Going There

There is a Tide in the Affairs of Men

You're In High School Again

Source: Sarah McNeil

Outlander

Keep The Car Running

Firstly

source: The Selby

Two More

Firstly, a heads-up that I'm going to make some major changes around here. Slowly contemplating things, as I am wont to do, and I'll get around to it.

Secondly (and thirdly), things that defy contemplation- the last of the summer movies.

I've got to say that District 9 was the second in two refreshing, heartening trips to the cinema (see previous post). Characters I cared about (none of them human, mind you- protagonist Wikus Van De Merwe has to be the biggest fuckup in a hero's shoes since John Locke of Lost), and therefore spent the film at the edge of my seat as their long-shot plans for escape went realistically awry again and again. I'm half-praying they don't sequalize this, but who am I kidding. We need more original concepts like this- look how they take hold of audiences, Hollywood, and stop banking on "known properties"...

...Or worse yet, continually fucking them up. I mean, what is there to fuck up about G.I. Joe? And before you roll out your "what did you expect?", let me explain.
G.I. Joe, in its odd way, is the reason I write, and the reason I went into acting. For years (maybe ages 9-12?) I concocted an elaborate, continuing storyline for my vast collection of toys and vehicles, a storyline for which I kept notes and taught myself things about plotting that I still use today (I didn't once see the cartoon, so the characterizations also became my own). Whenever I'm working on a script, there isn't a mental moment that goes by that I don't recall how I mentally bookmarked some action taken by Duke, or Flint, or Destro, as I played with those toys, and stored it away until the consequences of that action were to be dealt with in the storyline. And some serious stuff went down in my 11-year-old battlefield/bedroom: love, hate, betrayal, death, resurrection- so surely Hollywood could do better than an 11-year-old, right? I just had to go and find out.

Aaannnd, the answer was no. Sort of. The goofy nonsense that passed for plot in G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra incorporated some stuff that, if you can believe this, overthought the concept: Cobra Commander and Duke being brothers, or whatever the fuck they were, and however that relationship worked. And the opposite: the playing down/simplification of Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow's backstory, which was brilliantly done in the Marvel Comic of the 1980's (and I do mean brilliantly; that's not just emptyheaded trash culture fanboy flare; it was a magnificent and monumental series). Otherwise, boom-boom-pow, it was just like chucking plastic around the sand pit back in the glory days.

But this might stand as the utlimate example of a baffling line of thinking when it comes to making films about these pre-existing properties: why take iconic, memorable designs and slap black leather on them?????? Jesus, Murphy, I mean, it's even a good business decision to stick with some known elements; Transformers pulled a masterstroke by keeping some of the cartoon voices on the payroll, yet G.I. Joe took distinct design like this:


and 're-imagined' it as this:


Is this meant to be playing to world markets that didn't have the action figures/cartoon in their lives? Becuase that still doesn't make sense. I'm convinced they could have added $30-50 million to their box office if they'd reproduced some of the remarkable designs Hasbro came up with 25 years ago. I mean, Snake-Eyes, who is famously mute, had a mouth on his costume. How does this stuff get by 30 pre-production approvals and as many test audiences to be ridiculed by people like me?

Finally, A Film Worth Writing About

Just take a look at the previous post's date. It's been a wasteland of a summer, no? Star Trek- two hours of technicolor glee, but that was May. Up- a winner, and should be somewhere on the 1000 best films ever made. And since I'm full-time in Halifax now, I've blinked and missed anything critically notable like The Hurt Locker, and... um... The Hurt Locker. Instead it's been a parade of disappointment. When did movies stop making sense? Transformers, Harry Potter, Wolverine, Terminator- name your franchise; every one of them was like picking up issue #340 of a comic book I've never read. Maybe if you sit around thinking about Dumbledore's Army (but wasn't that what the last HP was about? And why not even a mention of said army in this new one?) or the internal workings of Jazz the police car Transformer (Is he the police car Transformer? Is he a he? Or an it? And was he even in Revenge of the Fallen?), you might be of another opinion, but you'd also be a child, and no one makes movies for grown-ups any more.
But- one that rides the line (meaning there's grown-up pleasures to be had, but if you just want to "Aw, Dude! That was fuckin this! That was fuckin' that!" all your way through it, fill your emotionally stunted boots) is the one I saw last night, Inglourius Basterds.

I've never been one to worship Tarantino to the exclusion of all else, but I've been a fan. I saw Reservior Dogs a year before it became an obsession at my and everyone else's university, and that's triggered an auto-reaction to every one of his films since (even Pulp Fiction): that there's never going to be that pure experience of being surprised by this filmmaker again. Or so I thought.

I think it's the classically evocative WWII setting that made so much of this movie pop for me. Every one of Tarantino's tricks that I'd grown so aware of worked for me here. As a writer I'm a huge fan of knowing the rules and promptly breaking them. This movie introduces characters, then shoots their nuts off before they've had a chance to do shit-all for the story or for themselves. There are extended scenes (or, in recent QT style, 'Chapters", such as the "Rendezvous in Nadine" sequence, that are as good as any stage script I've read in ages, that meander down entirely irrelevant roads (the 'King Kong' conversation b/t the undercover Basterds and the German officer), and pull themselves together just in time for the denoument, which is as abrupt as a gunshot to the face. Literally.
And there's just enough silence and breathing room in this film to set one's mind going. I found myself thinking, early on, 'Is this a film about good and evil? Or just about evil? Or just about war?' These are guys who don't beat them (well, in one sense of the word, they do), but join them. They're not glorious, and they're bastards. They, like their foul German opposers, don't think a lick about what horrid shit they're inflicting on hundreds of people. And that makes the nihilistic bent that Tarantino works with jive the best it has in any of his work.

There's a moment in the polar opposite of this film, the aforementioned Star Trek, where Kirk and Spock are trying to talk their way through an encounter with Nero, the planet-destroying villain, who of course doesn't want anything to do with diplomacy. And just when you think you might get one of those orations on humanity that Patrick Stewart did so well and Scott Bakula did so badly, Kirk just says "Fuck it. All we can do is shoot at him"
And Spock agrees. And they do.
That's what Inglourious Basterds is from start to finish. We all know why Shoshonna works with a steadfast resolve to burn every Nazi alive in her movie theatre- because that's what you do when the world's that way. And if you think these thoughts are far too lofty to have come out of this particular moviegoing experience, well.
I can't immediately bring to mind a war film that didn't have the protagonists coming to grips with the moral lapses they've expereinced in battle, which is something I suspect one doesn't do much of in The Fight. And before going to this movie I found my mind drifting over the PC implications of having Jews do this in a movie, but that's kind of all out the window now.

One of several scenes as good as a one-act play

Review: Watchmen

Considering my brief, vitriolic post which appeared when the first images of this film were released, I thought it best to follow up with some quick thoughts after having seen the finished product.
This film's been 20 years in the making- the book, with it's po-mo take on costumed heroes, was perfectly timed in the comic world and has changed everything since. I'm not so sure how it fits into what is now a full-fledged film genre: we have ten dozen Marvel adaptations coming down the pike that may seem a little flighty after this full-on deconstruction of our Modern Myths; the film, like the book before it, does seem like the last word on the superhero.
Will it resonate with the mainstream? I write this on its opening weekend, so only time will tell. Unlike The Dark Knight, which set up Gotham as an Everycity in a heightened societal moment of Rotten Republicans vs. Dreamy Democrats, Watchmen is set in a skewed 1985 where Richard Nixon rules and nuclear apocalypse looms: it's a rarified, detailed setting that harkens way back to the Reagan Years. Now that we're in Obama-topia, dark social satire is seeming passe for the moment.
Yet as an enduring, effective story, it hits all the right beats and (amazingly, for a director like Zach "300" Snyder) covers every tidbit of the dense narrative. Having lived with the characters for 20 years, I was struck at how fresh they came off onscreen, and how effectively their traits and motivations were captured. Nite Owl & Silk Spectre's shared thrill at 're-entering the game', Dr. Manhattan's godlike enlightenment, Rorschach's moral perversity, it's all there- and in the end, its likely audiences will take these vivid characterizations away with them moreso than the tricky plotline. There's a weakness in the portrayal of Ozymandias, the rogue team member who becomes the story's villain, that takes the piss out of what could have been a more shocking, indelible Villainous Plan: the denoument of the narrative, which on the page played out in a hell of a page-turning final chapter, comes off as slightly lame in the film. But I can forgive a bad ending, since I can't recall a genre film with a bang-up third act offhand (even The Dark Knight mangled its ending a bit, with its protracted encounters with Two-Face). It's seeing these smashingly original characters brought to life that thrilled and chilled me. So I give five points for each of these characterizations (no point for Ozymandias), and one for not completely f**king things up: that's a six out of ten.

2009's Only Do-Over

So Baby New Year whispers in Father Time's ear... "Shitty 2008 list... you can do better in 2009... do it. DOOOO IIIIIT."


So the (not so) faithful blogger puts his head together with his (faithful) significant other after

• shameful feelings over the pathetic end of 08 entry (even tho it resulted in at least one illegal download of Accelerate; hey R.E.M. ain't hurtin for money)
  
• actually listening to those 'missing albums' mentioned in the previous post; and speaking of:
  

First, the bad news:

• Fleet *yawn- oop, excuse me sorry* Foxes. What great background music for a low-key winter party! But shame on anyone who called this anywhere near the "greatest album of the year". Maybe it spoke to people of an entirely different (lemming-like?) sensibility than myself, but I've seen the Zuppa Theatre Co. put together better choral rounds on an average morning in the rehearsal hall.
• Beck. I won't reserve the yawn here.
• Kanye West. Ever have those weird dreams where you see a movie or hear a record and it's, like, protracted, strange, boring? I'm still not sure if 808s & Heartbreak is one of those dreams.
  
• Guns N' Roses. Waking nightmare.
• My Morning Jacket. Jim James, wither thine voice? Why the falsetto? Oh, wait, maybe the Fleet Foxes guy scooped your impending patent on "soaring", "ethereal" vocals.
  

Getting warmer:

• Metallica. Not so bad.
  
• Conor Oberst. If his self-obsession didn't come and go like the tides, I might be motivated to actually start building an opinion about this guy. Doesn't it stand to reason that prodigies should at least approach selflessness? But I'll still stick by him to see if he rounds himself out by 30 (!).

NOW THE GOOD NEWS
this collection of side projects and duckers of the top-ten slurry-pile are guaranteed to delight! seek them out! really! you won't regret it!

Little Joy, Little Joy:

Like if the Strokes were a Carribbean house band on the most chill vacation you've ever been on. Fab (from said band) provides the hooks and a girl named Binki the occasional mellow vocal.

Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan, Sunday at Devil Dirt:

Campbell (former of Belle & Sebastian) and Lanegan (former of Screaming Trees & Queens of the Stone Age [?!]) together at last... if you read a top ten list and picked up She and Her, Volume One (Zooey Deschanel & M. Ward)- this is better.

Mount Eerie, Lost Wisdom:

Frontman Phil Elverum's favorite singer ever is Canada's own Julie Doiron, so he asked her to make a record with him and she made his dreams come true. This will make yours come true too.

And to round out the 'Amazin Collaborations' section, the most amazin of all:

Vic Chesnutt and Elf Power, Dark Developments


Onward to a brief stop in Canada:

Construction and Destruction, The Volume Wars:

These two cats live way, way deep in rural Nova Scotia, a place I can personally attest generates either vapid ennui or creative explosions, in their case the latter: this was the most promising & rewarding piece to come out of Nova Scotia's increasingly derivative indie-rock scene this year.

Nadja, The Bungled and the Botched:

The ultimate in doom/drone metal, and another guy/girl collaboration, this time between a poet and a bookbinder. If you're playing D&D all day, going on a real-life quest for the Dread Sword or some shit, or just laying on your bed buoyed by elation or oppressed by dread, THIS. IS. IT.

And, to round it all out, some surefire twang/poetry/catchiness/genius:

Silver Jews: Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea
Twang/poetry

Blitzen Trapper, Furr
Twang/catchiness



Lambchop, OH (Ohio)
Twang/twang
Lucinda Williams, Little Honey
Twang/genius

Ahh, a proper ten, now I can sleep easy. Now get downloading! Happy New Year! Celebrate with music from the old year!