who couldn't catch a cold in Hollywood today. The script is more a compression of the novel than an adaptation in any traditional sense. The only misstep might be Dave Gruisin's overwrought score which seems at odds with the rest of the picture. It's also one of the only things the film makers added that didn't have its source in Higgin's original novel. If ever a film didn't need a score at all, this is it.
While it's true that they “don't make them like this anymore” it's also true that they never did. The Friends of Eddie Coyle is a unique film that got lost and remains so. It might be the ultimate cult movie, revered by it's small fan base and nearly unknown to everyone else
...and that's just fine by me.
Sporgey.
In the Loop
Brilliant.
In The Loop, Armando Ianucci's big screen quasi-adaptation of his own BBC political satire The Thick of It, is a thing of pure genius and a testament to the power and effectiveness of outstanding writing and a keen awareness of society's ebbs and floes. It's a nearly perfect melding of Wag The Dog, Dr. Strangelove and The Office, if you can imagine such a beast. The plot involves an off-the-cuff remark made during a radio interview by a junior government minister that quickly spins out of control launching he and his aides head-first into an escalating international (read: American) buildup toward war in the Middle East.
The star of the film is undoubtedly the foul-mouthed Malcolm Tucker (played to perfection by Scottish actor, Peter Capaldi), a sort of governmental attack dog who bullies and verbally pistol-whips the Prime Minister's underlings into holding the party line and doing what they're told. No one can swear quite like Capaldi. He is a one-man profanity factory and he is hilarious. There is an absolute embarrassment of quotable lines in the loop, so many in fact that it would take several viewings just to catch them all. It's a film that's 100% dialogue coming at you at 200 miles an hour. Frankly, it's a little exhausting trying to keep up but worthy of your complete attention.
In The Loop got me thinking that modern satire has turned a corner and might be better now than it ever was. It used to be tough to satirize the strictly buttoned-down and earnest news media and political elite. They were the source of important utterances and almost above ridicule. Exceptions existed back in the old days of course (Python, SNL and SCTV to name a few) but when The Onion News Network webcasts do it these days, it works mostly because they play it so straight. It's not that comedy writing is necessarily better, more that the mainstream media isn't as unassailable as they once were. Their product has become so clownish and ludicrous over the past ten or fifteen years, that exposing those traits for what they are works best when you simply copy them. I'd have to guess that In The Loop is ONN's political equivalent. The reason it seems so disturbingly humourous is its less-than-faint familiarity. One could easily imagine that this is exactly what the inner workings of politic parties of every stripe feels like, circa 2009. Like The Onion does with big media, Ianucci simply tweaks the present day political chicanery that we hear and read about every day and regurgitates it on the screen, almost verbatim.
As our society continues to morph into something as yet unidentifiable but clearly different, the cherished estates of yore are increasingly coming under attack. The First Estate (the clergy), the Second Estate (the elite) and the Fourth Estate (the press) are regularly lambasted and thoroughly discounted by an increasingly vocal Third Estate (the commoners, aka you and me). In The Loop plugs into this present-day elitist deconstruction with great success, and appears to have no qualms suggesting that the entire political system is fundamentally... in the words of Malcolm Tucker....
fuckity-fucked.
Hats off to all involved for a job well done.
Sporgey.
In The Loop, Armando Ianucci's big screen quasi-adaptation of his own BBC political satire The Thick of It, is a thing of pure genius and a testament to the power and effectiveness of outstanding writing and a keen awareness of society's ebbs and floes. It's a nearly perfect melding of Wag The Dog, Dr. Strangelove and The Office, if you can imagine such a beast. The plot involves an off-the-cuff remark made during a radio interview by a junior government minister that quickly spins out of control launching he and his aides head-first into an escalating international (read: American) buildup toward war in the Middle East.
The star of the film is undoubtedly the foul-mouthed Malcolm Tucker (played to perfection by Scottish actor, Peter Capaldi), a sort of governmental attack dog who bullies and verbally pistol-whips the Prime Minister's underlings into holding the party line and doing what they're told. No one can swear quite like Capaldi. He is a one-man profanity factory and he is hilarious. There is an absolute embarrassment of quotable lines in the loop, so many in fact that it would take several viewings just to catch them all. It's a film that's 100% dialogue coming at you at 200 miles an hour. Frankly, it's a little exhausting trying to keep up but worthy of your complete attention.
In The Loop got me thinking that modern satire has turned a corner and might be better now than it ever was. It used to be tough to satirize the strictly buttoned-down and earnest news media and political elite. They were the source of important utterances and almost above ridicule. Exceptions existed back in the old days of course (Python, SNL and SCTV to name a few) but when The Onion News Network webcasts do it these days, it works mostly because they play it so straight. It's not that comedy writing is necessarily better, more that the mainstream media isn't as unassailable as they once were. Their product has become so clownish and ludicrous over the past ten or fifteen years, that exposing those traits for what they are works best when you simply copy them. I'd have to guess that In The Loop is ONN's political equivalent. The reason it seems so disturbingly humourous is its less-than-faint familiarity. One could easily imagine that this is exactly what the inner workings of politic parties of every stripe feels like, circa 2009. Like The Onion does with big media, Ianucci simply tweaks the present day political chicanery that we hear and read about every day and regurgitates it on the screen, almost verbatim.
As our society continues to morph into something as yet unidentifiable but clearly different, the cherished estates of yore are increasingly coming under attack. The First Estate (the clergy), the Second Estate (the elite) and the Fourth Estate (the press) are regularly lambasted and thoroughly discounted by an increasingly vocal Third Estate (the commoners, aka you and me). In The Loop plugs into this present-day elitist deconstruction with great success, and appears to have no qualms suggesting that the entire political system is fundamentally... in the words of Malcolm Tucker....
fuckity-fucked.
Hats off to all involved for a job well done.
Sporgey.
11.06.2009
Scott Walker: 30 Century Man (2006)
Just who is Scott Walker? Women who were cooking pineapple hams and doing the house cleaning in the '60s have a very specific image of him as the panty-moistening dreamboat of MOR specialists The Walker Brothers; those that came of age while dodging spitballs from Johnny Rotten will recall being urged onto Walker's back catalogue through the proselytizing of Julian Cope; readers of Brit avant-music mag The Wire may have stumbled across references to the enigmatic artist in its pages; casual hipsters who cry and cuddle during Wes Anderson's stiflingly earnest moving pictures caught a brief sonic glimpse on The Life Aquatic soundtrack which included the short Walker composition from which this particular doc takes its name; and David Lynch fans: wondering what the maestro might do next? If you can, imagine something even more nightmarish, surreal and impenetrable than Inland Empire, and you'll find a clue and something of an audio equivalent in Walker's latest album, 2006's The Drift.
If that serves to complicate the original question further, so be it. Scott Walker seems to be defined by what he isn't rather than by what he is - the language for that doesn't quite exist yet. Scott Walker: 30 Century Man is a fascinating portrait of a man who went from near-Beatles fame in the '60s to a self-imposed exile for a near 20 year period, returning to release some of the darkest, harshest, but strangely beautiful work ever recorded. The rare interviews with Walker in the film serve to edify his process, but not necessarily the music itself. This is important, because the onus is still placed on the viewer/listener to impart their own meaning into his dense, troubling lyrics.
In an age where 99% of all pop music is created to placate, coddle, massage the listener's mind into a state of wonderful numbness, Walker's sounds rip the lollipop out of your mouth, shove you into a black pit and force you to confront your own demons, Helen Keller-style, but without the whole deaf thing. This makes many people uncomfortable; after all, who wouldn't prefer to be led by the hand, to be told, "It's going to be fine"? The imagery of his lyrics is so bold and almost painterly (Francis Bacon, not Robert Bateman), that they can at times be literally jarring. Who wants that? Not one unnamed and unapproachable ex-Monday night co-worker, who hated it when I played him a snippet of Farmer In The City from Walker's essential Tilt. I felt my inner Jack Nicholson rising to shout, "You can't handle the truth!", but instead calmly made him a tea, sat him in front of his console, and, with a pat on the head and some helpful reassurance that he would certainly solve this round of Fantastic Contraption, slunk away and pressed play on the cream-clad iPod, the saccharine jangle of the first chords of some anonymous Z-side from Oingo Boingo seeping from the subwoofer....
I digress.
The DVD will be a tough recommend: Walker fans likely had a copy on pre-order 6 months before it was released, and the rest of the music-doc loving world falls into two camps: those that want Rolling Stones: Shine A Light, and those that want Wilco: I Am Trying To Gobble Your Knob. However, I'll keep flogging this one, if only to wake people up to the fact that there is still some supremely good music being created, and hey, isn't it cool that Scott actually had a guy in the studio punching a side of beef for a sound on The Drift?
In the film, Walker is likened to Eliot, Beckett, and Joyce, and read his lyrics over and over enough times and the comparison isn't such a stretch. Call him pretentious, call him a genius, call him a pioneer, a modern day Captain Beefheart, the anti-Brian Wilson; or call him, as Brian Eno does, "not only the most important modern composer, but also the most important modern poet". Hell, call him Scott Walker: 30 Century Man - it's as ambiguous and exact a descriptor you're bound to come across. If you're still on the fence, you must have missed those names. A must watch; a must listen. Just don't expect an easy go of it; it's dark music for dark times.
This is in my top 10 of the year.
If that serves to complicate the original question further, so be it. Scott Walker seems to be defined by what he isn't rather than by what he is - the language for that doesn't quite exist yet. Scott Walker: 30 Century Man is a fascinating portrait of a man who went from near-Beatles fame in the '60s to a self-imposed exile for a near 20 year period, returning to release some of the darkest, harshest, but strangely beautiful work ever recorded. The rare interviews with Walker in the film serve to edify his process, but not necessarily the music itself. This is important, because the onus is still placed on the viewer/listener to impart their own meaning into his dense, troubling lyrics.
In an age where 99% of all pop music is created to placate, coddle, massage the listener's mind into a state of wonderful numbness, Walker's sounds rip the lollipop out of your mouth, shove you into a black pit and force you to confront your own demons, Helen Keller-style, but without the whole deaf thing. This makes many people uncomfortable; after all, who wouldn't prefer to be led by the hand, to be told, "It's going to be fine"? The imagery of his lyrics is so bold and almost painterly (Francis Bacon, not Robert Bateman), that they can at times be literally jarring. Who wants that? Not one unnamed and unapproachable ex-Monday night co-worker, who hated it when I played him a snippet of Farmer In The City from Walker's essential Tilt. I felt my inner Jack Nicholson rising to shout, "You can't handle the truth!", but instead calmly made him a tea, sat him in front of his console, and, with a pat on the head and some helpful reassurance that he would certainly solve this round of Fantastic Contraption, slunk away and pressed play on the cream-clad iPod, the saccharine jangle of the first chords of some anonymous Z-side from Oingo Boingo seeping from the subwoofer....
I digress.
The DVD will be a tough recommend: Walker fans likely had a copy on pre-order 6 months before it was released, and the rest of the music-doc loving world falls into two camps: those that want Rolling Stones: Shine A Light, and those that want Wilco: I Am Trying To Gobble Your Knob. However, I'll keep flogging this one, if only to wake people up to the fact that there is still some supremely good music being created, and hey, isn't it cool that Scott actually had a guy in the studio punching a side of beef for a sound on The Drift?
In the film, Walker is likened to Eliot, Beckett, and Joyce, and read his lyrics over and over enough times and the comparison isn't such a stretch. Call him pretentious, call him a genius, call him a pioneer, a modern day Captain Beefheart, the anti-Brian Wilson; or call him, as Brian Eno does, "not only the most important modern composer, but also the most important modern poet". Hell, call him Scott Walker: 30 Century Man - it's as ambiguous and exact a descriptor you're bound to come across. If you're still on the fence, you must have missed those names. A must watch; a must listen. Just don't expect an easy go of it; it's dark music for dark times.
This is in my top 10 of the year.
Is this like the Huey Lewis thing again?
The older, more out of touch, less relevant and dottier I get, the more I rely on people like Nick, Joe, Kris, Tom and Kendall to keep me current(ish). Even new movies that have some buzz drift on by as I stare out with dead eyes at a world that's passing me by. I fake “getting it” most of the time convincing the witless fairly effectively, but knowing all the while that most of you see right through me. I've stopped pretending with Joe and Nick and hope that they'll humour me long enough to make my escape to my moated castle redoubt in Owen Sound. Kendall puts up with me and Tom just doesn't understand how the ultra-cool Film Buff could possibly have had its genesis in a middle-aged lunatic that grabs his (Tom's) ass every shift. It stopped being funny months ago and has turned the corner toward creepy.... for both of us. Kris lives in a world I neither understand nor care to, being the consummate modern, urban techno-munnications expert of my small circle of regular contacts. His world is so of-the-vapid-moment and mine so of-a-nonexistent-past that we basically cancel each other out. He slices my head off with a smart phone laser just after I bash his skull in with a rock tied to the end of a heavy stick ...metaphorically that is.
One of my ongoing faux-hipster-charades is to scope out Joe's KRK delivery for the FBE each week, then order most of it for the FBW and pretend that I knew about them all along. Sometimes, if something's particularly cool, I just steal it out of Joe's order and put it in the FBW box and feign ignorance. Nick says and writes things like “def” that aren't real words but mean that same thing as their longer, former spellings. I'm working on peppering my verbal comm with these shorter versions.
This week I opened my conduit-to-film-hipness's FBE order box to discover this inside...
This is film No. 8 in the “Love Comes Softly” series and I'm uncertain what to make of it. Is it so square that it's hip like say.... '50s Broadway show-tunes are once again or is this a sign that a new, softer, queerer Joe is emerging? Is Patty Duke cool again.... or more accurately, for the first time? The rest of the order seemed normal (Joe-normal, that is). It had “Raw Meat” and “The Devil”, a banned 1972 Polish film about Jakub who, “goes insane and becomes a mass murderer” (from the blurb on the back of the box, a description, incidentally, that works for most of the films he orders). It also had, “From the creators of Kiltro”, Mirageman – starring Marko Zaror aka “The Latin Dragon”. I shit you not. (I took this one for the FBW, by the way).
One of these things is not like the others but I'll be damned if I can figure out which one it is. I'm flummoxed. The obvious choice, Love Finds a Home, is just too fucking weird not to belong to Joe's absurd purchase choices. About a year ago, just after I gave him the FBE store to play with like a train set, he reamed me out for not letting him order what he wanted, fearing the place would become a Rogers and they'd all have to wear little red shirts. Well, you have to admit that your fears were unfounded. The FBE catalog is now so off-the-wall only Jules understands it completely.
Sporgey.
One of my ongoing faux-hipster-charades is to scope out Joe's KRK delivery for the FBE each week, then order most of it for the FBW and pretend that I knew about them all along. Sometimes, if something's particularly cool, I just steal it out of Joe's order and put it in the FBW box and feign ignorance. Nick says and writes things like “def” that aren't real words but mean that same thing as their longer, former spellings. I'm working on peppering my verbal comm with these shorter versions.
This week I opened my conduit-to-film-hipness's FBE order box to discover this inside...
This is film No. 8 in the “Love Comes Softly” series and I'm uncertain what to make of it. Is it so square that it's hip like say.... '50s Broadway show-tunes are once again or is this a sign that a new, softer, queerer Joe is emerging? Is Patty Duke cool again.... or more accurately, for the first time? The rest of the order seemed normal (Joe-normal, that is). It had “Raw Meat” and “The Devil”, a banned 1972 Polish film about Jakub who, “goes insane and becomes a mass murderer” (from the blurb on the back of the box, a description, incidentally, that works for most of the films he orders). It also had, “From the creators of Kiltro”, Mirageman – starring Marko Zaror aka “The Latin Dragon”. I shit you not. (I took this one for the FBW, by the way).One of these things is not like the others but I'll be damned if I can figure out which one it is. I'm flummoxed. The obvious choice, Love Finds a Home, is just too fucking weird not to belong to Joe's absurd purchase choices. About a year ago, just after I gave him the FBE store to play with like a train set, he reamed me out for not letting him order what he wanted, fearing the place would become a Rogers and they'd all have to wear little red shirts. Well, you have to admit that your fears were unfounded. The FBE catalog is now so off-the-wall only Jules understands it completely.
Sporgey.
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